This graph (click to embiggen, via) explains why Democrats are always cautious with their rhetoric, moving towards the middle rather than the left, and, in general, why we can’t have nice things.
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.
Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.
People identifying as christian while ignoring christ and his teachings is a strange thing indeed.
The arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend itself. it’s up to us.
Good lord, these people are nuts.
Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.
Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.
Welcome to day five of every-bit-as-bad-as-you-thought-it-would-be.
It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.
It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!
fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)
Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.
“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”
Democracy cannot function without a free press.
Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.
We won’t go back.
Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.
rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius
Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.
You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.
When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.
Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.
If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.
Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.
Linda
I’m not sure that describes people’s voting patterns, or their reactions to those labels. My nephew would be horrified to be described as a “liberal,” but in economics, he is. My sister would describe herself as a “moderate,” but in reality she is a DFH (don’t tell her I said so). My sister-in-law is a Dittohead, but loves Glee and backs gay rights (yeah, I know). So who knows?
Kyron Huigens
A. Self-identification polling is useless. If you poll on individual issues, the liberal position on the issue frequently comes out on top. E.g. support for OWS versus the Tea Party; support for the public option; support for increasing taxes on incomes above $200 K.
B. For the last 30+ years, Democrats have failed to make the case for liberalism, granting conservatives complete control to frame the debate and advance their narrative unhindered. Behold the results of that strategy. To take this data as reason to move toward the center and chase the elusive independent voter is a recipe for more of the same disaster. With no ideological counterweight, the frame and narrative continue to drift rightward — to the point where our current national debate has moved into Bizzaroworld. E.g., Perry, Santorum, Bachmann. When Democrats make the liberal case, they do well. E.g. Obama’s recent polling.
El Cid
A poll like this really doesn’t tell you all that much.
For example, in this table, we don’t account for Independents who vote primarily Democratic, or vote primarily Republican, and these make up the great majority of Independents.
You have to link self-identification of a title (i.e., choosing to describe yourself as ‘liberal’) with political and ideological behavior.
There are plenty of people who would call themselves ‘moderate’ but hold quite staunchly conservative or liberal views. Because, as has been studied ad nauseum, these ideological referent names have their own significance — the term ‘liberal’ has been made quite negative sounding, so even people who hold clearly liberal views don’t want to call themselves that.
Surveys like this can tell you a few things, but not much else.
pluege
but as we all know the graph is misleading because after 30 years of hearing nothing but the republican/conservative spew from US corporate media of liberal=bad, conservative=good, Americans don’t really know the correct terminology for what they are. When asked their views on specific things, such as taxing the rich, Americans are decidedly more liberal than this chart.
The chart is crap, the result of 30 years of one sided propaganda from the corporate media manipulated by plutocracy.
Samara Morgan
The ugly truth is americans are biased towards conservativism as long as conservatism works….as long as americans are the overclass of the world.
People will start trending liberal as soon as it becomes obvious that the freed market paradigm is exhausted and other countries surpass the US.
the interesting question is what happens to America…..do we become a paranoid fascist state like Johan Galtung and Julian Assange predict?
Or do we become more liberal, more peaceloving, and use our reduced powers for good instead of evuul?
JPL
Polls like these point out why rethugs try to paint the democratic party as liberal. Unfortunately, the democrats let the rethugs destroy a perfectly acceptable word. The poll also shows that most people don’t own a dictionary.
Bill E Pilgrim
Not that you contradicted this exactly but it’s been gone over a million times how when those same people are asked poll questions about specific policies, they come out far more in favor of liberal or even progressive policies than this poll would have one think. The word liberal has become trashed. So Democrats have to step gingerly with rhetoric in terms of using that specific word, it’s true, but shouldn’t be so timid about other things.
Same with the word conservative, in the opposite direction. And actually, that chart seems to show only a combined 41% calling themselves conservative overall, which strikes me as much lower from last time I saw polls like this. Not sure if that means progress or just different pollsters.
agrippa
I am conservative about some matters and liberal about other matters. The devil is in the detail.
But, I would never be participate in a poll.
Mino
We can’t have nice things because our morale is poor.
mai naem
This is what happens when you hand over the airwaves to 24/7 whackjob republicans who keep on beating the drum about feminazis, treehuggers and liberal pinko commie soshulists who want abortion at 7-11s, have your kid contract the ghey disease by having him taught by a leather thong wearing gay teacher in kindergarten. Also too, guns. Don’t forget Obama, the scary black Kenyan muslim not your president wants to take your guns away. And give them to the black panthers. Also also too, reparations.
Tyro
This doesn’t explain why Democrats habitually move towards more conservative policies over time or why republicans espouse progressively more right wing ideas over time.
RossInDetroit
We live very conservatively but would never vote for a politician who called himself a Conservative. Because they’re really not. “Conservative” politicians stopped conserving anything but raw power around 30 years ago.
Self-applied labels are kinda pointless except to say what set of beliefs someone is willing to take a shot at defending.
arguingwithsignposts
first thing, we kill all the pollsters.
