Last weekend, I was trying to lay out the foundations of an argument that we need to understand the tension between Obama and progressives in terms of hegemonic power. On the one hand, in "Digby, Hegemony and the Policy-Personnel Debate", I argued that Digby was mistaken to say:
Liberals took cultural signifiers as a sign of solidarity and didn't ask for anything.
Rather, Obama really did have something in the way of a progressive agenda to offer, as Nate Silver had argued-although Nate overstated the case for how progressive that agenda was, as I argued in "Nate Silver's Curious Categorization of Obama's Policy Agenda". In the Digby diary, I laid down the bottom line to my argument:
progressives need to learn about political power. They need to learn about building it for the long term. They need to learn about investing in building power over the long haul, as opposed to simply spending wildly to avoid being utterly crushed in the next election. This is what hegemonic struggle is all about: building power across a range of institutions, so that their normal functioning produces the sorts of outcomes you want.
Obama has, quite simply, been responding to who's got the power, and how those with power define reality. That's my argument. And to change how he acts, in making further appointments as well as substantive policy, we have to change the hegemonic equation.
But what about Nate Silver? |
| The Argument
Funny you should ask. In "Nate Silver's Curious Categorization of Obama's Policy Agenda", I argued that the vast majority (if not all) of the policies that Silver categorized as solely progressive actually had broad support across the ideological spectrum. I was not saying that those policies weren't progressive-only that they weren't exclusively progressive.
This argument has two implications. One is that Nate's point isn't as strong as he supposes. I still agree that Obama's policy agenda is generally attractive to progressives, and that that was a rational reason for progressives to support him Obama wasn't just offering cultural signifiers, as Digby had put it. But that doesn't mean that Obama's positions are definitively progressive, because, in fact, they are not. I presented a number of broad national spending questions from the General Social Survey (GSS) to show the relative evenness of support in the areas covered. I re-present those tables below, both as a quick reminder, and as a prelude to my further argument.
The second implication is the flip side of the first. Since "progressive" is not an exclusive political category, it's time to stop accepting the logic of isolation, alienation and exclusion. In fact, it's ideological conservatives who are the real outsiders, in everything except for the powerful political institutions they've built-and those institutions are disproportionately based on vast inequalities of wealth, skillfully used to create the impression of far more popular support than they actually enjoy.
The Evidence
First, a quick recapitulation of the tables from last weekend's diary, as promised above.
Here is my explanation of the ideological categories I constructed to match Nate's categories as best I could:
We can do this in a number of cases by relying on the General Social Survey (GSS) questions on national spending, as answered on its surveys this decade: 2000, 2002, 2004 and 2006, and breaking those down as follows: from the seven-point scale we assign (1) extreme liberal and (2) liberal to "progressive", while assigning the mirror image categories of (7) extreme conservative and (6) conservative to "conservative." We assign (3) slightly liberal and (4) moderate to "center left", while assigning the mirror image categories of (5) slightly conservative and (4) moderate to "center right" and assigning (4) moderate alone to "center". This results in a triple counting of moderates, but this follows Nate's lead, and it certainly does reflect the over-infatuation with supposedly centrist positions.
And here are the tables, with multiple tables and alternate wordings in some categories:
:
Assisting the Poor
