The myth of ideas; the myth of idea sustitutes.
Jonathan Chait is back with one of his long TNR cover articles knocking down the latest right-leaning, Tom Friedman-esque Beltway CW, that "Democrats/liberals lose because they lack ideas", a myth that has happily taken root over at RNC web headquarters.
The most instructive part of Chait's article comes after he gets through demolishing the notion that Dems and liberals have comparatively few ideas, and after he draws the perpetuatlly overlooked distinction between the free-floating idea and the effective political-power-backed idea, but before he gets around to lambasting the stupid notion that old ideas (like social security) are somehow intellectually inferior to brand spanking new ones (like social security privatization). Rather, the most instructive part of his article is where Chait takes on the presumed political effectiveness of the raw "idea", in particular its currency during elections:
...The constant invoking of the idea gap isn't entirely, or even mostly, disingenuous. Lots of politicians and analysts earnestly believe it. They believe it because they buy into a set of shared assumptions, usually unstated, about how U.S. politics works. The central assumption is that politics revolves around issues and ideas--rather than things like personality, tactics, and outside circumstances--and that the party that wins is the one that presents a more compelling vision of the future.
...Alas, this sort of thinking assumes a wildly optimistic level of discernment by voters. Polls consistently show that large swaths of the voting public know very little about the positions taken by candidates. In 2000, the National Annenberg Election Survey found that just 57 percent of voters knew Al Gore was more liberal than Bush, 51 percent knew he was more supportive of gun control, and a mere 46 percent understood that he was more supportive of abortion rights. "The voting behavior literature, which is massive, shows that people are not particularly idea-driven," explains Berkeley political scientist Nelson Polsby. "They don't know what the fashions are, with respect to what ideas go with other ideas." [emphasis mine]
This caught me up pretty short. In 2000, 54% of voters weren't confident enough in their knowledge of the candidates to tell pollsters that the Democrat favoured greater abortion rights than the Republican? This goes against the grain not just of the "power of ideas" argument but against the what I refer to here as the "power of idea susbstitutes" argument. Before reading those Annenberg numbers, I would have taken it for granted that most American adults would know and/or assume that any generic Democrat would, by default, support greater abortion rights than any generic Republican. The same would go, to a lesser extent, for gun control or gay rights or affirmative action. These are the sort of instinctual identity-group cultural issues that, it's often argued, brand the parties and decide elections by turning the attention of voters away from liberal candidates' more comprehensive, more clever, more important "ideas" on things like consumer rights and access to health care and education.
Plus, in this case we aren't even talking about the "generic Democrat"'s position on abortion. Two months ago, Ed Kilgore found occasion to reaffirm the post-2000 CW over at the DLC's NewDonkey blog:
Personalities aside, the biggest difference between Clinton '96 and Gore '00 had to do with how each candidate dealt with two sets of issues: culture, and role-of-government--both big "trust" issues in the South. Clinton was thoroughly progressive, but went well out of his way to make it clear that he wanted abortion to be "safe, legal and rare," that he supported a modest gay rights agenda because everyone who "worked hard and played by the rules" should be treated the same; and that he fought to maintain and even expand the social safety net on condition that it truly represented a "hand up, not a handout."
...Compare that message to Gore's, and you go a long way towards understanding why the guy lost nearly half of Clinton's southern white support [note: it was actually about 14% of Clinton's white southern support]. Gore was forever bellowing about partial-birth abortion legislation (supported by about three-fourths of southerners) representing a dire threat to the basic right to choose. While Clinton called for "mending, not ending" affirmative action, Gore pledged to defend every aspect of affirmative action with his life. Clinton talked about balancing gun ownership rights with responsibilities. Gore talked about national licensing of gun owners...].
That is, by drawing "bright red lines" on hot-botton issues (to quote the DLC's Will Marshall making the same point), Gore made American voters, particularly white Southern voters and "Reagan Democrats", fixate on these issues to the detriment of his larger ideas-based message. But Kilgore's (snotty) analysis doesn't square very well with Chait's quoted Annenberg numbers. So I went to the Annenberg site to see if I could sort the weirdness out. I couldn't find the Chait's specific survey numbers, but last publicly available release from 2000 found 60% (63%) of the public able to identify Gore (Bush's) position on abortion correctly. Granted, that was right after the first debate and those numbers could easily have fallen off again as they appear to have done following the conventions. Also, Chait may overstate the problem of voter cluelessness a little bit since the Annenberg's methodology suggests that their reports aren't based on samples of "voters", registered or likely or declared, but rather random samples of American adults. Since before 2004, only about half the eligible population was voting in presidential elections, Chait's numbers probably include the 30% or so of Americans who chose to remain clueless about politics but without any intention of taking their cluelessness into the voting booth.
