I have respected Larry Bartels' analyses over the past twenty years more than most of his perch in political science land. In 2008, Bartels saw how democratic or republican (ideas, not political parties) values were eroding, as the non-coastal parts of the US had been hollowed out by trade deals and automation (although I wonder how he feels about his critique of Thomas Frank these days, especially as one begins to study the Knight Foundation as to who are the primary non-voters). Bartels' latest study (hat tip to a friend who is a retired Political Science professor from the University of California) is about how there is a growing lack of confidence in our public commitment to open government--but how the Republicans who have lost that confidence are more dangerous because theirs is rooted in ethnic and racial prejudices, and apocalyptic civil-war rhetoric. If I read Bartels' analysis correctly, he finds 20-30% of partisans in each political party who openly express a belief that violence is justified, and strongmen/women are required for leadership. He even found anti-democratic values more openly stated as an idea among Democratic Party partisans at least in regards to one question Bartels' study had asked.
Where Bartels does not go, and this is not a criticism of Bartels, is to find out, for example, which group of Dems want to have the president from their party shut down the other parties' controlled Congress. I think Bartels, if cornered, would assume it is more likely the AOC-Berniecrat activist. I would demur to that assumption or hypothesis. My gut is it is more the MSNBC truster who would want Biden to dissolve the entire Congress if the Congress goes fully Republican in 2022 (and it likely will if Biden governs as Biden intends). As an economically left New Dealer, I didn't trust Obama and I don't trust Biden. If they did declare martial law, they would do so to enforce a neo-liberal or corporate economics in a dictatorship, not complete the New Deal. After all, the corporate wing of the Democratic Party has little to no problem with the way in which Google, Disney, McDonalds, Coca-Cola, and other corporations bow to Chinese government censorship, and have no substantive problem with Chinese labor policies that replicate capitalist accumulation period-England, but under a Maoist-Communist banner. It is why corporate Dems refuse to work to enact card check or other labor reforms, or seek to give more power to the International Labor Organization, unlike their trade tribunals in the various trade agreement regimes created over the past nearly thirty years. The corporate Democrats are the ones who sided with corporate Republicans in establishing the global corporate order through international trade agreements they called "free trade," but which highly regulated intellectual property and agriculture favoring American agribusiness, and pushed manufacturing to lower wage/more exploitable work force nations.
I make this point because, unlike the much more complicated Democratic Party partisan divides, the Republicans who wanted Trump to shut down the Congress are pretty easy to find. And the sources those folks rely on for their world views are talk radio, FoxNews, and increasingly QAnon, NewsMax, and OANN--where there is a grooming for civil war to lead to a white nationalist/Fascist dictatorship to "save" America. Hence, Bartels' concern. It is in these media sources one finds the screaming white cultural grievances, and grooming for Fascism. When the economic populist component is mentioned, it is more where it is couched in language of government assistance for "in-crowd" people, but with harsh criminal laws that tend to more keep down those who are not in the racial or ethnic "in-crowd."
I remain convinced, not dissimilar to Thomas Frank and Christopher Lasch formulations, an economic populism of a Bernie type can most effectively recreate class solidarity across racial and ethnic lines, and stabilize belief in open government values--IF one is interested in protecting the stability of a society instead of taking care of your own short-term economic needs. The Republican Party's approach is clearly trending toward authoritarian Fascistic class divisions along cultural lines, and ethnic/racial lines. The corporate Democratic Party line believes more in meritocracy and political pluralism, where diversity reigns in superficialities of skin color and gender, but where the elite interests are most protected and promoted--even to the detriment of the many who are increasingly left behind in global-oriented markets. It remains my contention the corporate wing of the Democratic Party has a symbiotic relationship with the Republican fascists, where one side breeds more of the other side. The fact that many working class people who voted for Trump can conflate Democratic Party politicians with rich people should be enough to ask how and most importantly why that is.
