When Liberals Define Conservatism

Is conservatism dead?

by James Piereson

When in 1962 Clinton Rossiter published a revised edition of Conservatism in America, he gave it the subtitle The Thankless Persuasion. A decade earlier, Raymond English had touched upon a similar theme in an article in The American Scholar titled “Conservatism: The Forbidden Faith.” Their point was that conservatism as a political philosophy runs against the American grain and thus will always play something of an incongruous and subordinate role in a revolutionary nation dedicated to equality, democracy, and restless change. While the conservative case for order, tradition, and authority may be useful as a corrective for the excesses of democracy, it can never hope to supplant liberalism as the nation’s official governing philosophy. As Rossiter put it, “Our commitment to democracy means that Liberalism will maintain its historic dominance over our minds, and that conservative thinkers will continue as well-kept but increasingly restless hostages to the American tradition.” Liberals will always set the tone for public life, he argued, leaving conservatives with the thankless task of fighting liberal reforms and then adjusting to them after they have been adopted.

Rossiter, like other liberal observers of the post-war scene, such as Richard Hofstadter, Lionel Trilling, Louis Hartz, and Daniel Bell, lamented the fact that an authentic conservative movement was difficult to locate in the United States. To be sure, there were some thoughtful conservatives to be found, such as the author Russell Kirk and Senator Robert Taft, but they were eccentrics, who had little in the way of a popular following, and whose views on policy were hardly distinguishable from those of the business community. On the other hand, the new American right that arose in the 1950s to challenge the New Deal and the Cold War policies of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations did not seem to fit into the conservative tradition at all. Populist in tone and suspicious of leaders from both parties, the new right seemed to have more in common with extremist movements than with conservative parties that traditionally distrusted democracy and defended elites. The radical right, as the liberals called it, was especially frightening because it mobilized huge popular followings behind figures like Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and the various fundamentalist ministers who spread their messages through the radio waves. The very idea of a President McCarthy or, more realistically, a President Nixon, was enough to send chills down the spine of any right-thinking liberal. Naturally, those liberals preferred to deal with “real” conservatives like Sen. Taft than with populist figures like McCarthy and Nixon who, because of their popular appeal, actually threatened to topple them from power.

The liberal analysis of conservatism that was passed down from the 1950s and 1960s has caused endless confusion about what conservatism in America is and is not. It is never a good thing for any philosophical movement to permit itself to be defined by its adversaries, but this is more or less what happened to conservatism in the post-war period, as liberals sought to define it in such a way as to guarantee its failure or ineffectiveness. For one thing, they created a combination of traps and paradoxes for conservatives that gave added meaning to Rossiter’s concept of “the thankless persuasion.” On the one hand, conservatives, if they wished to maintain that designation (at least in the eyes of liberals), were obliged to endorse all manner of liberal reforms once they were established as part of the new status quo. Thus, self-styled conservatives who attacked the New Deal were not acting like conservatives because they were in effect attacking the established order—and, of course, “real” conservatives would never do that. So it was that conservatives who wished to reverse liberal victories became radicals or extremists. Conservatives, moreover, could have no program of their own or, at any rate, any program that had any reasonable chance of succeeding, because any successful appeal to the wider public would turn them into populists and, through that process, into extremists and radicals. Not surprisingly, they viewed a popular conservatism as a contradiction in terms. Conservatives, in short, could only win power and influence by betraying their principles, and could only maintain those principles by accepting their subordinate status. Thus, in the eyes of the liberal historians, conservatism could never prosper in America because, if it did, it could no longer be called conservatism.

Rossiter published the first edition of his book in 1955, barely a year after William F. Buckley Jr. launched National Review, thereby launching as well the modern conservative movement. A supporter of Senator McCarthy, ardent foe of the New Deal, and critic of Ivy League colleges, Buckley did not meet the requirements for conservatism as had been laid down by the liberal historians. In their eyes, Buckley was an extremist, as were most of the writers (like James Burnham, Max Eastman, and Frank Meyer) whom he recruited to his new fortnightly magazine. Buckley’s quixotic project to build a conservative intellectual movement was not supposed to succeed and even less was it expected to grow to a point where conservatives might be in a position to challenge liberals for intellectual and political influence. Yet it is undoubtedly true that the most far-reaching political development in the United States over the past half-century has been the rise of conservatism from its designated role as “the thankless persuasion” to its status by the turn of the millennium as the nation’s most influential public doctrine. This did not happen by accident, but rather because conservatives succeeded where liberals had failed in ending the Cold War, rejuvenating the American economy from the “stagflation” of the 1970s, and restoring order and fiscal health to the nation’s cities. Such achievements should have discredited all those claims that there is something “un-American” about conservatism, that it is forever doomed to minority status, and that it must always play second fiddle to liberalism. Nevertheless, despite everything that has happened since 1954 when Buckley announced his new magazine or since 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected president, there are many who still hold fast to the old myths about American conservatism.

Sam Tanenhaus has now reprised the old arguments about conservatism and tried to bring them up to date in his newly published jeremiad, The Death of Conservatism.[1] Tanenhaus, the editor of theNew York Times Book Review and author of a justly acclaimed biography of Whittaker Chambers, argues that the conservative movement collapsed under the presidency of George W. Bush, and that Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 marked the beginning of a new liberal era in American politics. Tanenhaus is not altogether certain as to the causes of this collapse, at times suggesting that conservatives undid themselves because they were corrupt and unprincipled in their pursuit of power and at others suggesting that they lost the support of the American people because of their devotion to right-wing “orthodoxy.” The one thing about which he is certain is that he dislikes conservatives—intensely and unremittingly so, judging by the rhetoric deployed in this book. Tanenhaus says at various points that conservatives are out to destroy the country, that they are driven by revenge and resentment, that they dislike America, and that they behave more like extremists and revolutionaries (“Jacobins”) than as genuine conservatives. In this sense, he has resurrected the liberal literature about Sen. McCarthy and “the radical right,” and sought to apply it to contemporary conservatism as if nothing of importance had happened in the meantime. All of this is nonsense, of course, and given some of the author’s previous writings, particularly his biography of Chambers, one had reason to hope that he would have produced something more elevated than the partisan assault against conservatives that he has packaged in this book.

Tanenhaus argues that conservatives failed because—well, because they did not act like conservatives at all but rather as extremists and radicals out to destroy everything associated with modern liberalism. The paradox of the modern right, he says, is that “Its drive for power has steered it onto a path that has become profoundly and defiantly un-conservative.” According to Tanenhaus, conservatives have been divided since the 1950s between their Burkean inclinations to preserve the constitutional order and their reactionary or “revanchist” impulses to tear up and destroy every liberal compromise with modern life. “On the one side,” he writes, “are those who have upheld the Burkean ideal of replenishing civil society by adjusting to changing conditions. On the other are those committed to a revanchist counterrevolution, whether the restoration of America’s pre-New Deal ancient regime, a return to Cold War-style Manichaeanism, or the revival of pre-modern family values.” In recent years, he concludes, the “revanchists” have gotten the upper hand over the Burkeans, and have thereby run the conservative juggernaut over a cliff and into irrelevance. In an entry that gives the reader a flavor of some of the exaggerated rhetoric contained in the book, Tanenhaus writes that, “Today’s conservatives resemble the exhumed figures of Pompeii, trapped in postures of frozen flight, clenched in the rigor mortis of a defunct ideology.”

