Any time there is a big mass shooting that gets a ton of media coverage, support for new gun control laws spikes up, but eventually settles back down to its pre-shooting baseline. It will be interesting to see if the same thing plays out with Dobbs. Support for abortion was extremely stable for decades. Is this a shock to the system that will return to the baseline, or the establishment of a new baseline?
I'm inclined to blame / credit the media more than anything. They tend to celebrate liberal victories, bring awareness to their positive aspects, and decry conservative victories shedding light on their negative aspects. This may be naive, but it seems like a simple explanation thay fits the data?
It's likely that these policy victories are catalysts for intense rounds of coverage. Abortion was never a non-issue, but there was a media surge around it when the Supreme Court decision leaked which continued for several months afterward.
IDK, they foresaw that Russia was going to invade Ukraine while pretty much all the MSM bashers were mocking them for that idea. Pretty good foresight.
There was a lot of outrage, for one thing. (I was in high school.) Roe overturned the abortion laws which people of 49 out of 50 states had voted for. That's why it's so ironic to me that so many people are indignant that Roe was overturned by "unelected judges."
Obviously true. Liberal news is not just CNN and MSNBC, it is also what comes on after a football game is over. 60 Minutes, for example follows CBS's NFL coverage. 60 minutes has had several scandals where they warped coverage to make conservatives look bad. Most high profile being the Bush one, but overall the program is far to the left of the electorate, and it is not an outlier.
CNN is not liberal news anymore. The primary shareholder donates to Trump, and the new CEO is also in line. Reporters who are too liberal, or who have refused to capitulate, have been fired.
Recently I had noticed that CNN was was doing just as Realus says, trying to look more balanced, and perhaps going so far as lose the respect of not only conservatives but liberals (excuse the black and white terms), by making quips that were completely unsupported by evidence. When the story first broke of Biden's possession of classified materials, one of CNN's first reports on this read exactly like something out of Fox News, making Biden appear just as blameworthy as Trump but actually worse since he's a hypocrite. That's how the report was slanted. This made me look into who is running things at CNN. Some reports suggest that while CNN is still liberal, we can expect it to become increasingly conservative.
Maybe worse because Presidents are covered by Presidential Records Act when they leave office and have unilateral declassification authority and Vice Presidents, as Biden was when he took the documents, have no such privileges at all?
That's a good story but CNN is still extremely liberal. This is a common theme among liberal "news" organizations. If they think they are losing all credibility (and ratings) they will make a show of being "balanced" or conservative even. But its a few articles or shows.
Heck even the NYT prints 5 to 10 political articles a year without massive liberal bias. That's 5 to 10. Not 5% to 10%.
I think they do this for reputation and to salve their own conscience and self esteem. I mean few people in the US, even journalists, want to admit they are just paid propagandists.
What makes you think of Douthat as a centrist? I tend to think of hand-wringing about cultural decadence and the decline of institutional religion as pretty firmly in the right's wheelhouse.
Zaslav (CEO of WBD which owns CNN) is a Democrat, but he is more pragmatic than Woke. I see him as fitting into the old-time Hollywood producer archetype -- a left-of-center Jew who prioritizes business over politics. E.g. Spielberg.
Looking at my screen, the Newhouse family is the LARGEST shareholder of WBD, but at an 8% stake, I wouldn't call them the PRIMARY shareholder, which to me implies control. I think this is really Zaslav's game at the moment and to the degree he's under shareholder pressure, it's over performance and not politics.
You have to be bonkers to think CNN is a moderate news organization. Perhaps compared to Mother Jones, but its primetime lineup is: Jake Tapper, Wolf Blitzer, Erin Burnett, and Anderson Cooper. Not a single Romney voter to be found. More lockstep Biden voters than Fox is lockstep Trump (Bret Baier is a well documented moderate Democrat) They still employ Don Lemon. The median story at CNN remains from a POV far to the left of the median voter or congressman.
We didn't do grade point averages in my day, I'll have to see if I can convert my Leaving Cert results!
EDIT: Okay, I found a website which was more confusing than helpful, so I converted my Irish final grades into US equivalents. I don't have "credits/hours" so I can't multiply my points for grade x credits/hours for class.
So: (1) Turn Irish grades into US grades - using Secondary School
Funny, I would say that this blog clearly leans Right. Perhaps it varies with the topic under discussion? (edit: or did you mean the blog itself rather than the comments? Scott's politics seem a bit more tricky to pin down.)
Scott has described himself as "vaguely centrist", and I think that's about all we're going to get.
I tend to think the blog gets more conservative commentators because it criticizes liberals more. Especially when it first started out, it had more of a feel of "reasonable liberal critiques leftist extremism". Unfortunately, this brought in a good number of conservatives who don't apply Scott's degree of charity and thought to their own analyses and just want to rant about how the eeeevul liberals are destroying civilization.
It's the opposite of most other intellectual spaces I've seen on the internet, where the conservatives generally have to hold themselves to a higher standard of reason and civility than the liberals majority do in order to be accepted by them.
Scott definitely leans left overall, but he often questions the orthodoxy of the left so he's not considered culturally left and ends up attracting a decent readership on the right. He also has some opinions that are right-coded or libertarian, such as his thoughts on feminism (which he doesn't talk about anymore).
We don't have a great way to measure political lean of the readers who don't post (Scott's survey will have that, but I also question it's worth in measuring "the blog" since they don't have a very visible presence). Of those that do post, there's a lot of range, with most people closer to centrist than the more extreme of either major political faction. On certain topics, such as gay marriage, "the blog" holds a very leftward view. On other topics, such as economic theory, "the blog" leans pretty heavily to the right (free market). Then there's some weird niche things like HBD where there are almost no places on the internet that tolerate discussion about it, so people come here to throw in their two cents about it. Scott barely tolerates that either, and clamps down on too direct of a discussion.
If I had to characterise (my impression of) Scott’s position, I tend to think he’s vaguely leftish centre but with genuine curiosity and a fair number of views that *I* don’t think are right wing, but have become caught up in the culture war. By contrast, I always read the Less Wrong crowd as generally rightish (and a bit elitist) in the way I expected a lot of ‘Rationalist’ techies to be, and EY in particular always read fairly rightish to me (certainly to *my* right), but a few years back I encountered a few who thought they (and EY) were all super left wing and that anyone who criticised them or anything they wrote must be right wing! Which was surprising.
But I don’t think ‘left’ and ‘right’ are especially useful terms, as they mostly seem to be tribal labels and generally people I know and have real conversations with hold views that are all over the place by the labels.
The real difference with Scott, apart from his openness, is that while he would think it was very useful and important to have the computer model what the impact would be of ‘kill all the poor’, he would be horrified by the idea that any answer to that would make you more or less likely to actually ‘kill all the poor’. Whereas I got the uneasy impression in some other ‘Rationalist’ circles that there would be some results from the computer that would make them actively work towards ‘kill all the poor’. https://youtube.com/watch?v=owI7DOeO_yg But maybe they’ve changed: I decided, on that basis, to stay away from them years ago.
You've got to be careful there. It's true that they make themselves look bad to ME, but not necessarily to those who agree with them. I remember a research study LONG ago where they found that in TV episodes of (?? Archie Bunker??), the liberals thought it was an argument for liberal views, and the conservatives though it was an argument for conservative views.
You are assuming that media leads public opinion more than it responds to it. But media has an incentive to respond to the mood of its audience. (A quick google gives me this recent 538 article showing media coverage of the economy responds to public opinion not vice versa https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/media-coverage-doesnt-actually-determine-public-opinion-on-the-economy/ ). Not sure if anyone has done similar studies for any of the examples listed
I don't think the economy is a good proxy to use on purely cultural war policies. No one comes to their conclusion on abortion the way they do about economic policy.
There's a lot of overlap, but I've got to admit that frequently I can't understand HOW people come to their conclusion on abortion. I've got the strong suspicion that people don't know, so they make up a story to justify their decision.
It's not that hard. If you think the foetus is a person, then abortion is murder. If you don't, it's just a medical procedure. Performative misunderstanding is so dull.
IIUC, most pregnancies spontaneously abort, usually early enough that it looks like just a heavy period. Is it murder to not protect those?
FWIW, I consider any cell bearing a human genetic code to be human, at least in potentia. And I don't consider it actually human until it can respond sensibly. And there's a gradation in between those positions, which I don't have defined. After all, it's reasonably possible that one could take some skin cells and grow a clone of the person sampled. We can't do it yet, or at least probably not, but I expect that we'll be able to within a decade. And I'm not going to stop showering because of that.
The "drawing a hard line" isn't what happens in the world, and I don't see how anyone could think that it is. Hard lines are drawn by people for their convenience. (Yes, it's *very* convenient, but it's still artificial. Once you look closely, any apparent clear separation between things in contact gets fuzzy. Are your guts inside you or on the surface? Well, it depends on how you're looking at things. Lots of really small animals treat them as a protected area of the surface. [I'm thinking of tapeworms in particular here, but they aren't alone.])
That doesn't seem to track increasing Republican support for gay marriage though, assuming Republicans are mostly paying attention to conservative media.
You're right, that isn't really explained. I'm speaking in ignorance here, but maybe there wasn't a major conservative media backlash against the Supreme Court gay marriage decision? Or not a sustained one?
