It's Not Ideology

Matthew Dickinson was dragged back to blogging (good to have him back! Although I'd like to read his WH staff book when it's done) to discuss polarization, and how there's not as much of it out there as some people think. I tend to be on his side of the discussion; I'd note that it's a real debate, however, and I'm glad that he's going to talk more about it in a subsequent post.

All I can add is that what's going on doesn't fit any notion of ideology that I can understand. I saw a couple of people note this on twitter, but you shouldn't miss this from yesterday's NYT look at polarization in one Georgia House district. It's a good article, but the kicker is the must-read:

Mr. Tripcony, the surveyor, said he underwent heart surgery not long ago without health insurance, “a bad blow.” He has been making payments against the cost. He had heard of the online marketplace for insurance that opened on Oct. 1 under the Affordable Care Act.

“I just don’t trust it,” said Mr. Tripcony, who has an equal distrust of President Obama. “I don’t like him, and I don’t feel comfortable with anything he’s got to do with.”

Mr. Tripcony said he had a better idea for a system to provide health care at a fair price. “I think it should be the same for everybody,” he said. “One big company, whether owned by the government or private.”

Informed that he had described the single-payer system that Mr. Obama abandoned when Republican critics called it socialized medicine, he said, “Yeah, I know, it’s crazy.”

He said he might eventually seek health insurance under the new system. “In a couple of months, when they get the Web sites working, I may do it.”

This is partisanship, not ideology, right? He's against the ACA because it's "Obamacare," which means it's Barack Obama, and that's got to be a bad thing. It's certainly not because he disapproves of government involvement in health care, right?

The thing is, and this really is a challenge both for survey research and for larger interpretations of what's going on, is that under the conditions that most elites express their partisanship in ideological, rather than partisan, language, then mass publics are going to learn to give "ideological" answers to political questions. But this is a perfect example of how this is all just on the surface. Not that Tripcony or most Republicans are really liberals underneath -- that's not at all what I'm saying. The point is that if you look at it as a matter of coherent ideas driving issue positions, you're going to be lost.  Most of us are neither liberals or conservatives, or anything else. Or, rather, we're a mishmash; some liberal ideas resonate with us, some conservative ideas resonate, but none of it particularly constrains our positions on specific questions of public policy.

And what makes it even more confusing is that the political culture generally is anti-party, and pro-ideology. So to begin with some of the most extreme partisans think of themselves as outside of the party they obviously belong to in any objective sense. On top of that, it's considered appropriate to oppose, say, Obamacare because one is conservative, but illegitimate to oppose it because one is a Republican.

Good luck figuring all that out in a  relatively brief set of survey questions.

Liberal and Conservative Impulses

I think I'd classify this one as amateur ideological interpretation; I don't want to claim much for it, only that it seems to come in handy for me when I try to make sense of things.

Anyway, I wrote over at Greg's place yesterday about the liberal impulse:

[I]f the liberal impulse is “we can do better,” and the liberal danger is a hubris that trying to do better is always an unambiguously good idea, the threat to liberals is a cynicism that we really can’t do better. That trying to do something difficult is inherently something to be mocked. And the truth is that anti-liberal cynicism isn’t without some merit at times, and it certainly isn’t without some political appeal.

So I'd want to extend that a bit, and to say that if the liberal impulse is "we can do better," then the conservative impulse is "don't make it worse." The conservative danger is allowing injustice to go unchallenged, and the threat to conservatives is the suspicion that caution and prudence are really masks for indifference.

Or something like that. The basic idea is that both of these impulses are valuable and necessary in any polity, and perhaps especially in democracies. And I guess I'd also say that both those impulses don't always map easily onto public policy positions that we associate with those who call themselves liberals and conservatives.

And the problem with American politics is that the "conservative" party post-Reagan really doesn't seem to possess the conservative impulse. The party of Paul Ryan, George W. Bush, and Newt Gingrich is a party of neither the conservative nor the liberal impulse, but a radical one. They are the party who not only embraces, as Ronald Reagan did, Thomas Paine's claim that "We have it in our power to begin the world anew," but that often doesn't seem to temper that grandiose attitude with any of Reagan's FDR-worshiping liberalism that ground their idealism in the real world (okay, Reagan's version of the real world, which caused all sorts of problems, but it was real to him at any rate and therefore imposed limits). Anyway, it leads them to absolutes, which everyone from Andrew Sullivan to Hannah Arendt could tell you aren't very healthy when it comes to politics.

Again, this is all sort of doodling; if you really want to know about ideology, you'll want to read Hans Noel. Just saying that it helps me sort things out when I think about it this way.