These “exhumed figures” are presumably free-market economists and conservatives like Jonah Goldberg and Amity Shlaes, whose books have been critical of the New Deal, neo-conservatives who supported the war in Iraq, and social conservatives who have opposed abortion, easy divorce, and gay marriage. In Tanenhaus’s view, genuine conservatives would accept the New Deal and the welfare state as “Burkean corrections” that served to adjust the American economy to modern conditions. Nor would “real” conservatives have supported a war in Iraq that was based upon a utopian ideal of bringing democracy to the Middle East. He also thinks that conservatives should accept gay marriage as an extension of family values to a new area. The reason conservatives have not followed such advice, he says, is that their attachment to orthodox doctrine trumps the practical advantages of finding areas of accommodation with adversaries. In a most un-Burkean way, he says, they have allowed ideology to prevail over experience and common sense. Thus, as he suggests, the right is the main source of disorder and dissension in contemporary society and the instigators of the long-running culture war that has divided the country.

Employing this framework, Tanenhaus arrives at surprising judgments about some prominent conservatives—for example, that Ronald Reagan was a “real” conservative because, despite his rhetoric, he made no effort to repeal popular social programs but accepted them as an integral aspect of the American consensus. This is gracious on the author’s part, though it is a judgment that few liberals will accept simply because they are certain that the only reason President Reagan did not repeal many of those programs is because Congress would not permit it. After all, one of Reagan’s favorite sayings was that “Government is the problem, not the solution.” Reagan, like every other major Republican office-holder of recent decades, including George W. Bush and Newt Gingrich, was constrained in this area by a mix of congressional politics, interest groups, and public opinion. Tanenhaus also says that Buckley, while starting out as a “revanchist” in the 1950s, turned into a Burkean in the 1960s by his acceptance of liberal reforms, especially in civil rights.

This, one may assume, will turn out to be the broad story line of the authorized biography of Buckley that Tanenhaus has long planned to write, though there are some obvious problems with it. For one thing, Buckley never took back anything he said or wrote during the 1950s about McCarthy, Communism, liberalism, or higher education, nor is it evident from anything he said or wrote that he regretted taking those positions. It is perhaps true that Buckley became somewhat less polemical in style with the passing decades, but it is difficult to discern any change in principles that would justify the conclusion that the Buckley of 1968 and thereafter was a different kind of man from the one who launched National Review.

Tanenhaus uses the terms revanche or revanchism promiscuously throughout his book, plainly as instruments for tarring conservatives as destructive reactionaries, but its use in this context is exaggerated and inflammatory to the point of irresponsibility. “Revanchism,” drawn from the French word for “revenge,” originated as a term to describe European nationalist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that sought to restore lost territory or prestige through new wars of conquest and occupation. Though originally applied to movements in France that aimed to recapture territory seized by Germany in the Franco-Prussian war, the term more accurately applies to the nationalist parties that arose in Germany in the 1920s dedicated to the overthrow both of the Weimar Republic and the Treaty of Versailles. Revanchists reject liberalism and democracy in favor of nationalism and strong-man rule, and surely cannot be said to endorse the ideals of liberty, limited government, and the rule of law that form the core of conservative thought. The repeated use of this term in the American context is thus hard to justify, as much so as McCarthy’s charge that American liberals of the 1950s were “crypto-Communists.” Tanenhaus condemns conservative writers who draw parallels between the New Deal and fascism, but carelessly suggests parallels between American conservatives and European fascists—one of the more unsavory aspects of a book filled with unsavory allusions and implications.

The argument that contemporary conservatives are reactionaries or revanchists is wrong on its face. The market school of economics cannot be dismissed because it is critical of the New Deal or of Keynesian policies, nor are free-market thinkers reactionary in any sense of that term. Tanenhaus does not inquire seriously into the reasons why conservatives are uneasy with the welfare state, why some see in it a threat to liberty and others an encouragement to the breakdown of the family and self-government. The market revolution of the last thirty years, moreover, contributed greatly to world prosperity over that period, to the fall of Communism, and to much else that was beneficial besides. It may be true that the current economic crisis presents a challenge to market thinking, but it certainly does not vindicate central planning or the welfare state, and there is nothing about that challenge that justifies the conclusion that market economics is dead. As we shall shortly learn, the path back to prosperity will lead through free and flexible markets.

Nor does the intervention in Iraq, whatever its ultimate outcome, support Tanenhaus’s case. That intervention, after all, was endorsed not only by conservatives and neo-conservatives, but also by every Democratic candidate for president in last year’s election, save for Barack Obama (who was a member of the Illinois legislature when the war began). President Bush, in addition, justified the war on liberal or Wilsonian grounds, so that if the war discredited anything, it was the liberal ideal of achieving collective security through the promotion of democracy. One may argue that such an approach is misguided or impractical, or even that it is inconsistent with conservative principles, but it is not possible to say that it is revanchist. As for the culture war—well, most conservatives would be glad to have it over with, if only cultural liberals and radicals would call a halt to their provocations. The historical record is clear that the first shots fired in every engagement of the culture war came from the left in the form of school busing, the abortion decision of the Supreme Court, the Mapplethorpe exhibition, political correctness on the campus, and (now) gay marriage. Indeed, what many call the “religious right” came into existence in the late 1970s in response to the Carter administration’s effort to deny tax exemption to religious schools on the grounds that they were segregated. Absent liberal provocations, there would have been no culture war and probably no “religious right” to wage it.

Tanenhaus, taking no prisoners on any side, even rebukes his own editors at the New York Times for signing up William Kristol to write a weekly column for the paper during the 2008 election campaign. The editors were no doubt trying to demonstrate an element of fairness and balance in an election year, an obviously impossible task in view of the overflowing stable of writers at the paper who dislike conservatives and Republicans as much as Tanenhaus does. Kristol, however, at least according to Tanenhaus, “cheapened this valued space [sic] into a shabby storefront for the Republican presidential campaign.” That charge is false as it applies to Kristol, who wrote about many subjects besides the election during his brief tenure at the paper, and even criticized Senator McCain at more than one point during the campaign. If we reverse the party labels, however, the judgment is accurate when applied to the work of other Times columnists, such as Bob Herbert, Paul Krugman, and Frank Rich, who even outdid the paper’s news pages in propagandizing on behalf of the Democratic ticket.

Like the liberal writers of the 1950s, Tanenhaus wants to see a conservative movement that accommodates rather than opposes liberalism, and thus one that will accept its role as subordinate to the dominant liberal tradition in American life. He acknowledges that there is an important role for conservatism, but it must be a “genuine” conservatism that preserves but does not seek to overturn liberal gains. In any event, he says, conservatives will have little choice but to accommodate to liberal leadership because the election of 2008 has effectively ended the era of conservative dominance in American politics. Much as liberals had to accommodate to conservatives after Reagan’s election in 1980, conservatives will now have to accept the newly dominant status of reform liberalism, or else accept the consequences of being turned into “the exhumed figures of Pompeii, trapped in postures of frozen flight.”

