Yet another good reason for powdercoating.

Getting in touch with your inner progressive

Despite what you're hearing, Americans are liberal.

By Steven Conn
The story line of the coming elections has been that conservatives are angry, motivated, and poised for a major electoral triumph. They promise to return America to its traditional values, hijacked as they've been by insidious liberals.

But here's the secret conservatives don't want you to know: America is a progressive nation, and Americans have always embraced progress over stasis. Chances are, you're a liberal, too.

Don't believe me? Let's have a quick history lesson, comparing the conservative and liberal positions on issues over the last 100 years, and you can see for yourself.

Think 10-year-olds should work in coal mines? One hundred years ago, conservative business interests and their political allies certainly thought so, and they fought efforts to enact laws protecting children from the dangers of coal mines, textile mills, and other hazardous workplaces. But progressives got those regulations passed, and kids don't work in coal mines anymore.

Ninety years ago this year, American women finally got the right to vote. It was a close call, however, because of the fierce opposition of conservatives and traditionalists who thought women were too mentally frail to vote. So, any conservative guys reading this, go tell your wife or sister or mother she isn't smart enough to vote. See how that one goes over.

Fifty years ago, African Americans were routinely denied the right to vote (and many other rights) by Southern states ruled by conservatives. That changed only when liberals in the federal government passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act over the protests of conservatives waving the "states' rights" banner. Fifty years later, how many of you think states ought to be allowed to strip people of their rights on the basis of race?

And how many think you ought to be left with nothing when you retire? In 1935, the United States was just about the only industrialized nation without an old-age pension system. That year, FDR signed the Social Security Act over the howling objections of conservatives in Congress.

The next year, Republican Alf Landon ran for president vowing to repeal Social Security. FDR won one of the biggest landslides in American history, and no one remembers Alf Landon anymore.

Likewise, as Americans began to live longer, many faced rising medical costs without health insurance. Then Lyndon Johnson and his liberal Congress created Medicare, and now seniors have some of the best medical coverage in the country. Raise your hand if you want to take Medicare away from the senior citizens in your life.

As we struggle out of the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, it's also worth remembering that conservatives have always opposed attempts to regulate the financial system. They hated the idea of creating the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. in the 1930s, and they stood overwhelmingly against the recent bank regulation bill. But who among us really thinks that the Great Recession was caused by too much oversight of the banking, insurance, and mortgage industries?

So it has gone across the last 100 years. If we had followed the conservative path, we'd be a nation with official racial segregation and gender inequality, poorer senior citizens, banks free to do whatever they want, and kids mining coal. Given their track record over the last century, one wonders what makes conservatives think they've finally gotten it right today.

The funny thing, of course, is that conservatives know all this. When tea-party darling Rand Paul suggested repealing the Civil Rights Act, conservative Republicans in the Senate rejected the notion. When President Obama proposed reining in some Medicare costs, conservative Republicans positioned themselves as great defenders of the program.

Conservatives have been on the wrong side of history over and over again, and Americans have demonstrated that they don't want to live in a conservative nation. So smile: You're really a liberal after all. Come November, why not go and vote that way?

I always use soap, water, and a towel on painted calipers.