The GOP meme that the so-called Tea Party ‘movement’ reflects the beliefs of a majority of Americans has been pretty much shredded by a New York Times/CBS News poll, conducted 4/5-12, according to TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira’s latest ‘Public opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress web pages. With respect to abortion law, Teixeira notes:

…The poll finds that the general public remains stalwart in its support for the Roe v. Wade decision establishing the right to obtain a legal abortion: 58 percent say this decision was a good thing, compared to just 34 percent who say it was a bad thing. But among Tea Party supporters, sentiment is just the reverse: 53 percent say the decision was a bad idea and only 40 percent say it was a good idea.

Regarding the financing of health care reform:

The public also shows its progressive colors on the issue of whether the rich should be taxed to help provide health insurance coverage for those who don’t have it. In the same poll, 54 percent say this approach is a good idea, compared to 39 percent who think it’s a bad idea. Among Tea Party supporters, however, an amazing 80 percent term this a bad idea and a mere 17 percent say it’s a good idea.

On President Obama:

…In the same poll, 58 percent say he understands the needs and problems of “people like yourself” compared to 39 percent who say he doesn’t. But Tea Party supporters diverge radically from this sympathetic assessment, with 73 percent saying he doesn’t understand their needs and problems and just 24 percent saying he does.

As Teixeira sums up the poll’s findings, “Tea Party supporters, in short, are representative of the conservative right and should in no way be confused with the center of American politics, which remains progressive on many key issues.”

One of the most unnverving aspects of the recent health reform debate was the extent to which opponents of various Democratic plans (usually lumped together as “ObamaCare”) embraced and promoted outright falsehoods, most famously the idea that the legislation would encourage euthanasia-by-rationing.
Brendan Nyhan now has an important article at The Forum that not only looks at the role of deliberate misinformation in the “ObamaCare” debate, but compares it to a similar Big Lie that “stuck” during the earlier debate over the Clinton administration’s health reform proposal (i.e., the claim that the proposal would eliminate the ability of Americans to choose doctors). He notes the seminal role of pseudo-wonk Betsy McCaughey in both episodes of disinformation, and the importance of partisan conservative media in reinforcing fabricated claims.
Nyhan’s conclusion is sobering:

The evidence presented in this article suggests that misinformation played an important role in the two most recent debates over health care reform. While some critics have faulted the response of the Clinton and Obama administrations to these charges… the argument presented in this article suggests that political myths are extremely difficult to counter. For instance, proponents of reform might attempt to address concerns in the bill-writing process, but Betsy McCaughey’s 1994 article suggests that such disclaimers can be distorted or ignored. And false claims with no actual basis in legislation such as the “death panel” myth are especially insidious precisely
because they cannot be addressed in the bill itself. As a result, until the media stops giving so much attention to misinformers, elites on both sides will often succeed in creating misperceptions, especially among sympathetic partisans. And once such beliefs take hold, few good options exist to counter them—correcting misperceptions is simply too difficult.

A particularly depressing finding of Nyhan’s is that belief in Big Lies about health reform actually increased among those Republicans who thought of themselves as well-informed on the subject. This reflects the experience many have had with conservative talk radio or Fox News fans who feel “empowered” by the “truth” about liberal policy ideas or politicians, and are exceptionally resistant to contrary facts or “objective” referees of the facts. Any progressive who’s done conservative call-in shows (or had extended discussions with conservative-activists friends or family) and dealt with inquisitors who perpetually suggest they are “on to you” and have divined your secret plans and motives, knows exactly what I am talking about.
It’s almost certainly unfair and counter-productive, and in any event a waste of time, to criticize consumers of deliberate misinformation as ignorant. When it comes to complex topics like health care, even extremely well-informed people filter information–or misinformation–via ideological presumptions, partisanship, and the “trust factor” of where they turn to become informed.
The better course, as Nyhan argues, is to focus on the elites who invent and disseminate misinformation, and relentlessly undermine their bogus credibility. Serial offenders like McCaughey should be hooted off the public stage when they pop up again (as did, to some extent, happen during the ObamaCare debate). And politicians who retail misinformation should be held accountable just as much. Personally, I wish that much of the vast progressive sea of contempt for Sarah Palin’s rhetoric and mannerisms would instead be channeled into a relentless focus on her huge and unrepentent role–via a Facebook post, no less–in turning the lie about government-encouraged euthanasia into the Big Lie of “Obama death panels.” This despicable act, aimed at terrifying seniors and the families of those with disabilities, not her general lack of intellectual curiosity or her inexperience in governing, is what should disqualify her from any elected office at least until she confesses and seeks absolution.

