Movement Conservative Economics-The Most Unpopular Idea Ever???

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sun Sep 23, 2007 at 21:29

In my last post, I wrote about the dramatic failure of free market economics-a failure clearly documented in cold, hard statistics.  Now I want to show that this ideology is also wildly unpopular-also using cold, hard statistics.  There are ways of presenting it that make it more appealing.  When you get down to brass tacks and ask people what they want, virtually no one wants the libertarian's "night watchman" state, no one wants to shrink goverment down to the size that Grover Norquist can drown it in a bathtub.  And this is not just the result of a new progressive mood in the land.  This is the way it's always been.  As with so many other things, reality and the Versailles political discourse are 180 degrees opposed to one another.

Yesterday, in comments, Acitizen referred to the Pew study from last March [PDF] , "Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes: 1987-2007, Political Landscape More Favorable To Democrats."
Acitizen wrote:

I[n] fact the citizenry has already moved far....

....far in advance of the political 'leadership'. Many here in Free Left Blogistan are equally lagging in their understanding of just how progressive the people are.

No...I'm not smoking anything. Clik thru my post:

Why I am an Idiot!

To the Pew Center study which covers the last 20 years and you will see what that I have good reasons for my assertion. The main issue now is to ensure that the political 'process' reflects the will of the people.

Acitizen makes an excellent point.  As this first chart from the Pew study shows, a number of broad trends clearly favor a more progressive politics:

This shift is certainly highly important.  Indeed, it is just as important as it is ignored by the Versailles media, and indeed by all of Versailles.  And yet, it is only the tip of the iceberg.  Because even 20 years ago America was far to the left of where Versailles imagined America to be. 

Everybody Is A Socialist In Grover Norquist's Eyes

I'm going to take particular aim at free market ideology.  Although it's only one component of movement conservatism, it is the overarching organizing component: the one that pays the piper, and thus calls the tune.  Its fondest wish was expressed by Grover Norquist, to reduce government to the size that he could drown it in a bathtub.  Repealing the New Deal is high on their agenda, which is why Bush wasted all his political capital from the 2004 election on trying to privatize Social Security.

Since 1972, the General Social Survey (GSS) has questioned the American people about a broad range of social and political questions.  Over the years it has become the most cited American data source in the social science literature after the U.S. Census.  One of the key components in the GSS is a set of questions about spending on a variety of national programs.  The set of questions has been supplemented occassionally, expanded dramatically in 1984, and added to modestly since then.  In order to produce an index of support for social spending, I created a compound variable mearuing support for six different programs.

The wording for all these questions is similar, and noteworthy for the balanced fashion in which it is framed:

We are faced with many problems in this country, none of  which can be solved easily or inexpensively. I'm going to name some of these problems, and for each one I'd like you to tell me whether you think we're spending too much money on it, too little money, or about the right amount. [X. Specific question wording here.]

The questions I used in creating my index were the following

A. Improving and protecting the environment.
B. Improving and protecting the nation's health.
C. Solving the problems of the big cities.
D. Improving the nation's education system.
E. Improving the conditions of Blacks.
F. Welfare.

My initial index measured every degree of support or opposition to spending, from those who say we are spending too little for all six, and thus would support spending more on everything, to those who say we are spending too much on all six, and thus would support spending less on everything.  In between, I used measures of net support: Spending too little on four, and two much on two is spending too little, net two, the same as spending too little on two, and about right on four.

Here is the result of over 30 years of polling:

TABLE 1 Attitudes Toward National Spending On 6 Items: Environment, Health, Education, Race, Big Cities, Welfare 1972-2006
Spending Too Little on All	6.2
Spending Too Little on 5	8.6
Spending Too Little on 4, Net	14.2
Spending Too Little on 3, Net	15.1
Spending Too Little on 2, Net	16.5
Spending Too Little on 1, Net	13.2
Spending About Right on All, Net	10.6
Spending Too Much on 1, Net	6.2
Spending Too Much on 2, Net	4.2
Spending Too Much on 3, Net	2.4
Spending Too Much on 4, Net	1.5
Spending Too Much on 5	0.6
Spending Too Much on All	0.6

As can be seen, there is much more support for spending more than for spending less. Ten times as many people (6.2 percent) say we are spending too little on all six items than say we are spending too much (0.6 percent).  Indeed, that last figure-0.6 percent, is the outside maximum for the number of people who support the movement conservative goal of dismanteling the welfare state.  After all, these people say we are spending too much.  They didn't say we shouldn't spend anything at all.  No doubt some of them feel that way.  But others surely do not.  So we are giving Mr. Norquist the benefit of the doubt by assigning him the full support of this entire mighty cohort-roughly one American in every 160.

Clearly support for hard core free market economics is virtually non-existent among the American people.  They may like its advertising slogans to varying degrees.  But when it comes to making actual case-by-case decisions, "Thanks, but no thanks," is the overwhelming response of choice.