Tanenhaus first laid out his theme in a long article in The New Republic published in the breathless aftermath of Obama’s inauguration when it was all too easy to imagine that liberals had scored a permanent knockout over their conservative adversaries and when many entertained hopes that the new president might bring about a wholesale transformation in the conduct of public affairs—a “revolution in the consciousness of our time,” as Norman Mailer put it in 1960 in describing the hoped-for consequences of John F. Kennedy’s victory. The excitement generated by Tanenhaus’s message (Conservatism is dead!) justified a rapidly written expansion of the essay.

The book now appears months later as these extravagant hopes have given way to more sober assessments of what it is truly possible to achieve within the American system, and as President Obama’s poll numbers have come back to earth in response to the public’s wariness about his ambitious proposals. Various opinion polls point to a resurgence in the popularity of conservative principles and policies, while pundits are now forecasting a Republican comeback in the forthcoming elections in 2009 and 2010. The polls offer no support for the claim that conservatism is dead among American voters or that the 2008 election represented a long-running realignment in the fortunes of the two major parties. One may confidently assume, if the past is any guide, that a conservative Republican will succeed President Obama in 2012 or 2016, and that Republicans will recapture one or both houses of Congress before Obama completes his tenure in office. Three of the books currently topping the Times best-seller list (as yet unreviewed by the Times) are conservative titles. It thus appears that Tanenhaus, in pronouncing the death of conservatism, has made the mistake of forecasting a trend on the basis of a single event. His obituary seems less compelling—and ever more exaggerated—with every passing month.

It is certainly true, as Tanenhaus says, that conservatism as a political doctrine has its flaws and weaknesses, which are magnified when it is judged in the immediate aftermath of a lost election or in isolation from alternative approaches to public life. When judged in relation to liberalism, however, modern conservatism takes on a more favorable outlook. Many of the sins Tanenhaus attributes to conservatives—overly zealous attachment to principle or ideology, unwillingness to adapt to change, impatience with popular opinion—are on display as much or more among liberals. If Tanenhaus or anyone else wishes to see liberalism in action, he might venture on to an elite college campus where only liberal and leftist views are permitted peaceful expression, or out to Sacramento or up to Albany where liberal Democrats, long in control, have spent their states into near bankruptcy. The liberal faculty and public employee unions that control those institutions and jurisdictions have not exactly distinguished themselves for their far-sighted and open-minded leadership. As for New York and California, the public employee unions that control the Democratic party, and thereby the state governments, have exploited the prosperity of recent decades to build up huge government establishments that will no longer be affordable in the forthcoming era of austerity, especially as taxpayers and businesses flee to other states like Texas and Florida that have followed more conservative paths. As California and New York unravel, voters will undoubtedly turn to conservatives to restore levels of growth and prosperity sufficient to fund their social programs and educational systems. Liberals will come to understand that in order to fund their programs, they will have to tolerate conservatives and conservative policies. That will be a hard and painful lesson for liberals to learn. If conservatism is dead, in short, then so is liberalism, and much else besides.

Conservatism, moreover, is now a permanent and enduring aspect of American political life, supported by millions of Americans and defended by a large network of writers, journals, and think tanks. There is, however, a more important reason for its enduring appeal among Americans. Conservatism in America deploys the principles of tradition, reason, and orderly change in defense of liberal institutions—the Constitution, representative government, liberty and equal rights, the rule of law. It is generally the conservative, not the modern liberal, who emphasizes the inspired example of the founding fathers, the words of the Constitution, and the sacrifices made to build free institutions. If it is true that liberals want to overcome the past, or apologize for it, then conservatives want us to remember, to learn, and to build constructively upon it. That may be a challenging task in a culture of short memory, but it is far from a thankless one.

1. The Death of Conservatism, by Sam Tanenhaus; Random House, 144 pages, $17. Go back to the text.

James Piereson is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

The 10th Amendment

Are States Sovereign in America?

There have been many articles the last two weeks concerning the moves of several states to introduce legislation claiming certain rights under the 10th Amendment. When these articles are posted or socially bookmarked discussions seem to rise as to whether states are sovereign or not, in many people's stated views they are not. by Gary Wood

Reading through many postings I kept seeing recurring themes of disobedience, division, and a movement bent on secession and civil war. It became obvious that despite many Internet political readers being more rooted in our history there is a representative voice echoing the belief of a large number of citizens. Sparking the discussion were legislatures in Arizona, New Hampshire, Washington, and Oklahoma introducing a general warning the 10th Amendment still applies. (In June of 2008 Oklahoma actually passed the legislation by a 92 to 3 margin while most of us slept.) Montana and Missouri are two examples of specific claims under the 10th Amendment with their focus on firearms and abortion.

There should be no surprise by those who believe this is a good movement others see it as a bad movement. In our lifetime states have not appeared to be sovereign nations unto themselves but merely a sub-category of government between the federal and city levels. Just as many believe we are a democracy the way history is taught combined with the changes we've instituted through Constitutional amendments and Supreme Court rulings it is easy to understand why opponents to this movement are confused.

The 16th Amendment created a system where the federal powers took money directly from the people and a funneling back to states began to occur. The 17th Amendment stripped the Legislative Branch from a true bicameral system of a Senate representing the states and a House representing the people to the facade of bicameralism as both chambers now represented the people. Even further back were the 14th Amendment alterations weakening the states sovereignty. Supreme Court cases over the past 60 years have given little credence to the 10th Amendment. However, we must remember the Supreme Court has given little credence to any of the founding principles since the 1930s. (For an analysis of SCOTUS assault read "The Constitution in Exile" or "Who Killed the Constitution.") When we consider Constitutional Law classes in our country focus more on modern events than any attempt to first embrace the original intent of those founding the United States of America it is easier to understand the confusion over the sovereignty question.

Combine this with what many mayors across the country asked President Obama to do this past week and we cannot blame any citizen for believing we are one nation and states are merely a sub-category. Articulated during news appearances by Los Angeles Mayor Villaraigosa, the mayors traveling to Washington D.C. did so to encourage the Stimulus Bill's quick passage and funds for cities are sent directly to the city without being filtered through the states. When mayors bypass governors while citizen watch without batting an eye who is to believe states are sovereign?

We've had this debate before when Federalist supporters (those actually wanting one nation) clashed ideologically with Anti-Federalists (those wanting recognition of states as sovereign nations). Would it surprise you to learn states, in the language of the day, were considered nations rather than a sub-category within a nation? In the Treaty of Paris King George III did not recognize one independent nation but 13 sovereign nations. According to Dr. Kevin Gutzman, "[b]ut sovereignty lay in the states. That was the first principle of American government." (Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution, p. 16) When this was last debated the words of the 10th Amendment were crafted to protect the power and sovereignty in the states as the Anti-Federalist clearly understood the tyrannical nature of a single, federal level control.

Are we to clearly abandon, once and for all, the key principles that helped in making us a great United States of America? Many of us have grown to accept two very dangerous ideas already. As this recent movement points out too many believe states are not now, nor should they be, sovereign. Also, as we will discuss in another article, too many believe we are a democracy. As keystones for securing our grand experiment are abandoned we crumble. Pause long enough to study our history and attempt to clearly understand your beliefs so you more clearly understand the direction you support.

