I've found polls or surveys to be a good indicator of perception as opposed to reality.
The difference is that from day to day our opinions waver depending on current events that effect each of us.
To the extent that the corporate owned sponsored and managed media places emphasis on polls - so do each of us.
Popular-ism can be created by the media and used to shape issues. Group think is a weapon of propaganda. Propaganda is all about lies.
Manufactured and manipulated "group think" is a serious problem in America today.
Group think is embedded by mass media into everything the public at large sees and hears.
Advertising is a huge force in America and the words free and freedom are used quite often to propagate lies that prohibit rather than foster freedom. Words such as free markets and free enterprise ... as well as socialism and communism are used to manipulate the feelings of the masses.
Abortion and guns and religious freedom are often used to preach quite the opposite.
Who in the majority of the public feels more free when strangers among them are allowed to carry guns openly or might be carrying them concealed?
Personal debt reduces our individual freedom. Yet advertising increase individual expenditures beyond that which is affordable.
Credit cards and bank loans allow individuals to incur debt - thus losing their freedom and created a forced labor market.
Thus who benefit the most from this spending system call it free enterprise or free markets. Incurring debt is quite the opposite of freedom; it is economic servitude.
Our nation aka each of us must pay taxes to pay the interest on our national debt.
It is ironic that those who are responsible for the increase in the national debt and who are collecting the passive interest income it generates are telling us we must spend less on ourselves to pay that debt down while at the same time reducing their taxes in order that they may create jobs for us.
It is a transfer of power and the diminishing of individual freedom and democracy that the radical right seeks.
The majority of supporters on the right are as adversely effected by income inequality and these false freedoms as are all Americans right left or sideways.