Nevertheless, the numbers I did find are striking, particularly those in this post-Democratic Convention report. The Annenberg crew, Paul Waldman et al, took random phone samples of American adults before and after the 2000 Convention to see if public awareness of Gore's various positions actually improved during the festivities. The results are instructive. The percentage correctly identifying Gore's position on allowing HMO lawsuits increased from 42% to 51% between August 13 and August 18-21. The percentage correctly indentifying his support for spending federal money on health insurance for children went from 69% to 78%. The percentages able to identify his support for the McCain-Feingold provisions, capital punishment, prescription drugs under Medicare and gays in the military all climbed between five and seven points. But two issues on which voters didn't increase their understanding of Gore's position throughout the convention (and, according to Chait, never did) were in fact the two issues that Kilgore thinks finished Gore off: abortion and gun control. In fact, if you look at Annenberg's graph of the % of the public that correctly identifies Gore's position on abortion (at the top of page 4), it holds steady at just over 50% for most of the summer, rises during the first three days of the Democratic convention, and then drops sharply on the days directly following Gore's nomination acceptance speech. But here's what Gore actually said during his speech on the subject of abortion:
"And make no mistake: I will protect and defend a woman's right to choose. The last thing this country needs is a Supreme Court that overturns Roe v. Wade."
Tough stuff (and the biggest applause line of the night). Compare that to Clinton's 1996 remarks:
"We respect the individual conscience of every American on the painful issue of abortion, but believe as a matter of law that this decision should be left to a woman, her conscience, her doctor and her God. But abortion should not only be -- abortion should not only be safe and legal, it should be rare. That's why I helped to establish and support a national effort to reduce out-of-wedlock teen pregnancy, and that is why we must promote adoption."
So how do you reconcile that? Why did the percentage of Americans not knowing Gore's position on abortion actually fall in the wake of his speech, even as the number getting the message about the campaign's loftier "ideas" on health care and lawsuit rights actually increased?
I venture two answers:
The first is simply that the relevence of hot-botton social and "values" issues is overblown by liberals, rightwingers and centrists alike (actually, a lot of non-wingnut conservatives play down the "values" thing, maybe out of embarrassment at the possibility that their guy keeps winning on the strength of the electorate's hatred for gays). That is, when the DLC complains about the "bright red lines" that cost their guys elections, or when I complain (as I have many times) about the "emotional, instinctual" American voter, that may say more about the DLC and about me than it does about the candidates or the electorate. Isn't it possible that the vast majority of potential voters just don't care, and therefore don't spend any time thinking, about where presidential candidates stand on abortion and gun control? Of course there is a minority of voters that does think about these things and cares strongly about them and who cites these issues to exit pollsters as reasons for supporting Candidate X or Candidate Y. But these people tend to be politically active and partisan. Among the wider potential electorate, and among people who don't follow politics closely or form opinions about the candidates until near election time (and who therefore make up the vaunted "swing vote"), there appears to be less reason to believe the culture war is a great drain on Democrats' performance*. Afterall, despite Kerry's obvious comfort with guns and gunsport during the 2004 campaign and his shying away from advocating stronger gun control, the Democratic share among gun-owning households did not actually improve in 2004 at all. That's because the type of voter who could actually see the daylight between Kerry's and Gore's position on guns was the type of voter who was already voting for Kerry or for Bush.
The second, ralated answer, is that Gore was doing what Hugh Hewitt likes to sinisterly call "talking in code to the hard-left base". "Hard left" here implies people who actually knew what Roe vs. Wade refered to and, at the same time, supported it. And this is the crux of what I'm getting at: Of course, any journalist or TV commentator or blogger would immediately know what Gore was getting at when he brought up Roe and when he vowed to defend "a woman's right to choose". We knew, and the DLC cringed, because we give a shit. The fact that we give a shit about abortion and about where candidates stand on abortion means that we learn the code. We learn it so well that we assume that everyone else does too. But how many American adults (and what percentage of the 53% who watched at least some of the 2000 Convention) would have understood the reference? That is, how much currency does Roe actually carry in the popular conciousness? Survey after survey tells us that the American electorate is woefully uninformed about history and current events. Isn't it just as possible that a big chunk of voters simply missed hearing the word "abortion" in clips of Gore's remarks and, not having heard heard him or the post-convention commentators use the word, just didn't think about it; then, when pressed, repeated their passive uncertainty to the Annenberg pollsters?
