Surprisingly, the survey reveals Tea Partiers to be slightly more economically secure than the general population. Combine those findings with the fact that Tea Partiers are a well-educated cohort, and the narrative that the Tea Partiers are a bunch of pitchfork populist rubes becomes harder to maintain. ~Steven Hayward

This isn’t really a surprise. For one thing, those who are more economically secure are probably paying more in taxes, and therefore are more likely to object to taxes more strongly, and they also probably have more time to engage in more intense political activism. It also makes sense that relatively economically secure people on the right are going to take a dimmer view of government spending than their more economically insecure fellow conservatives.

Indeed, the only people who seem to want to maintain the narrative of “pitchfork populism” are the activists and pundits who claim to be sympathetic to the movement. If the movement is a backlash from the conservative base and constitutes just 18% of the population, that makes it a bit harder to explain as the natural “pushback” of a “center-right” country against an unwelcome center-left agenda. Liberals are perfectly happy to point out that the movement does not have much populist credibility. Michael Lind states in the same symposium, “Pitchfork-wielding populists like William Jennings Bryan they are not.” Peter Beinart argues that the movement has nothing to do with populism, and as far as economic populism is concerned he is basically correct:

They’re not today’s version of the Nebraska dirt farmers who rose up against the railroads and the banks more than a century ago. They’re today’s version of the California suburbanites who rose up against their property tax bills in the late 1970s rather than pay for decent schools for the Golden State’s black and Hispanic kids. They’re the second coming of what Robert Kuttner called “the revolt of the haves.”

Again, this isn’t surprising. Self-identifying conservatives tend to look askance at economic populism, and the more ideological and activist they are the more intense their dislike of economic populists.

Hayward goes from making a poor observation to simply making a false claim:

The fact that so many Tea Partiers are new to political participation suggests that, like the Perot voters of 1992 who were said to represent the “angry middle,” a plurality of Tea Partiers are moderates who are simply shocked by Obama’s great leap forward in the size of government [bold mine-DL].

It is possible that there is some overlap between former Perot voters and Tea Partiers, but it is simply untrue to say that a plurality of them is moderate. As I said earlier today, 20% in the survey to which Hayward is responding identified as ideologically moderate, 34% identified as “somewhat” conservative, and 39% identified as “very conservative.” So, the truth is that a plurality of Tea Partiers self-identifies as very conservative, and they identify as “very conservative” at over three times the rate of the general public. That doesn’t make their complaints invalid, and it doesn’t make their preferred policies wrong, but couldn’t we at least acknowledge the real identity of the movement in question?

It’s true that 56% of Tea Party respondents said that they had never been active in a political campaign before, but that isn’t quite the same as saying that they are “new to political participation.” 97% of the Tea Party respondents said they are registered to vote. For that matter, the involvement of the vast majority of respondents who identified with the Tea Party has mostly been passive: only 20% say they have donated money or attended rallies, so most of the Tea Partiers who have never been active in political campaigns before now have also not become active in movement events.

The Winston Group found, in three national surveys conducted from December through February and published April 1, that the Tea Party movement is composed of a broad cross-section of the American people — 40 to 50 percent of its supporters are non-Republicans. Indeed, one-third of self-identified Democrats say they support the Tea Party movement [bold mine-DL]. ~Schoen & Caddell

I have seen some people claim things like this in recent weeks, and at least as far as the large number of Democratic Tea Party supporters is concerned I am quite confident it is almost completely false. What does it mean that a third of Democrats “support” the movement? I suspect that this is a lot like all those legions of 18-29 year olds intent on repeal of the health care bill, as Rasmussen would have it, which is to say that it is probably the product of poorly-designed questions or a misreading of the results. It seems in this case that it was the latter. In fact, if we look at the Winston Group results we see that just 13% of Tea Partiers identify as Democrats in their study.