This item, the fifth in the Demos/TDS forum on “Progressive Politics and the Meaning of American Freedom,” is by Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute.
Freedom, says John Schwarz, is too important to be left to conservatives. No argument there. For too long, liberals have been flummoxed by conservatives’ success in posing as defenders of liberty against government encroachment. This stance has given the conservative cause a simple, reductive logic and ideological coherence that liberals lack – and often envy. It has enabled the right to tap the deep strain of anti-statism that really does make American politics exceptional.
Modern liberals have chafed at the constraint that this classically liberal understanding of freedom imposes on their social vision. For decades, they’ve struggled to articulate a countervailing principle that can trump the power of what Louis Hartz called America’s underlying “Lockian” consensus.
Arriving in Washington just after Ronald Reagan’s election, I’d often ask shell-shocked liberals to define their first principle. The invariable, deflating answer: “affirming a positive role for government.” This trope reflected a confusion of means with ends – and it goes a long way toward explaining why only about a fifth of Americans have been willing to call themselves liberals since the early 1970s.
The story of how liberalism came to be linked with social engineering and redistribution, with tax and spend, and with rights and entitlements to favored groups is too familiar to need rehashing here. Suffice it to say that liberal efforts to expand government’s role to advance worthy social goals have often crossed lines that are important to many if not most voters. These lines mark the boundaries between individual and collective responsibility, and between government’s legitimate efforts to assure equal opportunity as opposed to equal outcomes.
So Schwarz’s diagnoses is right: the public’s abiding suspicion that expansive government means contracting freedom tends to stack the political deck in conservatives’ favor and keep liberals on the defensive. His ideas for reversing the presumption in liberals’ favor, however, fall short.
When it comes to freedom, liberals face an inescapable dilemma. They can never be as simple-minded as conservatives. They can’t simply counter conservatives’ classic-liberal conception of freedom with a social liberalism that aspires to greater equality and social justice. Mid-century liberals succeeded by keeping these often antagonist approaches in equipoise. Modern liberals have lost the balance, and with it, the ability to persuade a majority of Americans to their point of view.
Here it’s important to distinguish between Democrats and liberals. Most liberals are Democrats, but most Democrats are moderates (and another 17 percent say they are conservative). The outlook of moderate-to-conservative Democrats remains anchored in the classic liberalism of the American creed. Liberal Democrats incline toward social democracy, especially the Nordic model.
If liberals are very far from a majority, Democrats are achingly close. This suggests that we shouldn’t exaggerate the talismanic power of the right’s paeans to personal freedom. They didn’t prevent Democrats, first under Bill Clinton and now Barack Obama, from staging a political comeback. They didn’t stop Obama and his party from finally realizing their oft-deferred dream of universal health care, though it was a close-run thing.
Plus it’s arguable that, on the cultural front, Democrats already hold the high ground of freedom. Where morality is concerned, conservatives are all about government coercion; they want more legal prohibitions on individual behavior, not less. Liberals, to their ever-lasting credit, have fought to defend the individual freedom of minorities, women and gays against discriminatory laws and customs. Often they’ve paid dearly, as when the New Deal coalition splintered over civil rights. Over time, however, the right has been losing ground in the culture wars (to take the latest example, it won’t be long before the Pentagon retires “don’t ask, don’t tell”). No wonder Republicans are now turning from social issues to confront big government, big deficits and President Obama’s supposed plans for a government takeover of economic life.
This is the crucial battleground. Of course, the GOP’s “socialism” canard is ridiculous. But independents and moderates do worry that Democrats are insufficiently respectful of economic freedom and individual initiative, unwilling to discipline public spending, too trusting of central bureaucracies and regulation, and too focused on distributional equity at the expense of growing the economic pie.

