Tag Archives: liberal

America Is Becoming a Bit More Liberal. That’s Pretty Unusual Six Years Into a Democratic Presidency.

by MargotBugden Posted on May 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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Why are there more moderate Democrats than moderate Republicans? This has never been because Democrats are spineless wimps who won’t stand up for liberal values. The main reason is simple: there aren’t very many self-identified liberals in America. There never have been. Self-IDed conservatives have outnumbered self-IDed liberals by 10-15 percentage points for decades. This means that Democrats are forced to appeal more to the center than Republicans are.

But Gallup reports that this is changing. On social issues, the ID gap has narrowed to nearly zero. On economic issues conservatives still have a healthy 21 percentage point lead, but that’s way down from 2010. Here’s the chart:

In one sense, you should take this with a grain of salt. Sure, there are now more self-IDed liberals, but that’s compared to 2010, a high-water mark for conservative identification.

In another sense, this is pretty unusual. Normally, the country gets steadily more liberal during Republican presidencies and steadily more conservative during Democratic presidencies. This is, presumably, because voters get increasingly tired of whoever’s in power and more open to the idea that the other guys might have better answers. But this time that hasn’t happened. There’s too much noise in the Gallup chart to draw any definitive conclusions, but if you compare the numbers now to the average from the last few years of the Bush presidency, the country has actually gotten a bit more liberal. That’s something that rarely happens six years into a Democratic presidency.

The trend is more noticeable on social issues, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. On gay rights in particular, the country has plainly moved in the direction of more tolerance, and conservatives are just flatly out of step. As this trend continues—and it’s inexorable at this point—the conservative position strikes more and more people as not merely misguided, but just plain ugly. And you don’t self-ID with an ideology that you think is ugly.

It’s a funny thing. People say they don’t like President Obama’s foreign policy, but it turns out they approve of the specific things he’s doing. They say they don’t like Obamacare, but they like the things Obamacare does. They say they don’t like Obama’s economic policy, but they largely approve of his actual positions. You see this over and over. It doesn’t look like Obama is doing much to move the country in a more liberal direction, but in his slow, methodical, pragmatic way, he’s doing just that. A lot of people might not know it, but they’re attracted by his no-drama approach to incremental social change. It frustrates those of us who want to see things change faster, but in the end, it might turn out to be pretty effective.

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America Is Becoming a Bit More Liberal. That’s Pretty Unusual Six Years Into a Democratic Presidency.

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Update: What Do Critics Mean Who Say Obamacare "Isn’t Liberal Enough"?

by RobinLeflore Posted on April 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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I periodically drone on about the laziness of polls that ask a simple approve/disapprove question about Obamacare. The problem is that a lot of people say they disapprove because Obamacare isn’t liberal enough. These are folks don’t necessarily disapprove of the concept of national healthcare in general or Obamacare in particular, and shouldn’t really be counted among right-wing opponents of the law.

A couple of weeks ago, a Kaiser poll gave us a slightly deeper glimpse into all this. They asked the disapprovers why they disapproved, and it was clear that some of them had lefty criticisms of the law, not conservative criticisms. But the evidence was still a bit fuzzy.

Today, Mark Blumenthal goes further. In a recent HuffPo poll, about 9 percent of the respondents said they opposed Obamacare because it wasn’t liberal enough. Then, in a follow-up question, they were asked, “In your own words, what do you mean when you say the health care law is not liberal enough?”

The results are on the right. There’s still some ambiguity here, but I’d classify several of the responses as likely left-wing criticisms. Adding up the percentages, I get 6 + 4 + 15 + 4 + 4 + 3 = 36 percent. That’s a little less than half of those who had a response.

So, very roughly speaking, in future polls I’d guess that about half of the “not liberal enough” folks are basically supporters of Obamacare but want the law to go further. It might even be more than that, but it remains hard to parse the motivations behind all of these responses with precision. Is “too complex” a liberal or conservative criticism? How about “lack of choice”? Hard to say.

In any case, this adds some context to the whole debate about Obamacare critics who say it’s “not liberal enough.” It’s also an object lesson against assuming too much ideological coherence from survey respondents. A larger survey with a bigger sample size and a little more structure to the questions would be welcome.

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Update: What Do Critics Mean Who Say Obamacare "Isn’t Liberal Enough"?

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Medicaid Expansion May Be a Sleeper Issue for Democrats This Year

by FranciscaDGY Posted on January 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Once Obamacare has been in place for a while, will it become popular enough that Republicans will finally give up their opposition? Maybe, maybe not. But how about the Medicaid expansion? The evidence there might be a little clearer. Here’s Greg Sargent:

The Medicaid expansion, as an issue, is kind of taking on a life of its own, independent of Big Bad Obamacare. In Louisiana, Senator Mary Landrieu has aggressively criticized the rollout of the law, but has also attacked Republicans for refusing to implement the Medicaid expansion. In Georgia, Dem Senate candidate Michelle Nunn has called for fixes to the law while also saying the state should expand Medicaid.