Asserted without evidence that conservatives mostly pay attention to conservative media. If a conservative watches the NFL or any other sports league they are being exposed to progressive media. The news programs that come on after said sports will also be dominated by progressive-leaning reporting. If they stay up later and become part of the ever-dwindling audiences of late night comedy they are again watching very left wing media.
Fox News is pretty dang influential, you'd think it'd be able to swing the conservative demographic on at least one of those issues if that was what was happening
Most (overwhelmingly, as you note) journalists are Democrats, and story coverage is somewhat liberal but not in the sense that they're scheming against Republicans or just left-leaning equivalents of Fox or Breitbart or something. They make a serious effort to be "balanced" between the two parties. When it comes to unconscious bias, it's better-described as urban than "liberal," though there's some overlap there on social issues. On foreign policy, they are kind of "pro-establishment;" on economic policy, they're center-right; on culture, they're hopelessly left. Like, they might try to be fair to religious people, but there's no sense at all that God is real and acting in the world (remember that like 40% of the population in America is creationist), racism and "homophobia" are seen as obviously wrong and evil (and are more broadly defined than most people would define them), etc. And I think they are more deferential to Republicans than they are to Democrats (basically reflected in the fact that they are happy to be accused of partisan bias by Democrats and scared of the accusation from Republicans--naturally because in both cases it plays against common criticisms).
In combination with liberals being more interested in winning policy battles and conservatives being more interested in winning the culture war, that explains why both liberals and conservatives think the media is biased against them. It is on the issues that matter most to them.
The Newsroom TV series explained the phenomenon best:
“
Charlie: We did the news.
Leona: For the left.
Charlie: For the center.
Leona: Are you fucking out of your mind–?!
Charlie: For the center, Leona! Facts... are the center. Facts. We don't pretend that certain facts are in dispute to give the appearance of fairness to people who don't believe them. Balance is irrelevant to me. It has nothing to do with the truth, logic, or reality. He didn't go on the air telling people to give peace a chance, but evolution? The jury's back on that one.”
No. Wall Street Journal would probably be the closest because it is business focused, but the newsroom most definitely still skews significantly "left".
Whereas no credentials at all are needed to be sarcastic on the Internet, a fact for which I am grateful (even as I get into trouble for being sarcastic on the Internet).
You're assuming a uni-direcrional causation, which I think is questionable.
Media coverage reflects the opinions of the target audience more so than drives public views. This is an empirical question which has been studied. Some evidence shows that because people select their media to start with in order to confirm their views, the causal role of media in opinion formation is less than people often think.
I see two separate statements you're making, and one of them is much more defensible than the other.
One, the media has a liberal bias. This seems pretty clearly true to me, as NYT and CNN are what people think of as the "mainstream media", rather than Fox. Clutzy brings up "60 Minutes", which I've never consciously watched, but I'm willing to believe him that it's a random program that doesn't need to have a partisan spin but which has a liberal bias.
The other is that the mainstream media is actually a major driver of what people's opinions are. This may have been true when it was more truly mainstream, but now it's a truism that the media is biased. If everyone who leans conservative expects not to trust NYT, CNN, and wouldn't agree with them anyway, why would NYT and CNN trumpeting how bad a conservative victory is move even Republicans to react against it?
(An interesting theory raised below is that these polls are answered by the same types of people who answer political-horse-race polls, selecting against "silent Trump voters" etc.)
"Relative to the current status quo, are you pro-choice or pro-life" is a question that would produce the observed pattern, and it's plausible that many or most people would interpret the question this way, consciously or unconsciously.
I don't know about that. The labels "pro-choice" and "pro-life" have been firmly entrenched for decades as absolute positions, even if there's some variation in gradation among different people's definition (e.g. some interpret "pro-choice" as including those who support keeping abortion legal but personally think it's always immoral, others as thinking that abortion should be legal only in a narrow range of cases, others as being a body autonomy absolutist, etc.).
I think the gradation in definitions is precisely the point, and it depends on the context. If Roe is the law, and I am for abortion being legal only for serious compelling reasons, then I am pro-life, right? Against abortion on demand, so "pro-life with exceptions", one would say. But now, if I live in a state where abortion is banned without exceptions, or if that's an imminent proposal, then holding the same position I'd be called pro-choice, since I'm against that ban. This may well be enough to explain the entire polling change, although I do think backlashes happen as well.
This could be part of it. As an example, I have thought for a long time that abortion should be banned after 12 except for life of mother/child, but should be legal before that. Let's say I live in Texas and was polled this question each time. Before Dobbs, I want Roe v. Wade overturned so I say I'm pro life, to indicate my support for the conservative effort to appoint originalist justices. Post Dobbs, same question, I say I'm pro choice, to indicate to my current state government that they went to far, and should allow abortions up to 12 weeks. I think people like that could be a large amount of the change.
What *I* would do is interpret the question as biased, and decline to answer it. This is because of the connotations of the terms used. Or I might say "both".
Now if you asked me whether I thought the human population should increase, that I could answer.
I think it's the media is liberal, and they do $(a few different things) to convince everyone the conservatives are evil, and everyone agrees for a while. I suppose if I were serious about proving/disproving my hunch (it is, alas, only a hunch) I would go back to the 1990's, or some other time when one could argue the media had a conservative bias, and find similar events during that time and see if there was a conservative-direction backlash.
Back in the '90s I had to debate in school whether there was a liberal bias in the news. There was a 1993 Bill Clinton quote that I discussed where he said
"I have fought more damn battles here for more things than any President has in 20 years with the possible exception of Reagan's first budget and not gotten one damn bit of credit from the knee-jerk liberal press, and I am sick and tired of it, and you can put that it your damn article.".
Even back then there seemed to be the perception that the media had a liberal bias, otherwise it probably wouldn't have come up for debate. And ostensibly they were being too hard on Clinton, although I tend to think he was feigning outrage as politicians do.
Interestingly that quote came a few days before the Waco siege, and his popularity continued to take a dip to some historically low numbers. I was too young at the time to have a real sense of whether the media was being fair to him, but I'm not sure how easily even a liberal media could have put a positive spin on Waco.
The thing is, a right wing media that wanted to could easily have put a positive spin on Waco. They've done that kind of things several times. (But for right wing coverage it usually has to be our heroic soldiers in a foreign country. [Soldiers is just typical. Any US govt. employee being either aggressive or defensive will do.])
But, yeah, the doctrines of the left make defending that kind of action quite difficult.
Bear in mind Clinton ran as a "third way" centrist, and he was certainly in his rhetoric, and to some real extent in his policies, significantly to the right of traditional Democrats. (For example, he was definitely to the right of Joe Biden, even the 2020 Joe Biden.)
Theory 1: Individual liberal policies poll much better than liberal politicians as a whole. Events that crystalize politics around specific tangible policies may end up favoring liberals.
Theory 2: Maybe the "shy Tory" effect is actually stronger for liberals, or at least liberal policies, than we realize. Perhaps there's a significant cohort of people don't want to be one of those bleeding heart liberals or blue-haired feminists attitudinally but when it comes down to actual women being forced to carry unwanted babies they line up on the liberal side.
This is probably the best answer. Pluralities or even majorities of Republican voters often are shown to oppose Republican policies. The issue is probably that left-wing cultural-war stuff is unpopular but left-leaning policies are popular, which is why Republicans generally want elections to be about whose side one is on in the culture wars and Democrats want you to ignore culture wars.
A simple way to make an electoral killing: Start selling social conservatism and a mildly leftist economic lean in one package. The demand is there, but both parties studiously refuse to provide.
In Europe, there are parties along these lines but a lot of their representatives are village idiots for the simple reason that being part of said parties is hideously low status partly due to media coverage. (And not recent coverage at that, all the "respectable" media has told eg. me that immigration criticism is racism for all my life)
There was a little rhetoric in that direction at times, but in terms of actual policy I don't think anything he did can really be described as economically on the left. Maybe the trade stuff but calling that leftist is pretty debatable.
The question of whether Trump is economically on the left depends on whether you stand with Milton Friedman's "to spend is to tax" stance or with Dick Cheney's "deficits don't matter". For the Friedmanites he's way out to the left, but among the Cheneyistas he ain't
It's tricky to pull off, though. Republicans who do it are seen as not being legitimately committed to the leftist economic lean, and Democrats who do it are still tied to Twitter purplehairs by the rightist media.
For gay marriage the line could be that they won't repeal they wouldn't persue any expansion.
For abortion they could offer a middle ground (low term length and reasonable exceptions for health and rapee) as a federal guarantee and say states should make their own laws to suit them
I mean, I think somewhere in there is a belief structure that the median voter holds (note that this is not what I believe):
1. Abortion should be generally legal and isn't really murder in the first trimester, but certain mainstream Democrat positions on it are scary and, while rare, possibly murder (babies born alive left to die, abortion up to the moment of birth).
2. To oppose gay marriage is homophobic, but sexualized teachings and displays in front of children are weird and gross. Self-identified trans people are sort of nuts and society shouldn't revolve around them, but live and let live if they're not hurting anybody. Biological males shouldn't compete in girls' sports, and minors shouldn't be given trans surgery or hormone therapy.
3. Intact families are ideal. While no-fault divorce should remain freely available, fathers and mothers are both important and should be encouraged to get and stay married. The well-being of children ought to be prioritized over libertine sexual desires. Parents should have more say over their own children than teachers and "experts".
Of course, a politician of either party offering these views is going to most likely meet impossible opposition in the primary.
