Therefore, we are circulating a petition to make ourselves loud and clear to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson, and the various actors and actresses of this important film had better receive a fair hearing when nominations are handed out on January 25th, 2005. We are asking – no demanding – Hollywood put aside their own cultural bias against Christians, conservative and other mainstream Americans. We hope you will join our cause, as we seek to impose our values on Hollywood for a change, instead of the other way around.
Does this strike anyone else as incredibly ironic?
They hate Hollywood so much, they are going to petition them to favor one of their own.
While they’re at it, why don’t they petition Satan to favor their own kind of fallen angel over the others?
Satan: Sure, no problem. Now lets talk about the payment for this favor…
I wonder if this “polarization” effect is really just everyone getting more connected via the internet and finding out that there’s people not like them. People move to cities to get away from the country folk, and country folk move out of cities because they don’t like those city types.
Has the white working class abandoned the Democratic Party? No. . . . Has the white working class become more conservative? No. . . . Do working class “moral values” trump economics? No. . . . Are religious voters distracted from economic issues? No. An analysis by Larry Bartels, a professor at Princeton of “What’s the Matter with Kansas” (previously discussed here). Lots of good survey data about this issue.
Short version:
More poor whites vote for Democratic presdiential candidates, less middle class and even less rich whites do.
Democratic party identification has dropped for all white income groups, but more for the middle class and even more for the rich. However, the lower income party id drop is entirely concentrated in the South.
Not much evidence for lower income getting more socially conservative.
Regression shows lower income workers being less sensitive to social issues to decide their votes than everyone else.
Review of Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy
Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Yale University Press 2005
Hacker and Pierson immediately discard two common explanations, neither of which is supported by the facts. First, there is no evidence that Americans are more conservative on social issues than they used to be; indeed some evidence suggests that they are now a little more centrist. Nor does it appear that mobilization of “morals voters” was the key to Republican success in the last Presidential election – detailed analysis suggests that state-level efforts to put gay marriage on the ballot helped Kerry, not Bush. Second, there is no evidence of a general process of ‘polarization’ in which both the left and the right are rapidly seceding to the extremes, leaving moderate voters with few palatable choices. The evidence suggests the contrary – while Democrats have become only somewhat more left wing, as Southern Democrats have either disappeared or defected to the Republicans, the Republican party has shifted radically to the right. Positions that were in the mainstream of the Republican party of the 1970s and 1980s are anathema today.
So why hasn’t the Republican party been punished by voters for its radicalism? As I understand it, Hacker and Pierson’s explanation has three main components. First, information. Voters are often poorly informed about politics, and are vulnerable to “tailored disinformation,” which distorts public perceptions. Second, institutions. The Republican Party has been able to use its dominance of Senate, House and Presidency to set the agenda and to sideline opposition. Finally, networks. “New Power Brokers” like Tom DeLay have been able to assemble networks that bring together politicians, think-tankers, funders and lobbyists, creating a coherent agenda across separate institutions, rewarding and protecting loyalists while brutally punishing those who go off-message.
By bringing these together, Hacker and Pierson can explain how the Republican party has succeeded in bringing through radical policy shifts that go against public preferences. Their analysis of the 2001 tax cuts, the Bush energy plan, and the Medicare drugs bill shows how highly objectionable policies can be crafted to fleece the public without raising much in the way of public opposition. In the case of the tax cuts, assiduous propaganda disguised the fiscal impact of the cuts and made them look less biased towards the rich than they in fact were. Republican leaders made sure that they were sent to the floor for voting without opportunity for proper debate or for consideration of alternatives. “Sunsets,” “phase-ins” and “time-bombs” were deployed to make the measures temporarily more palatable and to disguise their true costs and long term consequences. “Backlash insurance” provided protection to Republicans who signed onto the agenda.
That’s a switch of about 10% of all the seats in Congress, and there are times when I think there’s really nothing else worth saying about American politics. Galston and Kamarck are right: when there’s an electoral switch of that magnitude, the losing side doesn’t have much choice except to adapt.
But it turns out that’s not the whole story, because in Off Center Hacker and Pierson also provide a ton of evidence that, congressional results notwithstanding, Americans haven’t become any more conservative over the past three decades. Nor has the activist base of the Democratic party become more liberal. Rather, it’s the activist base of the Republican party that’s gotten more extreme. The chart on the right, my favorite from the book, shows the startling story: compared to independent voters, Republican activists have gotten far more extreme since 1980, while over the same period the Democratic base has actually become more moderate.
In other words, contra Galston and Kamarck, the liberal base is not really the problem a lot of people make it out to be. It’s the Republican base that’s far outside the mainstream.
Yet, as political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson argue convincingly in Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy, there are scant public opinion data to suggest that is so. They cite political scientist James Stimson, who’s been recording the “national mood” through a survey of over 200 questions for over two decades and finds Americans no more conservative today than they were in 1972. National Election Survey data reveals that Americans are less likely than they were in the '70s to say that the government is “too powerful,” and the percentages of the electorate that identify as liberal and conservative respectively have remained unchanged for nearly three decades. “It is striking,” they write, “that across all of the major left-right issues, one is hard pressed to find any evidence that Americans are markedly more conservative today than they were in the recent (and even relatively distant) past.”
So what gives? That, of course, is the big question occupying progressive writers, academics, and public intellectuals of all stripes, and if Off Center’s answers aren’t entirely novel, the book’s detail, specificity, and comprehensiveness make it a vital contribution. Two key trends are at work according to Hacker and Pierson: the growing numerical and financial strength of the Republican base and the GOP’s refinement of a variety of tactical gambits—unified mostly by their reliance on subterfuge—to subvert the normal mechanisms that prevent majority coalitions from pushing through a radical agenda. All of this combines to produce “a systematic weakening of the institutional bonds that connect ordinary voters with elected politicians to ensure that American politics remains on center.”
Should have waited a few more months, then you could have had a nice round one year delay responding.[/quote]
I didn’t bring it back, I wasn’t even aware of QT3 when it was posted, but it popped to the top of the list, I was reading it, it was interesting, I noticed an error, and fuck you very much.
Alternatively, suck on this topic’s continued relevance to the stage of American political discourse, bitch.
I rather enjoy the cattiness. Nevertheless, you cannot deny that there is some disconnect between what liberals consider to be of paramount voting importance for those with lower incomes and the issues those same people articulate as their reasons for voting one way or another. I have noticed we fault the poor for voting Republican, because it seemingly runs contrary to their economic interests, but we don’t necessarily fault rich people for voting Democrat.
No, I drank a lot of Miller. We make Miller in Wisconsin, Budweiser is made by Anheuser Busch, St. Louis, Missouri. I cannot tell the difference taste-weiser, because I tend to drink it as fast as I can. (Miller time is only from 4-11 here, so I have to hurry, usually.)
Nevertheless, you cannot deny that there is some disconnect between what liberals consider to be of paramount voting importance for those with lower incomes and the issues those same people articulate as their reasons for voting one way or another.
Actually, that’s not true; apparently contrary to Frank’s very convincing narrative, the data doesn’t show much drop-off in all for working class white support for the Democratic party. It’s all with the upper middle class.
Then why do I see so many “W” stickers on shitbox cars?
I will admit that the sticker comes standard with late model SUV’s, but you mean to tell me that Bush’s working man approval rating is a sham? Golly.
