In releasing the poll, Harris said:
"Wingnuts" and President Obama
A socialist? A Muslim? Anti-American? The Anti-Christ? Large minorities of Americans hold some remarkable opinions
A new book, Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America by John Avlon describes the large numbers of Americans who hold extreme views of President Obama. This Harris Poll seeks to measure how many people are involved. It finds that 40% of adults believe he is a socialist. More than 30% think he wants to take away Americans' right to own guns and that he is a Muslim. More than 25% believe he wants to turn over the sovereignty of the United States to a world government, has done many things that are unconstitutional, that he resents America's heritage, and that he does what Wall Street tells him to do.
Obviously the last claim was not like the others. There's very good reason to believe it--or worse, to believe that Obama doesn't even have to be told, but that he sees the world in fundamentally much the same way Wall Street does, including their sense of whose welfare should count and whose should not. This can be seen in the following two charts, showing the cross-tabs by ideology and by party, where the relative convergence of attitudes is clearly visible on this question, the only truly eye-catching departure from the general trendlines:
The same is not true of the cross-tabs by education, however, which show that post-grads are more likely to converge on the notion that Obama "resents America's heritage." Education, it seems, can only do so much:
A Peek Into The Process With Harris's Humphrey Taylor
I was intrigued by what Harris said about how the poll came about, and wanted to find out more. Fortunately, I was able to interview the man at the center of it all, Humphrey Taylor.
I asked him first for a more detailed description of how the final list came about, in constrast with its origins in the book Wingnuts.
"I came across the book, and said, 'Wow! I wonder if anybody has quantified this? And it seemed that they had not," Taylor told me. "So I thought, 'Wouldn't it be great to find out how many people actually believed these things. So I then looked at the list and I did call John Avalon and say, 'What do you think would be the most interesting ones to ask for?'. So we produced a long list, and then, because resources are finite, we cut it down to the list we had [in the poll], what about fifteen things. But it was a subjective judgment as to which ones were worth including and which would be most interesting."
I wanted to know about the subjective factors guiding him. What exactly was he looking for?
"My guiding principles were... well, it was a combination. Some I included because I thought they would be widespread, and some I included because I thought they were pretty amazing. I mean, I had never heard of this Anti-Christ thing, until I read it in Wignuts."
As you can see from the charts above, there's no clear dividing line between the widespread and "pretty amazing," it's much more of a continuum. Which, it should be noted, goes to show that the data was not influenced at all by the subjective factors involved in the list selection.
I indicated to Taylor that there were pictures and video of people with Obama/Anti-Christ signs, and while this didn't surprise him, it didn't alter the fact that he'd never seen any of them. "My first reaction to John was 'You're joking. These people don't exist.' And he said, 'No, they really do.' And I said, 'Wow. Let's ask it,'" Taylor explained. "Essentially, I guess, I was thinking more like a journalist than like a scientist,in that I wanted to look at the ones that would be the most interesting and newsworthy."
Another question that interested me was whether there was a hard core of believers who tended to believe all the different items, or whether the less commonly believed items were more evenly distributed among those who believed the more common ones.
"I'm not sure we've done all of that analysis," Taylor told me at first, but then added, "There's no question there is a hard core of people who believe most of these things. And then there are sort of circles beyond the hard core who believe some of them and a few of them."
I then asked if they'd done cross-tabs of ideology combined with party ID-as I've done in the past using Genreal Social Survey date. "No we haven't, actually," he told me, adding, "We did ask people if they supported the Tea Party," and giving me a heads up: "We will be publishing a column next week about the Tea Party movement, which includes those data."
Definitely something to stay tuned for.
When I then asked if he was aware of other similar polls, his response was 'no', except for a few more limited polls. "Actually not," he said, then immediately qualified that to be more specific, mentioning "one or two polls that have asked whether Obama is a Muslim. They came up with slightly lower numbers, but not much lower numbers. And those were when Obama was much more popular. So the numbers who think he's a Muslim may have increased a little bit, as he's become more unpopular."
He also went on to mention polls on the Birther question, and on doing things that are unconstitutional, but "On the great majority of these, I've seen nothing."
