More on elites

This post follows up on a couple of others.  In my most recent post I said that there was a trend towards believing in climate change over the last 20 years, and that belief in climate change fell when unemployment was higher:  "if you regress the figures on a time trend and the unemployment rate, unemployment has a negative and statistically significant estimate."

It occurred to me that some opinions seem to go against the party in power--in a conservative direction when there's a Democratic president and a liberal direction when there's a Republican.  Logically, it doesn't seem like that should happen with these questions, but logic is of limited use when dealing with people.  So I regressed opinions on a time trend, party control, and the unemployment rate.  Now party control was statistically significant and unemployment was not.  The estimate for the time trend was almost unchanged--the estimate was an increase in the percent thinking it would be a threat in your lifetime by about 0.6% a year, so it would take about 15 years for it to increase by 10% (it's currently about 45%).

That post was in response to columns by Ross Douthat and Bret Stephens in which they said that climate change was one of several issues hurting the Democrats.  More specifically, the idea seemed to be that it was hurting them because it was associated with "elites."  Stephens said:
"The common thread here isn’t just right-wing populism. . . . It’s a revolt against the people who say: Pay an immediate and visible price for a long-term and invisible good. It’s hatred of those who think they can define that good, while expecting someone else to pay for it."

"When protests erupted last year in France over Emmanuel Macron’s attempt to raise gas prices for the sake of the climate, one gilets jaunes slogan captured the core complaint: 'Macron is concerned with the end of the world,' it went, while 'we are concerned with the end of the month.'"

This passage exemplifies a common mistake in analyzing populism, which is to assume that the difference between "elite" and popular opinions is that elites are to the left of the public.  A gasoline tax isn't a leftist policy:  the leftist policy would be to just require businesses to reduce carbon emissions.   That would definitely not provoke mass protests and probably would be pretty popular.  I'm not saying that it's a conservative policy either--it's a distinctively elite policy.  Economic theory says that "substituting a price signal for cumbersome regulations" is a more efficient way of reducing carbon emissions (quoting from a statement signed by a groups of distinguished economists of all political persuasions), so it appeals to people who've studied economists or who listen to economists.  Most ordinary people, however, are opposed:  in addition to general dislike of taxes, my guess is that they think it's unfair to put a special tax on something that people need.

Another common (and related) mistake is to treat elites as a single group,  Douthat says "a pattern of narrow, issue-by-issue resistance is also what you’d expect in an era where the popular culture is more monolithically left-wing than before. That cultural dominance establishes a broad, shallow left-of-center consensus, which then evaporates when people have some personal reason to reject liberalism..."  If "popular culture" means things like movies, music, and TV shows, it's probably true that the relevant elites are more monolithically left-wing than ever before.  However, although in the long run the creators of movies, music, and TV shows may be the unacknowledged legislators of the world, in the immediate sense what matters for political ideas is political elites, and there are plenty of right-wingers among them.

So getting around to some data, I want to talk about the differences between political elites and the public, using the 1998 Chicago Council on Foreign Relations survey I've written about before.  In that post, I took elites as a whole, but now I will distinguish between Democrats and Republicans in the elite group.  The survey asked about seventeen different goals, and what priority they should have.  On five issues, there was consensus:  Democratic elites, Republican elites, and the public saw the goal as about equally important.  For example, about 30 percent of each group said that "helping to bring a democratic form of government to other nations" should be a very important goal.  On six issues, Republican elites were on one side, Democratic elites on the other, and the public somewhere in the middle.  All of these are things that could easily be seen in left-right terms, and the parties line up as you'd expect.  For example, 77% of Republican elites, 44% of Democratic elites, and 59% of the public said that "maintaining superior military power worldwide" should be a very important goal.  Finally, there were six on which elites on both parties were on one side of the public.  For example, 83% of the public said that "stopping the flow of illegal drugs into the United States" should be a very important goal; 65% of Republican elites and 45% of Democratic elites said it should be.  Political elites of both parties regard it as less important than the public does.

The other five issues on which there was an elite-public gap were:

"Reducing our trade deficit with foreign countries"
"Strengthening the United Nations"
"Protecting the jobs of American workers"
"Defending our allies' security"
"Controlling and reducing illegal immigration"

This is already a pretty long post and I have other things to do, so I'll talk about the direction of those differences in my next post.