| American politics has moved sharply to the right over the past 30 years, while the American people have not. The evidence for this is overwhelming. A large reason for this state of affairs is that most people who call themselves conservatives are either liberals or moderates on the issues, but have come to support a reactionary, extremist movement primarily because it presents itself as "conservative" and spends a tremendous amount of energy demonizing "liberals." But when they are asked specific questions about their values, priorities and choices across a full range of issues, their liberal and moderate views emerge time and again.
There is a sharp split between the producers of conservative ideology, who have repeatedly expressed their hostility to government spending, international law, environmental protection, and similar liberal policies, and the majority of self-identified consumers of conservative ideology, who take a much more pragmatic, more liberal approach.
For America to function as it should, we need to restore the balance, so that its politics reflect the true values and priorities of the American people, which are substantially more liberal than our political system today--a system that is also increasingly out of touch with reality.
Conservative Support For Liberal Social Spending
Throughout the 1990s, a period of significant budget-tightening, a cross-section of Americans supported increased spending across a broad range of social programs, rather than cutting them back. The General Social Survey (GSS), which had been posing such questions every year or two since 1972, produced the following cumulative totals for 1992-2000, in response to the question how much are we spending:
Too About Too Liberalism
little right Much Index *
Improving nations education system 55.5 22 22.5 71.2
Dealing with drug addiction 52.6 29.8 17.7 74.8
Social Security 51.0 37.6 11.4 81.7
Improving & protecting nations health 50.5 28 21.6 70.0* Liberalism index = "too little" [liberal position] / ("too little" + "too much") [liberal position + conservative position]. It's a useful way to derive a single number to indicate level of support. It is only one view, however, since it disregards the middle position, which can vary enormously in size and significance.
For a number of other programs, the number saying we spent "too little" fell below 50%, but was still much higher than those saying we were spending "too much." What's more the combined number saying we weren't spending "too much" stayed safely deep inside landslide territory (greater than 60%):
Too About Too Liberalism
little right Much Index
Solving problems of big cities 49.8 26.1 24.1 67.4
Assistance to the poor 45.6 27.6 26.7 63.1
Improving & protecting environment 44.2 30.7 25.1 63.8
Highways and bridges 41.4 46.1 12.5 76.8
Mass transportation 34.5 47.2 18.2 65.5
Parks and recreation 29.5 55.3 15.1 66.1
These numbers might come as a surprise to many people. This was, after all the period of "Gingrich Revolution," a wholesale attack on the notion of "big government." There were suggestions that Congress should be made part-time, like the legislatures of most Southern and rural states, and even President Clinton declared that "the era of big government is over." The people, evidently, had different ideas--though you'd never know it from the political coverage of the decade.
But the most surprising thing about these numbers is that they are not a cross-section of all Americans. They are a cross-section of Americans who self-identified as the most conservative--7 on a scale of 1 to 7--roughly the most conservative three percent of the population by self-identification.
Naturally, self-identification is not a perfect measure. Some of these people are surely mistaken. Yet, if one looks at everyone who identified themselves as more conservative than liberal--more than a third of the population--the numbers (shown in chapters two and three) are roughly the same as the above. The results are inescapable: American conservatives are, on balance, supporters of big government and the liberal welfare state, despite the fact that those who represent them as conservative leaders feel exactly the opposite.
In fact, most conservatives seem to line up with old-fashioned conservatives like Bob Dole, whom Newt Gingrich attacked in 1983 as being a "tax-collector for the welfare state." As the Republican's presidential nominee in 1996 and their vice-presidential nominee in 1976, Dole's position as a party leader and a conservative were seemingly unassailable. Yet, Dole came back from World War II severely injured. Although he received private help as well, he owed his return to normal life to extensive government-provided rehabilitation services--just as his government owed its continued existence to men like him. He may have been a conservative--and he was. But he knew from personal experience that government and the people had a bond together, and that honoring and preserving that bond was just as much a matter of conservative principles as it was a matter of liberal ones. A majority of conservatives who had been through the Great Depression and World War II reached similar conclusions, and so did the majority of conservatives who came after them.