Tuffy
The tragedy is that in the blind taste test, people prefer Democrats’ policies every time (taxes, wealth distribution, public works, etc.), but self-identifying as a moderate or conservative is so ingrained that Republicans get mountains of votes from people far closer to Democrats ideologically.
WereBear
Yes, but when will they get a clue that they are not getting what they think they are voting for?
tommybones
Ask those same people calling themselves “Conservatives” about specific policies they support and lo and behold, they are suddenly quite liberal. The problem is the word “liberal” has been turned into a 4-letter word through decades of propaganda.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
I initially read (before enlarging) the 1st column heading as “Rational adults” and wondered why the chart included Republicans. Insufficiently caffeinated to read small print, though I believe the instinctive curiosity is valid, had I indeed read the heading correctly.
RSA
I agree with everyone who says that these polls don’t tell us which policies voters will really support, but I think they do tell us what the average low-information voter will do in the polling booth–support the guy wearing the same label. The consistency of Republican messaging is hugely effective in this way, enough to drown out all the data that would tell people when they’re voting against their own self-interest.
Lojasmo
I hold all kinds of liberal viewpoints, and opinions, but characterize myself as a moderate because a majority of Americans hold the SAME opinions.
Of course, as I am a soshulist, others’ opinions of my political bent are not the same.
The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik
@WereBear:
Never, because policies don’t fucking matter anymore. Labels do. Long as a Democrat dare attaches his name onto something, rest assured it could be a cure for cancer and most of the country would rush in to decry the rampant soshulism, because of….gasp…how ‘liberal’ it is.
batgirl
@Tuffy:
And this is why this polling isn’t useless. Yes, on individual issues (when not identified by a “label”) voters tend more progressive/liberal, but then many go to the polls and vote against those positions to vote for the “conservative.”
Of course, Democrats running to the middle will not fix the problem and will likely make it only worse. So I expect that is precisely what they will do.
Bill E Pilgrim
Just as one almost randomly-pulled example: 57 percent in 2009 said that they would favor higher taxes so that we could have universal health coverage. Does that sound like a “conservative” or “liberal” position?
So, the poll above tells us that 19% of people are liberal, and only 6% are “very liberal”.
Yet almost 60% of the people take a position that the news media tells us, constantly, is an “extreme liberal” or “progressive” position. (Note, not just in favor of universal care, but willing to pay higher taxes for it.)
Something doesn’t add up.
I mean okay, things can be off by a few points here and there, but this is McCardle’s Calculator off.
The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik
@Bill E Pilgrim:
It’s not supposed to add up, because Labels are more important. Always, always, always. You could have a guy someone agrees with 99 percent of the time, and most people would love to vote for him…but say he’s a liberal, and BAM, his support drops. It’s like the term ‘hippie’. Once you’re called that, it’s over. No matter how right you are, you’re always wrong. Not just wrong, but dangerously, anti-American wrong.
And at the rate we’re going, it’s never going to change. Our leaders are going to race for that mythic middle, while the GOP races further rightward and pulls the goalposts even further until the very idea of public ANYTHING has become radical soshulism to the point of needing eradication just like the good ol’ Constitution of the United Corporate States of America Inc. says.
RalfW
@Kyron Huigens:
Kinda.
A social scientist adjunct to the U of M (Beth Zemsky) has been researching, writing and presenting for several years now on a pretty credible theory about social movements and framing.
She strongly suggests that a country, or at least this country (I don’t think she’s looked at checking her wave theory against other countries) can really only hold one “master frame” at a time.
For a couple of decades, the master frame was rights, and that frame’s “wave” peaked in the mid-late 60s: MLK, voting rights, etc. By the early 70’s rights was fading (E.R.A. anyone? Anyone?)
Now, I suppose it’s not an absolute given that the wave following the current one has to be from the other major American political view, but it certainly was: individualism (spiced with security). I’d say rampant individualism, really.
And as a new master frame arises, things framed in the old narrative start to bounce off. I love when Beth says “Doing the same thing you always did gets you less that you always did.” It’s really clarifying as to why the Democrats “failed to make the case.”
It seemed like we were seeing the decline of the conservative master frame in the campaign for, and the first bit of, the Obama administration. I even remember Bobo in one column decrying how the GOP campaign/talking points were just going right past the electorate and not connecting.
I think we were seeing the first days of a new master narrative or frame. Of course, at an inflection point, there’s turmoil. Ergo, the mid-terms. But they were framed in the old GOP way. And the news this week that young voters are flocking to the liberal view/Dems in record numbers generationally says to me that the master frame is moving, and its up to us progressives to understand the implications (and strategies that come from it).
This does not excuse Democratic surrender-monkey politics – the lame votes and weak knees. But it also says to me that there’s only so much you can push the boulder up hill.
The key now is to try and tune in to the new narrative (and I do not mean the bullsh*t narratives the media tries to overlay things) that is emerging – what values are the bedrock?
And from that, what messaging around those values that are moving millions of youth to liberalism can be amplified and internalized to become the central messages (and policies and goals – lets not forget that one difference btwn progressives and the current, insane GOP is that liberals tend to actually try and follow thru on their themes, the GOP just uses themes to get elected, and then imposes policies often 180 deg opposite of their ‘message’).