For the last point, making marriage not a legal concept (id est, no law has a different effect based on marital status) would probably be your best bet.
This was Trump 100%. He campaigned on culture war issues plus was against immigration and free trade. He also supported universal health care and opposed cutting entitlements although that was obviously empty rhetoric.
My instinct is this strategy would perform very well in US general elections, but would usually lose in party primaries. Last election, extreme candidates performed very well in primaries, but underperformed in the general election. Lauren Boebert is an example of this having barely won in her historically red district by only a few hundred votes. Democrats even experimented with this phenomenon by running ads supporting more extreme GOP candidates in some places, so they would have a weaker opponent in the general election. Seems to have worked in a couple cases.
I think the sample size is too small to draw any meaningful conclusions. If this was a systematic pattern with decades of history I would be much more inclined to try to draw some conclusions, but otherwise I think each backlash is specific to the policy in question.
It may also be part selection bias: the last congressional session passed hundreds of bills, most of them didn't have backlash, so the baseline is to expect no shift in public opinion over the implementation of an idea (maybe unless the implementation is uniquely bad, like how brexit turned into a giant mess that left nobody happy).
Related possibility: the polling firms don't have a genuinely representative set of people labelled Republican. That is, the "Republicans" in their sample are only notionally so. Polling firms have research that shows this. Look for pro-social bias.
I am pretty sure this is true. In December, I answered a phone call from a survey organization asking it I would support a state constitutional amendment guaranteeing bodily autonomy for women in response to Dobbs. I said I would not, which led to many questions about how they could change it to get my support. When I explain my views (pro-life with exceptions for health of the mother/child), the pollster paused and said, “Okay, I have to write something down. He then started asking questions for another minute or so, after which the call cut off mid-question. We are pretty sure he reached out to a supervisor, who arranged to cut off the call. Thus my survey was incomplete and could be excluded from the results.
That sounds like an internal poll run by some organization that wanted to sponsor such an amendment and wanted data to inform decisions about how to frame and promote it, not the kind of poll that gets published as an estimated snapshot of public opinion.
Number of undecideds and level of salience is probably a factor. Pre Dobbs a lot of Americans who never really thought about abortion wouldn't report strong feelings on it, but when Dobbs passed it rapidly increased in salience, and so reported pro choice.
In general a big salient event probably pushes undecideds towards the most popular side, since they are likely to break down the same way as the rest of the population when exposed to more information. In the gay marriage case majority support was already for gay marriage, so undecideds mostly tipped that way.
I think Richard Hanania's observation that liberals are more tuned-in to politics and care more about politics than conservatives do can provide some explanation.
Would this imply that liberalism is more "scalable" as a movement? Like, can liberalism increase its level of political power in the country in a way conservatism cannot?
Thank you for the SSC link! As a true disciple, I read that post before, ofc. But, omg, it was and is a nice one. - I try to dig the ouroboros thing ... it seems good, but dunno, maybe it's just the font ...
Not as much a fan of Bastable either, but I had recently read it so I decided to include it mainly because of his points about how the general left narrative of fighting injustice is far more activating than the right narrative of defend against alleged existential risk.
I thought the bonstable article as decent initially, but upon further reflection it seems like he was half cribbing moldbug and half promoting a facile agonism.
I also dont think its particularly edifying to characterize the magna carta as the first step of progressivism. Sure enhanced rights and procedural due process, but rights for aristocrats as against the crown..
I'd theorize this happens when people think they can hold an opinion that will never come into effect. It probably felt nice for some people to vote for Trump in a rage against the machine, but when he came into power, they had to live with his actions, not just the message their ballot signaled. Similar story for abortion: I was talking to one of my closest friends a few days before the draft leaked; he said he wished abortion were illegal but "knew" the Court would never budge, and so it remained an abstract, lukewarm conviction. After the decision, the ensuing chaos, and a billion testimonies, he's now pro-choice. Maybe the decision encouraged people to proselytize outside their normal bubbles and punctured echo chambers; perhaps more people who knew the arguments and weighed them had their scales tipped. Not sure of any other examples to test this hypothesis against, but I'd love to hear some. (Edited for clarity and to remove Markdown syntax—sorry, first post <3)
A possible counterexample is the support for government healthcare post ACA, since it didn't really change, despite individual aspects of it like coverage for pre-existing conditions becoming accepted status quo. Though possibly its a case of people not connecting specifics to general principle. "Government healthcare" is sufficiently vague people can still say they oppose it while saying medicaid should be protected
Democrat policies are typically ones that don't produce identifiable victims. For example, the BLM movement generally resulted in increased homicide, but no individual homicide is 100% attributable to BLM. OTOH, a deported person is a crying person to have on camera. See, e.g. woman's tears as a superweapon.
Then it is a big problem for your theory that BLM-associated rioting and the "defund the police" slogan actually produced a *huge* backlash. It's the only reason Trump was even competitive in 2020.
Even far-lefties like David Shor have been talking about how the BLM backlash cost Democrats in 2020.
It's because when people are given conservative policies they realize those policies are terrible (abortion bans result in horrible criminalization regimes) whereas when they are given liberal policies they realize those policies are fine (gay marriage does not in fact undermine civilization and does not affect anyone's life negatively).
Recent US politics is maybe a bad example of the general phenomenon, given ideological polarization. The republican base is smaller and therefore further from the median voter. So a GOP victory is something with 30% popular support passing, not one with 50%. Would be interesting to do a comparison with a country with a more proportional system and centrist coalition based governance. (Germany maybe?)
This is the most interesting theory in the comments! I strongly appreciate that it can give clear predictions without simply accepting a political viewpoint.
In short: popular backlash is more likely when the governing coalition represents a minority. And perhaps: the smaller the minority, the more likely the backlash.
Trump won with minority support. The current SCOTUS majority did as well.
In the past, SCOTUS has been well to the left of the public, e.g. in decisions striking down segregated schooling and capital punishment. And those did provoke quite a backlash.
Congress has usually been slightly to the right of the public due to gerrymandering, but this changed in 2022 and going forward it's possible that will continue. If so, then it's possible there will be Congressional decisions that spark a right-leaning backlash.
Okay, maybe that's a bit nuts and someone needs to go tell some perverts no, but at least we believe in science and people aren't so ideologically compromised they can't answer "What is a woman?"
...oh, there's a film made to mock that very pathology?
Well, at least they're not letting bearded men convicted for sex crimes into women's prisons because they say s---
Fine, at least the cops still hate kiddy di-- they're visiting people for "being untoward towards paedophiles"?
If you think there weren't naked guys in Bugs Bunny masks -- not to mention leashes and collars -- parading around in public decades before Obergefell, you probably need to get out more often.
Not to mention nobody questions how, after hundreds of thousands of years of human civilization during which every sane human being would have considered it important, inasmuch as it were possible, for all children to have a mother, we now have no problem with children being raised by two men...
Right, "inasmuch as it were possible." But since most of these kids are orphans, they are supposed to remain in foster care until a straight couple comes along? That might be preferable, I suppose, but if so you need to make an actual argument, rather than what every sane human used to think, but no longer does. Every sane human being for hundreds of thousands of years believed lots of things that you, I am sure, think are nonsense, unless you happen to be a pro-slavery flat-Earther animist or the like.
There are plenty of man-woman couples who have to wait for years to adopt. Gay marriage is not suddenly solving a problem (that never existed) for orphaned kids.
I think the onus is on those who have decided that a basic biological fact of nature (in most species and certainly in human beings), ie. that offspring are primarily raised by the female figure, no longer matters at all. Why shouldn't that be subject to extensive scientific study before we decide that it has no negative effects on the child or on society in general? But no, we have done no studies. In the space of about 15 years we have unilaterally thrown hundreds of thousands of years of human wisdom and experience out the window.
And I firmly disbelieve that every sane person ever thought slavery (in the sense of chattel slavery and not castigative slavery) was a good and natural thing, in the same way that they would have thought the relationship between a mother and child was. I think that is an unfair comparison.
And yet there are also plenty of children who wait for years to be adopted. Not to mention intercountry adoptions. The point is that, unless there are zero children waiting for adoption, the argument that "inasmuch as it were possible" children should have a mother in the household is not much of an argument against permitting a male couple, or even a single male, to adopt. Note that this has nothing to do with gay marriage per se (nor did your comment, which was about adoption), because the argument applies equally to adoption by single men.
The comparison with slavery is not unfair because the point is not that they are identical, but that the rationale is the same. And here is what the Sultan of Morocco said in 1842, when asked by the British government what he was doing to suppress the slave trade: " "the traffic in slaves is a matter on which all sects and nations have agreed from the time of the sons of Adam . . . up to this day -- and we are not aware of its being prohibited by the laws of any sect, and no one need ask this question, the same being manifest to both high and low and requires no more demonstration than the light of day." Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East, p. 151. Why should we find your argument more convincing than yours?
I'm not sure that arguments from biology are strongly relevant to adoption; the biologically natural thing in many species is surely to let orphaned children die.
I'm confused by the assertion that there is not a problem for orphaned kids. If orphaned kids simply don't exist anymore, why does it matter who is allowed to adopt them? If orphans do exist (and I think we're in agreement that they do), could you break down your argument a little more? For example, you might be claiming one of several things:
1. Remaining in foster care until adulthood should be expected to be preferable to getting adopted by a family that doesn't have a stable heterosexual marriage.
2. Remaining in foster care until adulthood should be expected to be preferable to getting adopted by a family that doesn't have at least one woman (so e.g. adoption by a single mother or a lesbian couple is fine, adoption by a single father or a gay couple is not).
3. Adoption by a gay couple would on average be an improvement over foster care, but allowing gay couples to adopt does not lead to children getting adopted faster, and leads to worse experiences for the children once adopted (i.e. there are no benefits to allowing gay couples to adopt).
4. Adoption by a gay couple would on average be an improvement over foster care (there is a benefit to allowing gay adoption), but the benefit of waiting a little longer and getting adopted by a straight couple would be greater (there is a cost to allowing gay adoption); and the cost outweighs the benefit.
For what it's worth, my personal sense is that adoption is better than foster care (ruling out 1 and 2), and I'd expect increasing the supply of families who may adopt to decrease the time to adoption (ruling out 3), though I can imagine data that would convince me otherwise. That leaves arguing something like option 4, in which fundamentally you're pitting arguments from biology against arguments from culture. My own sense is that humans are *very* cultural animals and culture would win -- but before arguing about that, I would want to make sure that we don't diverge earlier!
"Same-sex couples raising children are four times more likely than their different-sex counterparts to be raising an adopted child. An estimated 16,000 same-sex couples are raising more than 22,000 adopted children in the US.
Among those under age 50 who are living alone or with a spouse or partner, nearly half of LGBT women (48%) are raising a child under age 18 along with a fifth of LGBT men (20%).
Same-sex couple parents and their children are more likely to be racial and ethnic minorities.
Childrearing among same-sex couples is most common in Southern, Mountain West, and Midwest regions of the country. States with the highest proportions of same-sex couples raising biological, adopted or step children include Mississippi (26%), Wyoming (25%), Alaska (23%), Idaho (22%), and Montana (22%).
LGBT individuals and same-sex couples raising children evidence some economic disadvantage.
Single LGBT adults raising children are three times more likely than comparable non-LGBT individuals to report household incomes near the poverty threshold.
Married or partnered LGBT individuals living in two-adult households with children are twice as likely as comparable non-LGBT individuals to report household incomes near the poverty threshold.
The median annual household income of same-sex couples with children under age 18 in the home is lower than comparable different-sex couples ($63,900 versus $74,000, respectively)."
So now let's compare adoption figures and foster care figures for the non-LGBT, if we can:
"Adoptions from foster care have declined for two years in a row. In FY 2021 (the most recent year from which the data has been reported), the number of children adopted with public child welfare agency involvement was 54,240. This is a decrease from 66,208 in FY 2019 and 57,881 in FY 2020.
Currently, there are 391,098 children in foster care, compared to 408,000 children in FY 2020 and 426,000 in FY 2019. Neglect remains the primary reason children enter foster care, followed by parental substance abuse. The average age of children in foster care is eight (8) years old — 44% of kids in foster care are nine (9) years and older. Finding foster and adoptive placements for these older kids is particularly challenging.
About 25% of children in foster care cannot reunify with parents or other kinship relatives. Approximately 37% were adopted or placed in a guardianship relationship. The average time spent in care for a foster child was 21.7 months. In FY2021, more than 113,000 children were waiting in foster care for an adoptive family."
Not all the children in foster care *are* eligible for adoption:
"In 2021, according the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services:
On any given day, over 391,000 children are living in the U.S. foster care system and the number has been rising. Over 113,000 of these children are eligible for adoption and they will wait, on average, almost three years for an adoptive family.
53% of the children and youth who left foster care were reunited with their families or living with a relative; 25% were adopted.
More than 48,000 youth in U.S. foster care live in institutions, group homes, and other environments, instead of with a family.
Of the 53,500 children and youth who were adopted in 2021:
55% were adopted by their foster parent(s) and 34% by a relative.
29% were age nine years or older and the average age of adoption is six years old.
Of the families who adopted children from foster care, 68% were married couples, 25% single females, 3% single males, and 4% unmarried couples.
93% of the parents rely on adoption subsidies and/or vital post-adoption services to help meet the children's varied, and often costly, needs."
So if we look at the LGBT group of adoptive parents, it's the lesbians who are adopting rather than the gays, and the non-white more than the white; from my own impression, the rich gay guys who want kids go for surrogate pregnancies rather than adoptions. But that's only my own impression.
Also, there may not be that many babies for adoption (as distinct from older kids in foster care):
"And, as we’ve heard a million times, there are so many babies out there who need a good home.
But that is not actually true. Adopting a baby or toddler is much more difficult than it was a few decades ago. Of the nearly 4 million American children who are born each year, only about 18,000 are voluntarily relinquished for adoption. Though the statistics are unreliable, some estimates suggest that dozens of couples are now waiting to adopt each available baby. Since the mid-1970s—the end of the so-called baby-scoop era, when large numbers of unmarried women placed their children for adoption—the percentage of never-married women who relinquish their infants has declined from nearly 9 percent to less than 1 percent."
So if you want a baby, you'll probably go the surrogate pregnancy route (if you can afford it) rather than wait for the possibility of adopting a baby.
Eh, I don't know. I guess I used to feel this way. But it's really not that bad. Sure, your examples are of tacky and low behavior, but other than that...
About the pedophiles, I think we are still working out how to process the fact they exist. Hatred and outrage really are not the best solutions, but neither is full acceptance a solution, like that time those French intellectuals signed a petition to do away with age of consent laws. It's tricky. Probably the solution will involve recognizing them as sick people, not judging them for it.
Age of consent is a poor and vague heuristic at best, so doing away with those laws isn't intrinsically a bad idea if better options are available. I think emancipation in general should be more accessible to teens that feel they are mature enough to vote or engage in other adult activities.
Yeah, teens are a gray area, but those French demons wanted to fuck literal children. It's really not the same. It would be interesting to see how we as a society would go about evaluating the maturity of a teenager, it could be a worthwhile exercise.
Marriage has declined since gay marriage was legalized, and some courts have started to recognize polygamous pairings. Megan McArdle on this subject pointed out years ago that the negative effects of policies pooh-poohed by their supporters don't cause those policies to be rejected:
> some courts have started to recognize polygamous pairings
Got a source for that? I've only had a brief look at Wikipedia but you'd think any actual recognition whould show up there. Utah has maybe decriminalised it in part, but that's a long way from recognition.
I will note also that Scalia predicted the court would eventually rule in favor of SSM based on the logic of earlier decisions, and was dismissed at the time by Kennedy (who ultimately ruled in favor of SSM.
That seems like a reasonable explanation for the two examples that you cite, but there are also examples of liberal policies becoming unpopular, such as Defund The Police and the 1994 federal AWB.
I think there was backlash against Trump's policies even before he implemented them; I also don't think the average person is capable of noticing whether "protectionism" is going well or poorly, aside from maybe the general state of the economy, which was fine under early Trump.
Any time there is a big mass shooting that gets a ton of media coverage, support for new gun control laws spikes up, but eventually settles back down to its pre-shooting baseline. It will be interesting to see if the same thing plays out with Dobbs. Support for abortion was extremely stable for decades. Is this a shock to the system that will return to the baseline, or the establishment of a new baseline?
Did this get cut off early? I see section 1 but no others, and it seems to end rather abruptly for you.
You're right that I shortened it and forgot to remove the I - thanks for reminding me!
I'm inclined to blame / credit the media more than anything. They tend to celebrate liberal victories, bring awareness to their positive aspects, and decry conservative victories shedding light on their negative aspects. This may be naive, but it seems like a simple explanation thay fits the data?
Implicit in your hypo is that the middle segment of swing opinion havers watch “liberal” news. I guess I’m not sure. Maybe?
What I mean is — if these media outlets had the sway and bias you claim, why wouldn’t they be effect in changing opinions *before* these events too?
It's likely that these policy victories are catalysts for intense rounds of coverage. Abortion was never a non-issue, but there was a media surge around it when the Supreme Court decision leaked which continued for several months afterward.
The Two Minutes Hate only works when there is a focused target. The media is incapable of foresight, so they have to be reactionary.
IDK, they foresaw that Russia was going to invade Ukraine while pretty much all the MSM bashers were mocking them for that idea. Pretty good foresight.
They predicted a war in 2022 that had been going on since 2014. Bravo? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_War
What happened when Roe v Wade dropped originally? ( I can't research right now.)
There was a lot of outrage, for one thing. (I was in high school.) Roe overturned the abortion laws which people of 49 out of 50 states had voted for. That's why it's so ironic to me that so many people are indignant that Roe was overturned by "unelected judges."
Obviously true. Liberal news is not just CNN and MSNBC, it is also what comes on after a football game is over. 60 Minutes, for example follows CBS's NFL coverage. 60 minutes has had several scandals where they warped coverage to make conservatives look bad. Most high profile being the Bush one, but overall the program is far to the left of the electorate, and it is not an outlier.
CNN is not liberal news anymore. The primary shareholder donates to Trump, and the new CEO is also in line. Reporters who are too liberal, or who have refused to capitulate, have been fired.
I'll admit I'm extremely surprised to hear this considering CNN's history. How on Earth did something like that happen?
Recently I had noticed that CNN was was doing just as Realus says, trying to look more balanced, and perhaps going so far as lose the respect of not only conservatives but liberals (excuse the black and white terms), by making quips that were completely unsupported by evidence. When the story first broke of Biden's possession of classified materials, one of CNN's first reports on this read exactly like something out of Fox News, making Biden appear just as blameworthy as Trump but actually worse since he's a hypocrite. That's how the report was slanted. This made me look into who is running things at CNN. Some reports suggest that while CNN is still liberal, we can expect it to become increasingly conservative.
Maybe worse because Presidents are covered by Presidential Records Act when they leave office and have unilateral declassification authority and Vice Presidents, as Biden was when he took the documents, have no such privileges at all?
That's a good story but CNN is still extremely liberal. This is a common theme among liberal "news" organizations. If they think they are losing all credibility (and ratings) they will make a show of being "balanced" or conservative even. But its a few articles or shows.
Heck even the NYT prints 5 to 10 political articles a year without massive liberal bias. That's 5 to 10. Not 5% to 10%.
I think they do this for reputation and to salve their own conscience and self esteem. I mean few people in the US, even journalists, want to admit they are just paid propagandists.
NYT columnists include centrist Ross Douthat and John McWhorter, a center-leftist who often covers racial issues from a center-right perspective
What makes you think of Douthat as a centrist? I tend to think of hand-wringing about cultural decadence and the decline of institutional religion as pretty firmly in the right's wheelhouse.
Imagine thinking the CEO and "primary shareholder" matters more than the people that are literally writing and reporting the news.
Zaslav (CEO of WBD which owns CNN) is a Democrat, but he is more pragmatic than Woke. I see him as fitting into the old-time Hollywood producer archetype -- a left-of-center Jew who prioritizes business over politics. E.g. Spielberg.
Looking at my screen, the Newhouse family is the LARGEST shareholder of WBD, but at an 8% stake, I wouldn't call them the PRIMARY shareholder, which to me implies control. I think this is really Zaslav's game at the moment and to the degree he's under shareholder pressure, it's over performance and not politics.
You have to be bonkers to think CNN is a moderate news organization. Perhaps compared to Mother Jones, but its primetime lineup is: Jake Tapper, Wolf Blitzer, Erin Burnett, and Anderson Cooper. Not a single Romney voter to be found. More lockstep Biden voters than Fox is lockstep Trump (Bret Baier is a well documented moderate Democrat) They still employ Don Lemon. The median story at CNN remains from a POV far to the left of the median voter or congressman.
CNN is still rated Left with high confidence:
https://www.allsides.com/news-source/cnn-media-bias
The funny thing is that you don't need to warp coverage to make conservatives look bad. They do it all on their own.
How very liberal of you to make such a comment.
And to think, I graduated H.S. with just a 1.8 GPA.
We didn't do grade point averages in my day, I'll have to see if I can convert my Leaving Cert results!
EDIT: Okay, I found a website which was more confusing than helpful, so I converted my Irish final grades into US equivalents. I don't have "credits/hours" so I can't multiply my points for grade x credits/hours for class.
So: (1) Turn Irish grades into US grades - using Secondary School
https://www.scholaro.com/db/countries/Ireland/Grading-System
(2) Turn US grades into points
https://www.scholaro.com/gpa-calculator/
(3) Multiply points by credits, then divide total by total number of credits
Can't multiply "3.00 points x 3 credits = 9 total points" so, going just by the raw marks (average of the points from step 2), it's 3.00 GPA? Maybe?
One thing I like about this blog is, despite leaning left, it seems to attract those interested in objective truth. With certain notable exceptions...
I identify as conservative (though not Republican). I apparently look bad.
Funny, I would say that this blog clearly leans Right. Perhaps it varies with the topic under discussion? (edit: or did you mean the blog itself rather than the comments? Scott's politics seem a bit more tricky to pin down.)
My impression is Scott's politics have a slight but quirky right lean while commenters lean pretty hard to the libertarian right.
Scott has described himself as "vaguely centrist", and I think that's about all we're going to get.
I tend to think the blog gets more conservative commentators because it criticizes liberals more. Especially when it first started out, it had more of a feel of "reasonable liberal critiques leftist extremism". Unfortunately, this brought in a good number of conservatives who don't apply Scott's degree of charity and thought to their own analyses and just want to rant about how the eeeevul liberals are destroying civilization.
It's the opposite of most other intellectual spaces I've seen on the internet, where the conservatives generally have to hold themselves to a higher standard of reason and civility than the liberals majority do in order to be accepted by them.
Scott definitely leans left overall, but he often questions the orthodoxy of the left so he's not considered culturally left and ends up attracting a decent readership on the right. He also has some opinions that are right-coded or libertarian, such as his thoughts on feminism (which he doesn't talk about anymore).
We don't have a great way to measure political lean of the readers who don't post (Scott's survey will have that, but I also question it's worth in measuring "the blog" since they don't have a very visible presence). Of those that do post, there's a lot of range, with most people closer to centrist than the more extreme of either major political faction. On certain topics, such as gay marriage, "the blog" holds a very leftward view. On other topics, such as economic theory, "the blog" leans pretty heavily to the right (free market). Then there's some weird niche things like HBD where there are almost no places on the internet that tolerate discussion about it, so people come here to throw in their two cents about it. Scott barely tolerates that either, and clamps down on too direct of a discussion.
If I had to characterise (my impression of) Scott’s position, I tend to think he’s vaguely leftish centre but with genuine curiosity and a fair number of views that *I* don’t think are right wing, but have become caught up in the culture war. By contrast, I always read the Less Wrong crowd as generally rightish (and a bit elitist) in the way I expected a lot of ‘Rationalist’ techies to be, and EY in particular always read fairly rightish to me (certainly to *my* right), but a few years back I encountered a few who thought they (and EY) were all super left wing and that anyone who criticised them or anything they wrote must be right wing! Which was surprising.
But I don’t think ‘left’ and ‘right’ are especially useful terms, as they mostly seem to be tribal labels and generally people I know and have real conversations with hold views that are all over the place by the labels.
The real difference with Scott, apart from his openness, is that while he would think it was very useful and important to have the computer model what the impact would be of ‘kill all the poor’, he would be horrified by the idea that any answer to that would make you more or less likely to actually ‘kill all the poor’. Whereas I got the uneasy impression in some other ‘Rationalist’ circles that there would be some results from the computer that would make them actively work towards ‘kill all the poor’. https://youtube.com/watch?v=owI7DOeO_yg But maybe they’ve changed: I decided, on that basis, to stay away from them years ago.
You've got to be careful there. It's true that they make themselves look bad to ME, but not necessarily to those who agree with them. I remember a research study LONG ago where they found that in TV episodes of (?? Archie Bunker??), the liberals thought it was an argument for liberal views, and the conservatives though it was an argument for conservative views.
All In The Family, a show which could never be produced nowadays.
You are assuming that media leads public opinion more than it responds to it. But media has an incentive to respond to the mood of its audience. (A quick google gives me this recent 538 article showing media coverage of the economy responds to public opinion not vice versa https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/media-coverage-doesnt-actually-determine-public-opinion-on-the-economy/ ). Not sure if anyone has done similar studies for any of the examples listed
That's true! It's hard to get the direction of causation correct. Probably it's at least a little bidirectional
I don't think the economy is a good proxy to use on purely cultural war policies. No one comes to their conclusion on abortion the way they do about economic policy.
There's a lot of overlap, but I've got to admit that frequently I can't understand HOW people come to their conclusion on abortion. I've got the strong suspicion that people don't know, so they make up a story to justify their decision.
It's not that hard. If you think the foetus is a person, then abortion is murder. If you don't, it's just a medical procedure. Performative misunderstanding is so dull.
I largely agree, but I’ll add that lifestyle choices wrt sex adds a motivated reasoning component on both sides
Agree about motivated reasoning - but not sure it applies on both sides.
IIUC, most pregnancies spontaneously abort, usually early enough that it looks like just a heavy period. Is it murder to not protect those?
FWIW, I consider any cell bearing a human genetic code to be human, at least in potentia. And I don't consider it actually human until it can respond sensibly. And there's a gradation in between those positions, which I don't have defined. After all, it's reasonably possible that one could take some skin cells and grow a clone of the person sampled. We can't do it yet, or at least probably not, but I expect that we'll be able to within a decade. And I'm not going to stop showering because of that.
The "drawing a hard line" isn't what happens in the world, and I don't see how anyone could think that it is. Hard lines are drawn by people for their convenience. (Yes, it's *very* convenient, but it's still artificial. Once you look closely, any apparent clear separation between things in contact gets fuzzy. Are your guts inside you or on the surface? Well, it depends on how you're looking at things. Lots of really small animals treat them as a protected area of the surface. [I'm thinking of tapeworms in particular here, but they aren't alone.])
Do newborn babies respond sensibly?
Just read this after posting a comment below: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/which-political-victories-cause-backlash/comment/12055275
You might find this interesting:
http://culturalcognition.squarespace.com/blog/2013/8/8/partisan-media-are-not-destroying-america.html
That doesn't seem to track increasing Republican support for gay marriage though, assuming Republicans are mostly paying attention to conservative media.
You're right, that isn't really explained. I'm speaking in ignorance here, but maybe there wasn't a major conservative media backlash against the Supreme Court gay marriage decision? Or not a sustained one?
Asserted without evidence that conservatives mostly pay attention to conservative media. If a conservative watches the NFL or any other sports league they are being exposed to progressive media. The news programs that come on after said sports will also be dominated by progressive-leaning reporting. If they stay up later and become part of the ever-dwindling audiences of late night comedy they are again watching very left wing media.