The recent New York Times survey shows that 54% of Tea Partiers are Republicans and 36% are independents. Just 5% identified as Democrats. Ideologically, Tea Partiers are not representative of the nation as a whole, and until recently no one has been silly enough to claim anything like this. Tea Partiers are overwhelmingly self-described conservatives, which is what you would expect. 53% of the Tea Partiers in that survey reported being angry about what is happening in Washington. The things that they say have angered them are consistent with conservative objections to the administration and Congress: government spending (11%), health care reform (16%), “not representing the people” (14%), size of government (6%), deficit (5%), and taxes (2%) were the most significant reasons given. 73% describe themselves as “somewhat” or very conservative, and just 20% call themselves moderates. Tea Partiers are disproportionately drawn from older age groups, and 56% report income of $50,000 a year or more.

Tea Partiers are as disproportionately conservative and Republican as you would expect antiwar protesters to be disproportionately liberal. That is fairly normal for any intense political protest movement: such a movement is going to represent and attract relatively more ideological supporters with strongly-held views with which most other Americans are not going to agree entirely or at all. The Tea Partiers in the NYT survey claim to be much more concerned with deficit reduction than the general public, and they almost unanimously favor a “smaller government with fewer services” (92%). 73% even say that they would favor spending cuts “on domestic programs such as Social Security, Medicare, education, or defense” if necessary. As we see later in the survey, this is not quite as significant as it seems. Tea Partiers are less likely to say that entitlements such as Medicare are “worth it,” but a full 62% of them still say this. 66% say that they “always” or “usually” vote Republican, and just 5% report voting this way for Democratic candidates.

The reason I am going over these polls in some detail is that Schoen and Caddell are leaning very heavily on the idea that the Tea Party movement is broadly representative in both its make-up and its views, and they have made this central to their argument that the concerns of this movement can somehow be credibly addressed by the administration to “minimize Democratic losses in November.” It’s as if someone dusted off some 1996 Democratic talking points aimed at co-opting Ross Perot’s issues and tried to apply them to a dramatically different political context over a decade ago. Simply as a matter of electoral politics, it makes no sense how an administration and a majority party can expect to reduce whatever losses they might suffer by signing off on large parts of the agenda of the rank-and-file of the other party. The claim that the movement is broadly representative allows Schoen and Caddell to push their “centrist” incrementalism as the solution to Democratic electoral woes, but as we can see here there is no real truth to that claim.

That would be a shame, because tacitly backing Wall Street on this issue erodes the GOP brand as the People’s Party [bold mine-DL]. ~Matt Continetti

Via Andrew

Continetti does not appear to be joking when he refers to the Republican brand as that of the “People’s Party.” He cites Barone, who correctly notes that Wall Street firms favored the Democrats before the last election. It is true that Democrats received more donations from people working at Wall Street firms than Republicans in the last cycle. Part of this does have to do with changes in political leanings, but an equally important reason for this backing was that a Democratic victory was expected. Perhaps no less important is the reality that Wall Street donors reasonably expect most Republicans to support their interests almost automatically, while Democrats are not always natural supporters.

Regardless, some Republican leaders have been eagerly trying to cultivate Wall Street donors for at least the last several months, and Boehner has specifically cited Republican willingness to oppose regulatory reform as the reason why the donors should support the GOP. Any remote chance of being confused with a “People’s Party” is one that the House and Senate Republican leadership has done everything it possibly could to destroy at least since it backed the TARP in September 2008.

This is understandable, because when it comes to economic and financial matters the Republican Party is not and really has never been a “People’s Party.” It is a bit unfair to expect the leadership of a party that has traditionally defended corporate and financial interests to support anything that could be considered economic populism. This is hardly news at this point, but Republican anti-elitism is limited specifically to those areas where there are the fewest Republicans: Hollywood, academia, and the media. Whenever similar attitudes start to be directed at corporations or Wall Street, party leaders and activists become very hostile to populism. This certainly goes against the public mood right now, but Republican leaders have been oblivious to the public’s economic concerns, trade skepticism and anger at Wall Street for years. There wasn’t much reason to expect them to change now.