OK, long post. But its Sunday. So, uh, it’s alright.
Comrade Dread
Doesn’t really tell us much though.
To be perfectly honest, I would probably still consider myself conservative.
I think government should actually be fiscally conservative. Genuinely actually fiscally conservative.
I think the US should look after its own interests and people first rather than be so heavily engaged militarily and otherwise in the world.
I think the US should do what it needs to do to keep jobs at home.
I think hard work should be rewarded and those who attain success should have to pitch in a little more back to the system that let them move up.
I think people should basically be left alone in their private lives.
I think religion is important, and people should live their values of community, responsibility, morality, and ethics, but I don’t particularly want the government getting involved and telling me what I should be believing.
I think a strong national defense is important. I just don’t think the definition of such involves starting unnecessary wars and telling other people in other nations how to live.
I think a strong middle class is needed to sustain a good society and government should do what it can to maintain one.
I think a strong free market economy is the best option we have, but I think government should regulate it and its negative externalities impartially for the public good so companies cannot exploit the powerless or the system for their own gain.
I could go on, but I would hazard that when most people say “I’m conservative”, they’re still thinking of the old Eisenhower mindset and not the lunacy of the current GOP.
marv
I defer once more to Orwell and 1984, which I’m reading right now with high school kids. The purpose of war in The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism is ultimately to maintain the heirarchy. I think this is also the purpose of the pseudo-war between “conservatives” and “liberals”.
Bill E Pilgrim
@RalfW: Yeah I think you’re right. The sixties and seventies weren’t like this, the trend was the other direction. People became “liberal” who had no idea why except that it was fashionable. The past few decades were a conservative ascendance, and if we’re lucky they’ve finally made such a mess of it that it’s actually going to end. I don’t think we quite know what it will shift to, though. That’s why I found that book by Graeber so interesting, but that’s another story I guess.
Omnes Omnibus
@Comrade Dread: It does tell us something. It tells us what the population’s self-perception is. If they see themselves as moderate to conservative as opposed to moderate to liberal, then, when given a choice between and right and left candidate, they will choose the candidate on the right. People generally do not vote for a set of policies, they vote for a person and the person’s label matters.
ornery
The tragedy, or sin, is that America was actually something new in the world: a liberal nation, born in liberty, We the People, United … a New World.
Now we have brought the Old World back. I guess it has been said you become your enemies.
One problem is that Conservatism is mostly a political movement, and liberalism is more an idea, or ideal. A set of principles. A philosophy. Conservatives can beat up ‘Liberals’ all day because no one is on some liberal ‘team’ to defend it. Some recognize that liberal principles are worth defending, but it doesn’t have the same dynamic at all.
Though, maybe nothing matters since we gutted education: we seem to be slouching into the mud. We abandoned our modern mechanisms of educating new generations, and no longer have the freedom of open spaces to hone independent thought.
The hope lies in rediscovering our past, I think, maybe, and with it a zeal for a better tomorrow. How you get there with this citizenry, I don’t know. People can surprise you though.
El Cid
@Omnes Omnibus: That’s not obvious from the poll. If you approached it from a minimally skeptical position — i.e., if you were trying to suggest your inferences to a political science discussion group — then they would be unsupported. Not necessarily wrong, just not supported by this information and its accompanying table.
Bill E Pilgrim
@The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik: Right so if all that is true though, then in theory someone could be in favor of all sorts of liberal policies like gay rights and universal health care and just call himself a “conservative”, and get elected.
I don’t agree that it’s “all” labels. It’s not hard to see however that the “See, it’s a conservative country!” you hear from the pundits is nowhere near that simple, since basically all they base that on is reading polls like the above, which as we’ve seen all sorts of other polls utterly contradict.
Put another way: the David Brookses who always push this aren’t saying “See it’s a conservative country and I mean only in the sense of labels”. If they were, they’d be saying the same as I am.
They read those polls and tell you things like “See, most of the country hates things like universal health care!” Because they “know” that’s a left wing liberal position and almost no one in the poll claims to be one of those.
And the myths go on.
Mark S.
This is probably hopelessly naive, but I actually think Elizabeth Warren could change this trend of people claiming they’re conservative even though they support a lot of liberal positions. She’s the best spokesperson for liberalism I’ve seen in ages. She makes powerful arguments that liberalism is actually a hell of a lot more pro-family than religo-nutso Galtian conservatism, and that message could really resonate with people.
Bill E Pilgrim
Never mind.
FlipYrWhig
Others have made similar points, but bear with me. Even when people say they support progressive policy in polls, they don’t vote for candidates who support said policies, because those policies are not make-or-break determinants of voting patterns. You could want the government to tax the rich up the wazoo and use that money to build a network of free clinics. But if those clinics provide abortions, all your support for the idea dissipates instantly. Under those conditions, are you really a liberal who doesn’t quite realize it?
And that’s not even getting into the way that voters will say they prefer the liberal position until being _told_ it’s the liberal position, after which they reject it because they’re affirmatively self-declaring as “conservatives.” Experiences like that don’t lead to questioning of conservative dogma. They lead to questioning of their own thought processes and a sense of shame and error.
