Subject: RE: [lbo-talk] Political leaning of the US population Date: Sat, 29 May 2004 12:17:28 -0400 From: "Louis Kontos" <Louis.Kontos at liu.edu> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
I agree that there is now greater potential for 'change' than there was a few years ago. But the problem I see is that the vast majority of people is uninformed and disengaged from politics and from social and political issues generally. For this reason the kind of public opinion (on issues) that emerges through polls and structured surveys is meangless, i.e., because people don't know much about the issues they appear to have opinions about. So if you ask them to explain why they oppose 'welfare', for instance, they demonstrate that they don't know anything about it. If you change the word welfare to 'government assistance to poor people' you get a majority on the other side of the issue. If you put the question about government assistance after a question about crime, support drops 15-30%. If you ask fictive questions about 30 % consistently offer an opinion. So polls and issue- survyes are increasingly mood driven rather than opinion driven; people's opinions on a broad range of issues are (increasingly) impressionistic rather than well-thought out. This is why, in my vew, they fluctuate as they do, often wildly, and why they never predict anything other than the kinds of behaviors Wojtek refers to: consuming and voting. None of this is to say that Bush won't be voted out of office. Rather, it's to say that if he's voted out it'll be because his policies are obviously 'not working' and because the pundits and opinion leaders have turned against him. It won't be because people understand what his policies are about, or that they've re-evaluated the substance of those policies -- regressive taxation, imperialism, etc. They might feel, in other words, that Bush is really not 'for them' without knowing what it would it mean to be for them. Whereas, wealthy people know that Bush is their guy and that, in order to be elected, he has to appeal to the masses (thus appearing to be not for them). They are engaged, informed, and active. We need social movements, then, not only a vehicle for more meaningful change than what can be achieved through elections, but also because these build relationships, networks, resources, and serve an educative (or consciousness raising) function. In other words, if change is to mean anything, beyond periodically pulling us back from total destruction by getting rid of an exceedingly dangerous president (Bush is not the first), then people need to be involved in this change.