The conventional wisdom and media mantra of our political landscape since about 1980 has been that the American population is conservative, which is why the Republican Party has been the dominant party during most of that period. The conventional wisdom is that the New Deal has been undone by Republicans because the American people were fed up with the leftward swing of the late 1960’s and 1970’s reflected in hippies, yippies, the environmental movement, feminism, the New Left, all of which were said to have grown out of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Americans were scared or embittered or both by this movement away from “traditional values” whatever they are. (I’ve always liked to point out to my “strict constructionist” friends that the original intent of the framers included slavery and the relegation of women to non-citizen status).
Rick Perlstein has an interesting article in the July 9 The Nation about a Pew Research Center for the People twenty year study of public opinion titled Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes 1987-2007. Here are some highlights.
Is it the responsibility of government to care for those who can’t take care of themselves? In 1994, the year conservative Republicans captured Congress, 57 percent of those polled thought so. Now, says Pew, it’s 69 percent. (Even 58 percent of Republicans agree. Would that some of them were in Congress.) The proportion of Americans who believe government should guarantee every citizen enough to eat and a place to sleep is 69 percent, too – the highest since 1991. Even 69 percent of self-identified Republicans – and 75 percent of small business owners! – favor raising the minimum wage by more than $2.
The study demonstrated that this wasn’t just abstract warm fuzziness on the part of Americans.
A majority, 54 percent, think “government should help the needy even if it means greater debt” (it was 41 percent in 1994). Two thirds want the government to guarantee health insurance for all citizens.”
The National Election Studies survey substantiates Pew by finding that
more than twice as many American want “government to provide many more services even if it means an increase in spending” as want fewer services in order to reduce spending.
Gallup finds that over 50 percent of Americans say
they generally side with labor in disputes and only 34 percent with companies; 53 percent think unions help the economy and only 36 percent think they hurt.
How about tax cuts and abortion, those bastions of conservative ideology?
In 2005 an NBC News/ WSJ poll found that 53 percent of Americans thought the Bush tax cuts were “NOT WORTH IT because they have increased the deficit and caused cuts in government programs.”
Another poll found that only 25 percent want to see Roe v. Wade overturned, and still another poll found that Americans reject “government-funded abstinence only sex education in favor of “more comprehensive sex education programs that include information on how to obtain and use condoms and other contraceptives” by 67 percent to 30 percent.”
On those conservative centerpiece issues like amnesty for illegal immigrants and treating juvenile offenders as adults in the courts 62 percent of Americans favor amnesty and 89 percent of Americans favor rehabilitation over incarceration for juvenile offenders.
Two thirds of Americans think corporate profits are exorbitantly high and three quarters think that “it’s really true that the rich just get richer while the poor get poorer.”
Here’s a very long passage from Perlstein’s article that addresses the issue of what Pew identified as “Political Landscape More Favorable to Democrats.”
When it comes to Americans who identify themselves as Democrats or leaning toward the Democrats as compared to those who identify themselves as Republicans or Republican leaning the percents are 50 percent Democrat and only 35 percent Republican. In 2002 the percents were 43 and 43.
..again and again, the views of independents track the views of Democrats–more so, in fact, with every passing year. Pew says it’s “striking” that 57 percent of independents think government should aid more needy people even at the price of higher debt. In 1994 it was only 39 percent. When asked their opinion of statement like “Business corporations make too much profit,” independents answer the same way as Democrats: about 70 percent agree. On questions like “Are you satisfied with the way things are going for you financially?” the chart is amazing: Republicans, independents and Democrats clustered together at 65 and 64 percent in 1994. But Republicans have increasingly answered that question in the affirmative–81 percent in 2007. Meanwhile, the lines for independents and Democrats headed down, down, down, nearly in lockstep, to 54 percent today.Pew says independents are thinking like Democrats, and that fewer and fewer want much to do with the Republican Party. In 1994 independents gave the GOP a 68 percent approval rating; now only 40 percent do. And the percentage of people who call themselves Republican has dropped from 29 percent in 2005 to 25 percent today. But these people are not signing up as Democrats. The proportion of those who call themselves Democrats has held steady, in the lower 30s.” (My emphasis).
Why is it that independents in America are predominantly progressive, hold values and positions that are associated with Democrats, but still refuse to call themselves Democrats? Perlstein puts it like this. Independents say to themselves
If only there was a party that thought like me–that was for harnessing the power of government to help the needy and protect the middle class; for reining in business excess; for fighting overseas threats through soft power instead of reckless force.
Perlstein says that independents don’t see the Democratic Party as the answer to this question. How can that be?
I think we frog ponders know the answer. It’s because the pattern of Democrats losing elections because they don’t want to look like Democrats is nothing new and it’s something independents get.
Well maybe it’s time for Democrats to act and stand up like Democrats for all those values that those Americans who self-identify as independent share.
A big part of the problem is the poor quality of the corporate media. Corporate media is an equal opportunity exercise in obtuseness. Just as the media declared conservatism to be dead in 1964, it has declared, as late as 2006, that the American public is still too conservative for the Democratic Party.
The commentariat tells itself a little fairy tale. As a new report from the Campaign for American’s Future….and Media Matters for America points out (The Progressive Majority: Why a Conservative America Is a Myth), when the GOP took over Congress in 1994, the New York Times front page claimed “The country has unmistakably moved to the right.” It hadn’t; for an excellent study showing this wasn’t so, see Ronald Rappaport and Walter Stone’s Three’s a Crowd, which shows how Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America was tailored as an appeal to Perot voters, then retroactively spun as a mandate for conservatism. Ten years later, when Bush beat Kerry by three points, Katie Couric asked on Today, “Does this election indicate that this country has become more socially conservative?” It was a rhetorical question, for the establishment had set the conclusion in stone long before. Three weeks before the 2006 election Candy Crowley of CNN said Democrats were “on the losing side of the values debate, the defense debate and, oh yes, the guns debate.” After election day Bob Schieffer of CBS said, “The Democrats victory was built on the back of more centrist candidates seizing Republican leaning districts……John Harris of the Washington Post, now of The Politico, said “This is basically not a liberal country.” Concludes the Media Matters/Campaign for America’s Future report, “Democratic victories are understood as a product of the Democrats moving to the right, while Republican victories are the product of a conservative electorate.
Nothing could be further from the truth. As anyone familiar with Presidential elections, the media operates by fairy tale. It constructs the “good guy” Bush, the “serial liar” Gore even though both fairy tales have no truth in them. Or the fairy tale about the “values voters” that cost Kerry the 2004 election. None of these truth resistant fairy tales accurately describe reality which is ostensibly the raison d’etre of the media.
The historical fact is that in 2000 the Supreme Court trampled on the will of the American People and installed a fascistic band of conservatives in power to accoomplish an agenda that is in stark contradiction to the values of America.
The way to victory for Democrats is to simply be progressives again: be for helping the poor and not the rich (the rich will always be able to buy people to help them), be for protecting the middle class and not the investor class, be for a living wage to support a family, be for a rational defense policy and not a messianic wish-fulfillment based war policy. And one last thing: be for impeaching Cheney and Bush before their term is up so that they can’t complete their destruction of our Constitution and our Republic.
