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]