….Meanwhile, the expansion could hold pitfalls for Republicans, because as enrollment mounts, they may be pressed to say whether they really support taking that coverage away from people. Mitch McConnell was recently asked to comment on Kentuckians benefitting from the law, and he filibustered. The GOP Senate candidate in West Virginia is gung ho for repeal but has hedged on the expansion.

Hmmm. Jonathan Bernstein took a quick look at the websites of Republican gubernatorial challengers in blue states that have expanded Medicaid but look like possible Republican pickups. After all the appropriate caveats, he tells us what he found:

And the answer? Nada. Zip. Nothing. None of these Republicans is pledging to repeal the Medicaid expansion put in place by a Democratic governor….I don’t want to make more of this than the evidence can support. But for what it’s worth, early evidence supports the liberal optimist (and conservative pessimist) view: that where it’s in place, Medicaid expansion is here to stay.

If that’s truly the case, then sooner or later Obamacare’s Medicaid component will expand to all 50 states. Eventually, every state will have a governor who is willing to embrace it. Provided that trend is not counteracted by reversals in states that were in the first wave of Medicaid expansion, we’re talking about a one-way street. The only question is how long it takes.

Pushing for Medicaid expansion in the holdout states could turn out to be a solid populist issue for Democrats this year. The argument is simple: It’s free medical care and it doesn’t cost the state anything. Who’s against that? We’ll find out later this how well that argument works.

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Medicaid Expansion May Be a Sleeper Issue for Democrats This Year

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The Canadian government doesn’t want you to get the mistaken impression that it takes climate change seriously

by Leon Russell Posted on January 2, 2014

The Canadian government doesn’t want you to get the mistaken impression that it takes climate change seriously

By

Paul McKinnon / Shutterstock

“The government of Canada takes climate change seriously, and recognizes the scientific findings that conclude that human activities are mostly responsible for this change.”

Canada’s environment minister came close to uttering that fairly ho-hum sentence in September — part of the government’s brief public response to the latest alarming report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

But, in the end, the sentence was never said.

Postmedia News used open-government laws to obtain the statement that had been drafted for the minister, Leona Aglukkaq, by her department. She ultimately omitted that sentence, opting instead to attack opposition parties.

“Unlike the previous Liberal government, under whose watch greenhouse gas emissions rose by almost 30 per cent, or the NDP, who want a $21 billion carbon tax, our Government is actually reducing greenhouse gases and standing up for Canadian jobs,” Aglukkaq said in her Sept. 27 statement.

Postmedia News asked the department why the minister dropped the sentence from her statement. Here was the department’s response:

“Our government absolutely takes climate change seriously and our actions and results demonstrate this,” wrote Aglukkaq’s spokeswoman Amanda Gordon in an email. “Since we have formed government, Canada’s projected carbon emissions have gone down by close to 130 megatons over what they would have been under the previous government. The statement highlights the important actions of our government so all Canadians can be aware of the work we have undertaken to protect the environment.” …

Green Party leader Elizabeth May said she found [the omission] “shocking” since she believed the recommended messages from Environment Canada were “banal” and not even as strong as the language from the IPCC report.

“It was watered down politically, and it’s further indication that [Prime Minister] Stephen Harper and his cabinet simply don’t understand that the climate crisis is a huge threat to Canada, to our kids, to our economy and we’re running out of time,” said May. “Stephen Harper doesn’t want to actually do anything that by his (opinion) impedes the oil and gas industry.”

Indeed, Harper has been doing all he can to help his country’s tar-sands oil industry, including dropping out of the Kyoto Protocol. Now Canada’s response to climate change is considered to be among the worst in the world.


Source
Stephen Harper’s government edited message about taking climate change seriously, Postmedia News

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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The Canadian government doesn’t want you to get the mistaken impression that it takes climate change seriously

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Here’s how you can get conservatives to care about the environment

by Myrna Posted on December 10, 2012

Here’s how you can get conservatives to care about the environment

By Susie Cagle

theworldfortune

Stop appealing to climate-change deniers with science and moral arguments, folks — it ain’t gonna work. Just get them worrying about their own health and the “purity” of their local environment. At least that’s how I’m reading this new study from UC Berkeley published today in the journal Psychological Science.

From the press release:

A UC Berkeley study has found that while people who identified themselves as conservatives tend to be less concerned about the environment than their liberal counterparts, their motivation increased significantly when they read articles that stressed the need to “protect the purity of the environment” and were shown such repellant images as a person drinking dirty water, a forest filled with garbage, and a city under a cloud of smog …

“These findings offer the prospect of pro-environmental persuasion across party lines,” said Robb Willer, a UC Berkeley social psychologist and coauthor of the study. “Reaching out to conservatives in a respectful and persuasive way is critical, because large numbers of Americans will need to support significant environment reforms if we are going to deal effectively with climate change, in particular.”

The researchers found that conservatives weren’t so motivated by the greater good, but rather by concerns about the the purity of their bodies and the Earth, patriotic arguments, and reverence for a higher authority (Father Earth?). Basically we need a lot more stock images of dirty drinking water.

Overall, the study found that the purity-themed message inspired conservatives to feel higher levels of disgust, which in turn increased their support for protecting the environment.

Incidentally, I too am now feeling higher levels of disgust. Hm!

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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Here’s how you can get conservatives to care about the environment

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