Forced to be fair

 In my last post, I said "Most people either favor free speech for their side only, or think that controversial ideas shouldn't be discussed, or should be discussed only with restrictions."  A few days, the New York Times had a major editorial titled "America has a free speech problem."  The critical responses to that editorial from "progressive" Twitter provided many examples of the first outlook.  The second one--not discussed, or discussed only with restrictions--is not as visible, because it is found mostly among people who are less interested in politics, but it is widely held.  Back in 1949, a Roper/Fortune survey asked "should colleges have courses that take up the subject of [topic], or should [topic] be discussed in class only when students ask about it, or would it be better not to discuss it at all?"  The topics were "racial and religious prejudice," "sex education," "how to be a good parent," "religious beliefs," and "Communism."  The results:

                                 Classes      When asked    No discussion     DK

Prejudice                         38%        23%              23%                  15%

Sex                                  54%        16%              16%                  13%

Parent                              62%        17%              10%                  11%

Religion                           36%       23%              28%                  12%

Communism                    35%       24%              21%                  19%

Note that support for classes was lower for the two political issues (prejudice and Communism), and higher for two of the personal issues (sex education and parenting).  

There was also a question about how colleges should "deal with the subject of socialism versus capitalism in class discussions with students."  The options were to allow professors to give only arguments in favor of capitalism (2%); require professors to give arguments in favor of both sides but allow them to express their own opinions only if favorable to capitalism (6%);  require professors to give arguments for both sides and allow them to express opinions, but try to have professors with different opinions (27%); and require professors to give arguments for both sides, but don't let them express opinions of their own (38%).  There were also 8% who said they didn't know what capitalism and socialism were, and 18% who didn't know.  None of the options represented the standard idea of academic freedom--let professors say whatever they think--but only 27% picked the one that came closest.  The most popular one was that professors shouldn't be allowed to express their own opinions.  For the questions on whether different subjects should be discussed, there were substantial differences by education--more educated people were more likely to say that they should.  For the question on capitalism and socialism, there were some educational differences in the relative popularity of the top two answers, but they were small.  Among college graduates, 44.4% favored allowing professors to express their own opinions, 43.9% favored giving arguments on both sides and not allowing opinions.  

 These questions were never repeated, but a few later ones point in the same direction.  In 1985, one asked "do you think newspapers should be allowed to take sides in their editorial pages during election campaigns?"  44% said yes, 48% no.  In 2008, there was "the government should be allowed to require newspapers to allot an equal amount of time to liberal and conservative columnists":  62% agreed and 34% disagreed.   So there is substantial popular support for requiring educators and the media to stick to facts, or limiting the opinions that they can express.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Speech on campus

 I've had a number of posts based on GSS questions about whether certain kinds of people should be allowed to teach in a college or university.  These questions are valuable because they have been asked over a long period, but they are pretty general and, at least for some of them, the content is not that relevant to contemporary controversies over free speech.  Also, the GSS is a survey of the general population and just records the highest level of education, not where you got it.  Therefore, it can't tell you about opinions at elite colleges and universities, which are of interest partly because people who attend them are more likely to reach positions of power, and partly because they may indicate the direction of future change.   I recently discovered that the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and College Pulse have conducted a survey at about 150 colleges.  The samples from each college are fairly large (100-200) and they seemed to make reasonable efforts to ensure that they were representative.  They also asked questions that represented the kind of issues that come up today.  These questions started with "Student groups often invite speakers to campus to express their views on a range of topics.  Regardless of your own views on the topic, would you support or oppose your school ALLOWING a speaker on campus who promotes the following idea?"   Four of the ideas would usually be characterized as left-wing, and four as right-wing.  The left-wing ones are "looting is a justifiable form of protest," "the police should be abolished because they are racist," "white people are collectively responsible for racism and use it to protect their privilege," and "religious liberty is used as an excuse to discriminate against gays and lesbians"; the right-wing ones are "abortion should be completely illegal," "Black Lives Matter is a hate group," "the lockdown orders issued in response to the coronavirus have infringed on our personal liberties," and "transgender people have mental disorders."  Answers were on a scale of 1-4:  strongly oppose, somewhat oppose, somewhat support, strongly report.  You can add them together to get an index of tolerance of left-wing and right-wing groups. 

