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...
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:
