LAUSR

Aside from today’s attitudes toward guns, immigration, and abortion, conservatives don’t really disagree with liberals about much. Public opinion surveys obscure this fact. That is, when abstract ideological principles are invoked without context, for instance when people are questioned about the role of government in “the economy,” ideological polarization is apparent and growing. With regard to specific government programs that guarantee a minimal standard of living or provide for greater economic opportunity for the working poor, however, conservatives tend to become liberals. In fact, like the majority of the population, the standard conservative is in substantive agreement with the left wing of the Democratic Party especially on the role of government in ensuring progress toward a fair and just society. The dominant notion of a social contract in American society remains essentially something like the New Deal. In addition, the general historical trends of liberalization of attitudes toward cultural issues (with the abovementioned exceptions), and of tolerance toward dissimilar others, continues despite various incarnations of reactionary right-wing populism – the Moral Majority, the Tea Party, the alt-right, etc. The contradiction between an increasingly liberal society and the increase of conservative self-labeling (which surpassed every other category in 2008), and between the popularity of the New Deal and the rightward turn of the established political parties, would be glaring if not for the fact that public opinion research locks people into a narrow range of choices that mirror debates among competing political elites. The few surveys that have provided the option of rejecting capitalism altogether have produced interesting results; that is, a third of the population prefers socialism when given the option. Political commentators of the liberal left and conservative right have repeatedly made the point that most of respondents don’t know much of anything about Socialism and Democracy, 2018 Vol. 32, No. 2, 1–13, https://doi.org/10.1080/08854300.2018.1512288