Read more…

This won’t come as a big shock to those who have been watching events in Utah, but a new survey of delegates to that state’s Republican Convention on May 8 shows GOP Sen. Bob Bennett on the brink of being denied renomination. Under Utah’s system, only the top two contestants at the state convention can proceed to a primary. Bennett’s running third, behind movement-conservative favorite Mike Lee and businessman Tim Bridgewater, both of whom are blasting the incumbent for insufficient conservatism.
According to the Mason-Dixon survey of state delegates, Bennett’s favorable/unfavorable ratio among these partisans who will determine his fate is an abominable 28/61. The survey’s second-choice analysis also indicates that if Bennett manages to get into second place ahead of Bridgewater, Lee might then get enough support to pass the 60% threshold that would give him the nomination without the trouble of a primary.
“Bob Bennett is toast,” concludes RedState proprietor Erick Erickson, who’s been conducting an Ahab-level obsessive campaign against Bennett for months.
The message to other Republican candidates down the road is No Enemies to the Right! No Friends to the Left!
Bennett’s primary sin to conservatives was his cosponsorship (with Ron Wyden) of a bipartisan universal health care proposal. This should be a particular lesson to Mitt Romney, whose endorsement of Bennett in his semi-home-state did neither man a bit of good.
Meanwhile, having left Bennett for dead, the purgemasters of the Right like Erickson have moved on to new tasks, such as the destruction of former Sen. Dan Coats of IN, who faces a primary on May 4.
UPDATE: Nate Silver has more on the byzantine nominating process used by Utah Republicans, and suggests Bennett may still have a slight chance of surviving–but only a slight chance.

WaPo columnist Chris Cillizza’s “Democrats’ young voter problem” in today’s edition of The Fix addresses a challenge facing Democrats regarding an important constituency. Drawing from a Gallup tracking poll, conducted 4/1-25, Cillizza explains:

Less than one in four voters aged 18-29 described themselves as “very enthusiastic” about the 2010 midterm election. Those numbers compare unfavorably to voters between 50 and 64 (44 percent “very enthusiastic”), 65 and older (41 percent “very enthusiastic”) and 30 to 49 (32 percent “very enthusiastic”).

Cillizza argues plausibly enough that this youth “enthusiasm” gap, especially in context of current events, makes it very difficult to recreate the pro-Democratic coalition that elected Obama for the mid-term elections. The concern is that low enthusiasm will translate into low turnout, which is especially worrisome because young voters are tilting Democratic, as the Gallup data indicates:

The Gallup data affirms the clear Democratic tilt of young voters. On a generic congressional ballot test, 51 percent of 18-29 year old vote opted for the Democratic candidate while 39 percent chose the Republican. In every other age group, the generic was either statistically tied or the GOP candidate led. (Republicans’ best age group was voters 65 and older who chose a GOP candidate by a 50 percent to 41 percent margin over a generic Democrat.)

Of course, Democrats would like a strong youth turnout in November. But how important is the youth turnout, compared to other age groups? Here’s an age breakdown of the last (2006) mid-term turnout, according to CNN exit polling:

18-29 12%
30-44 24%
45-59 34%
60+ 29%

Assuming age demographics in 2010 are not terribly different from ’06, it appears that the youth vote will be a relatively small segment, compared to older age groups. Perhaps youth turnout can be increased slightly with a targeted GOTV campaign. But it seems prudent to ask if putting more resources into targeting the 45-59 cohort — almost triple the percentage of young voters in ’06 — might be more cost-effective.
Of course it’s not so easy to craft appeals to arbitrary age groups. But one experience being shared by many in the 45-59 cohort is financing their kids’ college education, as tuition costs continue to rise dramatically. A brand new, well-publicized Democratic plan to provide tuition assistance through beefed up scholarships and tuition tax breaks might do very well with this high mid-term turnout group. And, as a collateral benefit, it could also help with young people who would like to go to college but can’t afford it.
There is nothing parents want more than for their kids to do well, and they know that a good education is the surest ticket to fulfilling that goal. The party that strives to help fulfill this dream will not go unrewarded by middle-aged voters.