The point of all this is as follows: Chait hits on an important truth in his piece. Apolotical Americans don't know much and don't care much about politics, probably much in the same way that I don't know much or care much about football. Many people it would find it mindnumbing that I don't know who won the SuperBowl (or the Grey Cup) last year. But I don't. I don't know not because I harbour any latent cultural hostility to football. It's just not something I choose to think about. If asked questions about it by a pollster, I'd just say that I didn't know the answers. On the other hand, I can quote verbatum chunks from Kerry's cultural issues answers at the third debate with Bush, and I typed that bit of Gore's nomination speech from memory. And, well, I write a blog about stuff like this.
Chait sums up as follows:
This conception of U.S. politics is especially compelling to intellectuals. It is a vision of a noble landscape in which philosopher kings hold sway. Each side has its visionaries, wonks, and pamphleteers, beavering away to see whose ideological manifestos, new syntheses, and ten-point plans will prove decisive in the next election. Writers and thinkers enjoy a heroic central role in shaping history: We--not grubby factors like attack ads or the state of the economy or the candidates' ease before the cameras--hold the future in our hands. Twenty years ago, Tom Wolfe appeared before a gathering of conservatives in Washington and declared that Marxism's appeal lay in its "implicit secret promise ... of handing power over to the intellectuals." The promise is not confined to Marxism. It seems to have seduced everybody.
Almost. If what I'm arguing is correct, the real seduction is not so the myth of intellectualism so much as the idea of emotional energy. It's not that those voters are unreceptive to our candidates' and spokesmen's ideas because of innate cultural prejudices or because they're more interested in who would be more fun to have a beer with. It's that they choose not to think about our candidates or our spokesmen at all. It's a passivity about politics that is entirely alien to the political junkie's mind.
* Note: as a caveat, these comments are probably more relevant to 2000 than to 2004 since 2004 was a very unusual election in the sense that both sides drew much more heavily and exclusively from their bases than usual and because the public was much more clued in. Therefore, I'd concede that the culture war, including all those gay marriage state ballot initiatives, might have had a larger effect on the 2004 outcome than my arguments here suggest.
The most instructive part of Chait's article comes after he gets through demolishing the notion that Dems and liberals have comparatively few ideas, and after he draws the perpetuatlly overlooked distinction between the free-floating idea and the effective political-power-backed idea, but before he gets around to lambasting the stupid notion that old ideas (like social security) are somehow intellectually inferior to brand spanking new ones (like social security privatization). Rather, the most instructive part of his article is where Chait takes on the presumed political effectiveness of the raw "idea", in particular its currency during elections:
...The constant invoking of the idea gap isn't entirely, or even mostly, disingenuous. Lots of politicians and analysts earnestly believe it. They believe it because they buy into a set of shared assumptions, usually unstated, about how U.S. politics works. The central assumption is that politics revolves around issues and ideas--rather than things like personality, tactics, and outside circumstances--and that the party that wins is the one that presents a more compelling vision of the future.
...Alas, this sort of thinking assumes a wildly optimistic level of discernment by voters. Polls consistently show that large swaths of the voting public know very little about the positions taken by candidates. In 2000, the National Annenberg Election Survey found that just 57 percent of voters knew Al Gore was more liberal than Bush, 51 percent knew he was more supportive of gun control, and a mere 46 percent understood that he was more supportive of abortion rights. "The voting behavior literature, which is massive, shows that people are not particularly idea-driven," explains Berkeley political scientist Nelson Polsby. "They don't know what the fashions are, with respect to what ideas go with other ideas." [emphasis mine]
This caught me up pretty short. In 2000, 54% of voters weren't confident enough in their knowledge of the candidates to tell pollsters that the Democrat favoured greater abortion rights than the Republican? This goes against the grain not just of the "power of ideas" argument but against the what I refer to here as the "power of idea susbstitutes" argument. Before reading those Annenberg numbers, I would have taken it for granted that most American adults would know and/or assume that any generic Democrat would, by default, support greater abortion rights than any generic Republican. The same would go, to a lesser extent, for gun control or gay rights or affirmative action. These are the sort of instinctual identity-group cultural issues that, it's often argued, brand the parties and decide elections by turning the attention of voters away from liberal candidates' more comprehensive, more clever, more important "ideas" on things like consumer rights and access to health care and education.