Demise of American Capitalism

Steven Malanga
Whatever Happened to the Work Ethic?
The financial bust reminds us that free markets require a constellation of moral virtues.
Summer 2009

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville worried that free, capitalist societies might develop so great a “taste for physical gratification” that citizens would be “carried away, and lose all self-restraint.” Avidly seeking personal gain, they could “lose sight of the close connection which exists between the private fortune of each of them and the prosperity of all” and ultimately undermine both democracy and prosperity.

The genius of America in the early nineteenth century, Tocqueville thought, was that it pursued “productive industry” without a descent into lethal materialism. Behind America’s balancing act, the pioneering French social thinker noted, lay a common set of civic virtues that celebrated not merely hard work but also thrift, integrity, self-reliance, and modesty—virtues that grew out of the pervasiveness of religion, which Tocqueville called “the first of [America’s] political institutions, . . . imparting morality” to American democracy and free markets. Some 75 years later, sociologist Max Weber dubbed the qualities that Tocqueville observed the “Protestant ethic” and considered them the cornerstone of successful capitalism. Like Tocqueville, Weber saw that ethic most fully realized in America, where it pervaded the society. Preached by luminaries like Benjamin Franklin, taught in public schools, embodied in popular novels, repeated in self-improvement books, and transmitted to immigrants, that ethic undergirded and promoted America’s economic success.

What would Tocqueville or Weber think of America today? In place of thrift, they would find a nation of debtors, staggering beneath loans obtained under false pretenses. In place of a steady, patient accumulation of wealth, they would find bankers and financiers with such a short-term perspective that they never pause to consider the consequences or risks of selling securities they don’t understand. In place of a country where all a man asks of government is “not to be disturbed in his toil,” as Tocqueville put it, they would find a nation of rent-seekers demanding government subsidies to purchase homes, start new ventures, or bail out old ones. They would find what Tocqueville described as the “fatal circle” of materialism—the cycle of acquisition and gratification that drives people back to ever more frenetic acquisition and that ultimately undermines prosperous democracies.

And they would understand why. After flourishing for three centuries in America, the Protestant ethic began to disintegrate, with key elements slowly disappearing from modern American society, vanishing from schools, from business, from popular culture, and leaving us with an economic system unmoored from the restraints of civic virtue. Not even Adam Smith—who was a moral philosopher, after all—imagined capitalism operating in such an ethical vacuum. Bailout plans, new regulatory schemes, and monetary policy moves won’t be enough to spur a robust, long-term revival of American economic opportunity without some renewal of what was once understood as the work ethic—not just hard work but also a set of accompanying virtues, whose crucial role in the development and sustaining of free markets too few now recall.

The American experiment that Tocqueville chronicled in the 1830s was more than just an effort to see if men could live without a monarch and govern themselves. A free society had to be one in which people could pursue economic opportunity with only minimal interference from the state. To do so without producing anarchy required a self-discipline that was, to Max Weber, the core of the capitalist ethic. “The impulse to acquisition, pursuit of gain, of money, of the greatest possible amount of money, has in itself nothing to do with capitalism,” Weber wrote in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. “Unlimited greed for gain is not in the least identical with capitalism, and still less its spirit.” Instead, the essence of capitalism is “a rational tempering” of the impulse to accumulate wealth so as to keep a business (and ultimately the whole economy) sustainable and self-renewing, Weber wrote. It is “the pursuit of profit, and forever renewed profit, by means of continuous, rational . . . enterprise.”

Weber famously argued that the Protestant Reformation—with John Calvin’s and Martin Luther’s emphasis on individual responsibility, hard work, thrift, providence, honesty, and deferred gratification at its center—shaped the spirit of capitalism and helped it succeed. Calvinism and the sects that grew out of it, especially Puritanism and John Wesley’s Methodism in England, were religions chiefly of the middle and working classes, and the virtues they promoted led to a new kind of affluence and upward mobility, based not on land (which was largely owned by the aristocracy) but on productive enterprises.

Nowhere did the fusing of capitalism and the virtues that made up the work ethic find a fuller expression than in America, where Puritan pioneers founded settlements animated by a Calvinist dedication to work. One result was a remarkable society in which, as Tocqueville would observe, all “honest callings are honorable” and in which “the notion of labor is therefore presented to the mind on every side as the necessary, natural, and honest condition of human existence.” Unlike in Europe, where aristocrats and gentry often scorned labor, in the United States, “a wealthy man thinks that he owes it to public opinion to devote his leisure to some kind of industrial or commercial pursuit, or to public business. He would think himself in bad repute if he employed his life solely in living.”

This thick and complex work ethic, so essential to the success of the early, struggling American settlements, became part of the country’s civic fabric. It found its most succinct expression in the writings of Benjamin Franklin, whose well-known maxims, now considered quaintly old-fashioned, recommended to citizens of the new country a worldview that promoted work and the pursuit of wealth. “Time is money” and “Never keep borrowed money an hour beyond the time you promised” and “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise” voiced virtues that Franklin and his contemporaries viewed not chiefly as religious but as utilitarian. A reputation for honesty makes it easier to borrow money for new ventures, Franklin counseled. A man who displays self-discipline in his personal life inspires confidence in lenders and business partners. This constellation of virtues, which Weber described as “the ideal of the honest man of recognized credit,” is how one gets ahead in life.

Franklin’s best-selling writings had an enormous impact on America. His ideas, widely applauded, permeated popular culture and education. The leading grammar school textbooks of the nineteenth century, for example, by William Holmes McGuffey and his brother Alexander, inculcated children with the virtues of work and thrift. To dramatize the “Consequences of Idleness,” McGuffey’s Fourth Eclectic Reader told the story of poor George Jones, who frittered away his time in school and wasted the money his father had devoted to his education, winding up a poor wanderer. In fifth grade, students memorized Eliza Cook’s paean to labor, simply titled “Work,” which urged them to “Work, work, my boy, be not afraid; / Look labor boldly in the face.”

Schooled in such attitudes, America’s nineteenth-century youth embraced the rags-to-riches novels of Horatio Alger, Jr., who sold some 200 million books with plotlines that are a road map of the work ethic. In his first commercial success, Ragged Dick, Dick Hunter, 14 and homeless, impresses patrons with his honesty and industriousness and slowly rises in the world. When he teeters on the verge of losing everything because a thief pilfers his savings-account passbook, bank officials recognize him from his regular visits to make deposits, and they have the thief arrested. In a later novel, Bound to Rise, poor Henry Walton wins a biography of Ben Franklin for acing exams and, inspired by his life story, goes off to earn a fortune.

The work ethic even shaped American play. The most popular game of its time, “The Checkered Game of Life,” produced by Milton Bradley in the mid-nineteenth century and sold door-to-door, challenged players to travel through life and earn points for successfully completing school, getting married, and working hard, while avoiding pitfalls like gambling and idleness. In his patent application for the game, Bradley observed that it was intended to “impress upon the minds of youth the great moral principles of virtue and vice.” Its success spawned a whole genre. “Many games with similar moral thrusts followed,” observed Jennifer Jensen of the New-York Historical Society in an article called “Teaching Success Through Play.” These games “emphasized secular virtues such as thrift, neatness, and kindness.”