Ackerman reports that civilian casualties in Afghanistan have declined significantly since Gen. McChrystal took command.

Conor wants to know why Jonah Goldberg keeps trying to change the subject.

Matt Steinglass argues that environment and occupation significantly affect political inclinations.

Jim Antle profiles Rand Paul.

The TAC symposium in the new issue of the magazine that I mentioned last week is now available online. Markos Moulitsas asks and answers a fair question in his contribution:

So where exactly are these anti-interventionist conservatives, willing to partner with progressives on rolling back the most ridiculous tenets of the absurd war on terror? Unfortunately, they don’t exist in any appreciable numbers.

To come back to Justin Logan’s post from a few days ago, the trouble is not just that there is not that much political or intellectual leadership on the right that opposes the warfare state, but that there are so very few self-identified conservatives who will support non-interventionist and antiwar conservative leaders.

This has to be the most ridiculous thing I’ve read in my life. Apparently neither the offended parishioners nor Andrew knows that the iconography of the crucifix in question is an example of perfectly normal Byzantine-style depictions of the Crucifixion. The crucifix’s iconography appears to be quite traditional, decent and appropriate. I don’t have that much more to say about this. Sometimes I am simply amazed at how stunningly ignorant many Christians are of the most basic religious elements of their own tradition and history.

I suppose it’s a good thing that this parish doesn’t have an image of the Theotokos Galaktotrophousa, or else there might have been a riot!

Continuing the “epistemic closure” debate, Jonah Goldberg writes:

Lord knows the Democrats did not ride back to power on the backs of nimble and novel public policy prescriptions.

This is quite right. There is no necessary connection between election results and the quality or vibrancy of the intellectual life of the activists, wonks and experts aligned with one coalition or another. Between early 2002 and early 2005, Republicans and conservatives were politically in fairly good shape, but that same period was characterized by some of the sloppiest thinking and the most inflexible, ideological responses to events in at least thirty years. This is why references to the relative political strength or weakness of a party that Goldberg and Continetti have made are entirely irrelevant to the question. The conservative movement could be operating in a self-reinforcing cocoon and suffering from intellectual bankruptcy, and the electorate might nonetheless support their Republican political leaders in spite or even because of these things.

It is not difficult to demonstrate the reality of the “hermetically-sealed mental world in which only information provided by organs of the conservative movement is trusted.” In the last four years, Republicans and mainstream conservatives have largely learned nothing or learned the wrong things about why they lost power. It was not intellectual bankruptcy that directly caused Republican defeats, but we can see intellectual bankruptcy on display in the way movement conservatives have responded to political defeats.

The first, most predictable move was to declare the losses to be setbacks for Republicans, but not for conservatives. As a dissident conservative, I agree that there was nothing genuinely conservative in Republican policies between 2001 and 2009, but movement conservatives’ maneuvering to distance themselves from the failures of policies they either tolerated or embraced has just been an effort to flee from the scene of the crime. Since then, movement conservatives have invented comforting stories that reinforce their ideological commitments and avoid all responsibility for anything that happened while self-described conservatives were governing.

In movement-world, Iraq had little or nothing to do with what happened in the 2006 midterms–it was spending and earmarks! In movement-world, the financial crisis was caused pretty much entirely by the Community Reinvestment Act and the GSEs. You might have never known that the Federal Reserve, FASB 157, and Bush’s “ownership society” housing policy even existed if you relied on mainstream conservative media, because these things might implicate the “wrong side” in contributing to the disaster. Critical thinking, self-criticism and a willingness to revisit and abandon assumptions were all notably absent. As movement conservatives see things today, Obama either rejects American exceptionalism or simply loathes America (and in some circles the debate is simply over where he learned this loathing), and he is doing all he can to weaken America and hasten American decline. Their new political stars and leading pundits spout nonsense on foreign policy, and they make blusteryproclamations of the uniqueness and superiority of American social mobility and economic dynamism that are flatly untrue. There is an impulse to self-congratulation and hubris in all of this that tends to hamper clear and critical thinking.

