The few or the many?

 A few days ago, Paul Krugman wrote that there has been a vicious circle in which rich people influence government policy to favor their interests, which allows them to get richer, which gives them more influence.....  This post will mainly be about the political side of his story, but I'll start with a few points about the economics.  The figure shows a general measure of income inequality over time:

It grew from the 1970s to the early 2000s, but has leveled off.  What about wealth?*

The share of the 99.0-99.9% peaked in 2018 and is now about where it was in 2009, but the share of the top 0.1% has continued to increase and is higher than ever.  So although you could argue about whether "inequality" is increasing, the very rich have been pulling ahead of the rest of us.

Krugman presents a figure showing the decline of corporate tax rates since the 1940s, which he says is a major cause of the gains at the top.    He says that the decline of corporate taxes reflects the power of the "oligarchs," and have happened "in the teeth of very broad public opposition," and points to a Gallup question about whether corporations "are paying their fair share in federal taxes, paying too much, or paying too little?"  The last time that was asked (2025), 21% said fair share, 7% too much, and 70% said too little.  

However, although agreement that corporations are paying too little in taxes may be broad, I don't think it's very deep.  First, when you mention specific rates, there's less support for an increase.  In 2021, an ABC/Washington Post survey asked "The top tax rate on corporate profits used to be 35 percent, then was cut to 21 percent. Would you support or oppose raising the corporate tax rate to 28 percent?"  58% were in favor and 36% were opposed.  That's a majority, but the question isn't even about returning to how things were, just going halfway back.  There aren't many other questions that specify rates, but back in 1986, Harris asked about raising the minimum rate to 25%:  61% were in favor and 33% opposed.  However, in 1985 a Business Week/Harris poll asked about "A gradual reduction of the maximum corporate income tax from 46 percent to 35 percent," and opinions were almost evenly divided, with 42% in favor and 47% opposed.  Second, in 2011 a CBS/New York Times survey asked "If you had to choose one, which would you prefer in order to reduce the federal budget deficit--raising taxes on corporations or cutting government spending?":  32% favored increased taxes on corporations and 64% favored cutting government spending.  As far as I know, this is the only question of its kind, but there's lots of evidence suggesting that people think that there's a lot of room to cut spending without losing services.  Third, strong majorities say that the middle class pays too much in federal taxes.  Putting these points together, the usual Republican package--cuts in corporate taxes combined with with smaller cuts for middle-income people and vague promises of savings by cutting waste, fraud, and abuse--can be fairly popular.  On the other side, when Democrats propose increasing taxes on high-income people and corporations, people may suspect that the increases will wind up applying to them too.  

Finally, here's a summary of the Gallup questions about taxes on high-income people, middle-income people, the poor, and corporations.  The numbers are percent who think the group pays too much minus the percent who think they pay too little:

Although federal taxes on corporations and upper-income people have declined over that period, public opinion hasn't moved towards saying that they pay too little:  in fact, there's been some movement in the other direction.  

So overall, I think that policy doesn't reflect the strength of oligarchs so much as the weakness of popular support for high taxes on anyone, even rich people and corporations.  This doesn't mean that Democrats shouldn't try to increase taxes on rich people and corporations--just that such attempts won't be especially popular.  Public opinion is likely to be pretty evenly divided, as it was with the Clinton and Obama tax reforms.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research] 

*Data from the Federal Reserve

Get back

 A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times published an op-ed by Adam Grant, Marissa Shandell, and Courtney Elliott called "The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week."  A few days ago, the Times promoted it in an e-mail, saying "Here’s what six years of data says is actually driving the push to get employees back to the office."  The reason they propose is narcissism--that many CEOs are narcissists, and narcissists want people to display deference to them and find displays of deference more gratifying when they are done in person.  The op-ed is based on a paper by Shandell, Elliot and Grant published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes with the title "Worship Me at the Office Altar."  They collected statements about remote work and several qualities that they regarded as measures of narcissism for a sample of about 250 CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and found that CEOs who ranked higher in narcissism were more negative in their comments about remote work.

Their argument for a connection seems unconvincing to me.  Fortune 500 companies are large organizations, so the CEO never has face-to-face contact with the average employee.  If the general claim about narcissists is correct, it would be relevant to the top management team--CEOs who rank higher in narcissism would want them to return to in-person work more quickly--but wouldn't have any implications for ordinary workers.  However, they do appear to have strong evidence of a connection (t-ratio of about 4), so how do I explain that?  

One factor is that the usual t-ratios assume that the errors are normally distributed.  In fact, the residuals from the regression aren't normally distributed:  

With an error distribution like this, the standard errors will tend to be underestimated so the t-ratios will be overestimated.  There is no perfect way to address this, but I tried a few reasonable alternatives and they produced t-ratios of about 2.5.  That's less impressive, but still reasonably strong evidence by conventional standards.  

The more important factor involves their measure of narcissism.   They propose four indicators:  size of signature on the annual reports, size of the CEO photo, cash compensation relative to the second-highest paid executive, and non-cash compensation relative to the second-highest paid executive.  If you have multiple measures of the same underlying concept, all of the measures should be positively correlated with each other.  In fact, the correlations among these variables range from -.113 to .160, with an average of .044.*  There are two possible interpretations:  either there is no underlying quality to measure, or that at least three of the four "indicators" are not good measures of that quality.  I'll go with the poor measures interpretation:  in particular, even CEOs don't have complete control over their own compensation or the compensation of other managers.   