| Spending On: Assistance to the poor |
| Spending? | Progressives | Center -Left | Center | Center -Right | Conservative |
| 1: "Too Little" | 78.5 | 70.7 | 69.7 | 67.5 | 52.5 |
| 2: "About Right" | 16.3 | 22.8 | 23.5 | 25.2 | 29.6 |
| 3: "Too Much" | 5.3 | 6.5 | 6.7 | 7.4 | 18.2 |
| 4: Lib Index | 93.7 | 91.6 | 91.2 | 90.2 | 74.2 |
| 5: #1 + #2 | 94.7 | 93.5 | 93.3 | 92.6 | 82.0 |
| Change in #4 | __ | 2.1 | 0.4 | 1.1 | 15.9 |
| Change in #5 | __ | 1.2 | 0.2 | 0.6 | 10.6 |
Education
| Spending On: Improving the nation's education system |
| Spending? | Progressives | Center -Left | Center | Center -Right | Conservative |
| 1: "Too Little" | 80.9 | 75.2 | 74.8 | 73.0 | 64.5 |
| 2: "About Right" | 16.6 | 22.0 | 22.3 | 23.4 | 22.7 |
| 3: "Too Much" | 2.6 | 2.9 | 2.9 | 3.6 | 12.7 |
| 4: Lib Index | 96.9 | 96.3 | 96.2 | 95.3 | 83.6 |
| 5: #1 + #2 | 97.4 | 97.2 | 97.1 | 96.4 | 87.2 |
| Change in #4 | __ | 0.6 | 0.1 | 0.9 | 11.7 |
| Change in #5 | __ | 0.3 | 0.1 | 0.7 | 9.2 |
And:
| Spending On: Education |
| Spending? | Progressives | Center -Left | Center | Center -Right | Conservative |
| 1: "Too Little" | 84.9 | 79.4 | 78.8 | 77.7 | 61.6 |
| 2: "About Right" | 13.6 | 17.4 | 17.7 | 18.4 | 24.7 |
| 3: "Too Much" | 1.7 | 3.3 | 3.6 | 4.0 | 13.6 |
| 4: Lib Index | 98.0 | 96.1 | 95.6 | 95.1 | 81.9 |
| 5: #1 + #2 | 98.4 | 96.8 | 96.5 | 96.1 | 86.4 |
| Change in #4 | __ | 1.9 | 0.4 | 0.5 | 13.2 |
| Change in #5 | __ | 1.6 | 0.4 | 0.4 | 9.7 |
Urban Spending
| Spending On: Solving the problems of the big cities. |
| Spending? | Progressives | Center -Left | Center | Center -Right | Conservative |
| 1: "Too Little" | 61.3 | 49.0 | 49.1 | 46.6 | 37.3 |
| 2: "About Right" | 32.5 | 39.6 | 38.7 | 40.0 | 41.2 |
| 3: "Too Much" | 6.4 | 11.3 | 12.2 | 13.4 | 21.5 |
| 4: Lib Index | 90.5 | 81.2 | 80.1 | 77.7 | 63.4 |
| 5: #1 + #2 | 93.8 | 88.6 | 87.8 | 86.6 | 78.5 |
| Change in #4 | __ | 9.3 | 1.1 | 2.4 | 14.3 |
| Change in #5 | __ | 5.2 | 0.8 | 1.2 | 8.2 |
And:
| Spending On: Assistance to big cities |
| Spending? | Progressives | Center -Left | Center | Center -Right | Conservative |
| 1: "Too Little" | 33.5 | 22.7 | 21.4 | 20.2 | 16.2 |
| 2: "About Right" | 41.8 | 46.7 | 47.0 | 47.4 | 34.7 |
| 3: "Too Much" | 24.7 | 30.5 | 31.6 | 32.4 | 49.1 |
| 4: Lib Index | 57.6 | 42.6 | 40.3 | 38.5 | 24.8 |
| 5: #1 + #2 | 75.3 | 69.5 | 68.4 | 67.6 | 50.9 |
| Change in #4 | __ | 14.9 | 2.3 | 1.9 | 13.7 |
| Change in #5 | __ | 5.8 | 1.1 | 0.7 | 16.8 |
Scientific Research
| Spending On: Supporting scientific research |
| Spending? | Progressives | Center -Left | Center | Center -Right | Conservative |
| 1: "Too Little" | 55.1 | 43.1 | 43.0 | 41.5 | 34.6 |
| 2: "About Right" | 37.7 | 44.8 | 44.0 | 45.9 | 51.1 |
| 3: "Too Much" | 7.6 | 12.0 | 13.0 | 12.7 | 14.3 |
| 4: Lib Index | 87.8 | 78.2 | 76.8 | 76.5 | 70.7 |
| 5: #1 + #2 | 92.7 | 88.0 | 87.1 | 87.4 | 85.7 |
| Change in #4 | __ | 9.7 | 1.4 | 0.3 | 5.8 |
| Change in #5 | __ | 4.8 | 0.9 | -0.3 | 1.7 |
Transportation Infrastructure
| Spending On: Highways and bridges |
| Spending? | Progressives | Center -Left | Center | Center -Right | Conservative |
| 1: "Too Little" | 34.3 | 34.9 | 35.2 | 34.5 | 36.7 |
| 2: "About Right" | 50.8 | 53.4 | 53.2 | 54.1 | 52.7 |
| 3: "Too Much" | 14.8 | 11.7 | 11.5 | 11.4 | 10.7 |
| 4: Lib Index | 69.9 | 75.0 | 75.3 | 75.2 | 77.5 |
| 5: #1 + #2 | 85.1 | 88.3 | 88.5 | 88.6 | 89.4 |
| Change in #4 | __ | -5.1 | -0.3 | 0.1 | -2.3 |
| Change in #5 | __ | -3.2 | -0.1 | -0.2 | -0.8 |
And:
| Spending On: Mass Transportation |
| Spending? | Progressives | Center -Left | Center | Center -Right | Conservative |
| 1: "Too Little" | 50.3 | 37.5 | 35.7 | 36.6 | 34.7 |
| 2: "About Right" | 42.5 | 54.0 | 55.3 | 53.9 | 51.4 |
| 3: "Too Much" | 7.3 | 8.6 | 9.1 | 9.5 | 13.8 |
| 4: Lib Index | 87.4 | 81.3 | 79.7 | 79.5 | 71.6 |
| 5: #1 + #2 | 92.8 | 91.4 | 90.9 | 90.5 | 86.2 |
| Change in #4 | __ | 6.1 | 1.6 | 0.3 | 7.9 |
| Change in #5 | __ | 1.4 | 0.5 | 0.4 | 4.4 |
Foreign Aid
(Recall, people vastly over-estimate the amount spent on foreign aid, and other polling shows broad support for actually increasing foreign aid several fold.)
