But Taibbi goes beyond the semantic part of the problem, which is where discussion of it as a framing issue usually stops. He points out the actions that are killing the Left - living in the past, not wrestling with the hard economic issues, and politically being underwritten by the corporate class in ways that will always sell out workers when it comes to the crunch:

Here's the real problem with American liberalism: there is no such thing, not really. What we call American liberalism is really a kind of genetic mutant, a Frankenstein's monster of incongruous parts - a fat, affluent, overeducated New York/Washington head crudely screwed onto the withering corpse of the vanishing middle-American manufacturing class. These days the Roosevelt stratum of rich East Coasters are still liberals, but the industrial middle class that the New Deal helped create is almost all gone. In 1965, manufacturing jobs still made up 53 percent of the US economy; that number was down to nine percent in 2004, and no one has stepped up to talk to the 30 million working poor who struggle to get by on low-wage, part-time jobs.

Thus, the people who are the public voice of American liberalism rarely have any real connection to the ordinary working people whose interests they putatively champion. They tend instead to be well-off, college-educated yuppies from California or the East Coast, and hard as they try to worry about food stamps or veterans' rights or securing federal assistance for heating oil bills, they invariably gravitate instead to things that actually matter to them - like the slick Al Gore documentary on global warming  

To the extent that right-wing positions are popular in the electorate I think it's mainly because the opposition has failed to articulate alternatives in a way that penetrates mainstream discussion.