Fox News is pretty dang influential, you'd think it'd be able to swing the conservative demographic on at least one of those issues if that was what was happening
I don't think people are really so easily manipulated or that the media is actually as liberal as some of you think.
Most (overwhelmingly, as you note) journalists are Democrats, and story coverage is somewhat liberal but not in the sense that they're scheming against Republicans or just left-leaning equivalents of Fox or Breitbart or something. They make a serious effort to be "balanced" between the two parties. When it comes to unconscious bias, it's better-described as urban than "liberal," though there's some overlap there on social issues. On foreign policy, they are kind of "pro-establishment;" on economic policy, they're center-right; on culture, they're hopelessly left. Like, they might try to be fair to religious people, but there's no sense at all that God is real and acting in the world (remember that like 40% of the population in America is creationist), racism and "homophobia" are seen as obviously wrong and evil (and are more broadly defined than most people would define them), etc. And I think they are more deferential to Republicans than they are to Democrats (basically reflected in the fact that they are happy to be accused of partisan bias by Democrats and scared of the accusation from Republicans--naturally because in both cases it plays against common criticisms).
In combination with liberals being more interested in winning policy battles and conservatives being more interested in winning the culture war, that explains why both liberals and conservatives think the media is biased against them. It is on the issues that matter most to them.
The Newsroom TV series explained the phenomenon best:
“
Charlie: We did the news.
Leona: For the left.
Charlie: For the center.
Leona: Are you fucking out of your mind–?!
Charlie: For the center, Leona! Facts... are the center. Facts. We don't pretend that certain facts are in dispute to give the appearance of fairness to people who don't believe them. Balance is irrelevant to me. It has nothing to do with the truth, logic, or reality. He didn't go on the air telling people to give peace a chance, but evolution? The jury's back on that one.”
I’d be absolutely shocked if there was even 1 Republican for every 99 Democrats in the newsroom of prestige papers.
Does america not have an equivalent of the Telegraph?
No. Wall Street Journal would probably be the closest because it is business focused, but the newsroom most definitely still skews significantly "left".
I have observed a decided leftward shift in the WSJ in the past couple of years.
Because of the need for a high school diploma to get a journalism job? /S
Whereas no credentials at all are needed to be sarcastic on the Internet, a fact for which I am grateful (even as I get into trouble for being sarcastic on the Internet).
You can't stop me by demanding qualifications!
You're assuming a uni-direcrional causation, which I think is questionable.
Media coverage reflects the opinions of the target audience more so than drives public views. This is an empirical question which has been studied. Some evidence shows that because people select their media to start with in order to confirm their views, the causal role of media in opinion formation is less than people often think.
I'm inclined to agree, except hardcore republicans watch right news, so they should produce a similar bounce.
I see two separate statements you're making, and one of them is much more defensible than the other.
One, the media has a liberal bias. This seems pretty clearly true to me, as NYT and CNN are what people think of as the "mainstream media", rather than Fox. Clutzy brings up "60 Minutes", which I've never consciously watched, but I'm willing to believe him that it's a random program that doesn't need to have a partisan spin but which has a liberal bias.
The other is that the mainstream media is actually a major driver of what people's opinions are. This may have been true when it was more truly mainstream, but now it's a truism that the media is biased. If everyone who leans conservative expects not to trust NYT, CNN, and wouldn't agree with them anyway, why would NYT and CNN trumpeting how bad a conservative victory is move even Republicans to react against it?
(An interesting theory raised below is that these polls are answered by the same types of people who answer political-horse-race polls, selecting against "silent Trump voters" etc.)
"Relative to the current status quo, are you pro-choice or pro-life" is a question that would produce the observed pattern, and it's plausible that many or most people would interpret the question this way, consciously or unconsciously.
I don't know about that. The labels "pro-choice" and "pro-life" have been firmly entrenched for decades as absolute positions, even if there's some variation in gradation among different people's definition (e.g. some interpret "pro-choice" as including those who support keeping abortion legal but personally think it's always immoral, others as thinking that abortion should be legal only in a narrow range of cases, others as being a body autonomy absolutist, etc.).
I think the gradation in definitions is precisely the point, and it depends on the context. If Roe is the law, and I am for abortion being legal only for serious compelling reasons, then I am pro-life, right? Against abortion on demand, so "pro-life with exceptions", one would say. But now, if I live in a state where abortion is banned without exceptions, or if that's an imminent proposal, then holding the same position I'd be called pro-choice, since I'm against that ban. This may well be enough to explain the entire polling change, although I do think backlashes happen as well.
This could be part of it. As an example, I have thought for a long time that abortion should be banned after 12 except for life of mother/child, but should be legal before that. Let's say I live in Texas and was polled this question each time. Before Dobbs, I want Roe v. Wade overturned so I say I'm pro life, to indicate my support for the conservative effort to appoint originalist justices. Post Dobbs, same question, I say I'm pro choice, to indicate to my current state government that they went to far, and should allow abortions up to 12 weeks. I think people like that could be a large amount of the change.
What *I* would do is interpret the question as biased, and decline to answer it. This is because of the connotations of the terms used. Or I might say "both".
Now if you asked me whether I thought the human population should increase, that I could answer.
I think it's the media is liberal, and they do $(a few different things) to convince everyone the conservatives are evil, and everyone agrees for a while. I suppose if I were serious about proving/disproving my hunch (it is, alas, only a hunch) I would go back to the 1990's, or some other time when one could argue the media had a conservative bias, and find similar events during that time and see if there was a conservative-direction backlash.
Maybe some things during Bill Clinton's reign?
The media was equally liberal in the 90s. You'd probably have to go back to the Eisenhower era to test this idea.
Back in the '90s I had to debate in school whether there was a liberal bias in the news. There was a 1993 Bill Clinton quote that I discussed where he said
"I have fought more damn battles here for more things than any President has in 20 years with the possible exception of Reagan's first budget and not gotten one damn bit of credit from the knee-jerk liberal press, and I am sick and tired of it, and you can put that it your damn article.".
Even back then there seemed to be the perception that the media had a liberal bias, otherwise it probably wouldn't have come up for debate. And ostensibly they were being too hard on Clinton, although I tend to think he was feigning outrage as politicians do.
Interestingly that quote came a few days before the Waco siege, and his popularity continued to take a dip to some historically low numbers. I was too young at the time to have a real sense of whether the media was being fair to him, but I'm not sure how easily even a liberal media could have put a positive spin on Waco.
The thing is, a right wing media that wanted to could easily have put a positive spin on Waco. They've done that kind of things several times. (But for right wing coverage it usually has to be our heroic soldiers in a foreign country. [Soldiers is just typical. Any US govt. employee being either aggressive or defensive will do.])
But, yeah, the doctrines of the left make defending that kind of action quite difficult.
Bear in mind Clinton ran as a "third way" centrist, and he was certainly in his rhetoric, and to some real extent in his policies, significantly to the right of traditional Democrats. (For example, he was definitely to the right of Joe Biden, even the 2020 Joe Biden.)
Theory 1: Individual liberal policies poll much better than liberal politicians as a whole. Events that crystalize politics around specific tangible policies may end up favoring liberals.
Theory 2: Maybe the "shy Tory" effect is actually stronger for liberals, or at least liberal policies, than we realize. Perhaps there's a significant cohort of people don't want to be one of those bleeding heart liberals or blue-haired feminists attitudinally but when it comes down to actual women being forced to carry unwanted babies they line up on the liberal side.
This is probably the best answer. Pluralities or even majorities of Republican voters often are shown to oppose Republican policies. The issue is probably that left-wing cultural-war stuff is unpopular but left-leaning policies are popular, which is why Republicans generally want elections to be about whose side one is on in the culture wars and Democrats want you to ignore culture wars.
A simple way to make an electoral killing: Start selling social conservatism and a mildly leftist economic lean in one package. The demand is there, but both parties studiously refuse to provide.
In Europe, there are parties along these lines but a lot of their representatives are village idiots for the simple reason that being part of said parties is hideously low status partly due to media coverage. (And not recent coverage at that, all the "respectable" media has told eg. me that immigration criticism is racism for all my life)
> Start selling social conservatism and a mildly leftist economic lean in one package
Isn't that exactly what Trump was about?
There was a little rhetoric in that direction at times, but in terms of actual policy I don't think anything he did can really be described as economically on the left. Maybe the trade stuff but calling that leftist is pretty debatable.
The question of whether Trump is economically on the left depends on whether you stand with Milton Friedman's "to spend is to tax" stance or with Dick Cheney's "deficits don't matter". For the Friedmanites he's way out to the left, but among the Cheneyistas he ain't
It's tricky to pull off, though. Republicans who do it are seen as not being legitimately committed to the leftist economic lean, and Democrats who do it are still tied to Twitter purplehairs by the rightist media.
You have to somehow sell “social conservatism + pro choice + gay marriage”, which is pretty hard.
For gay marriage the line could be that they won't repeal they wouldn't persue any expansion.
For abortion they could offer a middle ground (low term length and reasonable exceptions for health and rapee) as a federal guarantee and say states should make their own laws to suit them
I mean, I think somewhere in there is a belief structure that the median voter holds (note that this is not what I believe):
1. Abortion should be generally legal and isn't really murder in the first trimester, but certain mainstream Democrat positions on it are scary and, while rare, possibly murder (babies born alive left to die, abortion up to the moment of birth).