 Unfortunately, I couldn't download the table, so I had to enter data by hand.  I started by looking at the colleges that were unusually high and low in support for allowing speakers, then adding some in the middle, then adding some others that I was interested in, and then quit when I had about half of them.  There was a pattern emerging, which you can see here:

 

I show the indexes for both left-wing and right-wing speakers in the same figure.  The report also gave the admission rate for the college--that's on the horizontal axis.   Support for allowing right-wing speakers has little or no relation to selectivity; support for left-wing speakers is higher in more selective colleges.  Another way to look at it is that in the least selective colleges, support for allowing left and right wing speakers was about equal; in the most selective, support for allowing left-wing speakers was much higher.  This pattern could be explained by two things:  students at more selective colleges are farther to the left--that is, they will find the left-wing ideas less objectionable and the right-wing ones more objectionable; and they are more committed to the general idea of free speech.  These two things work together to increase support for allowing left-wing speakers, and offset each others to keep support for allowing right-wing speakers about the same.  As far as why students at more selective colleges are more committed to the general idea of free speech, it could be because they are more liberal, and liberals tend to be more favorable to the principle of free speech, or because they are more intellectually sophisticated, and more intellectually sophisticated people are more favorable to the principle (or some mix of both).  Both of these have historically been true, but many people say that the link to ideology has disappeared or reversed.  

It's also worth noting that the overall level of support for allowing either kind of speaker is not that high.  The possible values range from 4-16, so 10 is the middle value--mixed support and opposition.  Only one college ranks over 10 for right-wing speakers (Hillsdale).  Just about half are over 10 for the left-wing examples.  This is consistent with survey evidence going back to the 1940s--general support for free speech is an "elite" position.  Most people either favor free speech for their side only, or think that controversial ideas shouldn't be discussed, or should be discussed only with restrictions.  

If actions directly reflected opinions, less selective colleges would have more cases of "cancellation" or "no-platforming" and at those colleges, they would affect left and right-wing speakers about equally.  In reality, cases seem to be more common at elite colleges, and almost always are directed against conservative speakers.*  I may talk about why that pattern exists in a future post--at this point, I just wanted to note the discrepancy. 

*I mean incidents initiated by students or faculty.  There are some recent attempts at legal restrictions, and those have come from the right.   

What could happen here, part 2a

 Donald Trump is generally regarded as the favorite to get the 2024 Republican nomination.  This is unusual--the last time someone who lost a general election for president was taken seriously as a candidate for re-nomination was Hubert Humphrey in the 1970s.  Why is Trump different?  The obvious answer is that he has a large and passionate following among Republican voters.  A survey by Marist College in early December 2020 found that 66% of Republicans said they wanted him to run again in 2024 (24% were opposed).   But that seems less impressive when you compare it with a survey from mid-December 2000 (just after the Supreme Court decision giving the election to George W Bush), in which 79% of Democrats said that they thought Al Gore should run again in 2004.  In August 2001, 71% of Democrats said that they wanted Gore to run again.  So maybe the obvious answer is wrong--perhaps it's normal for a defeated candidate who runs a competitive race to retain strong support from ordinary voters.*  

What usually happens is that leading politicians from the losing party start pushing the last candidate to the sidelines--talking about how we need to learn the lessons from defeat and look to the future.   Journalists join in, and pretty soon the defeated candidate is written off (and usually condemned as a stiff  who never should have been nominated in the first place).    With Trump, things were different-- hardly any leading Republicans ventured the kind of criticism that is usually made of a losing candidate--that he had blown an election that he should have won--even though there was a strong case for it.  Only a few explicitly supported his claims of fraud, but many said or implied that there were some real questions about the election.  Why did they do that, even when they had good reasons to try to get him out of the way?  I said in a previous post that the complexity of the election system meant that you could make technical objections without having to take a stand on the issue of voter fraud.  In a later post, I proposed that the Constitution had a role--that people could say, and probably even believe, that they were defending the Constitution rather when they made technical objections.  But I don't think that post was very clear, so I will try again in this post. 

The starting point is American attitudes towards the US Consitution.   Charles Krauthammer spoke of "reverence" for the Constitution, while Gunnar Myrdal said there was "a nearly fetishistic cult of the Constitution."  You could say that these characterizations just reflect approval versus disapproval of the same outlook.  But I think there's a real distinction, which can be illustrated by a Supreme Court decision from 2015.  In a referendum, the voters of Arizona had voted to have an independent committee to draw the districts for its seats in the House of Representatives.  The Arizona legislature objected on the grounds that it violated this part of the Constitution:  "the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations..."  The Supreme Court rejected this by 5-4.  The majority said that "Legislature" could be interpreted to include the voters as a whole; the minority said that it could only mean the people who were elected to meet in the state capitol.  The minority opinion. written by John Roberts, said that people might be concerned about the fairness of having state legislatures handle redistricting, but that if they wanted to change that system, they had to go through Congress.  But there was an additional minority opinion by Clarence Thomas joined by Antonin Scalia.  This commented on the measure that had been approved by the voters:  "The ballot initiative in this case, unlike those that the Court has previously treated so dismissively, was unusually democracy-reducing. It did not ask the people to approve a particular redistricting plan through direct democracy, but instead to take districting away from the people’s representatives and give it to an unelected committee, thereby reducing democratic control over the process in the future. The Court’s characterization of this as direct democracy at its best is rather like praising a plebiscite in a 'banana republic' that installs a strongman as President for Life."   This is an example of  "fetishism"--not only did Thomas feel compelled to defend the traditional system, but his defense didn't contain any evidence or reasoning--it was just an expression of outrage that someone would want a system different from the one he saw as prescribed by the Constitution.  