As Austin Bramwell wrote four years ago for TAC, this is simply the way the movement works:

Anyone who expresses too vociferously too many of the following opinions, for example, cannot expect to make a career in the movement: that the Soviet Union was not the threat that anti-communists made it out to be, that the current tax system discriminates in favor of the very wealthy, that the Bush administration was wrong about the Iraq invasion in nearly every respect, that the constitutional design itself prevents judges from deciding cases according to the original meaning of the Constitution, that global warming poses small but unacceptable risks, that everyone in the abortion debate—even the most ardent pro-lifers—inevitably engages in arbitrary line-drawing. Whether these opinions and others are correct or not matters little to the movement conservative, even if he knows next to nothing about the topic at hand. If you do not reject these opinions or at least keep quiet, you are not a movement conservative and will be treated accordingly.

Third, and closely related to doublethinking, the conservative movement engages in selective editing of history. When events have a tendency to disconfirm ideology, down the memory hole they go. Thus, conservatives do not recall their dire warnings about the Soviet Union during the Cold War or about the economy after the Bush I or Clinton tax increases. On the Iraq invasion, they will not remind you of their claims that Iraqis would welcome us as liberators, that the world would soon be applauding the Iraq invasion, or that events in Lebanon and the Ukraine heralded global democratic revolution. Nor will conservatives remind you of their predictions that the insurgency’s demise was imminent, that Saddam Hussein and then Zarqawi were the Big Men of the insurgency, or that the insurgency consisted largely of foreign jihadis. As in 1984, the ability to forget that any of these events ever occurred signals one’s loyalty to the movement.

However, there has been an intensification in cocooning and forgetting as conservatives are now able to receive and exchange information in an almost parallel universe. In this universe, as Henninger’s column in The Wall Street Journal reminded me yet again this morning, Obama originally never intended to increase the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, when in the real world he had pledged to do this many times. When viewed from the parallel universe, Obama’s decision on Afghanistan is a surprise and a change, because it does not agree with the cartoon fantasy of Obama’s foreign policy that movement conservatives and their allies have constructed for themselves. This happens all the time, and not only are these mistakes never corrected, but the people who make them on a regular basis enjoy great success within the confines of the movement. This is not a “closing” of something that was once open, but the normal operation of an ideological movement.

Fifty-eight percent of Americans want to repeal the health care bill. ~David Brooks

Brooks refers here to the overall pro-repeal number in the latest Rasmussen poll. Like their last poll on health care repeal, this one contains several bizarre results when we look at the crosstabs. When we look at the numbers for 18-29 year old likely voters, who have regularly been the age group most supportive of the health care bill from the beginning, we see numbers that make no sense. Three weeks ago, 58% of 18-29 year olds said that they favored repeal, which was already hard to believe, and now that number has leaped to 76%. Looking at the other age groups, we find that pro-repeal sentiment has dropped among 30-39 olds from 52% in March to 48%, and it has risen from 55% to 64% among 40-49 year olds, but remain relatively unchanged among 50-64 year olds (54%) and 65+ likely voters (60%).

According to Rasmussen, by far the most ardent pro-repeal constituency other than self-identified conservatives and Republicans is supposed to be 18-29 year olds. This seems unlikely. 18-29 year olds, the so-called Millennials, were and have continued to be more supportive of Obama than any other age group, and they tend to be more socially and fiscally liberal than any other age group. The Pew survey on Millennials made this very clear. Obviously, something is wrong with this poll. The support/oppose repeal framing of the question ends up lumping in progressive hostility to the health care bill because they think it is too “centrist” and inadequate with the actual desire to repeal the new legislation and start over.

