In Chris's early October diary "Wall Street Bailout Thwarting Democratic Realignment" , a couple of commentators talked themselves into a fact-free Versailles kool-aide fest, confusing Versailles Dems with the Democratic base.
Texas Dem began with a comment that I might argue with, but that held a modicum of truth:
Labor atrophied, and the Democrats went from being a party of labor
to being a party of labor AND of business AND of half of the rich.
That is the real source of the "Democrats divided" meme. The true left base is not large enough in this country to rest a party on, so we have a party built on labor AND on business, which can barely function.
Democrats don't propose restoring the Reagan Brackets because a significant fraction of their donor base would revolt. Until we get a party built only on unions and working people without any rich people required (they can join out of conviction, but not to defend their interests), then even the obvious cannot be done.
I don't remember the details of when Obama waffled on rolling back the Bush tax cuts vs letting them expire (after the primary, or did Hillary do it too?), but that was the tell.
Actually, the Democratic Party was never a party of labor, labor didn't simply atrophy, the left was purged from it during the McCarthy Era and the business-friendly labor leadership that remained misrepresented labor even when it was still strong, and even today the Democratic Party is not the party of "half the rich." But ever since the early 80s, the party has gone out of its way to court Wall Street, and Obama has done the same to a ridiculous extent:
Given Obama' vast small donor base, he could have kept his distance from Wall Street. Instead, he's turned the other way around. But the comment thread quickly diverged further and further from reality:
This donor base that would revolt...
...why are they Democrats to begin with?
"We judge ourselves by our ideals; others by their actions. It is a great convenience." -- oward Zinn
by: Master Jack @ Mon Oct 05, 2009 at 20:08
Social issues
by: DTOzone @ Mon Oct 05, 2009 at 20:30
So the Dems have been reduced to...
...being the Abortion Party.
Lovely.
"We judge ourselves by our ideals; others by their actions. It is a great convenience." -- Howard Zinn
by: Master Jack @ Mon Oct 05, 2009 at 20:34
yes...sorta
that's how they rose from the 1980's doldrums...by winning over socially liberal fiscal conservatives in the Northeast.
and similarly, the GOP is the Christian party.
by: DTOzone @ Mon Oct 05, 2009 at 23:02
In fact, the Democratic electorate has not changed significantly since the 1980s in the ways alleged, and the gap between Democratic and Republican voters on a state-by-state basis is quite distinct on economic issues compared to social ones. Details on the flip.
In early 2006, I began working on a book project that never really worked out. (Got a spare $20k? I'm willing to give it another shot!) I wanted to address the extreme disconnect between the conservative political climate in Washington (remember, this was about six months before the 2006 midterms) and the political attitudes of the American people, which, according to the best social science, had only changed modestly overall since the early Nixon era. During the course of researching and drafting an introductory chapter, the importance of conservative identity politics became blindingly clear as the result of a series of number-driven arguments.
As I've been wrestling with recent manifestations of conservative identity politics that I planned to blog about this weekend--the Birthers, The Family, etc.--I remembered this earlier work, and the hard foundations of data on which it rested. I thought it would make a good companion piece to my contemporary observations to go back and resurrect that argument. So I took a draft chapter, whittled it down a bit, and I'm presenting it after the jump.
There are two overarching points that I hope will clearly emerge from this. The first is that my contemporary focus on conservative identity politics is not just some arbitrary whim. It emerges out of an inquiry that was not originally concerned with it at all. In fact, I was taken by surprise as the logic of it virtually ambushed me. The second point--closely related--is that conservative identity politics cannot simply be ignored, or factored out of other discussions. It lies at the very heart of understanding conservative hostility to liberals, which is the main driving force polarizing our politics today, and interfering with the important work of solving major problems that confront us as a society--such as meeting the challenge of climate change.
This is a long diary, over 4000 words, so feel free to skim the parts that may seem tangential to you. I wanted to preserve enough of the original to accurately reflect the range of factors that I had considered. And I hope that even if this is a bit long for you to read online all at one go, you'll want to bookmark it and return to it again. Heck, maybe even as soon as my next diary posts.