 If you include the individual variables as predictors in the regression, relative cash compensation consistently is statistically significant, relative non-cash compensation sometimes is, photo size sometimes scrapes in as "significant at the 10% level," and signature size is never close.  So there's pretty good evidence that CEOs who are highly compensated (relative to the next highest paid employee) expressed more opposition to remote work.  How would I explain this?  My proposal is that managements generally wanted to get employees back to in-person work--maybe not all the way back, but faster and farther than the typical employee would want--and that more prominent CEOs took the lead in delivering the bad news.  "Prominence" could be understood as status within the profession--high compensation is a sign that someone is regarded as an outstanding leader.  Or it could be within the organization:  high compensation could indicate a hierarchical organization in which nothing was final until you heard it from the big guy.  In less hierarchical organizations, the CEO could stand back and let subordinates deliver the bad news.   

Although I disagree with their interpretation, Shandell, Elliott, and Grant deserve credit for collecting and compiling the data (the link is on p. 5 of their paper, which I think is open access).  Unfortunately, they don't include the names of the companies, which would let other researchers add to the data set.  Confidentiality isn't an issue, since all of the data are from public records.  

*If you're interested in Cronbach's alpha, it's about .125.  

Done them proud?

 In 1999, Gallup asked "Overall, do you think the signers of the Declaration of Independence would be pleased or disappointed by the way the United States has turned out?"  The question was repeated in June 2001, 2003, June 2008, 2013, and June 2026.  In 2007 and 2010, CBS asked a similar question:  whether the "founding fathers" would be pleased or disappointed.  Finally, in 2010 (January and June), 2011, 2016 and 2017 Fox News asked if the founding fathers would be "proud of the country if they could see it today."  Here is the percent positive (pleased or proud) answers:

The breakdown by party identification (June 2010 and June 2016 are unavailable):*

Partisan differences were small and Democratic and Republican opinions moved in the same direction for the first decade or so, but then diverged in 2010.  The next figure shows the gap between supporters of the President's party and supporters of the opposition:

    For some evaluations, like economic conditions, partisan differences have increased steadily in the 21st century:  growing from Bush to Obama, Obama to Trump, Trump to Biden, Biden to Trump II.  This is different:  the partisan gap was bigger under Obama than in either Trump term (unfortunately the question wasn't asked in the Biden years).  Why is this question different?  My guess is that people focus on the political situation when answering, and evaluation of the political situation involves views of the opposition as well as the party in power.  That is, someone might think that the president was doing a good job but that the founders would be distressed to see the amount or kind of opposition that he was encountering.  Of course, Democrats were upset about Republican opposition during the Obama years, but I think they were still somewhat hopeful about winning a clear majority or achieving some bipartisan successes.  As a result, they were more optimistic in assessing the general political situation than Republicans are now.  

*I don't show independents in order to keep things simpler.  As you'd expect, they are generally in between supporters of the president's party and the opposition, and I don't see any clear changes in their relative position.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

That's great

 In May, the Guardian published a list of the 100 best novels "as voted for by authors, critics and academics worldwide."  They just gave ranks, but I was interested in total scores--how much difference is there between first and 10th place, or 10th and 100th?  I also wondered if there were novelists whose votes were scattered among a number of different works, so they would do better in a ranking by authors.  This article by Jarrett Kobek  has a link to a spreadsheet with the choices of individual voters.  I calculated scores as 10 points for a first choice, 9 for second, .... 1 for 10th.*  

There were 172 voters, who selected 670 different novels.  The distribution was highly skewed--the leader was Middlemarch, with 446 points, and at the other end there were 67 novels that got a single point (ie, one voter placed them tenth).  To make the top 100 required only 18 points--twelve novels had exactly that total.  Turning to authors, 474 received votes.  The top 25:

                                        N    points Guardian

George Eliot                 60    469 83.45
Virginia Woolf                64    407 84.35
Jane Austen                    63 390 82.50
Leo Tolstoy                    47     379 65.95
Toni Morrison                 57    361 75.05

James Joyce                 39 295 53
Charles Dickens         44 269 57.45
Marcel Proust                 27 201 37.05
Gustave Flaubert         22 159 29.95
Vladimir Nabokov         27 157 34.85

Henry James                 29 151 36.55
Gabriel García Márquez 23 126 29.30
Charlotte Brontë         21 121 27.05
F Scott Fitzgerald         21 120 27.00
Herman Melville         18 116 23.80

Emily Brontë                 15 114 20.70
Fyodor Dostoevsky         17 110 22.50
Laurence Sterne         18 109 23.45
Franz Kafka                 18 107 23.35
George Orwell          20 104 25.20

Kazuo Ishiguro         19 97 23.85
Chinua Achebe         15 94 19.70
Salman Rushdie         15 86 19.30
Miguel de Cervantes 11 84 15.20
Muriel Spark                 16 83 20.15

On the other side, here are some well-known novelists who didn't get much support:

                                points
Balzac                        7
Stephen Crane            9
Richard Wright          10
Zola                            13

In 1998,  the Modern Library offered a list of the top 100 novels published in English in the 20th century.  Novels from that list that got no support in the Guardian survey include Brave New World (#5), Darkness at Noon (8),  An American Tragedy (16), Native Son (20--Wright's points in the Guardian poll were for Black Boy), Henderson the Rain King (21), Sister Carrie (33), All the King's Men (36), The Heart of the Matter (40), and Lord of the Flies (41).  

One pattern that seems clear is that realist novels of the 19th and early 20th century don't get much support from the Guardian voters.  Why not?  The basic realist plot is that an outsider tries to get somewhere but is defeated, partly by social injustice but partly by his/her flaws and bad decisions.  I think that accounts for their poor showing in the Guardian survey:  educated middle class people are increasingly uncomfortable with anything that seems to express a critical view of disadvantaged people.  Another pattern is that novels by Americans and Europeans which are set in the rest of the world don't do well in the Guardian survey.  In addition to the examples of Henderson the Rain King and The Heart of the Matter, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano ranked 11th in the Modern Library list and got only 9 points from the Guardian, which puts it about 250th.  There's one big exception:  Heart of Darkness gets 42 points, for a rank of 40.  I think there's a reason for that:  it's about the damage done by colonialism.  Conrad gets only 9 points for all of his other novels (Modern Library had The Secret Agent ranked 46th, Nostromo 47th, and Heart of Darkness at 67th).  Finally, two novels with political themes do well in the Guardian ranking:  1984 at 16th and The Handmaid's Tale at 36th. But that's about it--several of the Modern Library picks that got no support in the Guardian survey seem at least equally relevant to contemporary politics.  Overall, the Guardian list seems to reflect the view that writers should "stay in their lanes."  

