In 1967, Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril published a landmark study, The Political Beliefs of Americans: A Study of Public Opinion,
based on surveys done by Gallup during the 1964 election season. It's considered a classic in public opinion research. One of their more striking findings was the degree to which various outgroups were perceived as having "too much" power, despite the fact that they actually had very little. Here is a table of their findings:
It's particularly striking that by 31% to 30%, people thought that blacks should have "less influence." At the time, blacks constituted 10.6% of the population, but had less than 1% of the seats in the House of Representatives, and tens of millions of them could not vote. Yet, by a slight plurality, the American people thought that they had too much power, and really ought to have less. (Hadley and Free did not break this out by race. The plurality among white Americans would surely have been a few points greater than just 31-30.)
A related finding was even more striking, however. This concerned how intensely this belief was correlated with what they called "operational conservatism"--basically, hostility to New Deal-style social spending. This is most significant, since they also discovered that most ideological or self-described conservatives were not operational conservatives.
The three spectrums--operational, ideological, and self-identification, produced strikingly different distributions:
and just over 1/4 of "ideological conservatives" qualified as "operational conservatives":
Thus, operational conservatives could credibly be regarded as a true "hard core." Here, then is how attitudes toward the power of outgroups broke down along the operational spectrum:
In graphic form, it looks like this:
Granted, this was a long time ago. But there is other, more recent data that shows similar patterns. It's no longer acceptable in most circles to come right out and say that you won't vote for Obama because he's black. And so, instead, we get a sizeable chunk of the electorate who believes that he's a Muslim, i.e. a potential terrorist sympathizer.
OTOH, there is actual videotape of Sarah Palin praising the Alaska Indepence party in a welcoming message to attendees at its 2008 convention:
Palin also has a long history of association with it, although she was never registered to vote as a member:
None of this is troubling, however, any more than it's troubling that tens of millions of white Southerners are fiercely proud of their heritage, including the Confederate battle flag, a flag of treasonous rebellion, under which hundreds of thousands of loyal American soldiers were killed or wounded. Such is the power of in-groups vs. out-groups.
If black Americans had rebelled because of their slavery, and killed or wounded hundreds of thousands of (mostly white) Americans in the process, does anyone seriously think there would be any tolerance whatsoever for the flying of their battle flag today?
And so, it is really no wonder that after building the most impressive volunteer effort ever in a presidential campaign, Barack Obama can be dismissively attacked as a mere "celebrity" with "empty rhetoric" (despite a long list of sponsored legislation) while Sarah Palin is touted for having "more executive experience", and her overnight appearance on the national stage is regarded as an "American success story."
Indeed, it would be very, very strange if this were not the case, given the nature of underlying attitudes about in-groups, out-groups, and power in America. |
