Former New Republic editor Peter Beinart directed us toward an interesting bit of survey research recently in a Daily Beast article, “The Rise of the New New Left.” The referenced survey was carried out by Pew Research in the fall of 2011, during the peak of the Occupy Wall Street protests.
Although Beinart uses the Pew results to support his claim that millennials are shifting leftward, perhaps the more interesting conclusion to be taken from it is that the American public is more ideologically confused than ever.
Put differently, Americans, at least since the rise of the Progressive movement and the left’s rather expedient appropriation of the term “liberal,” don’t use ideological labels like the rest of the world does. Terms like “socialist,” “liberal” and “conservative” thus mean different things in our country than others.
To illustrate this, Pew asked respondents in its “Political Rhetoric Test” for their views of various ideological concepts. “Socialism” provokes a 2-1 ratio of negative to positive; “Conservative” almost precisely the opposite (reinforcing the claim that America remains an essentially right-leaning, or at least a “center-right,” nation). “Liberal” gets a bit better response than expected (positive by 11 percent), while “libertarian” provokes a split decision (37 percent negative, 38 percent positive).
It’s all fairly predictable, at least until the term “progressive” is tested and gets a more than 3-1 positive to negative response. Since anyone with any ideological sophistication knows that “progressive” is merely a term leftists have begun to use as a substitute for the presumably discredited “liberal,” it becomes apparent that most of the respondents in the survey don’t know what it actually means,only that it kind of sounds good (perhaps in the sense of being vaguely in favor of progress?). Even 55 percent of the self-identified Republicans in the pool had a favorable view of “progressive” while having only a 20 percent favorable view of “liberal.”
It gets even more addled when looking at the breakdowns for “libertarian,” an ideological belief system usually associated with the political right. But according to Pew’s data, Republicans actually have a more negative view of libertarianism (by 11 percent) than Democrats do (who favor it by 1 percent), with self-identified “conservative Republicans” especially negative (by 12 percent) and self-identified “liberal Democrats” especially positive (by 15 percent). This is the opposite of what you would expect in a coherent ideological universe.
Confusion further accumulates when looking at the response to capitalism and socialism on the part of those liberal Democrats in the survey (the same folks who, remember, sort of like “libertarianism,” which is the ideological antithesis of socialism in every respect). The obviously misnamed liberal Democrat cohort expresses a preference for socialism over capitalism by a rather remarkable 13 percent.
Adding all this up, we come to several conclusions.
First, that lots of liberals (with approval) and lots of conservatives (with disapproval) see libertarianism not so much as a philosophy stressing severe limitations on the power of government but largely in terms of its implied permissiveness on social and cultural issues (abortion, legalization of marijuana, gay marriage, etc.). Indeed, the group most favorable toward libertarianism (self-identified liberal Democrats) is also the group most favorable toward socialism, about which no self-respecting libertarian would ever have a positive thing to say.
Second, liberal Democrats are actually socialists. You simply can’t be a genuine liberal and have a more favorable view of socialism than of capitalism, as the liberal Democrats in the Pew survey do. Indeed, acceptance of a market economy is a key historical element of liberalism (hence the concept of liberal and neo-liberal economics) that precludes acceptance of its great ideological rival, socialism.
The hunch that American “liberalism” has been largely indistinguishable since the New Deal from European socialism, or at least “social democracy,” is thus confirmed by the Pew data, even if American socialists masquerading as liberals won’t come clean and admit it. The political needs of the moment on the left might dictate a shift in moniker from liberal back to “progressive,” but either way it is still some strain of socialism that lies beneath. Indeed, a reasonable argument could be made that socialism in America can only be pursued if hidden beneath relatively benign labels. For the left, ideological confusion is thus more a necessity than a liability.
Third, and finally, President Barack Obama’s base has a fundamentally different view of America than other groups; indeed, the three cores of that base-blacks, Hispanics and 18-29-year-olds-are also the only demographic groups in the survey with a more positive view of socialism than of the capitalism that has historically defined American life.
Conservatives have long claimed Obama is a socialist at heart. Liberal Democrats have long scoffed at the idea. And now we have a Pew survey in which self-identified “liberal Democrats” express greater support for socialism than for capitalism, and the core of the Obama base does the same.
But that doesn’t make any of them, or Obama, socialists, does it? So what would?
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial, Pages 11 on 09/30/2013