But the "conservatives" of today do not go to war, so much as command others to go for them. The lessons of social solidarity that all Americans--liberals and conservative--learned from World War II are utterly lost on them.
The Two-Fold Power of Pragmatism:
Conservatives Are Liberal In A Broader Sense
Liberalism As A Conservative Force
There is solid conservative support for the welfare state because it works, and because it has become an integral part of America's social fabric. It is part of what they wish to conserve--just like the Bill of Rights and the Constitution itself, liberal inventions that ideological conservatives of that time also opposed.
Conservative support for the welfare state is just one facet of this larger phenomena. Our modern world is largely a product of liberal political theory, programs, policies, values and attitudes, which took centuries to develop, and are still evolving.
Even the simple acts of choosing a career, or choosing who one will marry reflect a liberal, individualistic worldview enshrined in a framework of social, political, and economic rights that virtually all of us take for granted. It was not always so. Going back to how things used to be--the traditional values of marrying who you were told to marry, and being a serf, a carpenter or a king just because your father was one--are utterly inconceivable to us. These old ways are not just un-American. They are unimaginable. Yet, they are the true face of the conservative, traditional, pre-modern world that liberalism has freed all of us from.
This basic fact--that the world, and day-to-day values we take for granted are liberal to the core--has been largely obscured by a prolonged and vicious attack on the image of liberalism, which bears no relationship at all to the historical meaning, purposes and accomplishments of liberalism. Because that attack has been so relentless and so thorough, the word "liberal" has become a dirty word, with no relationship at all to its real meaning, which is, historically, "liberty and justice for all."
Liberalism sprang from three great revolutions in Western thought--the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Together, these three great revolutions shattered the stagnant parochial world that preceded them, when Europe was a cultural backwater. They developed concepts of individualism, self-determination, progress and universalism that lie at the very heart of liberalism, and are taken for granted by almost all Americans.
But these revolutions in thought did not spring out of nowhere. Nor were they inventions of the Devil--as opponents of all three frequently claimed, though they had their darker sides, as all historical phenomena do. They were, at bottom, pragmatic responses to a changing world--a world in which the pace of change has only accelerated generation after generation for roughly six centuries now. Explanations, answers and ways of doing things that were once entirely adequate started to fail. And so people looked for something better.
The result today is a profoundly liberal world, nothing at all like pre-Renaissance 13th Century Europe. But it is a world largely stabilized to absorb, channel, and thrive off of forces that would have utterly destroyed that earlier world. In this very fundamental sense, liberalism functions as a conservative force--it holds our world together in a diverse, dynamic mix that would otherwise fly apart.
So it is that virtually all Americans are liberals in some sense or other, to some degree or other. Whether it is Seventeenth Century religious freedom and separation of powers, Eighteenth Century free speech and representative government, Nineteenth Century abolition of slavery, or Twentieth Century gender equality and the welfare state, Americans all across the political spectrum share a common commitment to the major hallmarks of liberal political theory and practices down through the centuries. Conservatives today are no exception--at least among the electorate.
Movement conservatives--including their most prominent members in the media and politics--may be the only group in America today that stands outside that liberal consensus in significant ways. It is only by demonizing liberals that they can obscure their isolation and alienation from basic American values, and eke out bare majority support at elections for policies they must deliberately misrepresent.
