--- Marvin Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
>> crisis. I think the difference
> between us is that you give primacy to cultural
> factors to explain the
> relative conservatism of the US masses while I see
> these mostly as an
> outgrowth and response to the social, economic, and
> political pressures
> they're experiencing. As I've noted, you also have a
> one-sided view of the
> US political culture; in fact, America comprises two
> cultures of relatively
> equal strength which coexist uneasily alongside each
> other: one conservative
> and the other liberal, the latter one quite in tune
> with your values.
This is exactly what I wrote in the posting to which you replied. I only added that the conservative part is sufficiently larger than the liberal one to assure the almost continuous rule of conservative ideas, from "limited government" and "taxpayer's bill of rights" to the war on public services, to the election of reactionary politicians, and to support for hawkish foreign policy.
However, this theory of "Two Americas" even if of unequal sizes, does not explain why left-of-the center candidates barely register in national elections. Such candidates are not merely defeated by the margin that reflects the unequal distribution of individual political preferences in the population - as the "Two Americas" theory would predict. They are altogether ignored, wiped out of the picture, failing to get even 5% of the popular vote, which in many parliamentary systems is the required minimum to have any seats at all.
To explain that outcome, one either needs to assume that Americans are 95+% conservative - a proposition that you just denied, and which indeed is preposterous on its face - or one needs to look for another explanation than that assuming that voters merely vote their individual political preferences.
This is why I mentioned the concept of instituional legitimacy - an idea that people vote for what they perceive as legitmate political choices rather than their individual political preferences. From that point of view, it does not matter much how people answer opinion polls or what they think, if anything, on various political philosophies. What matters is whether they perceive the necessarily limited electoral options presented to them for a vote as legitimate or not (or perhaps less legitimate).
That is to say, people may say in opinion polls that they want national health care plan, and then vote against such a plan. Such contradiction does not necessarily imply "false consciousness" i.e. ignorance, but it may imply different perceptions of legitimacy. Most people may covet their neighbors' possessions, but they do not steal what they desire because they perceive such form of acquision of what they want as illegitimate.
Likewise, people may want to have a universal health care, but they may also perceive a government provision of that care and the tax to fund it as illegitimate. Furthermore (going back to Bartel's paper) people may think that the rich pay too little taxes, but they also consider goverment taking a cut of one's possesions trasfered to one's heirs as illegitimate interfrence in family matters. Therefore they truthfully express ther view that rich pay too little taxes and it is a bad thing, and then oppose the "death tax" as illegitimate interference, even if it affects only the rich. For the same reason people may think that the rich accumulated too much wealth, but most of them would oppose theft or robbery as a means of re-distributing that wealth. With this explanation, there is no contradiction in voter behavior anymore.
Now, to answer the question what people perceive as legitimate, we need to look into social institutions (formal and informal), because legitimacy is almost always bestowed by institutions. The dearth of left-of-the center institutions in the US explains why left-of the center programs do not have the same legimtimacy as conservative programs, which in turn explains why left-of-the center candidates and their programs receive so little public support in elections even though people express similar personal preferences in opinion polls.
However, nobody on this list picked this theme, and people kept talking about individual preferences and how to meet them. This is what I meant when I said that institutional factors are being ignored - which is indeed very strange for this bunch. I have to admit, however, that the Durkheimian model of social causation that runs from the collective to the individual rather than the other way around looks rather strange to the Anglo-Saxon individual-ueber-alles mind.
Wojtek
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