The murder of Dr. George Tiller is evidence of the re-emergence of violent rightwing extremism, which many observers expected in the wake of Bush & Cheney's exit from the White House. Indeed, a report released in April, Rightwing Extremism: Current. Economic and Political Climate Fueling. Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment (pdf), was subject to rightwing backlash, precisely because it accurately focused attention on the potential for increased rightwing terrorism at this time. While it didn't focus specifically on anti-abortion activists, it has been ten years since the last abortion provider was murdered. While the numbers of violent rightwing activists can be measured in the thousands, they are representative of a much larger segment of the population, measuring in the millions. However, this still represents only a relatively small political fringe in the total electorate, as can be seen by this chart, showing that total opposition to all abortions encompasses roughly one in 11 Americans, and one in seven Republicans:
(Source: General Social Survey. Interactively generated by author, May 31, 2009, Sun 03:04 PM PDT. Filtered for years 2000-2008.)
Abthreat is a combined scale, measuring attitudes toward abortion in case of rape, threat to the health of the mother, or significant birth defect.
In my previous diary, "Nate Silver Redux", I wrote about a "Composite Index" of the long-term national spending items on the General Social Survey underlying Obama's "progressive" policies as identified by Nate Silver:
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?
Progress- ives
Center- Left
Center
Center- Right
Conserv- ative
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.
But there's an interesting additional twist to this story....
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.
The main objections to my diary "Center-Left Nation: Congress Since WWII" seemed to be two-fold: first that I was only using a single data source. Second, more significantly, that I was making an argument that ignored the racism of the Southern Dems. My answers were that (1) You only need one data source to disprove a thesis ("center-right nation"), and advance (not prove) another ("center-left nation"); (2) It was still true in the aggregate, as shown, for example, by the Congressional DW-Nominate scores.
I stand by those answers, but of course, they don't need to be the last word. And, indeed, they shouldn't be the last word. Hence, a look at party ID since 1972, from the General Social Survey (GSS). It should be noted that the figures here--which include partisan leaners--are not as strikingly Democratic as those from Pew, which is also a very reputable pollster, and I have no explanation for the discrepancy. But GSS figures are available going much further back.
(GSS polls not taken every year, see tables below for exact dates.)
So, the Democrats have lost their crushing 2-1 advantage enjoyed in the early 70s, but still have maintained an edge in every GSS poll since that time. And as for arguments about Southern racist Dems, well, that's what God made regional crosstabs for...
Obama's sudden lurch to the right is all in accord with one of Versailles' most treasured, and most bogus narratives, the claim that America is a "center-right" country, and thus that it's both natural and necessary for any Democrat to attack the party's base and trample the things it believes in. After all, they're just a bunch of DFHs, whose views are hated and despised by real Americans (who read David Brooks religiously to know what they should think).
I'll have more to say about the center-right premise in another diary...
Well, this is that diary. I want to go back to the same data source I used before, the General Social Survey (GSS), which is the most thorough long-term survey of American public opinion, administered 26 times since 1972. The GSS is the gold standard when it comes to American public opinion research, and is cited more frewuently by social scientists than any other data source except the US Census. The data I've drawn from it relates to social spending, and it shows remarkably consistent findings across all the times it has been administered. There are fluctuations, to be sure, but even when the public is in its most conservative frame of mind, support for these programs remains remarkably robust-and not just among liberals and moderates. This data provides undeniable evidence of conservative support for welfare state social spending.
