Last week David Brooks had a column about public opinion on foreign policy, based on a survey by the Center for American Progress. In Brooks's summary "The top priorities . . . are all negative aspirations: preventing bad things from hostile outsiders. The lowest priorities were . . . the core activities of building a civilized global community." He suggested that this represented a change: "After Iraq and other debacles, many Americans are exhausted by the global leadership role. " However, to his credit, he didn't say that there was any survey evidence of a change.
I have been writing about a series of surveys that asked the public and elites about foreign policy priorities. So far, I have focused on the 1998 surveys, but now I'll look at changes between 1998 and 2014 among the public, elites who identify as Democrats, and elites who identify as Republicans. There were eleven issues which they asked about at both times. On one of them, "securing adequate supplies of energy," there was little change in any group. On four, "protecting weaker nations against foreign aggression," "strengthening the United Nations," "helping to bring a democratic form of government to other nations," "combating world hunger," all groups moved in the same direction. In all of these, that direction was towards saying they should be a lower priority. This is in line with what Brooks suggested, although it's worth noting that the shifts were just as large among elites. More exactly, the were smaller among Republican elites, and larger among Democrats. As a result, there was a convergence of Democratic and Republican elites on these points. Basically, no one's idealistic now.
There were six on which the groups moved in different directions, or some moved and others didn't. Most of these involved divergence between Democratic and Republican elites. E, g., the percent of Republican elites who said that "maintaining superior military power worldwide" should be a top priority went from 77 to 85, while the percent of Democrats who said it should went from 44 to 37. Two of them deserve special note. On "controlling and reducing illegal immigration," the percent of the public who said it should be very important declined from 57 to 47; the percent of Democratic elites who said it should declined from 12 to 5, but the percent of Republican elites who said it should rose from 37 to 46. In 1998, the public was to the "right" of both elites; in 2014, the public was at essentially the same place as Republican elites. On "protecting the jobs of American workers," the public (81% in 1998, 77% in 2014) and Republican elites (41 and 40%) hardly changed, and Democrats rated it lower (40% in 1998, 30% in 2014).
Many accounts of Trump's success, like those by Peggy Noonan that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, focus on immigration as the key. " immigration . . . is the issue of the moment, a real and concrete one but also a symbolic one: It stands for all the distance between governments and their citizens. It is of course the issue that made Donald Trump. . . If you are an unprotected American . . . you have absorbed some lessons from the past 20 years’ experience of illegal immigration. You know the Democrats won’t protect you and the Republicans won’t help you. Both parties refused to control the border. The Republicans were afraid of being called illiberal, racist, of losing a demographic for a generation." That would have been a reasonable thing to say in the 1990s, but by 2014, the public had moved left and the Republicans had moved right and lost whatever fears they might once have had about being called illiberal or racist.* In fact, in 2016 Donald Trump was pretty much in line with what had become the mainstream Republican view--the differences were that he gave more emphasis to it and talked about it more crudely.
"Protecting American jobs" is where there was a gap between the public and both parties; although Trump didn't offer clear plans, I think that people did sense that it was a priority for Trump and not for conventional Republicans or Democrats. It also occurs to me that this might have been a particular weakness for Hillary Clinton. Her stint as Secretary of State may have given people the sense that she was more concerned with foreign than domestic policy.
[data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]
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