Tea Party phonies: Doing the conservative zigzag and right-wing flip-flop, based on who’s president

http://www.salon.com/2014/07/05/tea_party_phonies_doing_the_conservative_zigzag_and_right_wing_flip_flop_based_on_whos_president/



Tea Party phonies: Doing the conservative zigzag and right-wing flip-flop, based on who’s president
Paul Rosenberg
Saturday, Jul 5, 2014 08:30 AM EST

Fifty years after its underlying polling was done, ”The Political Beliefs of Americans” by Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril remains the starting point for anyone who wants to understand the big picture of American political opinion. But a new report on political polarization from Pew adds important new information, even as it leaves some questions tantalizingly unanswered and/or underanalyzed. Most notably, the twin issues of what’s driving polarization and how symmetric or asymmetric it is remain to be fully explored, while the greatest locus of continued agreement is overlooked.

In a section titled “Is Polarization Asymmetrical?” the study first suggests that Democrats are driving the process, before introducing two caveats. This finding is simply not credible in the America described by Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann in ”It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism,” or, more basically, in the system that’s produced the sharp rightward trend in roll call voting among congressional Republicans since 1980 (as mapped by the DW-Nominate scores of Keith Poole and colleagues) compared to a relatively modest leftward drift among Democrats. (House mean, Senate mean.) Moreover, Pew’s report itself contains a variety of contradictory information — not least the fact that the most consistent liberals are the people who most want political leaders willing to compromise.

While others have written extensively about Pew’s new report, I’d like to focus more on questions raised, on what’s not resolved, and that requires an initial discussion of why Free and Cantril remain relevant to this day. Their most innovative approach was the use of three different frameworks — an ideological spectrum based on questions about government intrusion vs. individual self-reliance and the free market, an operational spectrum based on support for specific government spending programs, and self-identification as liberal, conservative or middle of the road. A key finding was that 50 percent of Americans were ideological conservatives, while 65 percent of Americans were operational liberals — an overwhelming supermajority. More particularly, this psychological split manifested within the ranks of ideological conservatives: 46 percent of them were operational liberals, compared to just 26 percent who were operational conservatives. Thus, when you hear Tea Party Republicans say, “Keep the government’s hands off my Medicare!” what you’re actually hearing is just the tip of an iceberg that Free and Cantril were the first to discover and begin exploring.

The ideological and operational spectrums paint starkly different pictures of America — with the self-identification scale falling in between, with a 38 percent plurality calling themselves middle of the road. One consequence of these two pictures was a suggested difference in how to identify core liberals and conservatives. Since so many people supported spending more money on the operational questions, the relatively small fraction who don’t are prime candidates for the conservative label. Similarly, since so many people opposed government intervention on principle, those who don’t are prime candidates for the liberal label. It makes sense to define these ideologies in different terms, because that’s what produces relatively compact groups with coherent policy views on both sides.