2. To oppose gay marriage is homophobic, but sexualized teachings and displays in front of children are weird and gross. Self-identified trans people are sort of nuts and society shouldn't revolve around them, but live and let live if they're not hurting anybody. Biological males shouldn't compete in girls' sports, and minors shouldn't be given trans surgery or hormone therapy.
3. Intact families are ideal. While no-fault divorce should remain freely available, fathers and mothers are both important and should be encouraged to get and stay married. The well-being of children ought to be prioritized over libertine sexual desires. Parents should have more say over their own children than teachers and "experts".
Of course, a politician of either party offering these views is going to most likely meet impossible opposition in the primary.
For the last point, making marriage not a legal concept (id est, no law has a different effect based on marital status) would probably be your best bet.
I don't think that most social conservatives would be happy with that.
If it was framed as "getting government out of marriage" I think it'd have a shot.
This was Trump 100%. He campaigned on culture war issues plus was against immigration and free trade. He also supported universal health care and opposed cutting entitlements although that was obviously empty rhetoric.
I think you just invented the New Deal Coalition.
My instinct is this strategy would perform very well in US general elections, but would usually lose in party primaries. Last election, extreme candidates performed very well in primaries, but underperformed in the general election. Lauren Boebert is an example of this having barely won in her historically red district by only a few hundred votes. Democrats even experimented with this phenomenon by running ads supporting more extreme GOP candidates in some places, so they would have a weaker opponent in the general election. Seems to have worked in a couple cases.
The problem with #1 is that we're looking at how well a policy polls over time. The policy polling better could only explain a level, not change.
I think the sample size is too small to draw any meaningful conclusions. If this was a systematic pattern with decades of history I would be much more inclined to try to draw some conclusions, but otherwise I think each backlash is specific to the policy in question.
It may also be part selection bias: the last congressional session passed hundreds of bills, most of them didn't have backlash, so the baseline is to expect no shift in public opinion over the implementation of an idea (maybe unless the implementation is uniquely bad, like how brexit turned into a giant mess that left nobody happy).
Related possibility: the polling firms don't have a genuinely representative set of people labelled Republican. That is, the "Republicans" in their sample are only notionally so. Polling firms have research that shows this. Look for pro-social bias.
I am pretty sure this is true. In December, I answered a phone call from a survey organization asking it I would support a state constitutional amendment guaranteeing bodily autonomy for women in response to Dobbs. I said I would not, which led to many questions about how they could change it to get my support. When I explain my views (pro-life with exceptions for health of the mother/child), the pollster paused and said, “Okay, I have to write something down. He then started asking questions for another minute or so, after which the call cut off mid-question. We are pretty sure he reached out to a supervisor, who arranged to cut off the call. Thus my survey was incomplete and could be excluded from the results.
That sounds like an internal poll run by some organization that wanted to sponsor such an amendment and wanted data to inform decisions about how to frame and promote it, not the kind of poll that gets published as an estimated snapshot of public opinion.
Agreed, mostly. Otoh, there is one systematic pattern of "backlash" : mid-terms usu. go worse for the party that won the presidency.
Number of undecideds and level of salience is probably a factor. Pre Dobbs a lot of Americans who never really thought about abortion wouldn't report strong feelings on it, but when Dobbs passed it rapidly increased in salience, and so reported pro choice.
In general a big salient event probably pushes undecideds towards the most popular side, since they are likely to break down the same way as the rest of the population when exposed to more information. In the gay marriage case majority support was already for gay marriage, so undecideds mostly tipped that way.
I think Richard Hanania's observation that liberals are more tuned-in to politics and care more about politics than conservatives do can provide some explanation.
Would this imply that liberalism is more "scalable" as a movement? Like, can liberalism increase its level of political power in the country in a way conservatism cannot?
Yes as proven almost without fail by the past half century of american politics
Yes. Obviously, yes. Don't just look at the past half century, look at past half millennia.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/
https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/ouroboros-theory
Thank you for the SSC link! As a true disciple, I read that post before, ofc. But, omg, it was and is a nice one. - I try to dig the ouroboros thing ... it seems good, but dunno, maybe it's just the font ...
Not as much a fan of Bastable either, but I had recently read it so I decided to include it mainly because of his points about how the general left narrative of fighting injustice is far more activating than the right narrative of defend against alleged existential risk.
I thought the bonstable article as decent initially, but upon further reflection it seems like he was half cribbing moldbug and half promoting a facile agonism.
I also dont think its particularly edifying to characterize the magna carta as the first step of progressivism. Sure enhanced rights and procedural due process, but rights for aristocrats as against the crown..
Political victories which do not meet the approval of the hegemonic class.
I'd theorize this happens when people think they can hold an opinion that will never come into effect. It probably felt nice for some people to vote for Trump in a rage against the machine, but when he came into power, they had to live with his actions, not just the message their ballot signaled. Similar story for abortion: I was talking to one of my closest friends a few days before the draft leaked; he said he wished abortion were illegal but "knew" the Court would never budge, and so it remained an abstract, lukewarm conviction. After the decision, the ensuing chaos, and a billion testimonies, he's now pro-choice. Maybe the decision encouraged people to proselytize outside their normal bubbles and punctured echo chambers; perhaps more people who knew the arguments and weighed them had their scales tipped. Not sure of any other examples to test this hypothesis against, but I'd love to hear some. (Edited for clarity and to remove Markdown syntax—sorry, first post <3)
A possible counterexample is the support for government healthcare post ACA, since it didn't really change, despite individual aspects of it like coverage for pre-existing conditions becoming accepted status quo. Though possibly its a case of people not connecting specifics to general principle. "Government healthcare" is sufficiently vague people can still say they oppose it while saying medicaid should be protected
Democrat policies are typically ones that don't produce identifiable victims. For example, the BLM movement generally resulted in increased homicide, but no individual homicide is 100% attributable to BLM. OTOH, a deported person is a crying person to have on camera. See, e.g. woman's tears as a superweapon.
Then it is a big problem for your theory that BLM-associated rioting and the "defund the police" slogan actually produced a *huge* backlash. It's the only reason Trump was even competitive in 2020.
Even far-lefties like David Shor have been talking about how the BLM backlash cost Democrats in 2020.
Agree-- police and criminal justice reform fall into this category as well.
It's because when people are given conservative policies they realize those policies are terrible (abortion bans result in horrible criminalization regimes) whereas when they are given liberal policies they realize those policies are fine (gay marriage does not in fact undermine civilization and does not affect anyone's life negatively).
Recent US politics is maybe a bad example of the general phenomenon, given ideological polarization. The republican base is smaller and therefore further from the median voter. So a GOP victory is something with 30% popular support passing, not one with 50%. Would be interesting to do a comparison with a country with a more proportional system and centrist coalition based governance. (Germany maybe?)
This is the most interesting theory in the comments! I strongly appreciate that it can give clear predictions without simply accepting a political viewpoint.
In short: popular backlash is more likely when the governing coalition represents a minority. And perhaps: the smaller the minority, the more likely the backlash.
Trump won with minority support. The current SCOTUS majority did as well.
In the past, SCOTUS has been well to the left of the public, e.g. in decisions striking down segregated schooling and capital punishment. And those did provoke quite a backlash.
Congress has usually been slightly to the right of the public due to gerrymandering, but this changed in 2022 and going forward it's possible that will continue. If so, then it's possible there will be Congressional decisions that spark a right-leaning backlash.
Yes the obvious answer is this. Gay marriage passed, and all the supposed bad things clearly did not happen, people's net happiness just went up.
Thank goodness there are no naked men in Bugs Bunny masks parading around in broad dayli--- https://i.imgur.com/6J23Sjx.png
Fuck, well, at least kids aren't being taught pole dancing by half-naked wo--- https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1562841193439825920
Okay, maybe that's a bit nuts and someone needs to go tell some perverts no, but at least we believe in science and people aren't so ideologically compromised they can't answer "What is a woman?"
...oh, there's a film made to mock that very pathology?
Well, at least they're not letting bearded men convicted for sex crimes into women's prisons because they say s---
Fine, at least the cops still hate kiddy di-- they're visiting people for "being untoward towards paedophiles"?
Ok, the sky is still blue, at least? Please?
If you think there weren't naked guys in Bugs Bunny masks -- not to mention leashes and collars -- parading around in public decades before Obergefell, you probably need to get out more often.
True. But we weren't expected to fly flags celebrating them for a designated month of the year.
Not to mention nobody questions how, after hundreds of thousands of years of human civilization during which every sane human being would have considered it important, inasmuch as it were possible, for all children to have a mother, we now have no problem with children being raised by two men...
Right, "inasmuch as it were possible." But since most of these kids are orphans, they are supposed to remain in foster care until a straight couple comes along? That might be preferable, I suppose, but if so you need to make an actual argument, rather than what every sane human used to think, but no longer does. Every sane human being for hundreds of thousands of years believed lots of things that you, I am sure, think are nonsense, unless you happen to be a pro-slavery flat-Earther animist or the like.
There are plenty of man-woman couples who have to wait for years to adopt. Gay marriage is not suddenly solving a problem (that never existed) for orphaned kids.
I think the onus is on those who have decided that a basic biological fact of nature (in most species and certainly in human beings), ie. that offspring are primarily raised by the female figure, no longer matters at all. Why shouldn't that be subject to extensive scientific study before we decide that it has no negative effects on the child or on society in general? But no, we have done no studies. In the space of about 15 years we have unilaterally thrown hundreds of thousands of years of human wisdom and experience out the window.