*The Guardian used a different formula:  1 point for being chosen and then a bonus of 0.5 for first, 0.45 for second, .... 0.05 for tenth.  That doesn't make sense to me--it makes the difference between 11th and 10th more important than the difference between 10th and first.   

Highly respected, part 2

 In a recent post, I found that people who believed that they were treated with "less courtesy or respect than other people" were more likely to vote for Trump in 2016 (and probably 2020).  This post will look at it from another direction:  who is more likely to think that they are treated with less respect?*  I considered race, sex, age, and education.  My expectations were that black people, younger people, men, and less educated people would be more likely to perceive disrespect.  Age turned out to be the most important factor, followed by race, with no clear differences by education and sex.  But although the overall average is about the same for men and women, there is an interaction with age:

Young men perceive more disrespect than young women, but middle-aged women perceive more disrespect than middle-aged men.  Or looking at it in terms of the relation with age, perceived disrespect declines steadily with age for men, but stays about the same or even increases until about age 40 or 50 for women and then declines.  There's also an interaction between education and sex:  education makes a difference among men (less educated men perceive more disrespect), but not as much (maybe not at all) among women.  There are also interactions involving race:  black men perceive more disrespect than black women.  In fact, the means for white men, white women, and black women are very close, and are consistent with the hypothesis that race doesn't make any difference among women.  Finally, there's an interaction between race and education:  among whites, people with college degrees perceive less disrespect; among blacks, there's no clear difference.  I looked at possible interactions between race and age, and education and age, but found no evidence of them.  I also looked at the possibility of a three-way interaction between race, sex, and education, but the numbers are too small to say anything definite.  

A belief that you are treated with less respect than other people could reflect experience--you really are treated with less respect--or greater sensitivity--you are more likely to interpret the same treatment as disrespect.  The group differences probably reflect a mix of both, but there's no way to distinguish them in these data.

*In my previous post, I asked "whether the association involves support for conservatism in general, or a specific kind of populist conservatism... I'll try to shed light on that by looking at the association with various political views."  I did that analysis, and found that among people with college degrees, feeling that you are treated with less respect is generally associated with more conservative views, but it's not possible to be more specific, partly because the number of cases isn't that large and partly because the GSS questions on politics aren't very well suited to identifying populist conservatism.

A distinction without (much) difference

Last year I had a post about the claim that men don't have as many friends as they used to.   I noted that the 2021 survey cited as evidence of a large decline in friendship among men showed a similarly large decline among women.   That survey used different procedures from previous ones, so it's not clear that we should accept it as evidence of a real decline in friendship, but if we do, it shows a decline among people generally rather than men specifically.  

A few days ago, I read an interview of Laurie Santos, a professor of Psychology at Yale, by Derek Thompson.  Santos said there was a decline in friendship, and "that decrease is much worse for men. One study found that if you look at what’s standardly considered a good level of friendship -- do you have six close friends you could talk to? -- men have shown a decrease in that number by about half in the last couple of decades. And if you ask how many men say they have no close friendships at all, you see around 15% of American guys in midlife saying exactly that. That’s a fivefold decrease since folks have been running this survey."  Then there was this figure, summarizing the same 2021 survey I wrote about:

The share of men who reported six or more close friends indeed declined by more than half, from 55% to 27%.  The share of women who reported six or more friends declined from 41% to 24%.  That's a decline of 51% among men and only 41% among women, but it's just one possible comparison:  the share who report 10 or more declined by 62% among men and 61% among women, and the share who report five or more declined by 40% among men and 38% among women.  And the share of women reporting no close friends rose from 2% to 10%:  the same ratio of 5 as among men.  That is, the table doesn't support the general claim that any decline has been much worse among men.*  

That raises the question of why this misinterpretation is so prevalent (Santos followed this report, which is the source of the table).  The obvious factor is that people just like to talk about differences between men and women.  A second possibility is the influence of political ideology:  the idea of an especially large decline among men appeals to both liberals and conservatives, for different reasons.  Liberals are inclined to think that the traditional model of masculinity is unsuited to modern society, and we're seeing a symptom of that; conservatives are inclined to think that we've paid so much attention to the problems of women that we're neglecting the problems of men.  And moderates think that if both liberals and conservatives agree that there's a problem, we have a welcome opportunity for cooperation across ideological lines.  

*Even if you think that the comparison between six or more vs. five or fewer is especially important, you need to consider sampling error.  The 2021 survey had about 2000 people, and the 1990 survey had about 1200, so the figures for men and women are based on samples of 1000 and 600.  Then you have ratios, and differences between ratios, increasing the margin of error.  I estimate that the standard error of the difference between the ratios is about 5.5% assuming simple random sampling, but even without doing calculations it's clearly substantial.  

Highly Respected?