At any rate, it’s correct to note that these political labels are inconsistent and dynamic rather than static. One thing we definitely need is a way to induce more people to be, and call themselves, liberals. But there are huge headwinds against it.
Omnes Omnibus
@El Cid: That is probably true. My comment would also be rejected for publication in a peer reviewed journal. On the other hand, since we, commenters and FPers on this blog, have batted related issues around a number of times, I believed that a comment with my take on it was okay. Obviously, that belief was incorrect and I will strive for greater intellectual rigor in all my further comments. Do I need to use APA rules for citations or can I stick to the legal writing Blue Book rules to which I have become accustomed?
WereBear
This explains the many people I can discuss specifics with, and be in total agreement… yet the minute it goes to labels, they are “conservative” and always vote Republican.
They seem utterly unfazed by the craaaaaaaaaazy stuff actual Republicans do; it’s a self-image thing. “I’m a Republican.” I go, “So you want this and that to be illegal and we should start a war with Iran–” “Oh, no, no.”
Weird. Honestly.
Bill E Pilgrim
@FlipYrWhig: No, I agree entirely. Identity issues and all sorts of things are very important. I just think we’re trying to make absolutes often, and they just aren’t. Those polls are often used that way and they just don’t show what those citing them so often claim that they do.
One idea for instance is to get candidates who do think of themselves as conservative to look at the other polls and stop being so afraid of some of the policies that they’ve been told are only favored by left wingers, when it’s simply not the case.
artem1s
The tragedy is that in the blind taste test, people favor policies that benefit them (and the majority) but abandon them in implementation because the Kochsuking right has become so good at framing our economic (and civil) choices as a zero sum game. good for someone else=bad for me.
unlike Mittens, I personally don’t stick my finger in the wind whilst considering a solution to a problem. I doubt most people do, but now strategic problem solving has become a negative. No one who is chasing votes, either in an election or across the aisle, is going to be willing to openly exhibit the behavior. And its very hard to get anyone in the extreme wings to grasp the concept that firebagging a representative over party dogma only continues the cycle.
IMO this is why un-27% resist the overuse of the bully pulpit. It’s just not a great way to shift the conversation over to real problem solving. Unfortunately it often is the only way to get the extremes to STFU for one minute while the rest of us actually get something done.
The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Thing is, labels don’t get attached to just politicians, but policies as well. The rub there is that it really doesn’t matter the actual merits of the policy as long as the label is there. Theoretically, a conservative candidate COULD be in favor of all those things and get elected, if there was enough of a push to co-op those things under a conservative label. I mean, you’ve seen the reverse true enough. Things the current conservative leaders now used to support, but pushed to be seen as rampant liberalism and marxism, and how easily that was all fucking lapped up.
Omnes Omnibus
@Bill E Pilgrim:
This is, I think, the big thing. Don’t try to convince people to be “liberal.” Present the policies as sensible and rational solutions to problems. Of course, the question becomes how does one effectively do that?
Jennifer
If the 50’s & 60’s were all about rights, then I’d say the time period since then has been all about resentment.
All you need to know about the current GOP base is explained by the concept of “spite voting.” More often than not, these folks are motivated to vote by promises that a candidate or party will implement policies to punish their fellow citizens. It matters not if those very policies will also damage themselves so long as it hurts other people worse.
Really. It is just exactly that simple. The Israelis have a saying that there will never be peace in the Middle East until Palestinian mothers learn to love their children more than they hate the Israelis. I’m not sure I agree with the veracity of that, but its parallel in this country is certainly true: in the United States, we will never have real social equality or a measure of economic fairness until conservatives learn to love their families more than they hate dirty fucking hippies.
xian
it’s cool. st. julian’s got this.
Bill E Pilgrim
@The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik: If “conservatives” were in favor of universal health care and gay rights and support for unions and the unemployed and Keynesian economics and everything else I favor, then I’d vote for them. If we can pull it all off using metaphysics or something– fine by me! We’d have to remind everyone, okay, you’re going to go in and vote a straight “conservative” ticket, right? Wink wink.
More seriously (though actually I’m completely serious about the first part there) yes, if those people who were in favor of universal health care were bombarded with the message that it made them commies, then things can change. And in fact, that’s a poll from 2009, so some of that may well have happened.
Trakker
I came of political age during the early years of the civil rights movement when conservatives supported the whites who were seen beating African Americans senseless in front of TV cameras, and cursing and spitting on little black girls walking to their newly desegregated schools. Conservatives quickly earned the moniker “rednecks” and for years a plurality of Americans self-identified as liberals.
Maybe being in my 60s and recalling the America I grew up in I can appreciate the huge gains liberals have made for America in the last 50 years. It’s a long list and every gain we’ve made has been a defeat for the right. No wonder those righties my age are pissed!
Mark S.
Just when I thought the Kaplan Daily Fishwrap couldn’t get any shittier: Seniors against benefit cuts are “thuggish.” Fuck Hiatt and all those guys with rotating mechanical rusty pitchforks.
via (probably been discussed, been pretty much off the grid the last two days)
Jennifer
@Mark S.: Really. For such militaristic, gun-loving tough guys, the right really is the biggest bunch of mewling pussies I’ve ever seen. Now they’re afraid grandma is going to beat them up/stomp on them with her jackboots (and walker)?