The work ethic also distinguished the northern colonies from the southern, and later helped the North win the Civil War. Many southern settlers came in search not of religious freedom but only of economic opportunity. Instead of founding villages or towns with a common civic life, southern settlers developed isolated, widely separated plantations. They cultivated a few staple crops using slave labor, instead of developing a diversified economy. They created a society where a relatively few plantation owners acted like an aristocracy. Rather than viewing all honest work as honorable, they developed what historian C. Vann Woodward calls the “Southern ethic,” which saw some work as fit only for slaves. In the end, these attitudes proved the South’s greatest vulnerability, as the North, shaped by the work ethic, brought to bear its industrial might against the narrow economy of the South, built precariously on tobacco and slave labor and a Cavalier rather than a Puritan ethic.

After the Civil War, this secularized version of the Protestant ethic served as a lodestar for millions of poor immigrants, many from countries with little experience of free markets and democracy. Their assimilation into a culture that they recognized not as Protestant but as American reinvigorated the country, helping to set late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America on a distinctly different path from much of Europe.

Many of these immigrants, ironically, absorbed their Franklinesque code from the American Catholic Church. Key members of the church hierarchy—notably, New York’s brilliant, Irish-born first archbishop, John Hughes, who rose from poverty—lived by the ethic and understood its role in the country’s success. Hughes set as his task the moral and economic uplift of Gotham’s millions of poor Irish immigrants. He founded a network of some 100 Catholic schools that taught Irish children not just the three Rs but also a “faith-based code of personal conduct,” as William J. Stern wrote in City Journal (“How Dagger John Saved New York’s Irish,” Spring 1997). Hughes’s church was, as he put it, “a church of discipline.” He fostered residential schools that taught vocational skills and conduct to thousands of orphaned or abandoned Irish street children and sent them off successfully into American society. Catholic schools around the country copied his work, and many of them continue today to succeed even with at-risk kids.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the Irish had largely shaken off poverty and joined the American mainstream. Waves of Southern and Eastern European Catholics followed them, as well as Eastern European Jews—some 20 million immigrants between 1890 and 1925—who quickly replicated the success of the Irish in a country whose institutions emphasized and rewarded hard work, thrift, and self-improvement. Within a single generation, one study shows, the average early-twentieth-century immigrant family had achieved income and educational parity with American-born families, so that the children of these immigrants were just as likely to be accountants, engineers, or lawyers as the children of families rooted here for generations.

The breakup of this 300-year-old consensus on the work ethic began with the cultural protests of the 1960s, which questioned and discarded many traditional American virtues. The roots of this breakup lay in what Daniel Bell described in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism as the rejection of traditional bourgeois qualities by late-nineteenth-century European artists and intellectuals who sought “to substitute for religion or morality an aesthetic justification of life.” By the 1960s, that modernist tendency had evolved into a credo of self-fulfillment in which “nothing is forbidden, all is to be explored,” Bell wrote. Out went the Protestant ethic’s prudence, thrift, temperance, self-discipline, and deferral of gratification.

Weakened along with all these virtues that made up the American work ethic was Americans’ belief in the value of work itself. Along with “turning on” and “tuning in,” the sixties protesters also “dropped out.” As the editor of the 1973 American Work Ethic noted, “affluence, hedonism and radicalism” were turning many Americans away from work and the pursuit of career advancement, resulting in a sharp slowdown in U.S. productivity from 1965 through 1970. So great a transformation of values was occurring that, as George Bloom of MIT’s Sloan School of Management wrote in a 1971 essay on America’s declining work ethic, “It is unfortunate but true that ‘progress’ is becoming a bad word in virtually all sectors of society.”

Attitudes toward businessmen changed, too. While film and television had formerly offered a balanced portrait of work and employers, notes film critic Michael Medved in Hollywood vs. America, from the mid-1960s onward, movies and TV portrayed business executives almost exclusively as villains or buffoons. The era’s iconic film, the 1967 Oscar winner The Graduate, is a prime example in its tale of a recent college grad adrift and questioning adult society’s strive-and-succeed ethic. No character appears more loathsome than a family friend who counsels the graduate, “I just want to say one word to you—just one word: plastics. There’s a great future in plastics.” Such portrayals both reflected and strengthened the baby-boom generation’s attitudes. One 1969 Fortune poll, for instance, found that 92 percent of college students thought business executives were too profit-minded.

In this era, being virtuous became something separate from work. When the Milton Bradley Company reintroduced “The Checkered Game of Life” in a modern version called “The Game of Life” in the mid-1960s, it abandoned the notion of rewarding traditional bourgeois virtues like completing an education or marrying. What was left of the game was simply the pursuit of cash, until Milton Bradley, criticized for this version, redesigned the game to include rewards for doing good. But its efforts produced mere political correctness: in the new version, recycling trash and contributing to save an endangered species were virtuous actions that won a player points. Such gestures, along with tolerance and sensitivity, expanded like a gas to fill the vacuum where the Protestant ethic used to be.

The cultural upheavals of the era spurred deep changes in institutions that traditionally transmitted the work ethic—especially the schools. University education departments began to tell future grammar school teachers that they should replace the traditional teacher-centered curriculum, aimed at producing educated citizens who embraced a common American ethic, with a new, child-centered approach that treats every pupil’s “personal development” as different and special. During the 1960s, when intellectuals and college students dismissed traditional American values as oppressive barriers to fulfillment, grammar schools generally jettisoned the traditional curriculum. “Education professors eagerly joined New Left professors to promote the idea that any top-down imposition of any curriculum would be a right-wing plot designed to perpetuate the dominant white, male, bourgeois power structure,” writes education reformer E. D. Hirsch, Jr., in his forthcoming The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools.

The bourgeois values, however, had helped to sustain Weber’s “rational tempering” of the impulse to accumulate wealth: they helped put the rationality in “rational self-interest,” or, as Tocqueville put it, “self-interest rightly understood.” When the schools and the wider society demoted them, the effects were predictable. In schools, for instance, the new “every child is special” curriculum prompted a sharp uptick in students’ self-absorption, according to psychologists Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell in The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement. What resulted was a series of increasingly self-centered generations of young people displaying progressively more narcissistic personality traits, including a growing obsession with “material wealth and physical appearance,” the authors observe. Thus did the sixties generation spawn the Me Generation of the seventies. By the mid-1980s, a poll of teens found that more than nine in ten listed shopping as their favorite pastime.

The economic shocks that followed the tumultuous late 1960s, especially the devastating inflation of the 1970s, reinforced an emerging materialism. Thanks to the Johnson administration’s illusion that the country could finance massive social-welfare programs and a war without consequences, the U.S. by 1974 staggered under double-digit annual inflation gains, compared with an average annual gain of about 1 percent in the early 1960s. The inflation hit hardest those who had embraced the work ethic, destroying lifetimes of savings in unprecedented price spikes and sending the message that “saving and shunning debt was for saps,” Fortune observed. “The lesson seemed to be, buy, buy, buy, before the money visibly crumbling to dust in your hand vanishes completely.”

