[lbo-talk] Political leaning of the US population

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Thu May 27 13:50:46 PDT 2004


1. Michael Perelman:

Propaganda notwithstanding, there is su a thing as human agency and I woul dnot underestimate it. Propganada was relentless in x-Soviet bloc countries, yet many if not th emajority were not swayed by it.

2. Doug Henwood: I deliberately rejected the Nader - Buchanan comparison in 2000 because conservatives already had their prime choice candidate in the persona of George Bush. Not so for the leftists. Nader was in similar position vs other candidates in 2000 and the potential supporter as Wallace was in 1968. Besides, did not you say in one of your previous postings that 1960s and 1970s were much more left leaning than today?

I also think that central PA is more representative of the US population at large than NYC. As soon as I go to Baltimore suburbs I am surrounded by flags, bumper stickers proclaiming support of our troops, George Bush and the Republican party (the more blue collar the neighborhood, the more of them), derisive comments about women, gays, blacks and foreigners, etc. I am pretty sure you would encounter the same if you went to Brooklyn or Staten Island, left the five boroughs altogether (I guess Tim McVie grew up upstate NY, no?)

As to the popularity of various magazines - see my reply to Louis Kontos

3. Dwayne Monroe:

I did not argue that conservatism is "innate" in the US - as your reply seems to suggest. That would be a very hard position to maintain. I did not explicitly state why the US population seem more conservative than its European counterpart - but I can thing of three reasons: - immigration - immigrants tend to be more conservative than non-immigrant population; even the successful ones tend to be "more Catholic than the pope" to show their new loyalty (ec. New Yorker cartoon showing a NYC taxi cab covered with a gazillion of US flags and driven by a mid-easterner); what is more, immigrants are often strongly influences by religion as this is often the only institution that accepts them and gives them a sense of community - ethnic diversity and conflicts - self explanatory - the ability of the current system to deliver material goods in large quantities - this makes the corporate propaganda more plausible; see also my response to Louis Kontos

4. Louis Kontos: Your explanation of the popularity of Faux News vs. The Nation is good and explains the effectiveness of propaganda.

I also agree with your argument that people's political beliefs are not necessarily coherent - I think that also squares with Doug's point that political view of the US population is more complicated than a simple distinction left/right wing seems to suggest. I may also add, as I previously argued on this list - that people's voting decisions depend not on a comprehensive ideological assessments but on more impressionistic grounds (or "status generalizations" as it id known in sociology), hence inconsistencies.

However, I do not think that support of the New Deal welfare state provisions, which are quite modest, is a particularly indicative sign of left leaning. After all, Otto von Bismarck was the father of the German welfare state too. Welfare state enjoys wide support across the political spectrum - only radical libertarians and radical revolutionaries reject it.

I think more indicative of left leanings is internationalism and support of public ownership and control of strategic resources.

To summarize - I am not arguing that the left or center-left is non-existent in the US. As I said before it is probably a third or so of the US population which is almost 100 million people (more than the population of any European country). It is that the conservative element is much larger and more virulent.

Wojtek



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