This does not come as a surprise.
Grandma = The New Black Panthers. Be afraid, be very afraid!
Villago Delenda Est
It’s interesting that people who want to CONSERVE our natural resources are “liberals” according to conventional wisdom, but those who want to rape and pillage them are “conservatives.”
That a “conservative” (Darth Cheney) opposed energy conservation as n approach to addressing our energy shortfalls.
This is how fucked up the term “conservative” has become. People who pursue policies that tend to destabilize society are “conservatives” now, while those who seek to increase social stability across the board are “liberals”.
Judas Escargot
This, exactly. I like to frame this as “our UK DNA re-expressing itself”. We basically have everything but the landed titles at this point (and that’s probably only because they’re explicitly forbidden in the Constitution).
A lot of it does have to do with the closing of the frontier. Early on, if you didn’t like your local hierarchy, you could just head West, start a new hierarchy, and try to get some land, capital and status of your own. Others stayed put but managed to move up the economic ladder as industrialization made this possible. Meanwhile, new immigrants were constantly streaming in to fill the economic space you left behind– they’d be educated, assimilated to some extent, and the process would continue.
Now, there’s no more frontier. And that ‘conveyer belt’ has been disrupted by certain malefactors at the top, now more interested in preserving/leveraging what they have than in generating anything truly new. We no longer educate/assimilate new immigrants like we used to (the fact that the current crop tends to be a darker hue is likely a factor here also).
The past is gone, forever: Return is impossible. IMO we’d be better off creating ‘abstract frontiers’ and applying the old mettle to those– and we’ve done this to some extent, I don’t think it’s coincidence that it’s the US that was first to the Moon, or the US that started what became the internet. But we’re done colonizing the continent. Now we need to learn how to sustainably colonize the future (if that makes any sense).
But with this crop of citizenry? The jury is still out as to whether that’s possible. I’ve lately been forced to admit to myself that the vast bulk of humanity just might not be cut out for the future: Most everyday people seem totally content to live in a sort of “1985 with iPhones and Facebook”, unable to make the next leap in mindset.
If this horrible thing should turn out to be true… how does that scenario play out? The climate, the aquefers, and the oil supplies care not one whit for our feelings.
This whole conservative versus liberal BS is in some sense a proxy war. The real question is: are we yeast? Or are we fruit flies?
Villago Delenda Est
@Jennifer:
The obverse is true. There are more than a handful of Israelis (particularly Likud types) who think making the West Bank “Palestinienrein” is a great idea.
Mark S.
@Jennifer:
Even Dr. Dre knows not to fuck with Grandma.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Omnes Omnibus: I think Blue Book is fine (no surprise there), as long as your comment is framed sufficient intellectual rigor. Should that be lacking, you must compensate with APA rules.
Omnes Omnibus
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): Yes, ma’am.
Villago Delenda Est
@Comrade Dread:
Eisenhower (funny name, that) was a communist agent, you know.
The father of the Koch brothers was instrumental in the formation of the John Birch Society.
RalfW
@ornery:
I’d disagree strongly on the latter, and in a qualified manner on the former.
The free open space has moved. It’s here now. Yes the comment section at your local daily paper is a sewer. But frankly, the conversations that used to happen at the corner barber shop weren’t exactly enlightened a generation or two ago.
A fair amount of honing of independent thought happens on the internets. So watch out for creeping suppression there, of course.
As to edumacation. Yes, a chunk of public schools are failing us. The move to No Child Left Without a Test Score is bad, bad news. But there are plenty of schools which are not f*d up, and most states are trying to shed NCLB as quickly as possible.
I think the nation is a mess. Some moments I think the oligarchs are gonna win and turn us into 1984 about 30 years behind schedule.
But it’s not as bad as it seems. I said in a an earlier comment that we’re in the turmoil of a major, generational and even global inflection point. That’s a scary time. We could go full-core fascist. But we also could go in a much better direction.
There’s a lot more fat ladies these days, but they haven’t all sung.
Mark B.
It’s really an indicator of how well the war against language has worked since Reagan. Relatively few people are willing to self-identify as ‘liberal’, but if you ask them about individual liberal issues [the right to unionize, free speech, social safety net, equal rights for not heterosexuals, to name a few] most people are on the liberal side of the spectrum. It’s just that it isn’t ‘cool’ to be liberal these days.
Chris
@Linda:
People are much more to the left when you ask them about all the issues than when you ask them about labels. But then, most people vote on labels rather than issues, IMO… and are confused when the votes they’ve labeled “good” don’t result in the policies they think would be good.
Which sends me back to my old assessment of the American people, that they want to elect conservatives and get liberal results. And there’s the root of the problem.
RalfW
@Villago Delenda Est:
I give a hearty, interfaith and/or secular AMEN to that, sir.
Judas Escargot
@RalfW:
If it makes you feel any better, they can’t “win” the Long Game in any meaningful sense. The model they’re fighting for isn’t sustainable.