Plus, in this case we aren't even talking about the "generic Democrat"'s position on abortion. Two months ago, Ed Kilgore found occasion to reaffirm the post-2000 CW over at the DLC's NewDonkey blog:
Personalities aside, the biggest difference between Clinton '96 and Gore '00 had to do with how each candidate dealt with two sets of issues: culture, and role-of-government--both big "trust" issues in the South. Clinton was thoroughly progressive, but went well out of his way to make it clear that he wanted abortion to be "safe, legal and rare," that he supported a modest gay rights agenda because everyone who "worked hard and played by the rules" should be treated the same; and that he fought to maintain and even expand the social safety net on condition that it truly represented a "hand up, not a handout."
...Compare that message to Gore's, and you go a long way towards understanding why the guy lost nearly half of Clinton's southern white support [note: it was actually about 14% of Clinton's white southern support]. Gore was forever bellowing about partial-birth abortion legislation (supported by about three-fourths of southerners) representing a dire threat to the basic right to choose. While Clinton called for "mending, not ending" affirmative action, Gore pledged to defend every aspect of affirmative action with his life. Clinton talked about balancing gun ownership rights with responsibilities. Gore talked about national licensing of gun owners...].
That is, by drawing "bright red lines" on hot-botton issues (to quote the DLC's Will Marshall making the same point), Gore made American voters, particularly white Southern voters and "Reagan Democrats", fixate on these issues to the detriment of his larger ideas-based message. But Kilgore's (snotty) analysis doesn't square very well with Chait's quoted Annenberg numbers. So I went to the Annenberg site to see if I could sort the weirdness out. I couldn't find the Chait's specific survey numbers, but last publicly available release from 2000 found 60% (63%) of the public able to identify Gore (Bush's) position on abortion correctly. Granted, that was right after the first debate and those numbers could easily have fallen off again as they appear to have done following the conventions. Also, Chait may overstate the problem of voter cluelessness a little bit since the Annenberg's methodology suggests that their reports aren't based on samples of "voters", registered or likely or declared, but rather random samples of American adults. Since before 2004, only about half the eligible population was voting in presidential elections, Chait's numbers probably include the 30% or so of Americans who chose to remain clueless about politics but without any intention of taking their cluelessness into the voting booth.
Nevertheless, the numbers I did find are striking, particularly those in this post-Democratic Convention report. The Annenberg crew, Paul Waldman et al, took random phone samples of American adults before and after the 2000 Convention to see if public awareness of Gore's various positions actually improved during the festivities. The results are instructive. The percentage correctly identifying Gore's position on allowing HMO lawsuits increased from 42% to 51% between August 13 and August 18-21. The percentage correctly indentifying his support for spending federal money on health insurance for children went from 69% to 78%. The percentages able to identify his support for the McCain-Feingold provisions, capital punishment, prescription drugs under Medicare and gays in the military all climbed between five and seven points. But two issues on which voters didn't increase their understanding of Gore's position throughout the convention (and, according to Chait, never did) were in fact the two issues that Kilgore thinks finished Gore off: abortion and gun control. In fact, if you look at Annenberg's graph of the % of the public that correctly identifies Gore's position on abortion (at the top of page 4), it holds steady at just over 50% for most of the summer, rises during the first three days of the Democratic convention, and then drops sharply on the days directly following Gore's nomination acceptance speech. But here's what Gore actually said during his speech on the subject of abortion:
"And make no mistake: I will protect and defend a woman's right to choose. The last thing this country needs is a Supreme Court that overturns Roe v. Wade."
Tough stuff (and the biggest applause line of the night). Compare that to Clinton's 1996 remarks:
"We respect the individual conscience of every American on the painful issue of abortion, but believe as a matter of law that this decision should be left to a woman, her conscience, her doctor and her God. But abortion should not only be -- abortion should not only be safe and legal, it should be rare. That's why I helped to establish and support a national effort to reduce out-of-wedlock teen pregnancy, and that is why we must promote adoption."
So how do you reconcile that? Why did the percentage of Americans not knowing Gore's position on abortion actually fall in the wake of his speech, even as the number getting the message about the campaign's loftier "ideas" on health care and lawsuit rights actually increased?
