Progressive and Liberals have think tanks too. I don't trust a Conservative group to give a real good representation of Liberal and Progressive thinking as was made clear in Intense's post. I doubt too many Conservatives would want Think Progress to tell folks how they think and what they stand for.
In these polls where people are asked to define themselves, many don't want to pigenhole themselves into a category and will say they are moderate. Also, many Liberals don't use the word Liberal to define themselves. And many Conservatives don't use the term Conservative to define themselves. Did they ask how many consider themselves Libertarian or Progressive?
Liberals, as denounced by the haters on this thread, simply don't exist -- not in any significant numbers, anyway.
They are phantoms of the propaganda machine of mass media brainwashing and social conditioning -- just as home-grown "communists" were in the 1950's.
Probably most of the members of the American Communist Party were FBI infiltrators !!
Just as the case of "communists" in the 50's, modern day "liberals" are created by the Brainwashing Machine as a distraction from Real Problems.
People who are incapable of thinking believe in these ghosts that go "bump" in the night.
.
If they don't exist, then how did so much 'color go out of our world' as Pixie accurately described it? Who is responsible for that? Why is there a rodeo cloud banned for life for doing something utterly tasteless and offensive when rodeo clowns and others have been doing that kind of thing for a generation without losing their jobs?
Why was Paula Deen ruined professionally for simply admitting that she used a word long ago that one demographic in our society now uses routinely to describe themselves?
Why was there an organized effort to ruin Chick fil purely because the CEO spoke publicly in favor of traditional marriage?
Why are people in NYC restricted in the size of soft drink they are allowed to buy?
Why is it okay to have to show postive ID to buy a gun, fly on an airplane, or cash a check but not okay to have to show positive ID to vote?
Why does a wind energy firm or solar panel manufacturer or ethanol plant get almost instant environmental clearance from the EPA, while anything less politically correct waits interminable months or years for the same clearance?
If you say there are no liberals, as liberals are described in modern day America, who is pushing the liberal agenda?
What Pixie described (and Intense too) has nothing to do with Liberalism, which doesn't seek to "control" anything. What you have listed above here doesn't either-- it's a mishmash of mostly social mores and a couple of leftist ideas on the side, but none of it is Liberalism.
The "liberal agenda" as far as I can see is an illusory Emmanuel Goldstein device. I'm not part of it so I can't speak
for it but I see it as a strawman set up to, again, cloud the whole issue and lump basically liberals and leftists together as if they're the same thing, for the purpose of demonizing and then eliminating them so that the side creating that illusion can walk away with a political monopoly.
Somebody -- not you Foxy, but some demagogue in the past (and I'm looking at you Joe McCarthy), created this illusory device as a political wedge for their own political self-interest, and it's been a rhetorical sinkhole ever since. It's still used today as a crutch by internet wags, media talking heads, politicians and other demagogues to pave over and hopelessly oversimplify their chosen enemy into "liberals", "the left", "Democrats" and "all that is evil", as if they're all the same thing. And when you buy into that bullshit device, whether knowingly or not, you close all discourse, the wedge goes up, and nobody sees a thing on the other side of the wedge. You have two sides, permanently at war. We erroneously call them "liberal" and "conservative" rather than "Oceania" and "Eastasia".
Unfortunately for that facile device, it's not what "Liberalism" means, and we dig ourselves into a hole misusing the terms. True Liberalism, which is what founded this country, comes under attack from both the left and the right. Liberalism is not leftism.
Consider a truly wholly
Liberal concept from the Preamble to our Constitution:
"...All men are created equal".
That's as Liberal a concept as there is. It overturned and stood against (and still stands against) the stratified society that preceded it, a caste system of aristocrats, clergy and commoners. If you were born a commoner, that's where you stayed and you weren't moving up. If you were born into the aristocracy, you were already there.
"All men are created equal" destroys that system and declares that any child can grow up to be President or start his/her own business, regardless of birth. It's the philosophy that directly opposes discrimination based on race or gender or religion. It's a revolutionary thought in its time, because it overturned those lines of social demarcation that were, before this, very real.
By this definition of the Liberals who founded us, we're all Liberals, you and me included. Unless we believe in that caste system, or believe in racism, we're all "Liberals".
But Liberalism also means the government stays out of the way and lets people do their thing as much as possible. That's why our Constitution uses language like "Congress shall make no law restricting..." and spells out rights that "shall not be infringed"--- setting out
limitations on government rather than limitations on the People. The People will have free exercise of the rights spelled out, and the Constitution ensures that new laws cannot restrict those. At least it's supposed to.
So "all men are created equal" is a Liberal concept... then we get something like Affirmative Action. AA is
not a Liberal concept; it's a
leftist concept. To the extent that it uses government to create a Liberal goal, it's actually an anti-liberal concept. It's taking a Liberal
end and using government as the
means to make it happen. Laws from the right against sodomy or gay marriage or use of inebriants are not Liberal either. Again, an attempt to control and shape society through legislation. Again, anti-liberal.
Thus both left and right are at odds with the Liberal approach, which is to let the citizenry take care of itself -- within the boundaries of what government needs to restrict, such as public safety, fraud and such.
If we continue to pretend these concepts are something other than what they are, just to accommodate Joe McCarthy, we go where Joe McCarthy took us: nowhere. Gadflies like the radio/TV talking heads and pandering politicians will take us down this dank rhetorical road to nowhere just for cheap votes and audience ratings. But what we end up with has to do with solutions; instead we get an artificial wall with two sides shouting at each other and the wall just reinforces itself, because conflict makes it stronger. What's really needed is a balance of left and right.
The first step is listening. Declaring "you _____s are all about X, Y and Z" isn't listening. Nor is hanging labels. All that does is dehumanize and strengthen the wall, and the morass perpetuates itself.
OK I'm done, got things to do.
Obamneycare 
Why is it conservatives think that support for the community at large MUST come at the expense of support for the individual?
