America Is Not a ‘Center-Right

Nationʼ
By Eric Levitz Nov. 1, 2017

Op-Ed Contributor

Jordan Awan

The Democratic Party has learned to stop worrying and love “big
government” liberalism. The partyʼs top presidential prospects are
advertising their ardor for socialized medicine, free public college, universal
child care and paid family leave.

Even the partyʼs moderate senators are now pushing for the same kind of
public health insurance option that their centrist predecessors killed in the
early Obama years. And the partyʼs 2018 platform — the consensus agenda
that ostensibly unites all Democrats, from Joe Manchin of West Virginia to
Bernie Sanders — calls for vigorous antitrust enforcement to prevent mega-
corporations from rigging the economy against working people.

The partyʼs resident “sensible centrists” are horrified: “Has the entire
Democratic Party forgotten the words ‘George McGovernʼ?” they cry. In
column after column, they have been imploring their co-partisans to
remember a fundamental fact: America is a center-right nation, where
nearly 70 percent of voters are moderate or conservative, and just 25
percent are liberal. Over the past eight years, Democrats lost sight of this
inconvenient truth — and lost control of more than 1,000 state legislative
seats, the House, the Senate and the presidency.

This argument may sound coolheaded and pragmatic. But its core premises
— that American voters are hostile to progressive economics and have
punished the (increasingly left-wing) Democratic Party accordingly —
actually rest on ideological conviction, not empirical evidence.

In truth, the Republican Partyʼs dominance has little to do with the American
electorateʼs “center-right” ideology. We know this for two simple reasons:
First, the vast majority of that electorate has no ideology, whatsoever. And
second, when polled on discrete policy questions, Americans consistently
express majoritarian support for a left-of-center economic agenda.

The political scientist Philip Converse first brought the first reality to
national attention in 1964. In his classic essay “The Nature of Belief
Systems in Mass Publics,” Mr. Converse demonstrated that only 17 percent
of American voters could both correctly assign the terms “liberal” and
“conservative” to the nationʼs two major political parties and offer a sensible
description of what those terms meant. The rest of the electorate did not
understand politics as a fight over abstract theories of good government
but rather a conflict between interest groups. Ordinary voters did not select
the party that most faithfully represented their political philosophy — they
picked the one that appeared to best represent their people, a group they
might define with reference to class, region, religion, race or partisanship
itself.
This make intuitive sense: The left-to-right political spectrum is a construct
born of seating arrangements during the French Revolution. The impulse to
define oneself in relation to an in-group — and opposition to an out-group
— is a survival strategy thatʼs been with us since the dawn of our species.

And in their recent book “Neither Liberal Nor Conservative: Ideological

Innocence in the American Public,” the political scientists Donald Kinder and
Nathan Kalmoe show that the electorate is scarcely more ideological today,
at the peak of partisan polarization, than it was at the height of the New
Deal consensus (when Mr. Converse published his landmark study).

Thus, while itʼs true that fewer Americans self-identify as liberal than as
moderate or conservative, this tells us almost nothing about votersʼ policy
views. “Moderates” do not actually display a preference for “centrist”
positions, but merely for ideologically inconsistent ones. In fact, the
Stanford political scientist David Broockman has shown that moderates are
just as likely to subscribe to “extreme” policy positions as other voters are:
In the United States, there are self-identified “moderates” who support a $1
million maximum income, prohibiting gays and lesbians from teaching public
school and the mass deportation of all undocumented immigrants.

Meanwhile, the number of genuine “liberals” and “conservatives” is far

smaller than meets the eye. Most voters who identify with those terms are
partisans first, and ideologues second. Or as Mr. Kinder and Mr. Kalmoe
conclude an analysis of four decades of voter survey data, “ideological
identification seems more a reflection of political decisions than a cause.” In
other words: The average conservative Republican isnʼt a Republican
because sheʼs a conservative — she self-identifies as a conservative
because sheʼs a Republican.

One crucial implication of this finding is that political elites have enormous
power to dictate ideological terms to their rank-and-file supporters. For a
healthy chunk of conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats, the
“liberal” and “conservative” position on most issues is whatever their party
leaders say it is. Donald Trumpʼs success at redefining conservative votersʼ
consensus views on free trade, American policy toward Russia and the
relevance of personal morality to effective political leadership offers a
particularly vivid illustration of this phenomenon.

When we look past ideological self-identification to polling on discrete

public policy questions, America appears to be far more center-left than
center-right. In a recent analysis of Democracy Fund Voter Study Group
survey data, the political scientist Lee Drutman found that 73.5 percent of
the 2016 electorate espoused broadly left-of-center views on economic
policy.

That finding is supported by polling on individual fiscal issues over the past
year. Recent surveys have shown that most Americans — including
majorities of Republican voters — support increasing federal financing of
health care and oppose cutting taxes for the wealthy. And thereʼs little
evidence that the Democratsʼ left flank is exhausting the publicʼs tolerance
for government intervention in the economy: Recent polls have found that
over 60 percent of Americans support tuition-free public college (a majority
that includes 58 percent of independents and 47 percent of Republicans);
that over 60 percent of all voters favor Medicaid and Medicare buy-in
programs, while a slim majority likes the sound of single-payer; and that 82
percent of voters, including 70 percent of Republicans, support new
legislation expanding access to paid family and medical leave.

The Democratic Party has failed to translate the popularity of progressive

economics into electoral success for a variety of reasons. The most
fundamental is the one weʼve already observed: Most voters cast their
ballots on the basis of identity, not policy. And Americaʼs rapidly changing
demographics — and the rightʼs steadfast efforts to inflame and exploit
anxieties about those changes — have made racial identity increasingly
salient to white voters, particularly rural ones. This development, combined
with the disproportionate influence that our political system awards to white
rural voters, has given Republicans a structural advantage.

Democrats have all kinds of ways of addressing this problem. One would be
to cultivate the class identity of white voters by embracing populist rhetoric
that paints “the billionaire class” as an out-group they can define
themselves against. Another would be to invest more resources into
registering nonwhite voters. According to the Census Bureau, 74 percent of
non-Hispanic whites are registered to vote in the United States. For African-
Americans, that figure is 69 percent; for Hispanics, 57; and for Asian-
Americans, 56. As the policy analyst Sean McElwee has noted, this means
that even if every registered Latino voter in America went to the polls last
November, Latinosʼ overall turnout rate still would have been lower than it
was for whites (63 percent).

Embracing a more conservative economic agenda, however, would solve

none of the Democratsʼ problems. At a time of historic inequality, rampant
corporate consolidation and environmental crisis, the case for more robust
redistributive social programs and public-interest regulations is strong.
When centrist Democrats claim that making such a case is electoral suicide,
they reveal less about the American publicʼs stubbornly center-right
convictions than about their own.