Reagan Would Crush This Group

Steve Benen argues today that Ronald Reagan wouldn't be able to win the Republican nomination today, because today's GOP has swerved so far to the right that many of Reagan's policies (arms control treaties, raising the debt limit, tax increases, and more) would leave him as a moderate RINO. And he's right about the issues (and, indeed, Reagan frequently took hits from his right while in office; it was probably closely comparable to what Barack Obama receives from his left these days).

However, while a good piece of rhetoric, that sort of analysis mistakes, I think, the way that issues and ideology actually work. It's not that Ronald Reagan was seen as a conservative icon in 1980 and won the nomination because he rigorously held conservative positions on all issues; it's that Reagan won the nomination because he was a conservative icon, and people who thought of themselves as conservatives adopted his issue positions because he held them. That's easiest to see on taxes and budget deficits. Up until the late 1970s, standard conservative orthodoxy held that budget deficits were Bad Indeed -- and it wasn't just lip service. They actually cared about deficits, so much so that they opposed Democratic tax cuts and Democratic defense budget increases. When Reagan adopted supply-side policies, that all changed (despite the plain fact that Reagan did actually accept various tax increases), and tax cutting became the new conservative orthodoxy.

Of course, there are always dissenters, even when a Reagan-like figure happens to be around (Ted Kennedy played a similar role on the liberal side). But very little of that criticism from real ideologues filters down to rank-and-file voters, or to most of the more practical party actors. Unless, that is, they're looking for an excuse to distance themselves anyway.

What's happening now is twofold. First, in the absence of a Reagan-like figure, what counts as "conservative" is  up for grabs. And, at the same time, the particular set of presidential candidates in both the 2008 and 2012 cycles have reinforced the confusion, because all of them have entered the contests with serious blemishes on their record of adhering to conservative orthodoxy (other than a few safely conservative candidates, such as Rick Santorum this time around, who have other problems that keep them from being plausible nominees).

Since Reagan didn't have that problem, he'd mop the floor with this group. And in doing so he'd let the party know what being conservative meant, and pretty much everyone on the Republican side would go along with that.

Groups vs. Ideas within Parties

I shouldn't really wade into this without having read Hans Noel, who is both very smart and (I think) on the other side of this issue from me...but I absolutely love this from Matt Yglesias.  Gotta quote:

The main difference between left and right with regard to property rights is simply that the right is invested in a lot of rhetoric about markets and property rights and the left is invested in different historical and rhetorical tropes. 

The exact same thing is true of issues surrounding federalism, right?  In reality, both Democrats and Republicans tend to support states when it is otherwise convenient to do so, but have no problem supporting the national government is that's what will achieve their goals.  But Democrats pretty much banished states' rights talk from their vocabularies when they decided not to be the racist party any more, so talk about the virtues of local government and the evils of Washington wind up the more-or-less exclusive domain of Republicans.*

The truth is that when discussing politics, the press and most pols are far more comfortable talking about ideology than about groups, but in fact it's probably much better to think about parties as collections of groups than it is to think of them as proponents of ideas.  Granted, what Yglesias calls "historical and rhetorical tropes" can matter; Republicans might, all things be equal, tend to support policies that resonate with the way they talk about  politics, but things are rarely equal, and when it comes to a competition between ideology and group interests, odds are very good that group interests will win.

I'd also separate out partisanship from ideology and group-representation as a reason that parties take positions on issues of public policy.  In the case of health care, for example, it seems to me that partisanship (the urge to oppose whatever Obama supported because of the belief it would help Republicans candidates in 2010) won out over group representation, which would have led Republicans to fight for a bill that would have helped GOP-affiliated or leaning groups such as doctors, Pharma, and the insurance industry. 

All of which, in my opinion, is a perfectly healthy part of how parties facilitate democracy.  What's less healthy, to me, is how reluctant many are to acknowledge it.  If someone would say that he was supporting the Democrats because, as an African American, he supported the party that works for African Americans -- or that, as a wealthy American, she supports the Republicans because that's the party that looks out for rich folks...well, people don't like to hear that.  (And, yes, people have multiple identities, and can choose which of those to identify with politically, so I'm not saying that African Americans "have to" be Democrats, or that Anglo evangelical Christians "have to" be Republicans).  I do think it's fine, and regardless of value it's natural in politics, for people to express their preferences with something more universal than "gimme," but in my opinion American political culture is too friendly to ideas and not even close to friendly enough to groups, or political parties.


*And are oddly popular in the abstract among Americans.  What I always say to students to balance that out is (1) have you ever been to a DMV?, and (2) James Carville's joke -- I'll race you from Disneyland to Disneyworld, and I get to take the federal roads.  Although I should say that Texas DMV offices are fine, and Indiana's, or at least the one that I went to, are terrific.  California and Arizona?  Not so much, and I can't imagine how bad it must be now in both of those states.