Conservatives as a whole don't like big government, but they realize the pragmatic necessity of programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Head Start, and support them accordingly. Likewise, they don't like regulation. But they realize the necessity of protecting the environment, and so they support the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Environmental Protection Agency. They also don't like all their local media being gobbled up by distant monopolistic money machines that give nothing meaningful back to their communities, so they oppose further "media deregulation" allowing even more concentration of ownership. Conservatives don't like foreigners telling America what to do, but they've seen their World War II movies, and they realize the enduring wisdom and necessity of working with other countries rather than going off on our own, so they are confirmed multilateralists who support the United Nations. Besides, they have faith that most of the time our allies will support us, and that when they don't it's probably a good idea to think really hard before we get ourselves involved in another Vietnam.
On issue after issue, ordinary everyday conservatives take a pragmatic approach to problem-solving and accept liberal programs and policies that they would oppose philosophically in a perfect world. But of course, a perfect world wouldn't have those problems in the first place, and the majority of conservatives are grown up enough to realize the difference between a perfect world and the one we live in. They put problem-solving above daydreaming. It's a very pragmatic, very American sort of thing to do.
There is one notable fly in the ointment worth mentioning that comes out of the conservative embrace of liberalism--the use of liberal values for illiberal purposes, which will be discussed below.
Liberal Issues Positions In General
In his 1999 book, Public Opinion in America (2nd Edition), political scientist James A. Stimson observed that on average people self-identified as conservative over liberal by about 2-1, but had policy preferences exactly opposite--2-1 liberal. Of necessity, this means that a very large number of self-identified conservatives have generalized liberal policy preferences, going far beyond social spending.
Stimson shows there is a generalized phenomena called "policy mood" that encompasses a broad range of issues. This mood fluctuates gradually over time, but always within a range that it is predominantly liberal--at least since the late 1950s, when the public opinion data begins being common enough to construct a broad measure. His analysis of policy mood was built around a set of six GSS spending trends--on Social Security, the environment, welfare, education, the problems of big cities and the condition of blacks. The fact that these spending variables can serve as the basic building blocks for a much broader measure of policy attitudes supports the notion that attitudes toward social spending lie at the core of liberalism as a policy attitude.
Stimson is not the only researcher to examine a broad range of public opinion. Throughout the 1980s, another researcher, Tom W. Smith, published a series of studies, beginning with 111 trends in 1982 and concluding with a study of 455 trends in 1989. Smith is the director of research at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), the organization that conducts the GSS. The last paper he wrote, "Liberal and Conservative Trends in the United States Since World War II," is the most comprehensive and refined study, covering data through 1987. Regrettably, this analysis has not been repeated since. But Smith and Stimson both agree that trends since then have generally fluctuated up and down, leaving us roughly where we were then.
Smith organized the 455 time series into 17 categories of issue areas. Each was analyzed to see if it remained constant, showed linear movement in either direction, or showed non-linear movement (moving first one way, then another.) His first measure was simply to count the number of trends in each direction. He found that "54.9% are in the liberal direction and 24.2% in the conservative direction. Liberal trends thus exceed conservative trends by over two-to-one (2.27:1)." The net liberal/conservative score was thus 30.7%. Smith conducted a series of adjustments, to see if different ways of analyzing the data would produce significantly different results. They did not.
Smith also used a second measure, examining the amount of change--a measure called slope. He found that the net slope--the average slope of all the series--was 0.4 percent per year in the liberal direction....
Smith also analyzed slope by year, and discovered that the vast majority of liberal trending took place prior to 1974. Combining Smith's findings and Stimson's it seems strongly indicated that America as a whole is a much more liberal country than it was immediately after World War II, but only slightly more liberal than it was in 1974, when Nixon resigned. This stands in sharp contrast to the political establishment, which is markedly more conservative than it was in 1974.
The Liberal/Conservative Overlap On Issues
Among ordinary people, the categories "liberal" and "conservative" are fuzzy, with lots of overlap, as countless polls have repeatedly shown. Not only do most conservatives have liberal or moderate attitudes across a wide range of issues, but many liberals also have moderate or conservative attitudes--although usually not nearly to the same degree, especially on the core spending questions.