It would be much more useful if we could have a poll result of likely voters that distinguished between opposition to the bill and the willingness to support Republican candidates campaigning for repeal, or even a poll question like the one in the YouGov survey I have mentioned before. According to that YouGov survey of adults, 39.6% agreed that the “current health care reform bill has so much wrong with it that it should not become law.” That is what repeal advocates believe. Another 43% like some elements of the bill, but believe the bill could have been better. 17% are satisfied with the bill as it is. Even when we take into account that this was a survey of adults and not likely voters, that would not translate into 58% support for repeal.

Other weird numbers that leap out from the Rasmussen crosstabs is the even higher percentage of black likely voters who say they favor repeal: up from the implausible 32% of last month to 49% now. Does anyone believe that Republicans are going to win anything close to half of the black vote in the fall? 61% of women favor repeal, while only 55% of men favor the same? We’re supposed to believe that pro-repeal sentiment has jumped 10 points among women and dropped three points among men in the last three weeks? Are Republicans going to win the women’s vote by campaigning on health care repeal? This seems highly unlikely.

Most conservatives and voters 65+ really do oppose the health care bill, and they are more likely to turn out in the fall. If the Democrats are going to suffer major losses, it will be because of the relatively higher turnout of these and other voters for Republican candidates against relatively weaker turnout by the Democratic base and new Obama voters. It will not be because there is a pro-repeal majority swollen by the disaffected ranks of Obama’s core constituencies. In practice, very few of the young, black, women and Democratic voters who say that they favor repeal will actually vote in such a way as to make repeal more likely.

The argument for Middle East democracy that Hamid sketches above sees political participation as a release-valve for Arab grievances. But what are those grievances? As they relate to the United States they are: the basing of U.S. combat forces in the region and support for Israel.

So the idea that democratic participation would actually give aggrieved citizens some relief seems to imply that a democratic government would actually have to address and ameliorate those grievances.

In such a context, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to conclude that the advance of democracy in the Middle East could mean empowering governments that take a decidedly colder attitude toward America (and Israel). They might not go so far as to sever ties, but if you consider that a long-standing and democratic ally like Japan wants to reconfigure America’s basing agreements, it wouldn’t be a stretch to see newly empowered democratic states in the Middle East start pushing back against American military power in the region. ~Greg Scoblete

Greg refers to this column by Shadi Hamid, who mentions the phenomenon of “Bush nostalgia” among Arab reformers. This is sad for a couple reasons. No one in the region (or anywhere else) should ever feel nostalgia for the Bush years. However underwhelmed or disappointed one is with Obama for any number of reasons, Bush nostalgia is a horrible refuge. U.S. and allied policies during the Bush administration caused more harm and upheaval in the region than anything at least since the invasion of Kuwait. To the extent that the “freedom agenda” was welcomed by Arab reformers, the promises made in its name were never going to be applied consistently and regularly to Arab states.

So the more important point is that Arab reformers have little or nothing about which they can feel nostalgic. The “freedom agenda” was applied half-heartedly when it was applied at all in Arab countries, and the administration quickly abandoned its efforts in Egypt at the first sign of resistance from Mubarak. I don’t fault the administration for backing away from some of its more fantastical ideas, but I would stress that Arab reformers cannot point to much of anything substantive that they received as a result of the “freedom agenda.” Hamid mentions that Obama’s Cairo speech raised expectations that have since been dashed, which is true enough, but the “freedom agenda” was just the same: long on idealistic rhetoric and hints of changes in policy that never really materialized.

Were allied Arab states to become much more democratic, their governments would be obliged to pay more attention to the grievances Greg mentions, and that would make the divergence of perceived interests between our governments difficult to paper over. An important factor in determining how “cool” relations with the U.S. became would be the American response to the more forceful and frequent expression of long-held objections to U.S. policy and military presence in the region. So far, our official and popular reactions to Japanese objections to the Futenma basing deal does not give much reason to think that the response would be particularly constructive. Washington is not very used to having many allies that pursue independent foreign policies, and it does not respond well to allies that resist or criticize U.S. policies. Americans tend to expect deference and gratitude from our allies, and much of our political class tends to categorize anything other than this as evidence of growing “anti-Americanism.”