 It's often said that a large part of Donald Trump's support represents a reaction to the disdain that ordinary people receive from the educated middle classes.   For example, in a recent opinion piece in the New York Times, Dylan Gottlieb writes "yuppies and their arrogance bred new resentments. In the 2010s, a brand of populist conservatism opposed nearly every tenet of the yuppie dream, from racial and gender diversity to educational meritocracy to frictionless finance and globalization to gourmet culture and the very idea of urban living itself."  I don't think this works as a historical account:  rather than growing arrogance in the educated middle classes, there's been a growth of social egalitarianism.  But there's still a question about the individual-level relationship between resentment and politics:  are people who feel like they are looked down upon more likely to support "populist conservatism"?  There aren't many survey questions on the subject, but since 2018 the General Social Survey has had one on how often you are "you are treated with less courtesy and respect than other people" (six categories, from "almost every day" to "never").  A few years ago I looked at it and found "no clear connection to choices in the 2016 election or to opinions on a variety of political issues," but more data has accumulated since then, so I thought it was time for a new look.

The average (never=1.....almost every day=6) is 2.98 among people who say they voted for Trump in 2016 and 2.92 among people who say they voted for Clinton, for a difference of .06, but the standard error of the difference is about .08:  that is, no evidence that it's anything more than sampling error.  But feelings that you are treated with less respect differ by race and gender (higher among black people, especially black men), education (higher among less educated people), and age (higher among young people), and these factors also make a difference to voting choices.  In a logistic regression of Trump vs. Clinton voting with controls for age in years, college degree, black race, sex, and an interaction of race and sex, the estimate for feeling you are treated with less respect is .092 with a standard error of .023.  That is, people who think they are treated with less respect are more likely to vote for Trump.  It's not a huge difference, but it's large enough to be of interest (e. g., an increase of 4 points on the scale is about equivalent to the gender gap among whites).

In my previous post, I suggested that feelings of resentment might be particularly strong among more educated conservatives.  That is, conservatives are a minority at most colleges and and in many professional jobs, so they probably will encounter occasions when they are treated with less respect than their colleagues.  If you add an interaction between college degree and feelings of being treated with less respect:

                                           B       SE          T        P

disrspct	.057	.027		2.094	.037
black	-2.407	.202	.	-11.926	.000
female	-.402	.064		-6.301	.000
age	.009	.002		4.599	.000
black*female	-.761	.330		-2.306	.021
college	-.413	.206	.	-2.010	.045
college * disrspct	.106	.047		2.250	.025

That is, the estimated effect of perceived disrespect among people who didn't graduate from college is .057; among those who did, it's .163.  This is just the 2016 election:  the 2020 estimates are in the same direction and of similar size, but not statistically significant.  

Overall, it appears that feeling that you aren't treated with respect is associated with support for Trump, but that the association is stronger among more educated people:  that is, it's more relevant to middle-class support than to working-class support.  This raises the question of whether the association involves support for conservatism in general, or a specific kind of populist conservatism.  In a future post, I'll try to shed light on that by looking at the association with various political views.  

Why not?

 In January, I had a post about why Trump was renominated in 2024.  I argued that it wasn't because he of strong support among ordinary Republicans, but because of support from Republican elites.  Andrew Gelman recently discussed my post in his blog, which led me to some further thoughts.  My post concluded by saying "'the base' didn't impose Trump on Republican elites; Republican elites asked for him."  In retrospect, saying that they "asked for him" was going too far--it would be more accurate to say that they didn't put up much opposition even though Trump had shown that he was a drag on the party.  He underperformed in both 2016 and 2020, and he hurt Republican chances in Congress by promoting weak candidates like Herschel Walker and Dr. Oz.  So even if they liked some of Trump's policies, they had a good reason to turn to a new candidate in 2024.  

Why didn't Trump encounter significant resistance from Republican elites?  One possibility is that they they realized had so much support from ordinary Republican voters that resistance would be futile (and would expose them to retaliation).  In my earlier post, I looked at questions about whether people would like Trump to run for the 2024 nomination and compared them to earlier questions on whether they wanted Gore, Kerry, and Romney to run for re-nomination after their defeats.  Those questions are usually asked in the first couple of years after the election; once it gets closer to the next election, you get questions about who people would choose out of the declared or potential candidates.  The figure shows the percentages of Republicans favoring Trump and DeSantis in surveys between July 2022 and August 2023.

Trump was ahead in the first few surveys, but his support declined and DeSantis's rose until sometime in early 2023.  After that, Trump steadily gained, but he didn't consistently break 50% until late May 2023.  In the last few surveys, the average was 54% for Trump, 17% for DeSantis, and 29% for all others.

So there was a period when Trump seemed vulnerable and other candidates were starting their campaigns (Trump declared in November 2022, Haley in February 2023, and others in March-June 2023).   During this time, endorsements might have been helpful in getting opposition campaigns off the ground.  But only a few prominent Republicans offered them:  among Republican Senators and Governors, by the middle of May ten had endorsed Trump and no one had endorsed any of his opponents.  There were six for various opponents by the end of June, then one for Trump in July and one more in August.  After that Trump pulled ahead steadily.  That is, very few prominent Republicans endorsed other candidates when their endorsements might have made a difference.  To consider a few examples, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski both endorsed Nikki Haley, but not until early March 2024, when it was too late to matter.  A few days ago, the New York Times had a story on a new memoir by Lamar Alexander (who left the Senate in January 2021) in which he "says President Trump committed an impeachable offense on Jan. 6."   But Ballotpedia doesn't record an endorsement from Alexander in the 2024 campaign.  Mitch Daniels didn't offer one either.  

 Why did prominent Republicans who didn't support Trump and had no particular reason to fear him stay on the sidelines?  As I've mentioned before, the rise of partisanship means that the perception of party unity has a larger impact on the fortunes of the party--when a party is seen as divided, it does worse.   If a large number of prominent Republicans had come out against Trump, that might have stopped him from getting the nomination, but it would also have hurt Republican chances in 2024 (especially since Trump would not have been a gracious loser).  As an alternative, they hoped that he would fade away on his own, and by the time it became clear that wouldn't happen, it was too late,

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Time for a change?