I venture two answers:
The first is simply that the relevence of hot-botton social and "values" issues is overblown by liberals, rightwingers and centrists alike (actually, a lot of non-wingnut conservatives play down the "values" thing, maybe out of embarrassment at the possibility that their guy keeps winning on the strength of the electorate's hatred for gays). That is, when the DLC complains about the "bright red lines" that cost their guys elections, or when I complain (as I have many times) about the "emotional, instinctual" American voter, that may say more about the DLC and about me than it does about the candidates or the electorate. Isn't it possible that the vast majority of potential voters just don't care, and therefore don't spend any time thinking, about where presidential candidates stand on abortion and gun control? Of course there is a minority of voters that does think about these things and cares strongly about them and who cites these issues to exit pollsters as reasons for supporting Candidate X or Candidate Y. But these people tend to be politically active and partisan. Among the wider potential electorate, and among people who don't follow politics closely or form opinions about the candidates until near election time (and who therefore make up the vaunted "swing vote"), there appears to be less reason to believe the culture war is a great drain on Democrats' performance*. Afterall, despite Kerry's obvious comfort with guns and gunsport during the 2004 campaign and his shying away from advocating stronger gun control, the Democratic share among gun-owning households did not actually improve in 2004 at all. That's because the type of voter who could actually see the daylight between Kerry's and Gore's position on guns was the type of voter who was already voting for Kerry or for Bush.
The second, ralated answer, is that Gore was doing what Hugh Hewitt likes to sinisterly call "talking in code to the hard-left base". "Hard left" here implies people who actually knew what Roe vs. Wade refered to and, at the same time, supported it. And this is the crux of what I'm getting at: Of course, any journalist or TV commentator or blogger would immediately know what Gore was getting at when he brought up Roe and when he vowed to defend "a woman's right to choose". We knew, and the DLC cringed, because we give a shit. The fact that we give a shit about abortion and about where candidates stand on abortion means that we learn the code. We learn it so well that we assume that everyone else does too. But how many American adults (and what percentage of the 53% who watched at least some of the 2000 Convention) would have understood the reference? That is, how much currency does Roe actually carry in the popular conciousness? Survey after survey tells us that the American electorate is woefully uninformed about history and current events. Isn't it just as possible that a big chunk of voters simply missed hearing the word "abortion" in clips of Gore's remarks and, not having heard heard him or the post-convention commentators use the word, just didn't think about it; then, when pressed, repeated their passive uncertainty to the Annenberg pollsters?
The point of all this is as follows: Chait hits on an important truth in his piece. Apolotical Americans don't know much and don't care much about politics, probably much in the same way that I don't know much or care much about football. Many people it would find it mindnumbing that I don't know who won the SuperBowl (or the Grey Cup) last year. But I don't. I don't know not because I harbour any latent cultural hostility to football. It's just not something I choose to think about. If asked questions about it by a pollster, I'd just say that I didn't know the answers. On the other hand, I can quote verbatum chunks from Kerry's cultural issues answers at the third debate with Bush, and I typed that bit of Gore's nomination speech from memory. And, well, I write a blog about stuff like this.
Chait sums up as follows:
This conception of U.S. politics is especially compelling to intellectuals. It is a vision of a noble landscape in which philosopher kings hold sway. Each side has its visionaries, wonks, and pamphleteers, beavering away to see whose ideological manifestos, new syntheses, and ten-point plans will prove decisive in the next election. Writers and thinkers enjoy a heroic central role in shaping history: We--not grubby factors like attack ads or the state of the economy or the candidates' ease before the cameras--hold the future in our hands. Twenty years ago, Tom Wolfe appeared before a gathering of conservatives in Washington and declared that Marxism's appeal lay in its "implicit secret promise ... of handing power over to the intellectuals." The promise is not confined to Marxism. It seems to have seduced everybody.
Almost. If what I'm arguing is correct, the real seduction is not so the myth of intellectualism so much as the idea of emotional energy. It's not that those voters are unreceptive to our candidates' and spokesmen's ideas because of innate cultural prejudices or because they're more interested in who would be more fun to have a beer with. It's that they choose not to think about our candidates or our spokesmen at all. It's a passivity about politics that is entirely alien to the political junkie's mind.
* Note: as a caveat, these comments are probably more relevant to 2000 than to 2004 since 2004 was a very unusual election in the sense that both sides drew much more heavily and exclusively from their bases than usual and because the public was much more clued in. Therefore, I'd concede that the culture war, including all those gay marriage state ballot initiatives, might have had a larger effect on the 2004 outcome than my arguments here suggest.
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