A Liberal By Any Other Name...
One might have thought that after the Democrats' electoral victory last November, the ideology that dare not speak its name might come out of the closet. But no: Politico points out that the Democrats still won't let on that they are liberals:
These are heady days for Democrats. The party is favored by almost all measures in the coming presidential contest.But while Democrats are emboldened, they remain wary of the term “liberal.”
Republicans, by contrast, are as unpopular in the polls as they have been for at least 15 years.
Nonetheless, the label “conservative” remains in vogue.
At a recent Republican debate, Rudy Giuliani referred to himself as a “conservative” four times in roughly the same time span — a minute or so — it took Clinton to reject the word “liberal” and embrace “progressive.”
In seven Republican debates this year the word “conservative” was used 100 times.
In the seven Democratic debates the word “liberal” was used four times — not once by a candidate.
There's a good reason for that; a recent Gallup poll found that only 23 percent of voters call themselves liberals, while 39 percent describe themselves as conservatives. That ratio of close to two to one has been pretty constant for a number of years. Further, 7 percent of Gallup's respondents call themselves "very conservative" today, compared to essentially zero twenty years ago. It's shocking to recall, as Politico notes, that as recently as 1988, 15 percent of respondents said they were "very liberal." That seems inconceivable today.
Of course, these optimistic numbers are belied by the fact that quite a few voters who don't call themselves liberals seem to favor some very liberal policies, like socialized medicine. Nevertheless, the American public's aversion to out-in-the-open liberalism must be a serious concern to the Democrats. They won their majorities last year in part by recruiting candidates who could run, plausibly, as moderates or even conservatives. Nothing wrong with that, except that it now makes it difficult for them to claim a mandate for the liberal measures they would like to implement. And the persistence of a "conservative" plurality, however nebulously that might be defined, suggests, perhaps, that only the right leaders are needed to swing the country back toward the right, where it belongs.
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