 I wanted to write a post on opinion about redistricting, but there are only a few survey questions on the subject.  Two points are clear:  most people think it should be done by some body other than state legislatures and most people pay little attention to the issue (many don't know how it's actually done in their state).  In the course of looking for questions, I ran across one that I'd written about in the pioneering days of this blog, where people were asked to choose among three statements:

a.  "Our form of government, based on the constitution, has stood the test of time and no fundamental changes need to be made in it."

b.  "The Constitution has served its purpose well, but it has not kept up with the times and should be thoroughly revised to make it fit present day needs."

c.  "Changing times have outmoded our system of government and we might as well accept the fact that sooner or later we will have to have a new form of government."

At that time, I just found that it was asked in 1971, but now I discovered that it was also asked in 1973, 1976 and 1979.  The percent choosing each response:

The earlier numbers are from a question that had the same statement for option b, but somewhat different statements for a and c (see the linked post for complete wording). Over the long term, opinions shifted away from "no change" and towards the middle option, but between 1971-3 and 1976-9 there was a move towards "no change."  I can think of two possible reasons:  first, the celebration of the bicentennial in 1976 brought a lot of mostly favorable attention to the founders and second, after the Watergate scandal concluded with Nixon's resignation there was a widespread feeling that "the system worked."  

As far as group differences in opinions, liberals were more likely to favor revising the Constitution, but it was only a small difference.  The Democratic/Republican difference was even smaller.  Two larger differences were that younger people and blacks were more likely to favor revision or replacement.  Education also mattered:

Not HS grad:    36%     35%    28%

HS:                   44%     43%    13%

College:            63%     33%      4%

College graduates were substantially more likely to favor "no fundamental changes," and much less likely to favor "sooner or later we will have to change."  In my earlier post, I found the same general pattern in the 1971 data, and remarked that it could be regarded as surprising because more educated people are usually less attached to tradition.   I think this example shows something important about the effect of education on political views.  There's a tradition, going from Joseph Schumpeter through Rob Henderson's "luxury beliefs," that educated people are attracted to oppositional or edgy views.  But in some cases, like this one, educated people are more strongly attached to what you could regard as the core beliefs of a society.  

Hopefully someone will repeat the question in connection with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.  I think that the connection with ideology and party would be considerably stronger today, since the idea of constitutional originalism has become a central part of conservative thought. 

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research] 

The root of all evil?, part 2

People are more optimistic about the future when their party is in power.  This isn't surprising--in fact, it would be surprising if this wasn't the case--but you'd expect the effect to fade as they look farther into the future.  There's a question that I've written about several times, "In America, each generation has tried to have a better life than their parents, with a better living standard, better homes, a better education, etc. How likely do you think it is that today's youth will have a better life than their parents--very likely, somewhat likely, somewhat unlikely, or very unlikely?"   The average (higher numbers mean more optimistic) for Democrats and Republicans:

Both Democrats and Republicans are more optimistic when a President of their own party is in office, but the gap is much bigger for Republicans:  70-46 vs. 62-59.  Although it's hard to be sure because of the small number of cases, this gap doesn't seem to have existed in the 20th century:  it emerged in the GW Bush or Obama administrations.  

This question focuses on economic prospects.  There's also a broader question:  "Looking ahead to the next 10 years in the United States, would you describe yourself as optimistic or pessimistic about the future of the country?"  followed by wheter that is very or only somewhat optimistic/pessimistic.  Unfortunately it hasn't been asked since 2014, and I could only get party breakdowns for a few cases, but here are the means for those:

The percent "very pessimistic":

In the first two surveys (under Clinton and GW Bush) there were only a small number of "very pessimistic" responses among both Democrats and Republicans; then there was a surge among Republicans in 2011 and 2014.  

Why has the effect of partisanship grown?   I think it is because of a change among Republican opinion leaders:  rather than just saying that liberals/progressives have bad ideas, they increasingly say that they are evil people (or the tools of evil people) who are trying to destroy America.  Of course, there's always been some of this, but it was mostly confined to the fringes:  the mainstream leaders would make some effort to show respect and give their opponents credit for good intentions.    

Finally, to return to the subject of my previous post, progressives in general support the proposition that people are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights, but what about Wilson?  Thomas is not the only one to claim that Wilson rejected it.  Glenn Beck, and on a more respectable level, Christopher Cox (a long-time member of Congress and later a chair of the SEC) also make that claim and offer quotes from his work to support it.  However, they are very selective quotes:  Beck says that "To Wilson, the 'question is not whether men are born free and equal or not,' because we all 'know they are not.'"  He omits a crucial part "Suppose they were born so.  You know they are not .  They may have been born free and equal, but they are neither free nor equal if things of this sort can go on...."   So Wilson was appealing to the principles of freedom and equality, and saying it was not realized in contemporary society.  Of course, Wilson didn't always live up to those principles, especially when it came to race.  But his racism wasn't an expression of the progressive philosophy--it was in conflict with it.*

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

*W. E. B. Du Bois supported Wilson for president in 1912.    He was disappointed, but said that was because Wilson was "overwhelmed by a sudden and vicious onslaught on the part of his Southern supporters. Hungry for office they poured into Washington and regarded the election of a Democrat as a signal for a host of anti-Negro measures."

The root of all evil?

Clarence Thomas recently gave a speech at the University of Texas--Austin that's attracted a lot of attention.  Thomas said that a new philosophy of "progressivism," which rejected the principles of the Declaration of Independence, emerged in the early 20th century and "has made many inroads into our system of government and our way of life."    In his account, progressives don't believe in "universal, unalienable natural rights"; they believe "that our rights and our dignities come . . . from government."  Of course, it's unusual for a Supreme Court justice to make such an explicitly political statement.  But another noteworthy point is that his characterization of progressivism is not just wrong, but the direct opposite of the truth.  The early 20th century progressives saw the American Revolution as having two sides:  the spirit of democracy and the interests of the propertied classes (including slaveowners).  They held that the Declaration of Independence represented the first and the Constitution (mostly) represented the second.  The implication was that when considering proposed reforms, the focus should be on whether they helped to secure the rights of the people rather than on whether they followed tradition or were explicitly authorized by the Constitution.  That is, progressives didn't reject the idea of individual rights existing prior to government, they put them at the center of their philosophy.