And I firmly disbelieve that every sane person ever thought slavery (in the sense of chattel slavery and not castigative slavery) was a good and natural thing, in the same way that they would have thought the relationship between a mother and child was. I think that is an unfair comparison.
And yet there are also plenty of children who wait for years to be adopted. Not to mention intercountry adoptions. The point is that, unless there are zero children waiting for adoption, the argument that "inasmuch as it were possible" children should have a mother in the household is not much of an argument against permitting a male couple, or even a single male, to adopt. Note that this has nothing to do with gay marriage per se (nor did your comment, which was about adoption), because the argument applies equally to adoption by single men.
The comparison with slavery is not unfair because the point is not that they are identical, but that the rationale is the same. And here is what the Sultan of Morocco said in 1842, when asked by the British government what he was doing to suppress the slave trade: " "the traffic in slaves is a matter on which all sects and nations have agreed from the time of the sons of Adam . . . up to this day -- and we are not aware of its being prohibited by the laws of any sect, and no one need ask this question, the same being manifest to both high and low and requires no more demonstration than the light of day." Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East, p. 151. Why should we find your argument more convincing than yours?
I'm not sure that arguments from biology are strongly relevant to adoption; the biologically natural thing in many species is surely to let orphaned children die.
I'm confused by the assertion that there is not a problem for orphaned kids. If orphaned kids simply don't exist anymore, why does it matter who is allowed to adopt them? If orphans do exist (and I think we're in agreement that they do), could you break down your argument a little more? For example, you might be claiming one of several things:
1. Remaining in foster care until adulthood should be expected to be preferable to getting adopted by a family that doesn't have a stable heterosexual marriage.
2. Remaining in foster care until adulthood should be expected to be preferable to getting adopted by a family that doesn't have at least one woman (so e.g. adoption by a single mother or a lesbian couple is fine, adoption by a single father or a gay couple is not).
3. Adoption by a gay couple would on average be an improvement over foster care, but allowing gay couples to adopt does not lead to children getting adopted faster, and leads to worse experiences for the children once adopted (i.e. there are no benefits to allowing gay couples to adopt).
4. Adoption by a gay couple would on average be an improvement over foster care (there is a benefit to allowing gay adoption), but the benefit of waiting a little longer and getting adopted by a straight couple would be greater (there is a cost to allowing gay adoption); and the cost outweighs the benefit.
For what it's worth, my personal sense is that adoption is better than foster care (ruling out 1 and 2), and I'd expect increasing the supply of families who may adopt to decrease the time to adoption (ruling out 3), though I can imagine data that would convince me otherwise. That leaves arguing something like option 4, in which fundamentally you're pitting arguments from biology against arguments from culture. My own sense is that humans are *very* cultural animals and culture would win -- but before arguing about that, I would want to make sure that we don't diverge earlier!
"But since most of these kids are orphans, they are supposed to remain in foster care until a straight couple comes along?"
You know I always have to go looking for figures when claims like this are made, don't you?
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/lgbt-parenting-us/
"Same-sex couples raising children are four times more likely than their different-sex counterparts to be raising an adopted child. An estimated 16,000 same-sex couples are raising more than 22,000 adopted children in the US.
Among those under age 50 who are living alone or with a spouse or partner, nearly half of LGBT women (48%) are raising a child under age 18 along with a fifth of LGBT men (20%).
Same-sex couple parents and their children are more likely to be racial and ethnic minorities.
Childrearing among same-sex couples is most common in Southern, Mountain West, and Midwest regions of the country. States with the highest proportions of same-sex couples raising biological, adopted or step children include Mississippi (26%), Wyoming (25%), Alaska (23%), Idaho (22%), and Montana (22%).
LGBT individuals and same-sex couples raising children evidence some economic disadvantage.
Single LGBT adults raising children are three times more likely than comparable non-LGBT individuals to report household incomes near the poverty threshold.
Married or partnered LGBT individuals living in two-adult households with children are twice as likely as comparable non-LGBT individuals to report household incomes near the poverty threshold.
The median annual household income of same-sex couples with children under age 18 in the home is lower than comparable different-sex couples ($63,900 versus $74,000, respectively)."
So now let's compare adoption figures and foster care figures for the non-LGBT, if we can:
https://creatingafamily.org/adoption-category/adoption-blog/adoption-cost-length-time/
"Adoptions from foster care have declined for two years in a row. In FY 2021 (the most recent year from which the data has been reported), the number of children adopted with public child welfare agency involvement was 54,240. This is a decrease from 66,208 in FY 2019 and 57,881 in FY 2020.
Currently, there are 391,098 children in foster care, compared to 408,000 children in FY 2020 and 426,000 in FY 2019. Neglect remains the primary reason children enter foster care, followed by parental substance abuse. The average age of children in foster care is eight (8) years old — 44% of kids in foster care are nine (9) years and older. Finding foster and adoptive placements for these older kids is particularly challenging.
About 25% of children in foster care cannot reunify with parents or other kinship relatives. Approximately 37% were adopted or placed in a guardianship relationship. The average time spent in care for a foster child was 21.7 months. In FY2021, more than 113,000 children were waiting in foster care for an adoptive family."
Not all the children in foster care *are* eligible for adoption:
http://www.ccainstitute.org/resources/fact-sheets
"In 2021, according the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services:
On any given day, over 391,000 children are living in the U.S. foster care system and the number has been rising. Over 113,000 of these children are eligible for adoption and they will wait, on average, almost three years for an adoptive family.
53% of the children and youth who left foster care were reunited with their families or living with a relative; 25% were adopted.
More than 48,000 youth in U.S. foster care live in institutions, group homes, and other environments, instead of with a family.
Of the 53,500 children and youth who were adopted in 2021:
55% were adopted by their foster parent(s) and 34% by a relative.
29% were age nine years or older and the average age of adoption is six years old.
Of the families who adopted children from foster care, 68% were married couples, 25% single females, 3% single males, and 4% unmarried couples.
93% of the parents rely on adoption subsidies and/or vital post-adoption services to help meet the children's varied, and often costly, needs."
So if we look at the LGBT group of adoptive parents, it's the lesbians who are adopting rather than the gays, and the non-white more than the white; from my own impression, the rich gay guys who want kids go for surrogate pregnancies rather than adoptions. But that's only my own impression.
Also, there may not be that many babies for adoption (as distinct from older kids in foster care):
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/10/adopt-baby-cost-process-hard/620258/
"And, as we’ve heard a million times, there are so many babies out there who need a good home.
But that is not actually true. Adopting a baby or toddler is much more difficult than it was a few decades ago. Of the nearly 4 million American children who are born each year, only about 18,000 are voluntarily relinquished for adoption. Though the statistics are unreliable, some estimates suggest that dozens of couples are now waiting to adopt each available baby. Since the mid-1970s—the end of the so-called baby-scoop era, when large numbers of unmarried women placed their children for adoption—the percentage of never-married women who relinquish their infants has declined from nearly 9 percent to less than 1 percent."
So if you want a baby, you'll probably go the surrogate pregnancy route (if you can afford it) rather than wait for the possibility of adopting a baby.
Eh, I don't know. I guess I used to feel this way. But it's really not that bad. Sure, your examples are of tacky and low behavior, but other than that...
About the pedophiles, I think we are still working out how to process the fact they exist. Hatred and outrage really are not the best solutions, but neither is full acceptance a solution, like that time those French intellectuals signed a petition to do away with age of consent laws. It's tricky. Probably the solution will involve recognizing them as sick people, not judging them for it.
Age of consent is a poor and vague heuristic at best, so doing away with those laws isn't intrinsically a bad idea if better options are available. I think emancipation in general should be more accessible to teens that feel they are mature enough to vote or engage in other adult activities.
Yeah, teens are a gray area, but those French demons wanted to fuck literal children. It's really not the same. It would be interesting to see how we as a society would go about evaluating the maturity of a teenager, it could be a worthwhile exercise.
Marriage has declined since gay marriage was legalized, and some courts have started to recognize polygamous pairings. Megan McArdle on this subject pointed out years ago that the negative effects of policies pooh-poohed by their supporters don't cause those policies to be rejected:
https://fireflydove.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/a-libertarian-view-of-gay-marriage/
> Marriage has declined since gay marriage was legalized
Well yes, but continuing a trend since 1980 with much greater declines prior to 2000.
https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/2020/4/marriage-rate-blog-test
> some courts have started to recognize polygamous pairings
Got a source for that? I've only had a brief look at Wikipedia but you'd think any actual recognition whould show up there. Utah has maybe decriminalised it in part, but that's a long way from recognition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_polygamy_in_the_United_States
https://www.unz.com/isteve/judge-rules-in-favor-of-polygamy/
https://harvardlawreview.org/2022/03/threes-company-too-the-emergence-of-polyamorous-partnership-ordinances/
I will note also that Scalia predicted the court would eventually rule in favor of SSM based on the logic of earlier decisions, and was dismissed at the time by Kennedy (who ultimately ruled in favor of SSM.
That seems like a reasonable explanation for the two examples that you cite, but there are also examples of liberal policies becoming unpopular, such as Defund The Police and the 1994 federal AWB.
I think there was backlash against Trump's policies even before he implemented them; I also don't think the average person is capable of noticing whether "protectionism" is going well or poorly, aside from maybe the general state of the economy, which was fine under early Trump.