Once Fed chairman Paul Volcker’s tight-money policy tamed inflation in the early 1980s, America began to pick itself up. But it was a different country, one that had lost to some degree the “rational tempering” of the “pursuit of gain” that Max Weber had seen as the key to “forever renewed profit.” The corporate restructurings of the 1980s, prompted by a new generation of risk-taking entrepreneurs and takeover artists who used aggressive financial instruments with provocative names like “junk bonds” to buy and then make over big companies that failed to remake themselves, reordered corporate America, shaking it out of its 1970s complacency. But the plant closings, downsizings, and restructurings of the 1980s also stoked anxiety among workers, as the old ideal of lifetime employment at one paternalistic company gave way to a job-hopping career in a constantly changing business landscape. While the results were often salutary—innovation for companies and income gains for the most talented players—the “get it while you can” mentality that developed among some workers and investors found its ultimate expression in the “day traders” of the technology stock boom, speculators with a “right now” time horizon rather than long-term investors. When takeover-era titans Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky pleaded guilty to insider-trading charges, their confessions strengthened a growing sense that a new ethic had superseded the old standard of playing by the rules. The 1980s version of the Horatio Alger tales was not an inspiring story of uplift but the popular movie Wall Street, with Gordon Gekko’s infamous “greed is good” speech.

With government policy reinforcing the “get it now” mentality, a new era of consumption based on credit blossomed in the resurgent 1980s, and Americans turned from savers to debtors. Ostentatious displays of wealth grew more common. From 1982, the year that Volcker finally tamed inflation, to 1986, luxury-car sales doubled in America. The average age of a purchaser of a fur coat—that ultimate status symbol—declined from 50 to just 26 in the mid-1980s. To fuel such purchases, inflation-adjusted total U.S. consumer-credit debt rose nearly threefold, to $2.56 trillion, from 1980 to 2008, while the nation’s savings rate shrank from an average of about 12 percent of personal income annually in the early 1980s to less than 1 percent by 2005. Some middle-class Americans came to resemble not the thrifty bourgeoisie of the early Industrial Revolution but the landed gentry of that era who drained their real estate for cash to fund lavish living. One stark illustration of the change: by 2006, those who refinanced their mortgages were taking out in cash nearly a quarter of the equity they’d accumulated—compared with just 5 percent a decade earlier. A big reason Americans’ debt was growing, in other words, was that they were borrowing against their rapidly appreciating assets as fast as they grew.

The denouement of this transformation was the 2008 meltdown of world financial markets. America has certainly had its con artists, robber barons, and speculators before, but what distinguished the latest panic was that millions of mortgages belonging to ordinary Americans triggered it—mortgages that were foolhardy at best and fraudulent at worst. A typical case is Bradley Collin, a 27-year-old Minnesota housepainter with three kids. He decided to try to make a killing in real estate because, as he told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune last year, “I didn’t want to paint the rest of my life.” With the help of shady mortgage brokers, he and his wife simultaneously purchased four homes in new developments, intending to flip them for a profit. To buy the houses, the Collins had to make four separate mortgage applications, lie on each about their intentions, and hide each sale from the other three lenders, because no bank would have given them money to purchase four homes. When the local housing market stopped rising, the couple defaulted on their loans, abandoning the houses to the banks and helping further drive down their neighbors’ real-estate values.

The Collins were hardly alone. According to the FBI, reports of mortgage fraud soared tenfold nationwide from 2001 to 2007. No one knows precisely how deep the problem ran, but some mortgage servicers, examining portfolios of subprime mortgages that went bad in 2007, found that up to 70 percent of them had involved some kind of misrepresentation. Loans that required no verification of the borrower’s income infamously became known as “liar loans.” One mortgage lender who compared 100 of these loans with IRS tax filings found that in 60 percent of cases, the applicants exaggerated their incomes (or underreported them to the IRS). Occupancy fraud, in which investors intent on buying new homes and then quickly flipping them for a profit lied about their intentions, accounted for about 20 percent of all fraudulent mortgage applications. Since the mortgage meltdown began in 2006, builders in some regions have found that as many as a quarter of the buyers of the homes that they sold in new developments lied about their purposes.

This multitude of scams required the complicity of businesses that ultimately destroyed themselves and shattered an entire industry. The fall of America’s sixth-largest bank, Washington Mutual, which built an empire based on reckless lending, exemplifies these failings. As the housing boom heated up, WaMu raced after a piece of the action at all costs. Its supervisors chastised loan officers who tried to verify suspicious claims on mortgage applications. Executives gave loan officers flyers that said, “A thin file is a good file,” according to testimony by former employees. The lender set up phone banks, like penny-stock boiler-room operations, to sell home-equity loans. Ultimately, swamped by over $11 billion in bad loans, WaMu was seized by the federal government and sold to JPMorgan Chase, an object lesson in what Weber called the pursuit of “irrationally speculative opportunities,” which undermines capitalism rather than nourishes it.

Needless to say, this is not what Adam Smith had in mind. Smith laid the groundwork for the economic theories of The Wealth of Nations in his preceding book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which traces the evolution of ethics from man’s nature as a social being who feels shame if he does something that he believes a neutral observer would consider improper. Smith proposed that as societies evolve, they form institutions—courts of law, for instance—that reflect and codify these ethical perceptions of individuals, and that these institutions provide the essential backbone of any sophisticated commercial system.

Modern experiments in neuroscience have tended to confirm Smith’s notion that our virtues derive from our empathy for others, though with an important qualification: the ethics of individuals need reinforcement from social institutions and can be undermined by the wrong societal message, as neuroeconomist Paul Zak writes in Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values in the Economy. When people find themselves bombarded by the wrong message—like the Washington Mutual employees whose supervisors constantly pushed them into riskier and riskier actions—some will resign in disgust, but others will gradually suppress what scientists call the brain’s “other-regarding” behavior and the shame that goes along with it and violate their own ethics.

This mechanism of deception pervaded the recent housing bubble; cheating to get mortgages became so commonplace that cheaters barely seemed to perceive that they were committing fraud. A vivid case in point is New York Times economics reporter Edmund Andrews’s remarkable confessional tale, “My Personal Credit Crisis.” Andrews relates how he obtained a mortgage under dubious circumstances, aided by a broker who encouraged him to lie on his credit applications and a lender that, when its underwriters caught his intended deception, nonetheless allowed him to apply for another, riskier kind of mortgage. Granted a loan so oppressive that he will eventually default, Andrews admits to feeling that he had “done something bad” but also feeling “kind of cool” for making such a big score. Even today, society continues to reinforce Andrews’s lack of shame: he received a contract to detail his credit woes in a provocatively titled book, Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown, which was published this spring.

In the wake of the market crash, our national discussion about how to fix capitalism seems limited to those who believe that more government will fix the problem and those who think that free markets will fix themselves. Few have asked whether we can recapture the civic virtues that nourished our commerce for 300 years.

We’re not likely to find many churches preaching those virtues today. Though America is more religious than most industrialized countries, today’s pulpits hardly resound with the bourgeois work ethic. While John Wesley once observed that religion produces “industry and frugality,” and the American Congregationalist preacher Henry Ward Beecher declared that the way to avoid poverty was through “provident care, and foresight, and industry and frugality,” today the National Council of Churches, to which these denominations belong, advocates for a left-wing “social gospel” of redistributing wealth (see “The Religious Left, Reborn,” Autumn 2007). And though the Catholic Church once strove to assimilate generations of poor immigrants into American economic life, today its major social-welfare organization, Catholic Charities, has become an arm of the redistributionist welfare state (see “How Catholic Charities Lost Its Soul,” Winter 2000). Even our evangelical churches, whose theology most resembles that of the great Protestant reformers, have focused their energies primarily on social issues, such as fighting abortion or gay marriage, or even inveighing against welfare reform that encourages single mothers to return to work.

