CAP: The US is more liberal on issues than most (particularly the media) think.
A significant part of the problem appears to lie with the inaccurate use of labels. Without a doubt, self-professed conservatives consistently outnumber liberals in polls when Americans are questioned about their respective ideological orientations. Politicians, pundits, and reporters tend to believe that this extends to their views on the issues. It doesn’t. In fact it represents little more than the extensive investments conservatives have made in demonizing the liberal label and associating it with one unflattering characteristic after another.
Yet at the very same time, detailed polling by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press demonstrated a decided trend toward increasingly “liberal” positions by almost any definition. As I noted:
To offer just a few examples of this liberal-in-all-but-name attitude regarding economic and welfare policy, according to the 2006 survey, released in March 2007, roughly 70 percent of respondents believe that the government has a responsibility “to take care of people who can’t take care of themselves.” Two-thirds of the public (66 percent)—including a majority of those who say they would prefer a smaller government (57 percent)—favor government-funded health insurance for all citizens. Most people also believe that the nation’s corporations are too powerful and fail to strike a fair balance between profits and the public interest. In addition, nearly two-thirds (65 percent) say corporate profits are too high, about the same number who say that “labor unions are necessary to protect the working person” (68 percent). When it comes to the environment, a large majority (83 percent) supports stricter laws and regulations to protect the environment, while 69 percent agree that “we should put more emphasis on fuel conservation than on developing new oil supplies,” and fully 60 percent of people would “be willing to pay higher prices in order to protect the environment.”
According to Zell and Bernstein, all groups except for liberal Democrats “significantly underestimated their liberalism,” but none so much as self-identified conservatives. The result, therefore, is that the labels result in “conservative” voters voting for “conservative” candidates who share an ideological label but differ significantly on the issues.
Of course, the radicalization of the Republican Party has contributed to this confusion. Even self-professed conservatives such as Robert Dole decry how far Tea Party types have moved the party beyond the borders of mainstream Americans’ political beliefs, based in significant measure on their ideological commitment to what tend to be fictional beliefs. And yet because so many in the media have trouble recognizing and admitting this fundamental fact, our political conversation continues to be based on phony labels that mask the reality of a political movement with a decidedly minority constituency still managing to thwart the consistent political preferences of the majority time after time.