Thomas is correct in saying that the progressives saw rights as "historically conditioned," but that didn't mean that they thought rights were determined by governments.  Rather, it meant that new social conditions could give rise to new rights, which governments should then recognize:  for example, when education becomes necessary in order to get ahead, then people have a right to education, and the government has an obligation to see that people get an education.  

One of his examples of the evils of progressivism is a 1927 Supreme Court decision upholding a state law mandating involuntary sterilization of "feebleminded" people:  "Progressives believed that Darwinian science, the idea of ever-advancing progress written into biology itself, had proven the inherent superiority and inferiority of the races. It was only a small step for Wilson to resegregate the federal workforce. It was only another step for the government to launch sterilization programs on those deemed by the experts of the day to be unfit to reproduce, upheld by my court in Buck v. Bell in an opinion written by no less a figure than Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes."  But that case didn't produce a progressive/conservative split:  it was 8-1, and the dissenter didn't write an opinion.  Also, the state in question was Virginia, which was not exactly a hotbed of progressivism.  The decision was never overturned, but a 1942 Supreme Court decision largely ended involuntary sterilization:  that was unanimous, with the opinion written by William O. Douglas, a progressive.  This example illustrates two points.  First, there are general currents of opinion that apply to progressives, moderates, and conservatives.    Second, the general movement is towards a more expansive view of natural rights:  today virtually everyone would say that that the law in Buck v. Bell violated individual rights and that the court should have struck it down.  

In a recent post, I said that American conservatism has an oppositional tradition.  Thomas's speech illustrates what I mean by that.  He sees himself as defending American ideas, but as doing so in opposition to contemporary American institutions.  He concludes with an exhortation to "find in ourselves that same level of courage that the signers of the Declaration had, so that we can do for our future what they did for theirs."  This isn't just a general call for everyone to speak up for what they think is right, but a for the people who share his views to stand up against the oppressors.  For example, "it may mean running for your school board when you see that they are teaching your children to hate your values and our country."  

Beyond the fringe?

 A few weeks ago the New York Times published a story on people who think that women should not have the right to vote, and more recently they featured it in an e-mail to subscribers.  The story says "if a decade ago the idea was just another extreme provocation, today it is gaining adherents beyond the fringe."  Most of the evidence is just assertions from the pastor of a church that opposes women's suffrage, It's not a big church:  "more than 100 parishioners attending every Sunday, with five to 10 new families joining every year."  The nature of the story says something about changes in the media:  in the print age, the New York Times might have published a story about this, but I think it would have presented it as involving a small group of people with eccentric beliefs.  But today, there's a focus on engagement, so there's a temptation to build it up to get a rise out of people (which seems to have worked--there are over 900 comments).  

I didn't expect to find any survey questions about whether women should have the right to vote, but I looked and found one.  In September 2019, an Ipsos survey asked people if they agreed or disagreed that "The 19th Amendment, which guarantees women the right to vote, should be repealed."  3% agreed:  breaking it down by party, that was 3% of Republicans, 4% of Democrats, and 4% of independents.  10% chose "neither agree nor disagree" which is more than I would have guessed.  Another intriguing point is that Republicans were most likely to "strongly disagree" (90%, vs 80%% among Democrats and 85% among independents.

Moving on to issues on which there are serious differences of opinion, in 2017 an AP-NORC survey asked if various organizations and groups had "too much, too little, or neither too much nor too little power and influence in Washington?"  One of the groups was women.  The figure shows percent too much minus too little by party:

For the groups above the diagonal line, Democrats are more likely to say that they have goo much power; for those below, Republicans are.  Women are substantially below the line, but even Republicans are more likely to say that they have too little power than too much.  Men are another one of the groups:  Democrats overwhelmingly say that they have too much influence, while Republicans are pretty evenly divided, slightly on the side of "too much."  So there are substantial partisan differences:  the gap for women is fourth largest out of 18 groups (behing LGBT people, minorities, and whites), and the gap for men is eight (just behind poor people and ahead of the media).  The smallest gaps are for political lobbyists, small business, people like you, and working people (who are also discussed in this post).  The general pattern isn't surprising, but it's notable that Democrats are a lot more likely to think that "scientific and policy experts" have too little power--that was the fifth largest partisan gap, just behind women.  Republicans leaned slightly towards "too much power."  I will look for comparable questions to see if we can say anything about changes in the partisan division on this point.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research[

Why?, part 2

 In my last post, I wrote about the rise of Donald Trump.  In this post, I'll consider his return after being defeated in 2020.  This question hasn't gotten much attention, because people just assume that he has an unbreakable hold on the Republican "base."  I don't think this is true (see this post), but in a sense it doesn't matter, because Republican elites never tried to break it.  Although Trump did have opponents for the 2024 nomination, they rarely ventured to criticize him, until Nikki Haley in the waning days of her campaign,  