This item, the fourth in the TDS/Demos forum on “Progressive Politics and the Meaning of American Freedom,” is by John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira, senior fellows at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Teixeira is also a Founder and Co-Editor of The Democratic Strategist.
John Schwarz’s introductory essay provides many important insights about the philosophical framework of contemporary politics and offers a compelling overview of the continuity of progressive and liberal notions of freedom from Jefferson and Lincoln to FDR and Obama. We wholeheartedly agree with his assessment that the White House and progressives need to make this worldview a centerpiece of their public education and communications efforts. This is sound advice and the clear ideological markers laid out in the President’s speech on the economy at Georgetown would be a good place to start.
We disagree with Schwarz’s conception of the political challenge, however. Looking at the data, progressives do not have a problem with public resistance to their conception of freedom. Despite all the hype around the tea parties, extreme libertarian individualism is a much tougher sell in this country than FDR’s deeper conception of liberty as consisting of freedom of speech and religion coupled with freedom from want and fear.
Our research on political ideology last year found that by a 19-point margin, Americans agree more with a progressive vision of freedom similar to the one outlined in the essay over a more libertarian ideal put forth by Ayn Rand, Glenn Beck, and the tea partiers: 57 percent of Americans agreed that, “Freedom requires economic opportunity and minimum measures of security, such as food, housing, medical care, and old age protection,” versus 38 percent who believed that, “Freedom requires that individuals be left alone to pursue their lives as they please and to deal with the consequences of their actions on their own.” In numerous public polls and our own work, Americans also express a clear desire for tolerant policies that treat people equally and allow for diversity of thought, lifestyle and worship. They do not want the agenda of social conservatives. And even with the hostility to Obama and progressives that emerged over the course of the past year, the American public still believes in the core aspects of progressive government—regulation of the economy, support for the vulnerable, and public investments in education, infrastructure, health care, defense, research and energy transformation—although, in some cases, at lower levels than existed at the beginning of the Obama presidency.
The problem for progressives is not their conception of freedom as encompassing robust government actions to increase economic opportunity and social protections for people. The real problem for progressives lies in the severe public distrust that government can actually perform effectively and accomplish what Americans want it to do.
The recent Pew finding showing only 22 percent of Americans trusting the federal government—one of the lowest marks in half a century according to their analysis—is broadly indicative of this challenge and part of a larger issue of eroding public trust in large institutions ranging from Wall Street to the media. Looking at the data more closely, the stated reasons for this distrust are instructive. First, the massive divide between conservatives/Republicans and liberals/Democrats over the size and function of government presents an unavoidable reality. Progressives must accept that they are in titanic battle with conservatives over the proper role of the state and the individual in society and the economy—a battle that has been going on more or less for a century and is not likely to subside anytime soon given the internal structure of conservative politics and the asymmetry between conservative and progressive media.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, Pew finds that majorities of Americans—across party lines—believe it is a major problem that the federal government is often wasteful and inefficient, does too little for average Americans, and has policies that unfairly benefit some groups. This is the deeper and more difficult challenge for progressives.
In order for a fuller conception of liberty to take hold—one that encompasses both negative freedom from undue coercion and effective freedom to live a full and materially secure life as John Dewey and FDR postulated—progressives must undertake a more elaborate project. They must take far more aggressive and sustained steps to defend government itself, despite its current unpopularity, and make clear to people exactly how government enables individual freedom and the common good. They must deliver on their promises and ensure that expanded government action measurably improves the lives of working- and middle-class citizens and leads to growth and shared prosperity. They must get far more serious about purging corporate influence in government and reforming the political system so that government actually works for the people in an equitable manner. And they must systematically challenge the selfish and hollow conservative notion of freedom that amounts to little more than helping rich people avoid paying taxes and allowing corporations to do whatever they want regardless of the consequences for the nation.
Put simply, progressives need to constantly argue that government plays a vital role in promoting human freedom and advancing national prosperity. Individuals are capable of making tremendous advances in their own lives. But they cannot stop financial markets from crashing. They cannot stop jobs from being eliminated or wages from being cut. They cannot stand up to health insurers on their own. They cannot direct national resources to key public needs like education, infrastructure, defense, and energy production. Americans need an advocate and a supporter and a means to express their voice in key debates and in support of common purposes. The private sector needs a public counterbalance and communities need mechanisms to advance larger goals and aspirations. This is why we have government. In order to promote genuine human freedom and opportunity, government must perform its role properly by ensuring full and equal rights for all people, defending the nation, guarding against undue corporate influence in policymaking, protecting people from market failures, and investing in public goods. This is the time-honored American vision of freedom and government that dates to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
If progressives articulate the case for government clearly and confidently, and ensure that their actions and policies live up these principles in practice, they will be successful. If conservative anti-government ideology goes unchallenged, and reform efforts stall or get turned into half measures, the hopes of building a long term political environment conducive to progressive policies and expansive notions of human freedom outlined so well by Schwarz will be severely diminished.