In order to get a more manageable look at this data, I decided to produce a compressed scale, composed of four categories-Spending Too Much, Spending About Right, Spending Too Little on 1-3 Items and Spending Too Much on 4-6 Items.  The result of producing this new measure can be seen in Table 2:

TABLE 2 Attitudes Toward National Spending On 6 Items: Environment, Health, Education, Race, Big Cities, Welfare Compressed Attitude Scale 1972-2006
Spending Too Little on 4 or more, Net	29.0
Spending Too Little on 1-3, Net	44.8
Spending About Right on All, Net	10.6
Spending Too Much, Net	15.5

Here, we've lost track of Gorver Norquist's mighty band of 1 vs. 160.  They've been swallowed up in the much larger, but still distinctly marginal group of all those thinking we are spending too much, a whopping 15.5 percent, less than one person in six.  In contrast, almost twice as many people think we are spending too little on four or more items.  If 0.6 percent is the largest figure plausible for Norquists True Believer Corps, that 15.5 percent is as big as their extended auxiliary gets.  It is roughly half the size of Bush's approval levels over the last several months, and right down around Cheney's level of support.  It's hard to imagine a more marginal political position that has any national visibility at all.

Conservative Socialists: Breaking It Down By Ideology

So what about self-described conservatives?  How do their attitudes match up?  GSS asks people to place themselves on a 1-7 scale from extreme liberal to extreme conservative.  Table 3 shows how the figures from Table 2 break down across these 7 categories:

TABLE 3 Ideology and Attitudes Toward National Spending On 6  Items: Environment, Health, Education, Race, Big Cities, Welfare Compressed Attitude Scale 1972-2006
View of Spending	Ext Lib	Lib	Mod. Lib	Mod	Mod. Con	Con	Ext Con	All
Too Little on 4-6	59.5	46.1	35.5	27.4	20.9	17.4	19.9	28.8
Too Little on 1-3	29.7	39.7	46.9	48.1	47.3	41.4	30.6	44.9
About Right	4.2	7.6	8.4	11.2	12.2	12.7	13.2	10.6
Too Much	6.4	6.5	9.3	13.3	19.6	28.4	36.3	15.6

Yipes!  Look at that!  Even though it's clear that people's self-identification means something, it's equally clear that it doesn't mean quite what Versailles thinks it does.  More than half of all self-identified "extreme conservatives"-50.5 percent, to be exact-say that we are spending too little on at least on item, net, compared to just 36.3 who say we are spending too much.  And when you move over to just plain conservatives, the 58.8 percent to 28.6 percent margin is better than two-to-one in favor of more spending!  They're not conservatives, they're socialists!  Well, at least that's what Norquist and Gingrich and company would say.  If they were Democrats, that is.

Attitudes Over Time

Finally, lets look at how these attitudes have varied over the years:

TABLE 4: Attitudes Toward National Spending On 6  Items: Environment, Health, Education, Race, Big Cities, Welfare Compressed Attitude Scale 1972-2006
YEAR	Too Little on 4-6	Too Little on 1-3	About Right	Too Much
1973	28.8	43.4	11.5	16.3
1974	31.2	45.7	10.0	13.1
1975	28.0	42.8	11.6	17.6
1976	21.2	44.1	13.8	20.9
1977	17.9	43.2	14.7	24.2
1978	19.4	42.8	13.5	24.3
1980	19.0	43.0	13.5	24.5
1982	32.7	40.4	10.0	17.0
1983	25.8	44.0	12.7	17.3
1984	31.5	43.4	11.1	14.0
1985	27.8	43.0	11.7	17.5
1986	29.8	48.8	8.7	12.7
1987	39.5	41.9	8.1	10.5
1988	36.5	46.3	9.2	8.0
1989	34.6	47.0	9.1	9.3
1990	37.1	49.9	6.0	6.8
1991	35.6	45.1	9.2	9.9
1993	32.3	44.6	8.7	14.2
1994	29.0	45.5	9.9	15.6
1996	30.1	43.4	10.4	15.9
1998	30.2	48.2	9.3	12.3
2000	32.8	48.4	8.4	10.5
2002	28.7	50.8	9.1	11.5
2004	31.7	47.4	10.2	10.6
2006	36.1	44.7	9.1	10.1
TOTAL	29.0	45.0	10.7	15.4

This is really telling.  While it shows the same sort of outline seen in some of the Pew report data-conservatism, defined as oppostion to more spending, increasing from 1988 to 1996, and then decreasing since-the entire period since 1987 was less conservative than the entire era from 1975 to 1985.  Clearly, as elites have grown more hostile to govenment spending, the people as a whole have gone the other way.  Table 5 shows the story on a decade-by-decade basis:

TABLE 5: Attitudes Toward National Spending On 6  Items: Environment, Health, Education, Race, Big Cities, Welfare Compressed Attitude Scale 1972-2006
DECADE	Spending Too Little on 4 or more, Net	Spending Too Little on 1-3, Net	Spending About Right on All, Net	Spending Too Much, Net
1970s	24.3	43.6	12.6	19.5
1980s	29.4	43.7	10.9	16.0
1990s	31.5	45.9	9.3	13.3
2000s	32.4	47.7	9.2	10.7

Nothing could be clearer.  Support for increased spending on both 1-3 and 4-6 items goes UP every single decade. Support for decreased spending goes DOWN every single decade.  What's more, even the hallowed "middle" is shrinking: Those saying spending is "about right" also go DOWN every single decade.

It's hard to imagine how the Versailles conventional wisdom could possibly be more wrong.

But they'll find a way.  We know they will. They always do.