True, a few groups, including the Consumer Federation of America and the Institute for American Values, have launched a national campaign, modeled on World War II efforts to encourage savings, to reintroduce thrift into American life. But trying to teach adults about thrift or the patient accumulation of wealth through hard work, when they didn’t learn these things at home or in school, will be an uphill battle.

Could the schools do what they once did—create educated citizens inculcated with the ethical foundations of capitalism? That would require rededicating the schools to “making Americans,” as Hirsch proposes in his forthcoming book. Promisingly, a few public and private schools around the country have replaced the child-centered curriculum with one focused on learning about our culture and its institutions. Hirsch’s “Core Knowledge” curriculum, for instance, introduces kindergartners to the Pilgrims, Independence Day, and George Washington; first-graders to Ben Franklin and the concept of law in society; and second-graders to the Constitution as the foundation of our democracy. Other school reformers, according to David Whitman in Sweating the Small Stuff, have raised the achievement of low-income kids by using a “no excuses” model that teaches bourgeois “virtues like diligence, politeness, cleanliness, and thrift.” But these examples amount only to a tiny handful, swimming against the educational mainstream.

Late in life, Adam Smith noted that government institutions can never tame and regulate a society whose citizens are not schooled in a common set of virtues. “What institution of government could tend so much to promote the happiness of mankind as the general prevalence of wisdom and virtue?” he wrote. “All government is but an imperfect remedy for the deficiency of these.”

America in the twenty-first century is learning that lesson.

Steven Malanga is the senior editor of City Journal and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He is the author of The New New Left.

August 14, 2009

Political Ideology: "Conservative" Label Prevails in the South
Conservatives outnumber liberals in nearly every state, but not in D.C.

by Lydia Saad
PRINCETON, NJ -- The strength of "conservative" over "liberal" in the realm of political labels is vividly apparent in Gallup's state-level data, where a significantly higher percentage of Americans in most states -- even some solidly Democratic ones -- call themselves conservative rather than liberal.



The most conservative states are found primarily in the South, led by Alabama and Mississippi. The figure approaches 50% in several Southern states, plus Utah. The most liberal states tend to be the on the East and West coasts, led by Washington, D.C., and then Massachusetts, Vermont, and Oregon.

These findings are based on Americans' answers to a question asking whether their political views are very conservative, conservative, moderate, liberal, or very liberal. The data come from Gallup Daily tracking in the first half of 2009, encompassing interviews with more than 160,000 U.S. adults, with a minimum of 400 interviews for each state (and 300 in the District of Columbia).

The overall percentages of self-declared conservatives in each state range from a high of 49% in Alabama to a low of 23% in the nation's capital. The "liberal" label is embraced most widely in D.C., by 37%, followed by 29% in Massachusetts. At 14%, it is used least commonly in Louisiana. (See table at end of this report for complete state-by-state percentages.)

Because the percentage of moderates varies by state -- from 43% in Hawaii and Rhode Island down to 32% in Alabama -- the percentage identifying themselves as "conservative" does not by itself provide a complete picture of the relative strength of conservatism across states. For this reason, the "net conservative" statistic -- defined as the total percentage calling themselves conservative minus the total percentage defining themselves as liberal -- is used in the accompanying map to identify the ideological makeup of each state.

States where the conservatives' advantage over liberals is greater than 25 percentage points are defined as Most Conservative. Net conservatism registering 20 to 25 points is defined as More Conservative; from 10 to 19 points, as Somewhat Conservative; and from 1 to 9 points, as Less Conservative. Only Washington, D.C., which has more liberals than conservatives, is defined as Liberal.



While Americans' party identification and political ideology are related, they are by no means one and the same. For instance, while residents of Alabama and Mississippi are the most likely to be conservative ideologically, they are not the most Republican in their party affiliation. According to Gallup's report on party identification by state earlier this month, that distinction goes to Utah, whose net conservative score is only slightly higher than that of South Dakota (a Democratic-leaning state).

In fact, while all 50 states are, to some degree, more conservative than liberal (with the conservative advantage ranging from 1 to 34 points), Gallup's 2009 party ID results indicate that Democrats have significant party ID advantages in 30 states and Republicans in only 4.

Bottom Line

Despite the Democratic Party's political strength -- seen in its majority representation in Congress and in state houses across the country -- more Americans consider themselves conservative than liberal. While Gallup polling has found this to be true at the national level over many years, and spanning recent Republican as well as Democratic presidential administrations, the present analysis confirms that the pattern also largely holds at the state level. Conservatives outnumber liberals by statistically significant margins in 47 of the 50 states, with the two groups statistically tied in Hawaii, Vermont, and Massachusetts.

When considered with party identification, these ideology findings highlight the role that political moderates currently play in joining with liberals to give the Democratic Party its numerical advantage.

Gallup.com's "State of the States" series reveals state-by-state differences on political, economic, and well-being measures Gallup tracks each day, based on data collected between January and June 2009. To see all stories published in the midyear 2009 series, click here. New stories will be released throughout the month of August.

Survey Methods

Results are based on telephone interviews with 160,236 national adults, aged 18 and older, conducted Jan. 2-June 30, 2009, as part of Gallup Daily tracking. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±1 percentage point.

The margin of sampling error for most states is ±3 percentage points, but is as high as ±7 percentage points for the District of Columbia, and ±6 percentage points for Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, and Hawaii.

Interviews are conducted with respondents on land-line telephones (for respondents with a land-line telephone) and cellular phones (for respondents who are cell-phone only).

In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.





Click below for more on these topics:

Copyright © 2009 Gallup, Inc. All rights reserved.
Gallup®, A8™, Business Impact Analysis™, CE11®, Clifton StrengthsFinder®, the 34 Clifton StrengthsFinder theme names, Customer Engagement Index™, Drop Club®, Emotional Economy™, Employee Engagement Index™, Employee Outlook Index™, Follow This Path™, Gallup Brain®, Gallup Consulting®, Gallup Management Journal®, GMJ®, Gallup Press®, Gallup Publishing™, Gallup Tuesday Briefing®, Gallup University®, HumanSigma®, I10™, L3™, PrincipalInsight™, Q12®, SE25™, SF34®, SRI®, Strengths Spotlight™, Strengths-Based Selling™, StrengthsCoach™, StrengthsFinder®, StrengthsQuest™, TeacherInsight™, The Gallup Path®, and The Gallup Poll® are trademarks of Gallup, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. These materials are provided for noncommercial, personal use only. Reproduction prohibited without the express permission of Gallup, Inc.

Conservative Majority

CNSNews.com
Conservatives Now Outnumber Liberals in All 50 States, Says Gallup Poll
Monday, August 17, 2009
By Terence P. Jeffrey, Editor-in-Chief

(CNSNews.com) - Self-identified conservatives outnumber self-identified liberals in all 50 states of the union, according to the Gallup Poll.

At the same time, more Americans nationwide are saying this year that they are conservative than have made that claim in any of the last four years.

In 2009, 40% percent of respondents in Gallup surveys that have interviewed more than 160,000 Americans have said that they are either “conservative” (31%) or “very conservative” (9%). That is the highest percentage in any year since 2004.

