Are Americans Really Moving to the Left?

Tomb of Karl Marx          Photo Credit: Flickr.com/Matt From London

These troubled times see Americans traveling in sharply different ideological directions. At least partially isolated from each other and listening mostly to their own partisans, advocates of different ideological views sometimes are convinced their own viewpoint is gaining ascendency. This fact was brought forcibly and jarringly home to me while reading Peter Beinart’s post Why America Is Moving Left.     

We are all susceptible to our biases, I just as much as or more than others. Looking over the past seven years of Barack Obama’s tenure, I would have thought the country’s unrelenting economic weakness, the increasingly authoritarian tone of national government, and the immediacy of foreign threats to our physical existence would have moved Americans in reaction toward the political Right. Peter Beinart, however, has received exactly the opposite impression.

While I have been mostly transfixed by our economic deterioration, our turn away from our classical-liberal heritage, and the threats to our physical lives from radical Islamic jihadists, Beinart has focused on suddenly worsening inter-racial relations. Beinart writes that after the choking to death of Eric Garner by a New York City policeman; the shooting to death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; the murder of two New York police officers by an African-American; and the death in police custody of another African American, Freddie Gray, in Baltimore, Maryland; then

… in July, activists with Black Lives Matter … disrupted speeches by two Democratic presidential candidates in Phoenix, Arizona. As former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley fidgeted onstage, protesters chanted, “If I die in police custody, avenge my death! By any means necessary!” and “If I die in police custody, burn everything down!” … Anyone familiar with American history can hear the echoes. The phrase by any means necessary was popularized by Malcolm X in a June 1964 speech in Upper Manhattan. In the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in April 1968, Baltimore burned, as many cities did amid the racial violence that broke out every spring and summer from 1964 to 1969. In November 1969, in a speech from the Oval Office, Richard Nixon uttered the phrase silent majority. It soon became shorthand for those white Americans who, shaken by crime and appalled by radicalism, turned against the Democratic Party in the ’60s and ’70s. For Americans with an ear for historical parallels, the return of that era’s phrases and images suggests that a powerful conservative backlash is headed our way. … Seeing this year’s Democratic candidates crumple before Black Lives Matter and shed Clinton’s ideological caution as they stampeded to the left, I imagined the country must be preparing for a vast conservative reaction.

 Beinart then declares that he is wrong in this supposition, that he thinks evidence shows our current situation to be the mirror image of the 1960s and ’70s. The backlash against the progressivism of Obama’s era is more loud than strong, he declares, and the country is mostly still moving to the Left. Is he correct?

The main point he tries to make is that the leftist reaction against George W. Bush’s wars on Islamic jihadism, and the encouraging of progressive approaches to solving social problems by Barack Obama have enduringly moved America toward the Left. When the Republicans took over Congress and were so militant against Obama’s policies, he believed they were acting as Obama’s perfect foil. That Obama was  not capable then to curb Wall Street’s power, nor to curb “racist” police,  simultaneously enraged (Beinart cites the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, as well as the “Black Lives Matter” movement) and motivated activists to push America ever farther toward the Left. He says “the Democratic Establishment has responded to Black Lives Matter much as it responded to Occupy [Wall Street]: with applause.” Beinart then makes his most important and questionable claim: the American public is willing to follow the leftward lead of the Democratic Party.

What is different from previous times that will lead to a further move to the Left rather than a reaction against it, according to Beinart, is the difference in social attitudes that has penetrated even the Republican electorate. Most Americans, even those who consider themselves conservative, are against racial discrimination. Most are not reflexively anti-homosexual. He even claims “law-and-order” attitudes on the right have softened. These claims are to some extent persuasive. Somewhat more astounding to me is his claim there is no public backlash to Obama’s economic policies, nor to his health care policies.

It is irrefutable that the Democratic Party has moved farther to the Left. In the post Bernie Sanders and the Road to Serfdom, I noted a YouGov poll that found an even split between Democrats, 43% who favored socialism and 43% who favored capitalism. Among Republicans the split is 79% for capitalism, 9% for socialism; and among independents, 52% for capitalism and 22% for socialism. If independents should side with Republicans in the coming presidential elections, the country should turn to the Right, not to the Left. How realistic is this estimation?

Some polls by the Gallup Organization in 2015 give reasons for conservatives to fear. On their self-description of their views on social issues, those who call themselves Very liberal/Liberal now equal those  who style themselves Very conservative/Conservative at 31% of the population. Below is a graph of Gallup’s tracking poll on social attitudes over the years.

On economic issues, Americans who consider themselves conservative still have a considerable advantage over those who consider themselves liberal at 39% to 19%. The corresponding Gallup tracking poll over time is displayed below.

Gallup has yet another tracking poll of interest where Americans were asked for their party affiliation. The results over the years are shown in the plot below.

Clearly, the story here is the growth of the independents at the expense of both Democrats and Republicans. The question urgently to be asked is: How do independents lean? From what I have been able to see, this is a question that is almost impossible to answer unequivocally.  What gives me hope is that conservatives still hold the edge on economic issues, and a family’s bread and butter tends to be that family’s most pressing concern. In addition, Islamic jihadists killing Europeans in Europe and Americans in the United States tends to focus people’s attention on security policies favored by the Right.

Which party wins the presidency in the 2016 election will depend on the answer to the question of where the independents land, as well as on which side is more enthusiastic and gets their vote out. It is going to get exciting, folks! Entirely too exciting.

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