[lbo-talk] Pew's political typology of the US population

Jeffrey Fisher jeff.jfisher at gmail.com
Sun Aug 19 11:01:02 PDT 2007


On 8/19/07, Wendy Lyon <wendy.lyon at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 8/19/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> >
> > Enterprisers oppose welfare state measures and the removal
> > of immoral books from libraries.
>
> Yeah, but look at the social policy stats at
> http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?PageID=948. On gay
> marriage, abortion and stem cell research, the "social conservatives"
> are more libertarian than the "enterprisers".

indeed. also on teaching creationism.

i remember skimming this a couple of years ago (shoot, maybe when it came out), and i seem to recall having the same question marvin does. the enterprisers ought to be the most libertarian, but i'm wondering if pew sees the wrong distinctions among those group, given these anomalies? need to look at it again more carefully.

If Marvin drew any conclusions, though, from all this, I missed them. Is he saying that market research shows we have a product that will sell? Or, what seems more likely given his emphases, that, on the one hand, the left's natural constituency tends to be white, affluent, and highly educated, while, on the other hand, the (other?) left sees its future in the lumpenproletariat which is neither affluent nor well-educated, but still mainly white? (NB: there are several ambiguous and debatable terms deployed in the preceding sentence; this is not an effort to fix the terms of debate, but to set some terms as markers.)

Is that more or less the gist of it? Or are you going further and saying that seeing the future of the left in the latter group is a serious error?

j



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