It’s increasingly clear that Arizona’s new immigration law, signed by Republican governor Jan Brewer last Friday, is going to be a galvinizing force in national, not just state, politics. This will be true whether or not Congress gets serious on comprehensive immigration reform legislation, this year or next.
While conservatives will predictably object that support for draconian measures to reduce illegal immigration–and I’d say instructing police officers to regularly roust anyone deemed “suspicious” for proof of citizenship is pretty draconian–does not indicate hostility to legal immigrants, it is not seem that way by most Hispanic citizens. And you’d think Republicans might have learned their lesson in 1994, when California’s Prop 187–which like Arizona’s bill, purported to affect no one other than undocumented workers–triggered a major backlash against the GOP among Hispanic voters, especially but not just in the Golden State.
The timing of the Arizona action seems almost providential for Democrats, who can now benefit from a similar backlash without taking the lead on controversial national legislation (though they may choose to promote such legislation anyway). And the more Republicans continue to dutifully obey the Almighty Conservative Base on this subject, the more the prospect of a Republican-controlled Congress will begin to seem dangerous to Hispanic voters. Indeed, armed round-ups of brown-skinned Arizonans, to the cheers of Tea Party activists, could be a more potent GOTV force than anything Democrats could themselves devise.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The most recent Quinnipiac survey provides an intriguing backdrop to President Obama’s impending Supreme Court nomination. Fifty-three percent of the respondents are very or somewhat confident that the president will make the right decision about who should replace Justice John Paul Stevens. At the same time, 42 percent expect that his nominee will be more liberal than they would like, versus only 8 percent who think the nominee won’t be liberal enough. Perhaps that is why people are almost evenly divided (46 percent to 43 percent) between those who trust the president more than Senate Republicans and vice versa.
The people polled have clear views about judicial philosophy and behavior. Forty-nine percent favor original intent as the basis of Supreme Court decisions (up from 40 percent in 2008), while 42 percent say that the Court should consider “changing times and current realities” (down from 52 percent). But they don’t think that either of these jurisprudential norms entirely dominates the justices’ decision-making. Instead, 78 percent believe that their political views enter in as well. This belief is shared across lines of partisanship and ideology—by 82 percent of Republicans, 72 percent of Democrats, and 80 percent of independents, by 77 percent of liberals, 78 percent of moderates, and 80 percent of conservatives. And respondents are divided almost evenly (47 percent to 43 percent) between those who believe senators should take only the nominee’s qualification into account and those who believe they should also consider his or her views on controversial issues such as abortion and gay marriage. Forty-eight percent believe that senators who disagree with the nominee’s views on these issues would be justified in filibustering the nomination; 41 percent disagree.
The survey also shows that many of the specific positions that Democrats and the president care most about enjoy substantial public support. For example, 60 percent of the people endorse Roe v. Wade, including 42 percent of Republicans and even 39 percent of self-identified conservatives. And, on the topic of campaign finance, President Obama has repeatedly expressed his belief that the Supreme Court went badly astray in its well-known Citizens United case, which struck down key limits on election spending, especially by corporations and unions. By a margin of 79 percent to 14 percent, the American people agree with him—82 percent of Democrats, 79 percent of independents, and 78 percent of Republicans (along with 69 percent of self-professed conservatives). This suggests that, if his Supreme Court nominee shares Obama’s view (which is likely), his Republican adversaries in the Senate would be ill-advised to challenge that view very aggressively.
There’s no doubt that Obama will take many different factors into account when selecting his nominee, including the capacity for intellectual leadership on the Court and ease of confirmation. But the Quinnipiac Survey suggests that, while the president has room to maneuver on specifics and the Republicans might be unwise to defy a nominee’s more liberal views on certain hot-button issues, the public tends to believe the president will pick someone more liberal than they themselves are. Republicans, in turn, would not necessarily pay a high political price if they filibustered the nominee. We could be in for quite the confirmation circus.