At some point, allied states might begin to question whether it is their security interests, rather than Washington’s geopolitical ambitions, that are being served by the alliance. Like Hatoyama’s rhetoric of solidarity and fraternity (yuai) and his tentative proposal for an East Asian union, these allied states might begin discussing the possibility of regional economic and political cooperation with the neighboring states against which the U.S. is supposed to defend them. It might be possible for Washington to adjust to a world with many democratized Arab states that distance themselves from the United States in some ways, but more likely we would have to endure years of acrimonious domestic debate and recriminations over “who lost Oman.” Our politicians would try to outdo one another with promises to restore American “credibility” in the region, and the government would probably back the occasional coup against Islamist or populist Arab leaders. If American reactions to political change in Latin America are any indication, we would start hearing grave warnings about this or that anti-American Arab demagogue representing the next great threat to global peace.

Returning to the questions of the “cynical cudgel” of democracy promotion and causes of anti-American terrorism, Greg Scoblete writes:

If you’d like to see fewer American troops and less American meddling in the Middle East, in other words, than you should indeed be pushing for greater democratic participation in the region. And yet that sits at cross-purposes with much of what I understand the contemporary Republican and conservative position to be – which is to entrench American military power and influence over the region.

I suspect this is why, for all the talk, President Bush never really leveraged American aid and influence in the Middle East in such a way as to truly endanger any incumbent autocrats. If Bush grasped at the kernel of a sound idea, he and his advisers were likely scared off by its implications, especially after the elections in the Palestinian territories.

If they ever intended more than lip service to democracy promotion in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, for example, the previous administration probably was very quickly scared off by the prospect of empowering democratic majorities in those countries. Even though it was U.S. support for Egyptian and Saudi governments and the policies related to that support (e.g., American forces stationed in Saudi Arabia) that contributed to the motivations of the 9/11 hijackers, there was no serious proposal to “drain the swamp” (to use the hawkish phrase from that time) by somehow compelling democratic changes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Such changes would have been destabilizing for two important allies, and it would have probably resulted in the empowerment of groups that are critical or hostile to the alliance with the U.S. There would have been absolutely no promise that liberalization would follow democratization, and probably the reverse would have occurred, at least in Egypt. Democratic “values” would have been served after a fashion, but most likely at the expense of U.S. hegemony.

As we have seen, hegemonists find democratization desirable only when it destabilizes rival or hostile governments. After overthrowing a hostile Iraqi regime by force, hegemonists assumed not only that Iraqis would be grateful, but that they would show this gratitude by adopting a “pro-American” orientation. This did not happen. In many of the “color” revolutions, the supposed reformers were embraced because they supported a “pro-Western” orientation, but in most cases they were unrepresentative of their nation as a whole and their efforts to pull their countries in that direction met with varying degrees of resistance (Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan) or resulted in calamity (Georgia). What mattered to Washington in the Rose and Orange “revolutions” was not the leaders’ credentials as reformers or their credibility as democrats, but their willingness to move their countries toward Western economic and security structures that their people either did not want or the pursuit of which worked against the economic and political interests of their countries.

There are at least two key tenets that democratists have typically held: democratization will stabilize the region in which it occurs and nations that share “our values” will also tend to share our interests. These are both wrong. New democracies are often unstable and can often be the cause of international instability. Democratic practices, institutions and values provide the framework for the expression of a nation’s own interests (as defined and shaped by the nation’s political class), which normally diverge more sharply from the interests of other nations than their authoritarian or monarchical rulers admitted. Even with thoroughly Westernized and European allies, values and interests do not coincide nearly as often as democratists would have us believe. A foreign policy view that assumes that the U.S. interests are served whenever “our values” prevail somewhere is a policy doomed to result in repeated misunderstandings, disappointments and failures. And so it has.