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The Hangover

Yet neither the Democratic ascendancy nor the Republican humiliation meant the country had made a fundamental shift to the left. People had fired Tom DeLay’s congressional majority and quit on President Bush, but they had not become latter-day McGovernites. In fact, the opposite. A July 2009 Gallup report noted that by a 2–1 margin, people […]

Yet neither the Democratic ascendancy nor the Republican humiliation meant the country had made a fundamental shift to the left. People had fired Tom DeLay’s congressional majority and quit on President Bush, but they had not become latter-day McGovernites. In fact, the opposite. A July 2009 Gallup report noted that by a 2–1 margin, people said their views had become more conservative in recent years.

Republicans, independents, and even Democrats had all moved to the right, although Democrats just barely so (34 percent had become more conservative, 40 percent hadn’t changed, and 23 percent had become more liberal). Gallup noted that “the results are conspicuously incongruous with the results of the 2008 elections.” Incongruous, indeed. ~Lowry and Ponnuru

The results seem incongruous partly because the ideological self-identifications in the survey have been divorced from questions of policy. Most Americans claimed in mid-2009 to have become more conservative in their views in recent years, but whatever “more conservative” meant for many of the respondents it does not obviously translate into support for political or ideological conservatism. Lowry and Ponnuru take respondents’ subjective assessments of “becoming more conservative” as proof that the electorate actually shifted right in recent years. A year after these “incongruous” results, Gallup found that majorities favored additional stimulus spending, “regulating energy output from private companies in an attempt to reduce global warming,” and “expand government regulation of major financial institutions.” If Americans have actually become “more conservative” in their views in recent years, that still leaves a majority in favor of a number of things that political conservatives abhor. That suggests that the electorate has been moving left, and possibly started moving left well before the 2006 and 2008 elections.

When the pollster asks more specific, policy-oriented questions, it becomes clear how limited or even meaningless the other result is. The second poll was taken just four months ago, and shows majority support for three things that Lowry and Ponnuru are telling us the majority ought to oppose or scorn. Unfortunately for their argument, it shows majority support for increased regulation of financial institutions when they insist that opposition to regulation is at an all-time high. Many respondents might be confused or have conflicting views on the subject, or perhaps their answers are shaped to a large degree by the phrasing of the questions. Lowry and Ponnuru are assuming that the public’s views are coherent, and they assume that ideological self-identification is a meaningful statement about policy preferences. These assumptions are doubtful.

What is strange about Lowry and Ponnuru’s article is that they are doing nothing that the people the target for mockery didn’t already do in the wake of the 2008 election. Like Carville and Tanenhaus, they have taken a transitory political moment to declare the public’s permanent or enduring support for their preferred politics, they are attaching ideological meaning to temporary changes in fickle, malleable public opinion, and they are arguing that their opponents’ political failures have resulted from failing to heed public opinion. To answer the charge that conservatism is dead, they have produced the claim that conservatism was never really sick and was actually growing stronger all this time. One of their concluding claims is one that we have heard so many times since 2006:

The public in the late 1970s had turned on liberalism. Today’s public had merely turned on Bush.

One can make the argument that a genuine, sane conservatism and the ideological conservatism of Bush’s supporters had nothing to do with one another, but that is not what Lowry and Ponnuru are arguing. They want to claim that 1980 represented the repudiation of a reigning ideology, but that 2008 was just a rejection of Bush. Of course, on the eve of the 1982 election one can imagine liberals making the claim that 1980 was just a rejection of Carter (who was in any case not one of them). Indeed, after the 1982 midterms that is what quite a few liberals did believe. If liberals were foolish to hype 2008’s long-term significance, this article is simply delusional.

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