The first two are especially interesting and perhaps surprising. He writes:
Structural difficulty number one: There just aren’t as many liberals as there are conservatives in the United States. Gallup asks people this question most years. In the 2020 edition, 36 percent of respondents called themselves conservative, 35 percent moderate, and 25 percent liberal. And that 25 is way up from the 1990s, when the liberal number was around 17, 18, and the conservative number was more like 38.Tomasky is exasperated because he is himself very liberal and edits a liberal journal, and he makes a good point when he observes that Democrats rarely call themselves liberals. It's not because they're not liberal but rather because they don't want the general public to know that they are.
This never-discussed fact explains a lot. It means that Democrats have to do a lot more reaching beyond their base than conservatives do. And it helps explain why Republicans are constantly trying to out-conservative one another and Democrats, with very rare exceptions, never even use the word “liberal.”
This exasperates me to no end, but seeing these numbers, I can kind of understand it. If those numbers were reversed, Democrats would be saying liberal this and liberal that all day, and conservatives would be all hamina-hamina at candidate forums when the moderator asked them if they’d call themselves conservative.
His next point is also noteworthy:
Structural difficulty number two: Not quite half of Democrats are liberal. Here’s a Pew result from early 2020 in which Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents were asked their preferred ideological label.Yes, but what they don't explain is why liberals control both houses of the legislature and the White House. If the nation is basically conservative how do liberals keep getting elected to office?
Leading the pack? Moderate, 38 percent. Liberal came in at 32 percent, very liberal at 15 (way up from the single digits 20 years ago), while conservative and very conservative combined for 14 percent (conservative Democrats tend to be more religious).
Compare to Republicans: In most surveys I’ve seen, about two-thirds of Republicans, maybe even 70 percent, say they’re conservative, with most of the remainder moderate, and a very confused 4 percent or so liberal.
Mull those numbers. There are roughly as many conservatives in the Democratic coalition as there are “very liberals.” That Republicans are overwhelmingly conservative makes their messaging challenges much easier to surmount.
It also means, and this is a very important point, that there’s no divide between the GOP base and the political class, which is obviously not true of Democrats. The Democratic political class is, for the most part, very liberal, which means that the political elites embrace a number of cultural left positions that aren’t even particularly popular among the Democratic rank and file, let alone independent voters. (Economically populist positions, however, are popular, as evidenced by how well the constituent elements of Build Back Better polled.)
Again, these numbers are very under-discussed in our discourse, but they explain a lot.
Is it that the average voter, not to mention the average non-voter, though conservative, is woefully ignorant of the politics of the people he or she votes for? And if these citizens are non-voters, are they so apathetic about the course of the country that, though they are instinctively conservative, they just don't care enough to vote?
Either possibility portends ill for the future of our nation. To quote Thomas Jefferson "Any nation that expects to remain ignorant (or apathetic) and free, expects what never was and never will be."