As for his take on the wider context, Taylor told me, "We had about 30% of the American people still believing that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq two or three years after the President said there were not. And I think the other thing, I don't think the traditional media with a few exceptions is responsible for spreading this.information, or disinformation. I think it comes partly from maybe talk radio, but mostly from the social media, from cyberspace, from the blogosphere. And I think these numbers are actually a very interesting indication of the power of the blogosphere, and cyberspace, and social media."
I mentioned that there was a long history behind this, dating back to email lists in the 1990s. I didn't get into the wingnut books and pamphlets from the 60s I've mentioned in recent weeks. Taylor then went on to say, "There's another network that's not well studied, I wish we'd done a poll on, I don't think we did, which was on those people who believed in the Rapture. You know about the Rapture. Something I stumbled across, I didn't know anyone who believed in the Rapture, so I didn't know about it. But, apparently, again, there are large numbers of people who believe in that. And, of course, there are certainly people who believe the end of the world is near."
Thirty years after the election of Ronald Reagan--based in no small way on just this sort of people--I was a bit surprised that he was not more attuned to their importance. I then said something about Birthers vs. Truthers and the problem of false positives from people aware of legitimate problems, and Taylor said, "Well, actually, you've triggered another idea for another poll that I might try, which is that we should take all the great conspiracy theories, and see how many believe them. I mean, some of them may be true."
Altogether it was a very interesting conversation. The next day, Taylor posted a blog talking about the response to the poll, "Wingnuts: A Harris Poll That Has Generated A Lot of Attention". One thing he said that stood out for me was this:
Q. What are the implications of this poll for American politics?
A. They are important. Next week we will be publishing a poll on the Tea Party Movement and the attitudes of their supporters. Many of them believe the statements about President Obama. There are other Republicans who think they are dangerous nonsense.
Over this year, and beyond, I think we will see a struggle for the control (some might say the soul) of the Republican Party. If the Tea Party people come out on top, I think it spells real trouble for the party, as they run the risk of alienating moderate Republicans and most Independents.
Where It All Comes From
While I'm sure there's a good deal of truth to Taylor's intuition about the role of social media, that's not the whole story, and Media Matters has done a good job of pulling together ("No surprise that Harris poll finds Republicans believe GOP smears of Obama"). Introducing a list of examples, Media Matters said:
In the past two years, conservatives in the media have advanced many of these false claims, including that Obama is in fact a Muslim and not a Christian, wants to take away Americans' guns, and was not born in the United States. They have also advanced numerous smears that Obama is a socialist, a racist, and has policies and beliefs similar to Hitler's.
Media Matters presents far too many examples for me to look at in any detail, but I did want to pull out one, not because it was extraordinary, but rather, precisely because it was not-and focusing on it for a moment could help to drive home the role played by seemingly mundane, everyday forms of lying that have become entirely routinized. Under the heading of "Right-wing rhetoric: Obama is a socialist," they cited an example where Morris actually slips in an entirely false narrative about subverting the Constitution, thus showing how the two lies interconnect:
Morris: Obama is "going to adopt the entire socialist program by essentially circumventing the Constitution." On March 19, talking about President Obama's policies, Fox News contributor Dick Morris, who has repeatedly referred to Obama as a "socialist," stated: "I think he'll pass amnesty for illegal immigrants with it [reconciliation]; he'll pass cap and trade; he'll pass financial regulation; he'll pass the public option -- between the House doing the 'deem to have passed' and the Senate doing reconciliation, he's got his own little Constitution going here." He later added that Obama "is going to adopt the entire socialist program by essentially circumventing the Constitution." [Fox
News' The O'Reilly Factor; 3/19/10]
But, of course, not only are reconciliation and "deem and pass" common legislative practices, they are at most exceptions to more commonly used legislative practices-all of which the Constitution is basically silent on, since it gives the House and Senate the power to set their own rule. The ignorance here is so profound that no high school student who thought like Morris ought to be allowed to graduate. There is nothing remotely approaching a circumvention of the Constitution here, and this blacher by Morris is nothing but an intentional effort to deceive the American people.
Conclusion
Put simply, then, what we now have is a clear picture of how the conservative propaganda infrastructure has convinced a large part of the GOP & conservative base that Obama is an enemy of America, based on a constant barrage of false and misleading arguments. By failing to be vigilant about this fact, the rest of the media is equally at fault for dereliction of their duty. Let's hope that the Harris Poll can help spark at least some small change in the rest of the media's failure to pursue the truth, and act in the public interest. |
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