For example, if we look at the GSS's cumulative results since 1972, in seven issue areas--national defense, education, the environment, health care, social security, aid to cities and aid to blacks, the difference between self-identified liberals and conservatives ranged from a high of 26.7 percent to a low of 11.6 percent--a million miles away from the 100 percent opposition you would expect from the constant demonization of liberals.
Even when we turn to so-called 'hot-button' issues, the differences between liberals and conservatives are far from polar opposition. When asked if it should be legal for a woman to get an abortion "for any reason," the GSS showed a difference of 21.8 percent between liberals and conservative. But when given three choices--should abortion be legal "always," "sometimes," or "never," the difference sank to 12.1 percent.
What's more, the vast majority of that difference did not come from extreme opposition to abortion--the supposedly defining position for conservatives. Among liberals, 7.0 percent said abortion should never be legal. Among conservatives, the figure was 9.8 percent--a difference of just 2.8 percent. Yet, to hear hardline conservatives speak, you would think that the difference here would be 100 percent--all liberals would oppose outlawing abortions completely, and all conservatives would support outlawing them. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Collapsing The Overlap: The Gulf Between Issues and Candidates
If liberals and conservatives have such similar attitudes, and so many conservatives hold liberal or moderate attitudes, then why has American politics moved so far to the right in recent years?
A starting point to answering this question is easy enough to find. There is one area in which the liberal/conservative overlap drops significantly--voting for President. In the 2004 election, liberals favored Kerry by 85-13, while conservatives favored Bush by 84-15. The overall difference: 70 percent. It's not 100 percent, but it is dramatically higher than the differences found on the issues just mentioned--or any other issues one is likely to find. For example, it's more than double the 31.9 difference in attitudes toward homosexuality found by the GSS during the 1990s.
This vast split is typical of a much broader phenomena: self-identified liberals and conservatives differ much more on who they vote for than in what they believe. There is a vast gulf between the realm of issues--where there is a surprising degree of consensus on issues across ideological lines--and the realm of electoral politics, where polarization comes to the fore. Liberals dominate in the issue realm, conservatives dominate in the electoral realm.
This gulf produces an enormous gap between issue attitudes of the electorate as a whole, and the positions of the politicians it elects. Let's take the issue of abortion as our benchmark--a high-profile polarizing issue that could hardly be accused of over-stating consensus. If the liberal/conservative split on Bush and Kerry reflected the liberal/conservative split on abortion, what would have happened? Using the GSS question above, it would have shifted 5.8% of the vote from Bush to Kerry, giving him the election by a margin of 3.3% in the popular vote, rather than a 2.5% loss. If this shift were evenly distributed across all states, it would have given him a broad 325-213 victory in the electoral college, rather than a narrow 286-252 defeat.
Two things should be obvious from this analysis: First, there is a huge gap between the public's attitudes on issues and the sorts of candidates it elects. Second, without that gap, the Republican Party would be deeply in trouble at the national level. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the GOP's recent era of dominance is entirely dependent on preventing people from voting their values--if we understand values to mean all of their values, all the things that people believe in, and not just a narrow subset of them.
This book is based on the simple premise that it is time for America to elect a government that actually represents its values and priorities, as well as the best aspects of its history. What we have instead today is "the best government money can buy," a product of clever marketing and crafted talk that bears little relationship to the values it pretends to profess, and no relationship at all to the real world, which it regards as just one more prop to use in its perpetual campaign for political power.
That marketing goes very deep. It sells people on images of identity--both of themselves and of America. The repeated insistence--overt and covert--that liberals are not loyal Americans has taken an enormous toll. It has not drastically reduced the number of liberals, which is remarkable, considering the amount of venom directed at them. But it has increased the partisan polarization. It has reduced the number of conservatives who will vote for a Democrat, or call themselves a Democrat.
