Neither Liberal nor Conservative

Ideological Innocence in the American Public

Donald R. Kinder, Nathan P. Kalmoe

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780226452593
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Congress is crippled by ideological conflict. The political parties are more polarized today than at any time since the Civil War. Americans disagree, fiercely, about just about everything, from terrorism and national security, to taxes and government spending, to immigration and gay marriage.
Well, American elites disagree fiercely. But average Americans do not. This, at least, was the position staked out by Philip Converse in his famous essay on belief systems, which drew on surveys carried out during the Eisenhower Era to conclude that most Americans were innocent of ideology. In Neither Liberal nor Conservative, Donald Kinder andNathan Kalmoe argue that ideological innocence applies nearly as well to the current state of American public opinion. Real liberals and real conservatives are found in impressive numbers only among those who are deeply engaged in political life. The ideological battles between American political elites show up as scattered skirmishes in the general public, if they show up at all.If ideology is out of reach for all but a few who are deeply and seriously engaged in political life, how do Americans decide whom to elect president; whether affirmative action is good or bad? Kinder and Kalmoe offer a persuasive group-centered answer. Political preferences arise less from ideological differences than from the attachments and antagonisms of group life.

The Nature of Ideological Identification in Mass Publics

Chapter Three

Meaning and Measurement of Ideological Identification

After sorting through all the arguments and evidence generated by Converse’s essay, we conclude that the American public is, by and large, still innocent of ideology. On the whole, Americans are naive in matters ideological, no less today than in the 1950s. But if this is so, what do we make of the fact that many Americans seem quite happy to describe themselves in ideological terms; that when asked directly, millions say they that are liberal or that they are conservative? Reconciling these two “truths”—ideological innocence and the widespread presence of what we call ideological identification—will fully occupy our attention, beginning here and continuing through the following four chapters.

Chapter 3 lays down the foundation for this work. First we spell out what we mean by ideological identification, describe how ideological identification is typically measured, and then show that the standard measure stands up to a series of straightforward empirical tests. With these preliminaries accomplished, we then provide a first glimpse of ideological identification in the American public. We establish three elementary but consequential facts: first, many Americans say that ideological identification is not for them; second, among those who do describe themselves in ideological terms, many seek the center; and third, among those who claim to be either liberal or conservative, conservatism wins. In the chapter’s final section, we initiate a comparison that will run through much of the analysis that follows: a comparison between ideology and partisanship, between the attachments Americans form to political belief systems and those they form to political parties.

Ideological Identification Defined

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines identification as a “psychological orientation of the self in regard to something (as a person or group) with a resulting feeling of close emotional association.” The Oxford English Dictionary provides several illuminating examples:

He . . . kept himself free from identification with either party. (Leslie Stephen, Alexander Pope [1880])

Perhaps the simplest way of describing this wholeness is by saying that it is a “we”; it involves the sort of sympathy and mutual identification for which “we” is the natural expression. (Frederic Milton Thrasher, The Gang [1927])

They constituted an audience so rapt and attentive, so impressionable and apparently uncritical that their identification was almost total. (Michael Thelwell, Harder They Come [1980])

In principle, ideological identification could encompass a close attachment to any systematic political program: socialism, libertarianism, populism, anarchism—any ism would do. In practice, for an investigation of ideological identification in the contemporary United States, the options reduce primarily to two, conservatism and liberalism.

Ideological identification is categorical, in that ideological programs—most notably in the American case, liberalism and conservatism—are kinds or types. Ideological identification is, at the same time, dimensional, in that the degree of psychological attachment varies continuously. For liberals and conservatives in full, identification constitutes a central and abiding aspect of identity. Among those who find their primary rewards in domains other than politics, attachment to liberalism or conservatism may be difficult to distinguish from no attachment at all. And there exist all shades in between.

As we noted back in chapter 1, ideologies advance normative claims. Liberalism and conservatism designate the values we should share, prescribe the actions government should take on our behalf, and point to what is good and evil in the world. For the true believer, liberalism and conservatism are moral commitments.1

The Standard Measure

The first attempt to assess ideological identification among the American public was carried out by the Gallup organization in 1936 (Ellis and Stimson 2012). Gallup’s interest in ideology was perhaps a reaction to the New Deal, President Roosevelt’s answer to the Great Depression. The president argued that the American people had a right to decent homes, productive work, and “security against the hazards and vicissitudes of life” and that these rights could be secured only through the active intervention of the national government. Putting deeds to words, Roosevelt proceeded to create the biggest public works program in American history, build new institutions designed to regulate the banks and protect organized labor, and invent a comprehensive system of unemployment and old-age insurance. In these ways and more, Roosevelt provided the country with a tutorial on the meaning of American liberalism.

Indeed, it was Roosevelt who introduced the term “liberal” into popular American discourse. The president referred to the New Deal as “liberalism,” both as a way to distinguish his policies from the earlier progressive movement and as a defense against his predecessor’s claim that the ideas driving his programs were un-American, “dipped from cauldrons of European fascism or socialism” (Herbert Hoover, quoted in Rotunda 1986, 72).2 In Roosevelt’s view, liberalism was simply a common-sense reaction to the dire problems confronting the nation. “Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity,” the president said, “than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference” (quoted in Kennedy 1999, 280).

If Roosevelt called himself a liberal, perhaps others did as well. In May 1936, Gallup posed a simple if, to the contemporary ear, somewhat odd question to a cross section of Americans:

If there were only two political parties in this country—Conservative and Liberal—which would you join?

As Christopher Ellis and James Stimson (2012) show, in succeeding years, Gallup, Harris, Roper, and other survey organizations developed variations on this question:

Should President Roosevelt’s second administration be more liberal, more conservative, or about the same as the first?

Which of these three policies would you like to have President Truman follow: Go more to the left, by following more of the views of labor and other liberal groups; Go more to the right, by following more of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Innocent of Ideology?
• Converse and His Critics
• The Nature of Ideological Identification in Mass Publics
• Conclusion
• Appendix A:  Alternative Measures of Ideological Identification
• Appendix B:  Are Moderates Ideological?
• Notes
• References
• Index