from the hip

Something is seriously wrong in a country when a vast majority of its population say that the country is headed in the wrong direction:

81% in Poll Say Nation Is Headed on the Wrong Track

Americans are more dissatisfied with the country’s direction than at any time since the New York Times/CBS News poll began asking about the subject in the early 1990s, according to the latest poll.

In the poll, 81 percent of respondents said they believed “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track,” up from 69 percent a year ago and 35 percent in early 2002.

This poll was reported by the New York Times. These are numbers, frankly, that would not have surprised me if they had been from a poll conducted in the Soviet Union before glasnost and democratization. But numbers like this, in a democracy, is astonishing, to say the least!

A majority of nearly every demographic and political group — Democrats and Republicans, men and women, residents of cities and rural areas, college graduates and those who finished only high school — say the United States is headed in the wrong direction. Seventy-eight percent of respondents said the country was worse off than five years ago; just 4 percent said it was better off.