This was the same passage that many Republicans relied on in questioning the 2020 election.  Their objection was that changes in voting rules in response to the Covid pandemic had been made by "unelected committees" (election officials) or state courts, rather than by the state legislatures.   That meant that they been enacted in violation of the Constitution--and because they had been enacted in violation of the Constitution, you could assume that they were bad in substance.    That is, the "nearly fetishistic cult of the Constitution" was what made technical objections count so heavily with Republican politicians and voters, even after they had been rejected by the courts. 

*I say "perhaps" because there's only one example--I looked for similar questions in other years, but didn't find any--but I think it's a strong example, since Gore clearly didn't have a passionate following.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Old and new liberals (and conservatives), part 2

 My last post was about group differences in self-rated ideology in 1950.  More educated people were somewhat more likely to call themselves liberal, although at the time they were also more likely to vote Republican.  There was also a big difference by city size, with people in larger cities more likely to call themselves liberals.  But what did "liberal" and "conservative" mean to people?  The survey had questions about whether government spending on certain things should be increased, reduced, or kept the same.  Self-described liberals tended to support more spending on all of them, even national defense.  The correlations were strongest for public housing, "social welfare, health, and social security," and veterans benefits.   There were also questions about the Taft-Hartley law and general economic policy (government programs to provide security vs. cutting taxes and spending), and self-rated ideology had substantial correlations with both.  There were also a few questions on other issues.  One was about Joe McCarthy's claims that there were Communists in government--conservatives were more likely to say that they were true, liberals that he was just playing politics, and somewhat less likely to support a hypothetical bill to require members of the Communist party to register with the Justice Department.  Then there were two questions involving foreign affairs--whether President Truman should arrange a meeting with Stalin and other heads of state to try to settle the cold war, and whether Emperor Hirohito of Japan should be tried for war crimes.  Self-rated ideology had pretty much no correlation with opinions on either,

You can give a plausible explanation of all of these differences--politics was focused on economic issues then, and there weren't yet clear partisan differences in "hawkishness" on international affairs.  So people were basically following political elites--liberals were taking positions advocated by prominent liberals (like Truman), conservatives were taking positions advocated by prominent conservatives (like Senator Robert Taft).  On things that weren't current issues of political controversy (e. g., I don't think that the possibility of trying Hirohito for war crimes was being seriously discussed), no difference appeared.  

But in terms of this explanation, it's puzzling that more educated people were more likely to call themselves liberal, because they were more likely to oppose most kinds of government spending, support the Taft-Hartley act, and favor the low taxes and spending approach--that is, they were more conservative on what appeared to be the major issues.  There's a similar puzzle with occupation (back then, surveys asked people what kind of work they did):  

The most liberal group was professionals, who leaned Republican; the most conservative was farmers, who leaned Democratic.  The most Republican group was managers and executives, who were about the same as unskilled workers, a heavily Democratic group,  in terms of self-rated ideology.

The survey also had an unusual question that I've written about previously:   "If you had a son of college age and he could enter any college or university in the United States and you had enough money to send him, to which one would you most want him to go?"  Answers were spread over a large number of institutions, but I divided them into three groups:  the Ivy League, the Big Ten (including the University of Chicago) and all others.  A cross-tabulation of college type by self-rated ideology:

                       Conservative      Neither   Liberal

Ivy                         24%                 32%         44%

Big 10                    28%                 42%         30%

Others                    30%                 41%         29%

So among people who wanted their (hypothetical) sons to go to Ivy League colleges, liberals outnumbered conservatives by almost 2:1; among people who wanted them to go to other colleges, liberals and conservatives were about equally numerous.  

Taken together, the differences by occupation, preferred college, and city size might suggest something about the nature of American conservatism:  a sense of alienation from at least some of the central institutions of society.  At the time, people like Lionel Trilling and Louis Hartz said something like that.  Their idea was that European conservatism was associated with support for the tradition, but that in America the dominant tradition was liberal, so that conservatism was to some extent oppositional.   But Hartz and Trilling focused on intellectual traditions, not on general public opinion. 

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]