Liz Sidoti’s AP article, “Analysis: GOP, Dems compete for populist title” provides a revealing take on the framing battle between the parties with respect to financial industry reform. As Sidoti notes, both parties are “furiously casting each other as the handmaidens of Wall Street” because of “…polls showing voters favoring tighter controls on Wall Street.”
Fair enough. But Sidoti strays into false equivalency territory when she overstates her point that both parties have overindulged the financial industry. “Both share the blame for deregulating the industry in the 1990s and bailing out Wall Street when the financial sector was on the brink of collapse.” She provides some data on financial contributions which indicates Dems accepted more in contributions from the “the financial services, real estate and insurance sectors,” a curiously broad grouping, without noting that very few Republicans have supported major financial reforms in recent years, while leading Democrats have been in the forefront of advocates for reform.
Yes, some Democrats did go wobbly on their obligation to check Wall St. power. But suggesting that Democrats bear equal blame for the Bush meltdown with a party which views most forms of financial regulation as socialism is a big stretch. This part of Sidoti’s article provides an instructive example of how the MSM impulse to go overboard in being ‘even-handed’ can do a disservice to the truth. I sometimes wonder if this more subtle kind of distortion — particularly in the nation’s leading wire service — misleads more voters than Fox ‘News.’ (Media Matters for America documents examples of Sidoti’s alleged distortions in other articles here.)
Sidoti does better in illuminating the struggle for hearts and minds with respect to financial reform in the rest of her article, as in this glimpse of the respective ad campaigns to win the support of “the little guy”:

For years, Republicans stood by while Wall Street ran wild,” says a Democratic National Committee television spot. “Risky bets. Lax regulation. When the economy collapsed, Republicans looked the other way. … Now Republicans are working with Wall Street lobbyists to block reform” that would “protect consumers and prevent a future bailout.”
Countering, the Republican National Committee rolled out a video claiming the legislation rewards Wall Street with a “permanent bailout fund. … Propping up Wall Street is what Obama does, and Obama does it well.”

Sidoti also shows how ‘conflicted’ the public can be regarding Wall St. reform:

More than half — 58 percent — say that “the government has gone too far in regulating business and interfering with the free enterprise system,” and roughly half oppose government exerting more control over the economy. But, perhaps because their own pocketbooks are at stake, people make an exception for regulating the financial industry: Sixty-one percent say it’s a good idea for the government to more strictly limit the way major financial companies do business.
All that — combined with the fact that two-thirds of Americans own stock — underscores why the White House as well as Republicans and Democrats are competing to be the most populist. It also explains why Democrats and Republicans are trying to agree on a bipartisan bill even as they publicly castigate each other.

All of which suggests that pollsters could be doing a better job of pinpointing exactly what kind of financial industry reform the public believes is needed, and which reforms they consider intrusive. I suspect there is a small business/big business distinction lurking undetected outside the polling data
When the deal is finally done, don’t be surprised if the “blame game” is pretty much a draw, owing to the Republican MSM advantage. In terms of getting credit for presenting financial reform solutions, however, it shouldn’t be much of a contest. Democrats will have to screw up very badly to let the GOP get any credit at all.

