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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhy most conservatives are secretly liberals
A couple months ago, a Gallup poll recorded a small uptick in the percentage of Americans who identify as liberal to 23 percent, or what Gallup, eliding the margin of error in the poll, called a new high. My Post colleague Chris Cillizza wondered if liberal was no longer a dirty word.
We will see. After all, there were far more conservatives in that Gallup poll, which, for some, means were still a center-right nation. But whether people call themselves conservative isnt necessarily that telling in the first place. A recent book by two political scientists shows that liberal may be a dirty word, but liberalism is alive and well even among people who call themselves conservative.
In Ideology in America, Christopher Ellis and James Stimson describe a striking disjuncture. When identifying themselves in a word, Americans choose conservative far more than liberal. In fact they have done so for 70 years, and increasingly so since the early 1960s.
But when it comes to saying what the government should actually do, the public appears more liberal than conservative. Ellis and Stimson gathered 7,000 survey questions dating back to 1956 that asked some variant of whether the government should do more, less, or the same in lots of different policy areas. On average, liberal responses were more common than conservative responses. This has been true in nearly every year since 1956, even as the relative liberalism of the public has trended up and down. For decades now there has been a consistent discrepancy between what Ellis and Stimson call symbolic ideology (how we label ourselves) and operational ideology (what we really think about the size of government).
more here http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/03/06/why-most-conservatives-are-secretly-liberals/
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Why most conservatives are secretly liberals (Original Post)
CTyankee
Mar 2014
OP
It's been known for a long time, that individual Democratic platform planks poll well...
phantom power
Mar 2014
#2
arcane1
(38,613 posts)1. That would include every teabagger on medicare, definitely.
I'm going to check out that book, it sounds interesting!
phantom power
(25,966 posts)2. It's been known for a long time, that individual Democratic platform planks poll well...
if you poll people about them without attaching the word "Democratic Party" to them.
Also, I think that you can't over-emphasize that Conservatives are mostly fine with government services and safety nets as long as it's going to them and theirs, and not those other people they don't like:
Skocpol: Definitely. Vanessa and I did something that nobody else has done. In addition to pulling together a lot of public information and using the best journalism and the best national surveys, we managed, in three regions of the country, to sit down for confidential face-to-face interviews with tea party people. And that gave us a setting in which we could hear the tone of what they were saying, get into the nuances and find out things that might not be obvious from public demonstrations where a few people are carrying angry signs. We asked people about Social Security, Medicare and veterans benefits. Tea partiers are almost all either on Medicare, Social Security or veterans benefits or about to be. And like most other Americans, they tend to believe these are legitimate programs, and they know they are tax-funded public programs. Theyre not deluded about that.
So what they oppose is public spending and taxation to support public spending on them, on the moochers, on the freeloaders. And, like all conservative populist movements, when you listen to what theyre saying, the moochers and the freeloaders are often people of color and low-income workers. But we also discovered that for many of them, the moochers are young people, including at times their own grandsons and granddaughters.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/03/06/the-tea-party-just-turned-five-and-its-not-going-away/
So what they oppose is public spending and taxation to support public spending on them, on the moochers, on the freeloaders. And, like all conservative populist movements, when you listen to what theyre saying, the moochers and the freeloaders are often people of color and low-income workers. But we also discovered that for many of them, the moochers are young people, including at times their own grandsons and granddaughters.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/03/06/the-tea-party-just-turned-five-and-its-not-going-away/