Yet, these same conservatives still retain a broad range of liberal or moderate attitudes. As polarization increases in intensity, the gap between attitudes and identity intensifies as well. Denial, deceit and distraction become increasingly central to perpetuating the conservative agenda. The more this happens, the more important it becomes to project the image that conservative leaders are truthful, straightforward, no-nonsense men of integrity. If that central lie can be sold, then all the other lies are relatively easy.
The yawning gap between conservative identity and values can never be exposed and dealt with so long as Democrats believe--mistakenly--that they need to move to the right on the issues in order to be "more mainstream." The mainstream of American opinion is liberal across a broad array of issues, and that is where Democrats ought to take their stand, regardless of how they choose to label themselves. The more firmly they do so, and the more firmly they insist on talking about specific issues, the more difficult it will become for conservative politicians to continue hoodwinking a public--much of which calls itself "conservative"--that is opposed to them on most policy questions.
Conservative Identity Politics
The previous section drew a stark contrast between issues and candidate voting. That contrast is very important. However, it also needs some nuance added to it. There are some questions on which Americans appear quite conservative. These are often--though not always--questions heavily influenced by perceptions, as opposed to more pure policy questions. These perceptions usually involve perceptions of social worthiness, which can be thought of in terms of in-groups and out-groups.
A classic example of this is questions about welfare. Americans appear quite hostile to welfare if we take the broadest approach to sampling their opinions. But if we dig deeper, we discover a much more complex picture. Part of the complexity involves stereotypes about welfare recipients and the welfare system itself. When questions are asked that filter out inaccurate stereotypes, levels of support skyrocket dramatically.
This is part of larger pattern. Perceived out-groups and those who would help them are generally viewed with suspicion--their influence, power, and the share of resources they receive are all exaggerated. This suspicion, however, is much greater among those who are generally more conservative.
This was dramatically demonstrated as far back as 1964, in a detailed survey, published three years later in the book The Political Beliefs of Americans. Using an operational measure of liberalism and conservatism--based on specific support for social spending--the authors, Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril, found a striking pattern. For four distinct groups--blacks, Jews, Catholics and labor unions--those who were more operationally conservative were more likely to say these groups had too much power. At the time, one should note, most blacks lived in the South where millions of them were denied the vote, and none held elective office of any kind. Less than 1% of the House of Representative was black. Yet, 60% of operational conservatives--those most opposed to a specific set of government spending programs--said that blacks should have "less influence."
Conservatives identity politics is a major reason that conservatives have been more distrustful of the federal government over the past 50 years. It has often served as a counterbalance to local prejudices, not just against blacks in the South, but more generally as a protector of minority rights. Still, even most conservatives believe in protecting most minority rights--at least in the abstract--until their buttons are repeatedly pushed with hysterical distortions and outright lies (equating affirmative action with "quotas," for example, when quotas were outlawed by the Supreme Court in the 1977 Baake decision.).
Conservative identity politics involves an identification with in-groups, along with a preferential evaluation of them and their institutions, treating them as normal, virtuous, and generally above suspicion. As a consequence, the opposite view is adopted toward out-groups--they and their institutions (and those perceived as supporting them) are regarded with suspicion, and treated as abnormal, morally suspect, and possibly threatening or dangerous.
Because liberals as a rule stand up for the disadvantaged and downtrodden, this is part of the reason for the conservative demonization of liberals. Liberals also favor freedom of speech and critical questioning, as opposed to blind deference to authority. This adds to the sense that they are disloyal, when questioning authorities is presented as attacking their leadership--and, thus, the nation as a whole.
Conservative identity politics is an underlying factor that helps explain why conservatives will vote against their policy positions, and for politicians who implement opposing, conservative policies. It is such a deeply-rooted phenomena that it's unrealistic to think it will ever disappear. But its power and influence can be combated, if it is understood, and is not confused with conservative principles across the board. Indeed, a great deal of the identity conservatism wishes to project is constructed from liberal ideals that conservatives in the past have fought against tooth and nail. |
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