| Spending On: Foreign aid |
| Spending? | Progressives | Center -Left | Center | Center -Right | Conservative |
| 1: "Too Little" | 17.7 | 9.6 | 9.5 | 9.2 | 5.9 |
| 2: "About Right" | 31.6 | 27.8 | 26.3 | 26.7 | 26.8 |
| 3: "Too Much" | 50.5 | 62.6 | 64.2 | 64.1 | 67.2 |
| 4: Lib Index | 25.9 | 13.3 | 12.9 | 12.5 | 8.1 |
| 5: #1 + #2 | 49.3 | 37.4 | 35.8 | 35.9 | 32.7 |
| Change in #4 | __ | 12.6 | 0.4 | 0.4 | 4.4 |
| Change in #5 | __ | 11.9 | 1.5 | 0.0 | 3.1 |
And, finally...
The Composite Index
If we combine all of the above questions that were asked of the same people (split samples were used, so we can't include all the tables), we have seven spending items we can combine with a distribution of support that looks like this:
| Spending Composite Index--Seven Items |
| Spending? | Progressives | Center-Left | Center | Center-Right | Conservative |
| 1: "Too Little" | 87.3 | 83.9 | 71.8 | 69.2 | 50.0 |
| 2: "About Right" | 8.7 | 9.0 | 15.5 | 16.6 | 15.2 |
| 3: "Too Much" | 4.0 | 7.4 | 12.4 | 14.0 | 34.8 |
| 4: Lib Index | 95.6 | 91.9 | 85.2 | 83.1 | 59.0 |
| 5: #1 + #2 | 96.0 | 93.0 | 87.3 | 85.8 | 65.2 |
| Change in #4 | -- | 3.6 | 6.7 | 2.1 | 24.2 |
| Change in #5 | -- | 3.0 | 5.7 | 1.5 | 20.6 |
What we see first in this table is a relatively slow gradation from progressive to center-right, followed by a sharp drop off among conservatives. The liberalism index only declines 12.5 points from progressive to center-right, but then plunges 24.1-almost twice as much-from center-right to conservative. The drop-off in total support (#1 +#2) is smaller, but the ratio is greater: a 10.2 point drop from progressive to center-right, followed by a 20.6 point drop (more than twice as much) from center-right to conservative. By both measures, conservatives are outliers.
And yet, what we see second in this table is that even conservatives think we are spending too little, rather than too much. 50 percent think we are spending too little, 65.2 percent think we are either spending too little, or about right, and 59 percent of those thinking we're spending either too little or too much think that we're spending too little. These are all sharply at odds with conservative ideological orthodoxy, which says that virtually all government spending outside of the military and police is a bad thing, and that successful government programs are especially bad, because they will make people think that government can help them and do good things.
In short, these spending areas, and the specific proposals that they encompass are solid gold in terms of marginalizing conservatism, and even turning self-identified conservatives against the core ideology of movement conservatism. Although it is clearly mistaken to categorize these programs as exclusively or distinctively progressive, they are-at least potentially-powerfully progressive in terms of shifting political behavior.
I say, "at least potentially" because nothing that I've observed above has a uniquely determined outcome. Indeed, one consequence of Obama stacking his Administration with establishment centrists is that passage of this part of Obama's policy agenda (the part that Nate identified as distinctively progressive) will be readily spun as a centrist victory, a victory for "bipartisanship" and "pragmatism" and against "ideologues of both extremes"-even though it is most strongly favored by "ideologues" on the left and is only opposed by hard-core ideologues on the right, who are so small in number that they can't even be distinguished in the tables above.
This analysis helps underscore one of the problems with centrist staffing that's been under-appreciated so far, a problem that's part of a much broader dynamic, in which progressive political effort, unacknowledged, only serves to strengthen centrists who turn around and use their enhanced power and prestige to further marginalize progressives. This is not a bargain that progressives should willingly accept, regardless of whether they consider themselves more mainstream or more independent. Indeed, even centrists with integrity should not want to be playing this game. Giving credit where credit is due should be a basic tenet of decency and respect, to be routinely expected as part of the process of keeping politics working in a healthy and harmonious manner as much s possible. We ought to be at least as concerned about treating other Democrats with respect as we are about Republicans. After all, we're the ones who have earned it.
What Next?
If all the above items are progressive, but not exclusively so, the natural question arises: what is exclusively progressive? Or, if not exclusively progressive, then at least distinctively progressive, in that it finds much more favor among self-identified progressives, and motivates them in ways that it doesn't motivate others. Or, perhaps even better, what is it that if embraced, has the effect of transforming people in an increasingly progressive direction?
That's what I'd like to discuss in one or two diaries tomorrow. |