And I don’t just mean in terms of resources: Good luck keeping an industrial/capitalist civilization running once you’ve succeeded in reducing the lower 95% into an impoverished herd of superstitious, illiterate morons with no hope for the future.
If the pyramid collapses, they have the furthest to fall.
Chris
@RalfW:
I think the closest historical equivalent for where we are post-2008 might by America between 1968 and 1980. At that time, the Democratic coalition had been destroyed, Democratic dominance was on its way out, the liberal consensus as the Master Narrative of its time had ended… but there wasn’t anything to replace it yet (which explains why Nixon largely continued his liberal predecessors’ policies). Wasn’t until Reagan in 1980 that a new Master Narrative was established.
We might be in a similar situation right now. I get the sense that there are fewer people than ever who actually believe the conservative horseshit about meritocracy, neoliberal economics, and the right wing in general. It’s just that that hasn’t translate into a shift of public confidence in our favor, or anything else’s.
Chris
@Jennifer:
This. It’s much, much bigger than “individualism” as a guide to the politics of the last thirty/forty years.
OzoneR
@Linda:
Doesn’t matter, he may support those policies, but he’d never vote for “a liberal”
That’s the point. It’s how people end up voting against their own interests.
RalfW
@Chris: Al Franken wasn’t just making sh*t up when he did all the “me generation” stuff on SNL in the 80’s. Gordon Gekko wasn’t a caricature as much as a hero.
I think resentment is a feature of what I called rampant individualism. “I got mine, screw your social security” isn’t so much resentment about the next people to get it as it is supreme, self-absorbed individualism.
That said, resentment is powerful and easily played.
Davis X. Machina
In a country where ‘Eat anything you want and lose twenty pounds by Christmas’ articles run in every checkout-aisle magazine, who’da thunk it?
Brand names — how do they work?
Chris
@Judas Escargot:
I have a notion they wouldn’t actually mind us all being reduced to third world level poverty, as long as they stay on top. Economic elites have it grand in third world countries, and their ownership of the government and status as being above the law’s even more than the Wall Streeters here in the States.
Not saying most of them have ever thought it through that far, but if any of them have, I think “collapse into feudalism” might be taken as an incentive rather than a deterrent.
WereBear
@Chris: And yet so many of them rake in the cash from the serf PURCHASE OF CONSUMER GOODS.
Just how much are we serfs going to be able to pony up in the Feudal Future?
Chris
@WereBear:
Don’t know, but based on the last thirty years, I don’t think most of them understand the Henry Ford “my customers need to be able to afford my products” concept in the first place, so it’s not something they think about.
RossInDetroit
@Chris:
Different markets. The workers were all American and the buyers almost all were at the time. These days if a corporation could lay off its entire American workforce and make slightly more money employing and selling outside the country, it would have to do so.
Modern corporations are effectively sociopaths. The fact we’re all still alive proves there wasn’t a dime to be made poisoning, starving or murdering us. Nothing personal, it’s just business.
tkogrumpy
All well and good but I’m too fucking angry to be fucking cautious in my fucking rhetoric.
Tom Hilton
@Kyron Huigens:
Sadly, no: it’s the other way around. Polling on individual issues is useless as a predictor of voting patterns–partly because support for one liberal issue doesn’t mean support for all of them (60% pro-A + 60% pro-B + 60% pro-C != 60% pro-(A+B+C)), partly because people polled about individual issues don’t necessarily have any idea who supports those issues (because most people aren’t really paying attention), and partly because voting behavior is nearly always more tribal than policy-based.
And it’s depressing as hell to see the first few responses to this thread be 100% denial and/or rationalization. Liberals will never make any serious attempt to appeal to a broader populace until they recognize that this is exactly what they need to do.
AA+ Bonds
That’s defeatist as fuck. Get the fuck over it if you want those numbers to move.
@tkogrumpy:
^ actually the key to getting more Americans to identify with you
AA+ Bonds
Marc
@Tom Hilton:
Exactly. The blunt truth is that the US is far more conservative than comparably wealthy peer nations (Western Europe, Canada, Australia, etc.) This shows up in the influence of religion, tax rates, the size of the public sector, crime and punishment…I could go on, but the self-identified ideology of people is very stable and correlates well with international comparisons of us with others.
In short, I think that liberalism is a minority position in the US, and that the poll is accurately capturing the reality of what people think.
What the issue polling tells you is that there is hope for changing people’s minds. If you want an analogy, you could look at the Republican party in the southern USA in the 1960s. The party identification of whites was overwhelmingly Democratic, but there were issues where the Republican party clearly had some important cultural resonances with southern whites. They, however, didn’t just keep their message static; they adjusted their message to appeal to southern whites and embarked on a sustained effort to recruit them.
I think this is a lot closer to the liberal task than to pretend that there is some liberal majority. If the latter is true, then copying Republican tactics (playing to the median party voter) will work. However, in reality the median Democrat is a moderate, while the median republican is a conservative. Liberalism isn’t even a consistent winner in Democratic primaries. So liberals need to form alliances and focus on changing minds, not simply inspiring the true believers.
