Why most conservatives are secretly liberals

The Washington Post's The Monkey Cage ^ | March 6, 2014 | John Sides

[2ndDivisionVet]

A couple months ago, a Gallup poll recorded a small uptick in the percentage of Americans who identify as “liberal” — to 23 percent, or what Gallup, eliding the margin of error in the poll, called a “new high.” My Post colleague Chris Cillizza wondered if liberal was “no longer a dirty word.”

We will see. After all, there were far more conservatives in that Gallup poll, which, for some, means we’re still a “center-right nation.” But whether people call themselves “conservative” isn’t necessarily that telling in the first place. A recent book by two political scientists shows that liberal may be a dirty word, but liberalism is alive and well — even among people who call themselves “conservative.”

In Ideology in America, Christopher Ellis and James Stimson describe a striking disjuncture. When identifying themselves in a word, Americans choose “conservative” far more than “liberal.” In fact they have done so for 70 years, and increasingly so since the early 1960s.

But when it comes to saying what the government should actually do, the public appears more liberal than conservative. Ellis and Stimson gathered 7,000 survey questions dating back to 1956 that asked some variant of whether the government should do more, less, or the same in lots of different policy areas. On average, liberal responses were more common than conservative responses....

[Pecos]

That’s why I prefer the term “Constitutionalist”. That simplifies the question.

[gusty]

Yes indeed, you are in the company of every President from Washington to McKinley. In politics, words are important. The term “liberal” used to mean free markets and free men in the 19th Century, while “conservative” meant absolute monarchy, clerical tyranny and mercantile economics, think of Czarist Russia and Habsburg Austria. About a hundred years or so ago we allowed Socialists snatch our label away and then we relabeled ourselves “conservative” the same as the ideological enemies of the United States in the 19th Century.
The true “classic liberal” has been the true revolutionary fighting for freedom in the entire history of the world. All other movements are varieties of statist tyrannies. For us to sucede we need to reclaim the freedom label in some form or another, if not we will continue muddling along.