The first thing I'm going to do is look at a combined index of spending preferences, a slightly different one than the one I used in my earlier diary, since this one includes Social Security, which the GSS did not start polling for until 1984. Since then, majority of extreme conservatives (self-identified 7 on a 1-7 scale) said we were spending too little on a combined measure (call it NatWelfComp) of whether people think we're spending too little, too much or about right on seven different areas-Social Security, welfare, "improving [the] nation's education system," "improving & protecting [the] environment," "improving & protecting [the] nations health," "improving the conditions of blacks," and "solving problems of big cities." The number of extreme conservatives who thought we were spending too little on one or more programs (net: i.e. "too little" on two, but "too much" on one is a net of "too little" on one) was nearly twice the number of extreme conservatives who thought we were spending too much: 59.3% to 30.7%. This can be seen in the last column of the chart below:
Obama's sudden lurch to the right is all in accord with one of Versailles' most treasured, and most bogus narratives, the claim that America is a "center-right" country, and thus that it's both natural and necessary for any Democrat to attack the party's base and trample the things it believes in. After all, they're just a bunch of DFHs, whose views are hated and despised by real Americans (who read David Brooks religiously to know what they should think).
I'll have more to say about the center-right premise in another diary, but here I want to dramatically illustrate quite the opposite conclusion--that it's not the DFHs who are out of touch with the American people. It's the movement conservatives who are so far out there that even the vast majority of day-to-day conservatives are opposed to their fundamental agenda.
I will do this by looking at just two areas--albeit fairly crucial ones: social spending and abortion, using data from the General Social Survey (GSS), the gold standard of public opinion polling. (The GSS is cited by social scientists more often than any other data source except the US Census.) In both cases, it turns out, conservative doctrine has little mass support.
Abortion
First, we take a look at a combined measure of support for abortion in three cases where a pregnant woman is under duress--in the case of rape, potential birth defect(s) or threat to her health. The hardline conservative position is that abortion is murder, period, and therefore cannot be allowed for any reason. This is, however, a clear minority position:
Well, 7.5%. That sure makes Mr. 23% seem like a popular guy, now doesn't it?
But we're just getting started!
Social Spending--Round 1
Next, we look at another combined measure, which measures support for social spending on aix national priorities:
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
Again, the movement conservative position is clear: none of this is any of the government's business. Just to be merciful, I'm going to start off with a measure that lumps things together into big chunks. That way, conservatives can claim anyone who wants to cut more than they want to hold steady or increase spending--a much bigger group of people than those who want to cut everything. But even being exceedingly generous, the number of conservative believers is a tiny minority--again, even less than the 23% Bush dead-enders:
When Obama praised Reagan, he was echoing the elite, Versailles conventional wisdom, as he all too often does, rather than challenging it, and presenting the American people with a true, substantive choice for a real change of direction. How much change of direction is possible while still clinging to the myths of the past?
NObama! Reagan Did NOT Change The Trajectory Of America
"I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing."
Reality:
Reagan was a figurehead, a rallying point for the conservative movement that has taken over many of the elite institutions of America, but it has not changed the heart of America. In particular, the notion that "government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability" is directly refuted by the most-respected, and most-cited public opinion survey in America, the General Social Survey , which is cited by social scientists more often than any other data source, except for the US Census.
Here's how attitudes toward spending on the environment were not changed by Ronald Reagan:
Charts for seven more spending categories on the flip...
Obama's promise to end the culture wars is a source of enormous appeal. And why not? Wouldn't we all much rather solve actual problems-ones that could even threaten the future of human civilization? The only problem is the question of how realistic such a promise can be. I've pointed out in the past that the partisan polarization we're experiencing has causes that go far beyond individual goodwill. And I've pointed out that this period of increasing polarization and prolonged gridlock also corresponds with an unprecedented period of bi-partisan divided government. It's also obvious that political battles over culture have a very long history in America, and did not just appear out of nowhere in the 1960s.
Here, I want to take a different approach. I want to examine the claim, made fairly often by Obama supporters, that the culture wars are over for young voters. I'm going to look at data from the General Social Survey on two hot-button culture-war issues for which we have continuous long-term data: abortion and homosexuality, comparing results for successive decades from the 1970s to the 2000s. And for sake of comparison, I'm going to present data on Boomers-those born from 1946 to 1964, and those under 30 at any particular time they are surveyed. The results show quite clearly that these culture war issues are not resolved among younger voters.This is not to deny the obvious point--which Chris has pointed out a number of times--that younger voters are increasingly abandoning the GOP and shifting to the Dems. But it is to say that culture war issues have not all been resolved. The most plausible explanation is simply that conservative governance has been such a disaster that it has simply overwhelmed all other considerations-much as the Great Depression did in the elections of 1930 and 1932.
But don't take my word for it. Look at the data yourself, and then we can debate what it means.
Everyone knows that the West is a land of free spirits, full of cowboys and cowboy wannabess, where the national anthem is "Don't Fence Me In," and nobody wants no big government mucking around, no way, no how.
Only, not so much.
In fact, when it comes to levels of support for spending on domestic government programs, there is very little difference between the regions, as one can tell from just a cursory glance at the following table, based on combined measure of suport for eight domestic spending items tracked by the General Social Survey:
Domestic Spending Preferences By Region
Northeast
Midwest
South
West
MUCH TOO LITTLE 5-8 Items Net
20.8
19.6
20.4
20.7
TOO LITTLE 1-4 Items Net
56.8
54.6
53.2
54.6
ABOUT RIGHT Net
8.9
9.7
10.1
8.8
TOO MUCH 1-8 Items Net
13.5
16.1
16.3
16.0
Now, you might object that the "West" jams together California with all its coastal elites alongside the "true Westerners" from states like Idaho, Montana and Nevada. So here's a breakdown of the West into its two sub-regions:
Domestic Spending Preferences Within The West
MOUNTAIN
PACIFIC
MUCH TOO LITTLE 5-8 Items Net
18.4
21.7
TOO LITTLE 1-4 Items Net
55.8
54.0
ABOUT RIGHT Net
8.7
8.8
TOO MUCH 1-8 Items Net
17.1
15.5
As you can see, there's a slight difference between the two, but the big picture story is exactly the same: there is much more support for spending more than for spending less.
Now, I'm not for a moment suggesting that there's nothing at all behind the perception of a libertarian West. But I am suggesting that it's a good deal more complicated than your average would-be pundit supposes. And these figures offer indisputable proof.
This matters for a very significant reason: As the GOP shows signs of fracturing during this primary season, Mike Huckabee is the figure touting a form of economic populism that naturally encompasses more government spending. But he comes from a religious context that is much more deeply rooted in the South, and for that reason alone, he has distinctly less resonance in the West. Yet, these figures stongly indicate that if enough different factors combine to energize economic populism generally, there is as much potential for a shakeup in the West as there is anywhere else. And this becomes important because of Tom Schaller's thesis in Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South.
Before saying anything more, though, let's take a quick peek at conservatives alone, just to make sure that they don't have any geographic peculiarities. Well do that right after the jump.
The problem for old school, laissez-faire conservatism was evident as far back as 1936, when the GOP thought that it was going to sweep back into office in a landslide, when people saw the government taking money for Social Security right out of their paychecks!
Didn't happen. People liked Social Security. In fact, so many people liked it that it was obvious that even conservatives liked it.
Oh, and the 1936 elections? Biggest landslide defeat ever for the GOP.
Fast forward to 1964, and another landslide defeat for the GOP. That year, two giants in the history of public opinion research, Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril, fielded a comprehensive survey via their good friend George Gallup's operation. Published three years later, one of it's most stunning findings was that self-identified conservatives were strong supporters of domestic (welfare state) spending. A clear majority of them either wanted to increase or maintain existing levels of spending.
In 1972, the General Social Survey began comprehensive surveys of the American Public, once every year or two (every two years regularly since 1994). It's findings have consistently confirmed Free and Cantril's findings. Using an aggregate measure of all domestic spending items initiated at that time, and the 7-point scale for ideological self-identification, here is the cumulative record of support for welfare state spending:
Domesetic Spending Preferences By Ideological Self-Identification
Ext Lib
Lib
Mod Lib
Mod
Mod Con
Con
Ext Con
MUCH TOO LITTLE 5-8 Items Net
43.2
33.3
25.3
19.2
15.1
11.8
12.5
TOO LITTLE 1-4 Items Net
43.8
51.9
57.5
57.3
55.5
49.7
39.7
ABOUT RIGHT Net
5.4
6.8
7.8
9.9
10.6
11.4
10.3
TOO MUCH 1-8 Items Net
7.7
7.9
9.4
13.7
18.8
27.1
37.2
(Note: The table uses a "net" measure--meaning that it subtracts the number of programs a respondent thiks we're spending "too much" on from the number of programs a respondent thinks we're spending "too little" on.)
The problem for conservatives is evident at a glance. Even among self-described "extreme conservatives," barely more than 1/3 think that we're spending "too much" on domestic spending, overall. What's more, a larger percentage of extreme conservatives think we're spending too little--an absolute majority, in fact.
The problem can be seen even more starkly, if we collapse the table into three divisions: liberal, moderate and conservative:
Domesetic Spending Preferences By Ideological Self-Identification (Condensed)
LIBERAL
MODERATE
CONSERVATIVE
MUCH TOO LITTLE 5-8 Items Net
30.3
19.2
13.5
TOO LITTLE 1-4 Items Net
53.8
57.3
51.8
ABOUT RIGHT Net
7.2
9.9
10.9
TOO MUCH 1-8 Items Net
8.6
13.7
23.8
Now it's really clear. Barely more than 1/3 of all conservatives think that we're not spending too little.
Of course Congressional Democrats realize that Bush's veto of SCHIP is good for Democrats and bad for Republicans politically. But do they really have any idea just how bad it is? I doubt it. And because they don't recognize how bad it is, it won't be. Failure to capitalize on the political opportunity will largely squander it.
For example, it's a little known fact, but Bush was opposed to fully funding SCHIP when he was Governor of Texas, and Democrats failed to make an issue of that in the 2000 campaign. If they failed to fully capitalize on it then, they will surely do so again.
But what is it, exactly, that they will fail to do? Simple: They will fail to show how deeply out of step movement conservatives are with the rest of the country. And more importantly, that gap is growing, as younger voters are even more supportive of social spenging than older voters.
[Note: I'm going to be out of commission most or all of today. So I won't be responding at first. I had hoped to prepare two diaries for today, but it's been that kind of week...]
But it's a simple truth, whether you support the war or not: There is a lot more Democrats could do to change, or at least challenge, the politics of the war in Washington, even if they do not have the numbers to impose new policies on President Bush.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) could force a vote a day over Iraq. She could keep the House in session all night, over weekends and through planned vacations.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) could let filibusters run from now till Christmas rather than yield to pro-war Republicans.
Such tactics might or might not be politically sensible, but in their absence, anti-war lawmakers can hardly say they have done everything possible to challenge the war and bring attention to their cause.
Lawmakers over the past generation have threatened and sometimes carried out such extreme parliamentary maneuvers over less consequential matters than dying soldiers.
This is one of the reasons why the Demcoratic base is so frustrated. Republicans, for example, were willing to go nuclear in order to force their judicial nominees across. Democrats, by way of contrast, are not willing to go nuclear over ending the war. There is a widespread perception that Demcorats are giving up too easily, and not playing their entire hand.
Chris was understating things. The Democrats are not playing anything in their hand. They're playing the Republican's hand! Condemning MoveOn? What next? Declaring Bush "President for Life"?
But let's back up to that short-but-to-the-point list of things the Democrats could do. Surely, this list comes as no surprise to anyone. We're not talking solutions to differential equations here. What they all have in common is something surprisingly simple. One might even say, elementary: They are about setting the agenda, even if you can't win right away. And the mere fact that this seems to be utterly beyond the Democratic establishment tells all too much about the state of politics in America today.
It's not just about Iraq, of course. It's about everything-everything from impeachment to Katrina to privatizing Social Security to the Minnesota bridge collapse.
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.