The third Republican debate (Nov 18, 2023) began with a question from the moderators:  "Speak to Republican voters who are supporting Donald Trump. why should you and not him be the Republican nominee to face Joe Biden a year from now?"  Ron DeSantis started by criticizing the Biden administration.  He then turned to Trump:  "He owes it to you to be on this stage and explain why he should get another chance. He should explain why he didn’t have Mexico pay for the border wall, he should explain why he racked up so much debt."  Nikki Haley also started by talking about the Biden administration, and then said "Everybody wants to talk about President Trump. Well, I can talk about President Trump. I can tell you that I think he was the right president at the right time. I don’t think he’s the right president now. I think that he put us $8 trillion in debt and our kids are never going to forgive us for that." Vivek Ramaswamy criticized the "Republican establishment" and the media, but didn't mention Trump.  Chris Christie spent most of his time talking about the general state of the world, but finally got to Trump:  "Anybody who’s going to be spending the next year and a half of their life focusing on keeping themselves out of jail and courtrooms cannot lead this party or this country, and it needs to be said plainly."  Tim Scott criticized the "radical left" but didn't mention Trump.  The final question of the debate was "I’ll ask you each to please use your closing statement to focus on any topic you didn’t have time to address and why you and not former President Trump would be the party’s best choice to tackle these important issues."  None of them mentioned Trump, although DeSantis did work up the courage to say "I’ll be a nominee that will be able to win the election."  That is, none of them made much of a case against Trump, and none of them (except DeSantis in a veiled way) raised the obvious issue:  that he had lost the 2020 election, and lost by a pretty large margin, to a weak candidate.  Or going back farther, that he had trailed another weak candidate by 3,000,000 votes in 2016.   There were other obvious lines of attack that they missed--he not just failed to get Mexico to pay for the border wall, he didn't build a border wall.  

I've also noted that Trump jumped out to a lead in endorsements as soon as he announced, and his lead grew as the race picked up.  So Republican officials put up very little opposition to his return.  Why?  One factor is that increased partisanship means increased focus on party unity:  being seen as divided is bad for a party, and breaking with the party, even to take a popular position, doesn't help an individual candidate as much as it once would have--Democrats may like you more than they did before, but they'll still vote for the Democrat.  So Republican officials hoped that Trump would just fade away once he was no longer the center of media attention.  A second factor is that American conservatism has an oppositional tradition.  In European countries, conservatism was aligned with the establishment--monarchy, aristocracy, established church--which didn't exist in the United States.*  American politics didn't really get aligned on a left-right basis until the 1930s, when the right was in opposition.  Also, a substantial part of conservative support came from Southern whites--the side that was defeated in the Civil War.**  So conservatives see themselves as insurgents rather than part of the establishment, and this sense has become stronger over the last few decades.    Republicans who were opposed to Trump didn't see it as their job to stop his return--it was the job of Democrats and "liberal elites."  For example, in October 2024, Bret Stephens had a column about how the Democrats were in danger of "falling short in a race against a staggeringly flawed, widely detested opponent."  If they did, the "main culprit" would be "the way in which leading liberal voices in government, academia and media practice politics today."  But that raises the question of why the Republicans nominated "a staggeringly flawed, widely detested candidate."  Stephens didn't address that question in his column, but I think he did in previous columns, and once again it was the fault of the liberals:  indictments and other attempts to discredit Trump drove Republican voters back into his arms.  In any case, some prominent conservatives made that argument and, as far as I know, none have offered an alternative explanation.  

*Seymour Martin Lipset made this point in his writings of the 1950s and 1960s.

**Conservatives didn't necessarily support white supremacy, but white supremacists appealed to conservative values of individual property rights and state and local government autonomy.  

Why?

One popular explanation of the rise and survival of Donald Trump is summarized by Senator Elissa Slotkin, who said that some of her constituents tell her "it’s like I’m a Stage 4 cancer patient. My life has been getting worse, from my grandfather to my father, from my father to me, and my kids are going to do worse than me, so I need experimental chemo. Trump is my experimental chemo."  That is, things were getting worse for a long time, under both Democrats and mainstream Republicans, so they got desperate and turned to someone that promised to be completely different.  My last two posts have been directed against this analysis:  most people don't think that their lives have been getting worse, or that they're worse off than their parents.  Then how would I explain the rise and survival of Trump?  

His initial success is mostly because of American political institutions.  First, it's possible for an outsider to become the leader of an existing party.  Members of Congress never had any special role in nominations, and state party leaders are weaker than they used to be.   You don't even have to appeal to the voters in general:  the Iowa caucuses and first few primaries have an outsize influence, so there's a good deal of unpredictability in who gets the nomination.  Second, the two party system is extremely strong, probably stronger than anywhere else in the world, and our system of electing the president helps to keep it that way.  Most nations which elect a president have a runoff if no one gets a majority in the first round.  The United States doesn't:  if no candidate gets a majority in the Electoral College, it goes to the House of Representatives.  That means that if a political party nominates a candidate who many members find unacceptable, it doesn't make sense for them to break away and nominate another candidate.  In 1912, the Republicans nominated William Howard Taft, but former President Theodore Roosevelt ran as an independent.  He ran ahead of Taft, so if we had a runoff it would have been Roosevelt against Woodrow Wilson, and Roosevelt might well have won (he got 27.4% and Taft got 23.2%, making a total of 50.6%).  But as it was, Wilson won with a large electoral college majority despite getting only 41.8% of the popular vote.  

In March 2016, after Trump had become the front-runner for the nomination, an Opinion Research/CNN poll asked Republicans how they would feel if Trump got the nomination.  21% said they would be "angry" and another 12% said "dissatisfied."  The survey also asked if "you would like to see another Republican run for President as a third-party candidate or not," about 35% of those who said they would be dissatisfied or angry said no.  They were asked a follow-up question about whether that was because they would be comfortable with Trump as the nominee or because it would lead to a Democratic win, and about 90% said that it was because it would lead to a Democratic win.  

So the choice comes down to supporting your party's nominee or helping the other party's nominee to get elected.  There were a few previous cases when many members of the party were unhappy with the nominee, most recently McGovern in 1972 and Goldwater in 1964.  In those cases, many party leaders declined to endorse or even openly opposed them.  But partisanship has become stronger, so fewer people are willing to do that today.  According to Wikipedia, 31 Republican Senators and 19 Republican governors endorsed Trump in 2016, against only 14 and 4 for Goldwater in 1964.  

