BrainGlutton gets it. Liberalism is a loaded term. Conservatism is not, it actually carried positive connotations with the public. BrainGlutton wants to change that. But that requires starting the project and that takes time. It would also result in another reshuffling of the parties’ coalitions if it was successful.
Basically yeah. And here’s the evidence:
Liberals are always [del]making suggestions to advance human progress [/del] whining about one thing or another which tends to push down self-identification. They’re annoying. OTOH, on policy grounds, liberalism has broad support - just keep the government out of my medicare!
Yeah. The fallback attack is “Extremist”: I’m not sure the word, “Reactionary” has much traction though frankly that’s a pretty decent depiction of Rand Paul’s libertarianism. If you’re a libertarian on social welfare spending, but an advocate of higher military spending - well that’s just calling for a return to the Gilded Age of the 1890s, right?
adaher advances some defendable propositions in this thread, which honestly is blowing my mind.
Frankly while I like social progress, I’m not in any great rush. Substantively, I’d support a conservative party that insisted that all policy i’s were dotted and t’s were crossed. (Though to be more accurate, I’d probably be a swing voter under such circumstances.) But that wing of the Republican Party disappeared into the sinkhole after 1980. It makes sense that the professional class has trended Democrat, starting in 1964 (when they were still majority Republican) and continuing even to this day.
ETA:
The story I get from that chart is a decline in the share of moderates in the population. Polarization.
Links:
Kevin Drum: You all remember the old saw that Americans are ideologically conservative but operationally liberal? It means that lots of Americans say they’re conservative and like to believe they’re conservative, but when it comes to specific government programs they turn out to be pretty liberal. They like Medicare and Social Security and federal highways and disaster relief and unemployment insurance and all that. Try to cut these things and you learn very quickly just how operationally liberal most Americans are. Americans May Not Like Capitalism As Much As Conservatives Think – Mother Jones
Kevin Drum, 2007 polling: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2007_03/010893.php
Kevin Drum, Liberals are annoying: Liberals Are Annoying – Mother Jones
Ezra Klein, touching upon some academic studies: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/10/the_irrelevance_of_the_liberal.html
The word “liberal” is not popular, it has never been popular, and I do not expect that it ever will be popular. But liberalism – and the politicians who support it – are doing just fine. Not in any given election, of course, but over time. It’s not obvious that a stronger brand has done much for the right, nor that it has seriously hampered the left. Branding might be important. But product matters more.
On the margin though, I think Tea Party crazies and modern conservatives need to be hammered, preferably by tough minded liberals standing tall for American growth, opportunity and national strength. Some might say we should just ignore those erratic conservative ideologues who propose sapping national growth, crippling opportunity for all and rushing towards pointless war. But that would be wrong. Not all conservatives are like that of course -I’m a fair minded guy - but too many are. So no, we shouldn’t demonize - it’s better to just tell it like it is. I’m not going to play the blame game.
Americans are conservative about taxes, liberal about spending, but also conservative on the deficit. The policy upshot is that Americans fiercely defend existing spending, fiercely oppose higher taxes, and when push comes to shove, are willing to cut spending on the poor to avoid higher taxes(but not middle class entitlements).
Bullshit (about the deficit). The public doesn’t give a flip about federal budget deficits, by and large. Name me a president who lost an election due to high deficits.
I’ll also add that the public only seems to care about their own taxes. So raising middle-class taxes is very unpopular, but raising taxes on the rich is quite popular.
You’re partly right on both counts. No President has ever lost due to the deficit, but it’s always a big issue in elections when it’s high. Many liberal economics bloggers I’ve read say that the deficit is just a stand-in for economic concerns during those elections, and that sounds plausible. But voters still don’t like deficits, so they are actually conservative on the issue. It’s actually a way out of the mainstream position to want higher deficits, although it’s not a politically costly position to stake out.
As for the public’s support for raising taxes on the rich, polls show one thing, but the rich make up a higher percentage of voters, and for my purposes, the voters are the public. In the 2012 election, 59% of voters made more than 50K, and 28% more than 100K:
http://www.cnn.com/election/2012/results/race/president
I’d also point out that raising taxes on the rich has little meaning when we’re talking about the ultra rich. There’s just not much extra revenue to be had from so few people, so there’s little in the way of either policy or political ramifications from raising taxes on them.
If you really want to gauge the popularity of high income tax increases, let’s go back to Gore’s threshold of $150K and above.
Obviously that all depends on how you define ‘rich’. Lately, the threshold has been $250K or higher, and tax increases on those incomes are quite popular.
I would say just start pulling “conservative” out from under the RWers: “No, that’s not a ‘conservative’ position, you can call yourself a flying purple space frog, that doesn’t make you one.”
Of course, you have to tell people what they actually are. That could be an insulting term questioning their fairness or mental stability. You could call them a right winger, but that doesn’t have much impact. Reactionary might work. “Not a conservative: you are a just a tea partier,” has its merits.
Yeah, because that includes like no taxpayers and yields barely enough money to fund the government for a couple weeks.
The reality of our fiscal situation means the public is fiscally conservative. The public is not willing to raise enough money to even keep the spending we have, much less expand it.
They’ve tried that, with some success. Problem is, it reinforces that conservative is awesome.
The second sentence contradicts the first. Perhaps that’s part of the problem.
And they are happy to lower taxes as long as their benefit checks continue unabated, their social security money hits their bank accounts promptly, and their medicare insurance covers 90% of their medical bills.
It won’t be long before our defense budget hits a Trillion a year. WTF do we need to spend more than the rest of the world combined?
We don’t. But cutting defense to the bone doesn’t preserve entitlements. It just gets our budget back to near balance, while entitlements continue to grow at unsustainable rates. Meanwhile, domestic discretionary spending continues to get squeezed. It’s already down to Eisenhower-era levels.
Paul Krugman said a couple years ago that the US government was going to become an insurance company with an army. Reality is heading towards the conservative vision of the role of government whether Democrats can rally public opinion or not. Since they aren’t even really trying, that’s the endgame: a government that exists only to collect taxes and pay out benefits to old people.
That assumes the ideological demographics of America are static. They’re not, they’re slowly shifting and in a liberal direction.
Depends on the issue. On social issues other than abortion, sure. On economic issues, not so much.
The Republican party, more or less, accepts social security and Medicare as sacrosanct. Assuming the ACA continues on its current trajectory, even with modifications, it’s likely that in the next decade or two the Republican party will consider it sacrosanct as well.
being conservatives, that shouldn’t be surprising.
But I think ACA kinda proved the point. Big changes today result in the immediate booting out of office of the offending party.
I don’t think so. If the ACA really was that unpopular, Obama would have been easy to beat. But he won pretty easily.
The lesson for Democrats (so far) from the ACA is, IMO, ‘big change is hard, but ultimately can be worth it if you don’t give up on it.’