Marc
@AA+ Bonds:
Does screaming at people actually ever convince them?
AA+ Bonds
I swear only the Democrats would have people within their ideological content generators (i.e. Balloon Juice) posting stories arguing that liberals are marginalized and we should shun liberalism.
AA+ Bonds
@Marc:
It intimidates and heartens many of the people who are watching you scream at the other person into supporting you, yes.
See: the Republicans. Or do you think they got those numbers through weasel-ass weak-ass nice-nice debate?
Many Democrats failed to properly harness anger. That’s why OWS exists, thank the Lord for that.
Marc
@AA+ Bonds:
You’re utterly misunderstanding what we’re saying. I’m a liberal, and I’d like to see liberal policies enacted. If a majority of people agree with me I can mobilize them. If they don’t, I have to convince them. I think our task is in the second category, not the first. And the aggressive attitude of the online left is thus counterproductive.
If you want two concrete examples of what I’m talking about, look at two successes for liberal politics: medical marijuana and gay marriage. In both cases there was strong public opposition, and activists seized on an appealing message (helping the sick; allowing people who love one another to marry.) These policies were successful in ways that frontal assaults (end the war on drugs, for instance) were not. And they led to powerful social changes in related issues.
If you already had a majority favoring legalized marijuana, by contrast, you could choose completely different tactics and ends. The substance of public opinion matters.
Marc
@AA+ Bonds:
And it infuriates potential allies into despising you. I have turned from sympathy to active contempt and dislike for some prominent online “progressive” writers, for example, because of their nasty approach towards anyone who disagrees with them and their casual attitude towards truth and lack of respect for others.
AA+ Bonds
@Marc:
This more or less makes my point as you talk about the Republicans and the American South.
AA+ Bonds
Here’s your starting point for understanding how to move those numbers on “liberal”, from Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (1995):
Elements of Diffusion: Characteristics of Innovation
Understand that to many Americans, liberalism will be an innovation, something they haven’t seen since infancy – or ever. It is a legend more than a movement, and if it appears as active process or substance, it will face some of the similar challenges of any innovation.
I think the key takeaway here is “compatibility”. Liberalism will not be seen as compatible with a large amount of conservative-influenced ideas about every-man-for-himself, don’t-trust-anybody.
Liberalism can, however, adopt compatible ideas about the acceptable vitriol of public discourse and the questionable patriotism of its opponents. Since the left most certainly has America’s best interests in mind, in contrast to conservatives at this point in history, these are not only good ideas to promote adoption of liberalism, but also fully justified shifts.
AA+ Bonds
@Marc:
I think that’s inevitable – however, I don’t worry about people like you abandoning the left or not showing up for the game. The bigger problem is how to get people who’ve never considered themselves left-wing on our side.
That will take some hard tackles from our side, some unrelenting D, some very not nice things between the coin toss and the victory party. I don’t see this as a civil war, but it is certainly a spectator sport, and here’s America for you: Go Big Or Go Home.
Again, read this. It presents the challenges liberalism faces in America, and offers ideas on how to overcome them, rather than saying “LOOK AT THIS POLL QQ”
Calouste
@ornery:
The Dutch and the Swiss would like to have a word about that. The start of the Dutch Revolt was almost as far back from the American Revolution as the American Revolution is from us.
David Koch
@Mark S.: Shocking how Kaplan would dare attack “the greatest generation”!
Chuck Butcher
If it came to sports analogies I’d say the Democrats have spent a whole bunch of time playing table tennis while the GOPers played football. Regardless of the percentage of “liberal” Democratic legislators the outcomes have been anything but that whenever they’ve held majorities for the last 30 years.
You certainly can make the case about how easy it is to “buy” a small state Senator and etc but the flat fact is that “liberal” politics has not pushed back in any meaningful way in politics or in enacted policies.
There is considerable heat around here about “friendly fire.” I’d like those folks who don’t think the rightward drift of politics is a good thing to state rather clearly exactly how they propose to push in another direction by cheerleading that drift? It ought to be pretty damn self-evident that the only reason “x” piece of shit is all that is possible is because “x” piece of shit is applauded rather than mocked – because it works with the people who elected the people who passed it.
If (d)s don’t want my fire, then they could try at least talking like (D)s and that includes the President through pieces of work like Ben Nelson (d). I’m not talking about making BS charges against our own, but calling their actual bullshit out. If it means Ben (d) faces a Primary and loses, ask yourself what the actual cost is even if the GOPer wins. The GOP has proven that there is actually such a thing as a filibuster…
slightly-peeved
@ AA+ Bonds:
isn’t all that screaming and aggressiveness the reason that the Republicans have lost their popularity in the last couple of years? Obama’s personal popularity is very high, and if the 2012 race is going to be a contest it will be because of economics more than any genuinely charismatic politician appearing on the right.
I think the Republican label has survived as well as it has because it puts a sober face on insane policy. The crazy stuff happens below the radar of a lot of the voting public. Obama’s framing of Tax issues as about people paying their fair share is a similar, sensible framing of a liberal policy.