This item, the third in the TDS/Demos forum on “Progressive Politics and the Meaning of American Freedom,” is by Matt Yglesias, a Fellow at the Center for American Progress, a prolific writer at thinkprogress.org, and the author of Heads in the Sand. Matt’s post is a response to John Schwarz’s earlier essay in this series.
I was a philosophy major in college, and as such I came to appreciate the importance of the controversy between the libertarian conception of “negative liberty” (the absence of state coercion) and the modern liberal idea of “positive liberty” (the presence of opportunity). And John Schwarz has given us a brilliant tour of how this these contrasting conceptions of liberty—or, to use the more Anglo-Saxon term, “freedom”—can illuminate certain high-level disagreements of principle about public policy matters and how this dispute has played out in the history of American political rhetoric.
So far so good. But I think this issue is much less relevant to actual political practice than he seems to believe. In particular, I seriously doubt that Republican Party success at mobilizing freedom-rhetoric has much of anything to do with Barack Obama’s falling poll numbers or public hostility to Obama’s health care or cap and trade proposals. After all, these proposals existed during the 2008 campaign and were described then as threats to American freedom, but at the time those arguments had little purchase. On one level, the reasons behind the change are complicated. On another level, they’re simple—the poor performance of the American economy has eroded people’s trust in incumbents in general, Obama in particular, and the public sector writ large. There’s good reason to believe that this will turn around if the economy turns around, but not otherwise.
Beyond narrow electoral considerations, I also think it’s a mistake to too-closely identify the right’s freedom-rhetoric with the formal philosophical conception of libertarian-style negative liberty. It is, rather, a slogan that’s invoked as a gesture of ideological identity and solidarity that’s largely devoid of semantic content—it plays a role similar to the one “yes, we can” (itself an echo of the United Farm Workers’ “¡si se puede!”) plays for Obama’s supporters.
Consider that the proponents of right-wing “freedom” are not even slightly inclined to back elements of a libertarian agenda that conflict with conservative identity politics. When John Boehner says “most importantly, let’s allow freedom to flourish” he’s not suggesting we should open our borders to more immigrants or drop the vestigial Selective Service system or allow gay couples to marry or let Latin American countries sell us more sugar or reduce military expenditures. Indeed, the very same critics who castigate Obama for limiting Americans’ freedom also accuse him of being insufficiently eager to torture people, unduly hesitant to detain suspects without trial, and too eager to take the side of black professors subject to police harassment for the crime of trying to enter their own home.
Which is just to say that Boehner is a conservative. He sides with the military, with law enforcement, with the business establishment, and with the dominant ethno-cultural group in the country. In the United States of America, people who adhere to these values like to talk about “freedom” but this has nothing in particular to do with any real ideas about human liberty.
Back in September of 1960, the leading lights of the nascent conservative movement met in Sharon, Connecticut to found Young Americans for Freedom and they proclaimed that “foremost among the transcendent values is the individual’s use of his God-given free will, whence derives his right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force.” A naive person might read that and conclude that William F Buckley, Jr was a strong proponent of federal anti-lynching legislation and other civil rights laws since, clearly, it was African-Americans in the Jim Crow South who were most subject to “restrictions of arbitrary force” and general lack of freedom. In the real world, a couple of lines down the Sharon Statement is talking about state’s rights, “the genius of the Constitution – the division of powers – is summed up in the clause that reserves primacy to the several states, or to the people in those spheres not specifically delegated to the Federal government.” In 1962, YAF gave its Freedom Award to none other than Strom Thurmond, and in 1964 they helped organize the GOP nomination victory of Barry Goldwater, spearheading the party’s turn away from its historic support of liberty for black people. Somewhat similarly, the far-right parties in the Netherlands and Austria are both called “Freedom Party.”
Which is not to say that invocations of “freedom” circa 2010 are really about racism. It’s just to say that in 2010 as in 1960 they’re about conservatism in all its splendor and horror, and have little to do with serious disagreements about the nature of liberty.