The fact that questioning has been so long ignored (and, worse, denied, as in Bartels' critique of Thomas Frank's major book on American politics) is the purpose of this post. My prime criticism of public opinion political scientist researchers is they so rarely question whether people are able to correctly self-identify "what" they are--meaning left, liberal, moderate, conservative, right. I say this despite the fact political scientists and pollsters have long recognized and documented how the majority of Americans, when asked about specific policy issues, are "liberal"-"left", not "center" or "moderate," at least as how those political philosophy conclusions are defined in corporate media. The disconnect, where people self-identify as "moderate" or "conservative" compared to "liberal," while somehow wanting steep wealth and progressive income and capital gains taxes, higher minimum wages, single payer health care, cancelled student debt, and free college tuition, to take a few examples, has to do more with propaganda techniques which deeply embedded themselves in our corporate-sponsored media-directed discourse that makes opinion surveys akin to asking fish about whether they notice the water. This blind spot also applies to "journalists," pundits, and political scientists themselves, who, when pushed on structural bias, are wont to yell, "Bias? You must be a conspiracy theorist!"
I have long said a proper public opinion survey (and this goes for overrated hacks such as Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist who studies people's political views and values) should and must apply Daniel Bell's formulation that uses the modifiers "economic," "political," and "cultural" to qualify the spectrum words "left," "liberal," "moderate," "conservative," and "right." Bell called this his "three realms" methodology in his brilliant book, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976). Applying this methodology to himself, Bell would say to interviewers, "I am an economic radical, a political liberal, and a cultural conservative. So what am I? Liberal or Conservative?" And he would almost always smile with the recognition of confusing the interviewer.
Too often, most Americans, not able to articulate the structure of their own beliefs, begin, without consciousness, with "cultural" issues to determine if someone is a "liberal" or "conservative," or "far left" or "far right"--without recognizing they are doing so. They rarely cite economical and political theories and policies to define someone as "liberal" or "conservative," nor ask how their own economic or political philosophies or policy views interact with how they evaluate the overall world views. This is most frustrating because, in Daniel Bell's other works, Bell taught us how global corporate capitalism, emboldened with trade treaties, was making economics primary for understanding the world. He did not, of course, mean we should be listening to economists over sociologists, political scientists, and historians--as he recognized how corporate power capture of college or university economics departments had long occurred.
This leads to the second problem I have with political scientists' public opinion surveys and analyses: Too often, political scientists refuse to engage with the structural biases in modern official/corporate media. They think, if they do so, they are making value judgments about the media people consume, and worse, becoming "political"--and therefore biased. I agree this is a very real problem in conducting experimental and empirical analyses, and that attempting to quantify the degree to which media sources influence the way voters evaluate their own world views is probably impossible--at least without putting yourself directly into the analysis. However, if a political scientist's public opinion analysis ignores the way in which corporate-owned media outlets, upon which the majority of Americans rely, frame what is or is not discussed, and how various topics are discussed or not discussed, then the political scientist's analyses tend to be self-fulfilling prophecies at best, or, worse, reenforce, under the guise of scholarship, the very propaganda they have ignored.
Yes, it is harder to do a "press" or "media" criticism within a public opinion survey analysis, but if one begins with the questions using the Bell Three Realms Methodology, one can begin to help improve the way in which readers of political science analyses, and citizens answering the political scientists' surveys, can more effectively and accurately self-identify. This means political scientists should learn how to more effectively recognize how language is used in corporate media presentations, how questions are asked in different ways of different political actors, and where assumptions of legitimacy are made that fall more in line with corporate hierarchies of the media companies themselves--and corporations in general.
If I was to have an opportunity to speak to a group of political scientists, I would say they should take history of journalism courses that critically review and analyze the works of Will Irwin, Upton Sinclair (The Brass Check), George Seldes (Freedom of the Press), Ben Bagdakian (The Media Monopoly), and Robert Parry (Fooling America), as well as the examples provided in Noam Chomsky/Ed Herman's Manufacturing Consent. It would greatly help political scientists better formulate how to construct questions in surveys that better control for survey responders' own misunderstanding of the structures of their own world views, and to begin to understand how people are as manipulated in politically-oriented conclusions or opinions they express as they are to prefer Coke or Pepsi. Political scientists may also learn more about how large institutions control for dissent in interview and intern processes, where one has gone to college, etc. Chuck Todd and Tucker Carlson did not materialize out of nowhere, ya know?
In short, to err on the side of letting people self-identify creates garbage-in/garbage-out analyses that reenforce the very trends that cause even learned people to be surprised at how we got to where we are in American politics. And, too often, political scientists fall prey to recapitulating, under public opinion surveys that ask who is "liberal" or "conservative," the very corporate biases that continue to bedevil and confuse us as a society.