TG Chicago
“This graph…explains why Democrats are always cautious with their rhetoric, moving towards the middle rather than the left…”
Fuck no. What this explains is the result of one side saying for decades how totally awesome it is to be Conservative while the other side always runs from being called Liberal.
In fact, that’s one good thing that Bill Clinton could do. Yeah, Clinton wasn’t much of a liberal in the way he governed, but that’s beside the point. He could embrace the term “Liberal” (or “Progressive”, if you prefer) and, in general terms, explain why it’s not the horrible thing we’ve heard that it is for so many years. Basic stuff like “Having the EPA is a good idea, and it’s a Liberal idea”. Or “It was Liberals who created Social Security, and it’s Liberals who want to maintain Social Security.” He’s generally popular, so he’d be a good spokesman for creating broader acceptance of the label. Hillary, too, once she’s out of the administration.
Seriously: who is the most prominent person on the political scene (either in office or not, possibly a pundit or commentator) who defends the concept of Liberalism? Rachel Maddow? Al Franken? Probably Nancy Pelosi. No disrespect intended to any of those people — they’re the good guys, doing the right thing — but they don’t have the influence of Rush Limbaugh and Mitch McConnell and John Boehner and their ilk, all of whom will gladly and forcefully defend their Conservatism.
Let’s say you rounded up all the campaign materials for all the Senate and House elections in 2010. I imagine the ratio of “Republicans using the word ‘Conservative'” to “Democats using the word ‘Liberal'” in those materials would be 10:1 or more. That would be true even in blue states with incumbent Democrats.
Heck, to test my theory, I just went to Google to see how often “liberal” shows up on dickdurbin.com vs. how often “conservative” appears on kirkforsenate.com (comparing the Democratic and Republican Senators from my state). The ratio was actually greater than 10:1 (5 for Durbin; 59 for Kirk). And that’s despite the fact that Durbin is a safe incumbent while Kirk is a freshman.
Until there are more Democrats are willing to embrace and defend the Liberal mantle, you’re not going to see much positive change in those numbers. You can’t blame the followers for not going where the leaders are unwilling to take them.
YoohooCthulhu
@Kyron Huigens:
That may be true from a purely ideological perspective. But from a political strategy perspective it’s a problem; often even if a person believes an idea in isolation, if they hear the idea coming from someone who’s labeled as “very liberal” and they’re a “moderate”, they’ll be skeptical of it. It works both ways, though–if you’re smart enough to have liberal views but paint yourself successfully as a “moderate”, you can get away with a lot. But you just have to realize that these self-identification labels means the situation is more complicated than what the voters believe in isolation–it matters how they perceive themselves and how they perceive others who are talking about the issues.
nitpicker
@Kyron Huigens: Exactly. If you don’t defend yourself or your policies for 30 years, while the other side says “conservatism is the apex of civilization” 20 times in every minute they’re speaking, this is what you get.
When you actually poll people on an issue-by-issue basis, the right loses big time.
Kyron Huigens
@RalfW:
That’s helpful, but I have doubts about a couple of things. First, the Reagan framework wasn’t individualism; it was pro-wealth. Not the same thing. The liberal rights agenda you point to is the ultimate in anti-government individualism. Hard for me to see how individualism followed individualism, unless we say it was individualism of a different kind. So it was civil liberties individualism versus a pro-wealth individualism. So dropping the term that shows up on both sides of the equation. . .
Second, the Democrats did not fruitlessly persist in advancing the New Deal framework. After the New Dealer McGovern lost in a landslide, Democrats promptly tried to co-opt the pro-wealth framework, several years before Reagan took office. Carter did a lot of deregulating. Predictably, co-opting turned into to adopting. And did McGovern lose because of his New Deal convictions? Debatable.
Kyron Huigens
@YoohooCthulhu: And to the other commenters who made the same point.
I’m saying only that we have a strong base of opinion on which to build. Yes, those individual preferences won’t don’t constitute a voting pattern. Pull them together into a unifying narrative and you establish a voting pattern. And yes, that unifying narrative has to have a strong tribal element. That would be “We’re the 99% (and we’re against the 1%).” It resonates (again, OWS is polling well) because it’s got a solid factual basis. So let’s get on with it and stop trying to out-conservative the conservatives.
Samara Morgan
@Kyron Huigens: /yawn
this blog is so americancentric.
Conservatism is popular because it HAS WORKED for decades.
Its going to take the American Fall a while to sink in.
Call it lag in the system.
Myhero
If by a “Liberal” they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people — their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties — someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a “Liberal,” then I’m proud to say I’m a “Liberal.”
John F. Kennedy
deadrody
Yes, indeed. Because, Lord knows, the government in the US should certainly NOT reflect the opinions of the people therein.
What you have just posted exactly explains the complete dishonesty of Democrats across the country. When they’re in charge, its patently obvious the shit they want to mandate to the rest of us, thus making the difference between Democrats and sane people so much clearer.
deadrody
Oh and good one with the “nice things” line.
Nice things being gigantic, ineffectual government that enslaves its people, massive entitlement programs that can never be paid for, that kind of shit.
Can’t have them because MOST people don’t WANT them.
That’s the sticky part about democracy, isn’t it.