Liberal Policy Preferences are Everywhere

Tim Kowal at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen is going after Kevin Drum for repeating what political scientist have known for about half a century. First, Drum:

You all remember the old saw that Americans are ideologically conservative but operationally liberal? It means that lots of Americans say they’re conservative and like to believe they’re conservative, but when it comes to specific government programs they turn out to be pretty liberal. They like Medicare and Social Security and federal highways and disaster relief and unemployment insurance and all that. Try to cut these things and you learn very quickly just how operationally liberal most Americans are.

To which Kowal responds:

Yes, I remember that old saw.  It’s rubbish.  Try it in another context:  A lot of Americans say they eat healthy, and like to believe they eat healthy, but put a bunch of tasty junk food in front of them and, Bob’s your uncle, they turn out to be pretty unhealthy after all.

Of course people are not going to give up Medicare and Social Security after those programs have been dangled in front of them their entire working lives.  (They’re just tax-and-spend programs, remember, so we’re not “investing” in our own “trust accounts”—we’re paying for them because we like them so much because, again, we’re all “operationally liberal.”)  To suggest this means the whole thing’s a draw politically is pretty crooked scorekeeping.

OK, let’s go ahead and chalk people opposing cuts to Medicare and Social Security up to them wanting to get a return on their metaphorical investment. I’m not sure I completely agree, but whatever. The thing is, “that old saw” doesn’t just apply to so-called entitlement cuts.

Basically, what researchers have (repeatedly) done is get a bunch of people together and have them fill out a long and comprehensive political questionnaire. They ask them to choose an ideological label, vague questions about principles (e.g., whether the government should do more or less), and ask them thousands of questions on specific policies in order to ascertain the ideological character of their policy preferences.

Here’s what they found:

In the aggregate, Americans are always operationally liberal on average.
They prefer policies through which the government does and spends more to solve social
problems. And they are always symbolically conservative on average: they consistently prefer the
conservative label to the liberal one.

[…]

Only about one in five self identified conservatives holds consistently conservative issue positions: right of center positions on both [moral and social welfare] dimensions. Put another way, almost 80% of professed conservatives are not conservative on at least one of these dimensions.

Notice that Ellis and Stimson’s findings apply to more than the few social programs that this country still provides. Hell, they aren’t even restricted to economic issues. A plurality (34%!) of conservatives, Ellis and Stimson discover, are neither social nor economic conservatives. 30% are conservative morally but not economically, and 15% are conservative on issues of social welfare but not morality. And again, this is far from an isolated study. Repeatedly, political scientists have found this to be the case.

Even outside of academic research, it isn’t very difficult to find issues where the symbolically conservative public is to the left of not only Republicans but Democrats as well.

But I’m sure Kowal will dismiss all of this as Americans gorging on “junk food” (funny for a guy who indignantly chastised Drum for supposedly condescending to “flyover country”). Faced with evidence of his own ideological isolation, he equates those who don’t toe the Federalist Society line to children who want sugar. Is it any surprise, then, that most Americans hold fundamentally liberal policy positions? Even as liberalism has fallen out of favor as a label people are unable to adopt truly conservative ideals. A movement that would call care for our most vulnerable “junk food” while demanding massive tax cuts for our most prosperous is morally and intellectually bankrupt. It is one thing to argue that in a world of limited resources we cannot do everything we would like to – it is quite another to mock the positions of all who disagree with you as childish whims.

A Few Notes on NCLB

So, I made the mistake of reading of this series of love letters masquerading as an interview about NCLB between Andrew Rotherham and George W. Bush (via Laura Clawson at GOS). President Bush thinks his signature legislative accomplishment is a resounding success and that its critics are unfair? I never would have imagined.

As worthless as that interview is as a journalistic endeavor, it did remind me of just how much Bush still repulses me. As disappointed as I am with Obama (especially on education), at least he doesn’t make make me feel sick whenever I see/hear/read him.

Rotherham’s solo defense of NCLB does not even have that small bit of perspective-keeping to recommend it. I clicked through to it, hoping to find a defense of NCLB that wasn’t the usual “some scores on some tests for some demographics have improved somewhat, therefore it is a success.” I was mostly disappointed:

The No Child law didn’t get everything right the first time, but that’s the wrong yardstick. If we held other policy areas — think food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security — to the same standard No Child is held to these days, i.e., flawlessness, then we would have jettisoned those and many other worthy programs long ago.

Rotherham conveniently forgets that No Child Left Behind had a very clearly defined goal that went beyond “make education slightly better.” It aimed, nay, demanded, 100 percent proficiency in reading and math by 2014. By its own measure of success, NCLB is a complete and utter failure.

Rotherham goes on:

Together, the focus on data and accountability is fueling a growing urgency about the need to improve our schools. The law highlighted the magnitude of the gaps in achievement and outcomes that divide students by race and income and makes it harder for people to argue, in essence, that “our schools are doing fine if you don’t count the poor and minority kids.” Oh, and by the way, there has been some improvement in achievement for low-income and minority kids, the law’s intended beneficiaries — which is no small thing in a country that systematically overlooks these students.

Here’s the thing: people (notably but far from exclusively this guy) noticed these inequities long before NCLB and its merry band of reformers came along. Civil Rights groups demanded more equitable education funding systems and enforcement of Brown v. Board in court and often won. Considerable progress was made in closing the gap before the Supreme Court decided that school segregation wasn’t so bad after all, and, oh yeah, standards-based reformers convinced everyone (or rather, everyone that mattered) that equitable funding was a meaningless goal.

I had hoped that Rotherham would defend NCLB’s core principle of accountability, but alas, he does not. Indeed, it the fact that Rotherham and his compatriots no longer need to make even the most cursory defense of the concept that he celebrates most about NCLB.

Accountability holds great appeal, obviously. Who doesn’t want accountability? I would certainly like some measure of accountability for those bastards who burnt our economy to the ground and then suffered not even the most minor of consequences. I would like accountability for those sons of bitches in government who have decided to destroy jobs rather than fix the economy. I would like accountability for those who recklessly replaced a system of public education with a system of public test prep. But, as I have learned time and time again, only plebs can be held accountable. To hold anyone with any amount of power to account would tear the country apart, or something.

But I digress. The real problem with accountability when applied to education, aside from Campbell’s law which I have never seen an education reformer acknowledge let alone engage with, is that, shockingly, education does not only take place within the classroom. NCLB demands that schools carry not only their own weight, but that of society in its entirety. It is unclear why standards-based reformers believe we can have equitable educational outcomes without an equitable society. That is not to say that no progress can be made without societal changes, but certainly not the uniformly high outcomes that NCLB demands.