Only 21% have told Gallup they are liberal, including 16% who say they are “liberal” and 5% who say they are “very liberal.”

Thirty-five percent of Americans say they are moderate.

During Republican President George W. Bush’s second term, the number of self-identified conservatives as measured by Gallup dropped, riding at a low of 37% as recently as last year.

According to new data released by Gallup on Friday, conservatives outnumber liberals in all 50 states--including President Obama’s home state of Illinois--even though Democrats have a significant advantage over Republicans in party identification in 30 states.

“In fact, while all 50 states are, to some degree, more conservative than liberal (with the conservative advantage ranging from 1 to 34 points), Gallup's 2009 party ID results indicate that Democrats have significant party ID advantages in 30 states and Republicans in only 4,” said an analysis of the survey results published by Gallup.

“Despite the Democratic Party's political strength-- seen in its majority representation in Congress and in state houses across the country--more Americans consider themselves conservative than liberal,” said Gallup’s analysis.

“While Gallup polling has found this to be true at the national level over many years, and spanning recent Republican as well as Democratic presidential administrations, the present analysis confirms that the pattern also largely holds at the state level,” said Gallup. “Conservatives outnumber liberals by statistically significant margins in 47 of the 50 states, with the two groups statistically tied in Hawaii, Vermont, and Massachusetts.”

Massachusetts, Vermont and Hawaii are the most liberal states, even though conservatives marginally outrank liberals even there. In Massachusetts, according to Gallup, 30% say they are conservative and 29% say they are liberal, a difference that falls within the margin of error for the state. In Vermont, 29% say they are conservative and 28% say they are liberal, which also falls within the survey’s margin of error for the state. In Hawaii, 29% say they are conservative and 24% say they are liberal, which falls within the margin of error for that state.

In one non-state jurisdiction covered by the survey, liberals did outnumber conservatives. That was Washington, D.C., where 37% said they were liberal, 35% said they were moderate and 23% said they were conservative.

Even in New York and New Jersey, conservatives outnumber liberals by 6 percentage points, according to Gallup. In those states, 32% say they are conservative and 26% say they are liberal. In Connecticut, conservatives outnumber liberals by 7 points, 31% to 24%.

Alabama is the state that comes closest to a conservative majority. In that state, according to Gallup, 49% say they are conservative and 15% say they are liberal.

In President Obama’s home state of Illinois, conservatives outnumber liberals, 35% to 23%.

Gallup's results were derived from interviewing 160,236 American adults between Jan. 2, 2009 and June 30, 2009.

Even though conservatives outnumber liberals in all 50 states, in 21 of these states self-identified moderates outnumber conservatives, and in 4 states the percentage saying they are conservative and the percentage saying they are moderate is exactly the same.

The two states with the highest percentage of self-identified moderates are Hawaii and Rhode Island, where 43% say they are moderate.

For a ranking of all 50 states by the advantage that self-identified conservatives have over self-identified liberals see the Gallup analysis at http://www.gallup.com/poll/122333/Political-Ideology-Conservative-Label-Prevails-South.aspx#2

Who are "We the People"?

Our Unconstitutional Census

California could get nine House seats it doesn’t deserve because illegal aliens will be counted in 2010. By JOHN S. BAKER AND ELLIOTT STONECIPHER

Next year’s census will determine the apportionment of House members and Electoral College votes for each state. To accomplish these vital constitutional purposes, the enumeration should count only citizens and persons who are legal, permanent residents. But it won’t.

Instead, the U.S. Census Bureau is set to count all persons physically present in the country—including large numbers who are here illegally. The result will unconstitutionally increase the number of representatives in some states and deprive some other states of their rightful political representation. Citizens of “loser” states should be outraged. Yet few are even aware of what’s going on.

In 1790, the first Census Act provided that the enumeration of that year would count “inhabitants” and “distinguish” various subgroups by age, sex, status as free persons, etc. Inhabitant was a term with a well-defined meaning that encompassed, as the Oxford English Dictionary expressed it, one who “is a bona fide member of a State, subject to all the requisitions of its laws, and entitled to all the privileges which they confer.”

Thus early census questionnaires generally asked a question that got at the issue of citizenship or permanent resident status, e.g., “what state or foreign country were you born in?” or whether an individual who said he was foreign-born was naturalized. Over the years, however, Congress and the Census Bureau have added inquiries that have little or nothing to do with census’s constitutional purpose.

By 1980 there were two census forms. The shorter form went to every person physically present in the country and was used to establish congressional apportionment. It had no question pertaining to an individual’s citizenship or legal status as a resident. The longer form gathered various kinds of socioeconomic information including citizenship status, but it went only to a sample of U.S. households. That pattern was repeated for the 1990 and 2000 censuses.

The 2010 census will use only the short form. The long form has been replaced by the Census Bureau’s ongoing American Community Survey. Dr. Elizabeth Grieco, chief of the Census Bureau’s Immigration Statistics Staff, told us in a recent interview that the 2010 census short form does not ask about citizenship because “Congress has not asked us to do that.”

Because the census (since at least 1980) has not distinguished citizens and permanent, legal residents from individuals here illegally, the basis for apportionment of House seats has been skewed. According to the Census Bureau’s latest American Community Survey data (2007), states with a significant net gain in population by inclusion of noncitizens include Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Nevada, New Jersey, New York and Texas. (There are tiny net gains for Hawaii and Massachusetts.)

This makes a real difference. Here’s why:

According to the latest American Community Survey, California has 5,622,422 noncitizens in its population of 36,264,467. Based on our round-number projection of a decade-end population in that state of 37,000,000 (including 5,750,000 noncitizens), California would have 57 members in the newly reapportioned U.S. House of Representatives.

However, with noncitizens not included for purposes of reapportionment, California would have 48 House seats (based on an estimated 308 million total population in 2010 with 283 million citizens, or 650,000 citizens per House seat). Using a similar projection, Texas would have 38 House members with noncitizens included. With only citizens counted, it would be entitled to 34 members.

Of course, other states lose out when noncitizens are counted for reapportionment. According to projections of the 2010 Census by Election Data Services, states certain to lose one seat in the 2010 reapportionment are Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania; states likely (though not certain) to lose a seat are Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, and Ohio could lose a second seat. But under a proper census enumeration that excluded illegal residents, some of the states projected to lose a representative—including our own state of Louisiana—would not do so.

The census has drifted far from its constitutional roots, and the 2010 enumeration will result in a malapportionment of Congress.

In the 1964 case of Wesberry v. Sanders, the Supreme Court said, “The House of Representatives, the [Constitutional] Convention agreed, was to represent the people as individuals and on a basis of complete equality for each voter.” It ruled that Georgia had violated the equal-vote principle because House districts within the state did not contain roughly the same number of voting citizens. Justice Hugo Black wrote in his majority opinion that “one man’s vote in a congressional election is to be worth as much as another’s.” The same principle is being violated now on a national basis because of our faulty census.

The Census Bureau can of course collect whatever data Congress authorizes. But Congress must not permit the bureau to unconstitutionally redefine who are “We the People of the United States.”

Mr. Baker teaches constitutional law at Louisiana State University. Mr. Stonecipher is a Louisiana pollster and demographic analyst.

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved