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.
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