So Trump won in 2016 because he got the Republican nomination, and then party loyalty and negative partisanship took over.  But why did he get the Republican nomination?  It's natural to think that an important event must have deep roots in social and economic conditions--that voters turned to an outsider because they were profoundly dissatisfied with something.  But that's not necessarily the case--there are always people people who are discontented and looking for something different, and the nature of our system of nominating a president means that they have a chance.  For example, it's not clear that Republicans were more dissatisfied in 1964 than they had been before.  There are also changes in general mood that don't seem to reflect social conditions: e. g. people seem to have been discontented in the early 1990s, without any obvious reason.  So I think that there was a significant risk of a Trump-like figure before Trump came along.  

Then there's the question of why Trump survived and came back from his defeat in 2020.  I'll address that in a future post (probably not the next one, but pretty soon).  

[Some data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Now and then

 My last post looked at subjective income:  whether you think your income is above average, average, or below average.  The number of people who say that their incomes are average has declined, while the number who say their incomes are below average income has grown--but so has the number who say their incomes are above average.  So there's more dispersion, but no trend in the average rating (there are short-term changes reflecting economic conditions).  This doesn't fit one popular story about the rise and return of Trump:  that people felt like they were falling behind for a long period of time, so they lost faith in "elites" of both parties and turned to an outsider out of frustration.  But that's only one possible comparison:  you sometimes hear that people think that they are no better off, or even worse off, than their parents were.  

Last year (almost exactly one year ago), I wrote about a question that was asked a few times between 1951 and 2016:  "Comparing your present family circumstances with those when you were a child, would you say you are better off, or worse off, than your parents were then?"  In order to get a more complete picture of change, I identified questions that seemed similar--that asked people to compare themselves to their parents at the same age or their family when growing up.  The one that's been asked most frequently is in the GSS starting in 1996:  "Compared to your parents when they were the age you are now, Do you think your own standard of living now is much better, somewhat better, about the same, somewhat worse, or much worse than theirs was?"  Some of the questions had five response categories, some had three, and some just asked better or worse.  I dealt with this by considering the ratio of better to worse answers.  The results:

The ratio was always greater than one, meaning more "better off" than "worse off" answers.  The closest was in September 1980, when 44% said better off, 33% worse off, and 22% about the same.  It seems like opinions have been getting less favorable in the 21st century, but they are still more favorable than in the early 1980s or even the early 1990s (as I've noted before, people seemed to feel negative in the first half of the 1990s).  Specifically, the ratio in 2016 was almost exactly equal to the median of all surveys (there were two surveys:  Gallup found 72% better off and 20% worse off, GSS 59% and 17%, both giving a ratio of 3.6).  

So these data also don't suggest that the rise of Trump was a result of economic frustration.  There are some other interesting things in the figure, like the strongly favorable opinions in the 1980s--the economy was doing well, but no better than in the late 1990s, but the main thing is that people have not been particularly dissatisfied with their living standards in recent years.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Above and below

 Many people have observed that in the last 5 or 10 years, a gap has emerged between public ratings of economic conditions and standard measures like unemployment and inflation:  people say that the economy is bad even when the statistics look pretty good.  One view is that the gap is due to politics or the nature of media coverage; the other is that it's because the standard statistics miss something about people's experience of the economy.  In the New York Times, David French writes that he used to favor the first view, but has now shifted to the second.   He says that what the standard statistics miss is the development of complex pricing systems; rather than offering a standard product at a standard price, companies now offer different levels at different prices.  For example, airlines used to distinguish between first class, business class, and economy--now they make a lot of additional distinctions, charging for a little bit of extra legroom, boarding in the first group, and so on.  His idea is that now people are constantly being reminded that other people are getting premium service--they are discontented because they're more aware of what they are missing.  

This change seems likely to have had the most impact on the middle and upper-middle classes:  people who could afford something beyond the necessities, but not at the premium level.  You have to be able to afford to fly before you're aware of all the extras you can't afford.   Since 1972, the General Social Survey has asked "Compared with American families in general, would you say your family income is far below average, below average, average, above average, or far above average?"  If people have reacted in the way that French suggests, the percent who see themselves as "average" or "above average" will have declined in the last decade or so.

The percent who say their income is average:

That's been declining pretty steadily over the whole period.  Now, (somewhat) above and below average.  

They both go up and down with short-term economic conditions--for example, below average rose and above average fell from 2008 to 2010.  But they both have upward trends, and the percent rating themselves as "above average" reached its highest level ever in 2024.  

Finally, far above and far below average:

They both have clear upward trends.  

The basic pattern is that there's more dispersion, but no change in the mean.  In a general way, this matches real changes in the distribution of income:  inequality has increased since the 1970s.  Although the increase has slowed down or stopped in the last 15 years or so, it may take time for people to become aware of that.  In any case, average ratings of your relative economic position haven't declined in recent years.

Although French identifies a real change, it doesn't seem to have affected people's perceptions of their economic position.  I think that's because it can work in both directions--people may look up at the people who get something better, but they may also look at those who get something worse and congratulate themselves at being able to afford an upgrade.  There are also people who could afford an upgrade but pass it up and congratulate themselves at getting a bargain.  

So we're still left with the paradox:  people think their own economic situation is pretty good, but that "the economy" is in bad shape.  Of course, this is just one possible comparison:  looking at other people today.   Another comparison that people talk about is with previous generations:  for example, where your parents were at the same age.  I'll look at that in my next post.

Whose idea was that?

A lot of the commentary after Paul Ehrlich's death said that his ideas were popular among liberals and/or "elites."  For example, Nicholas Eberstadt writes:  "In retrospect, what may look most amazing about Ehrlich’s career is the company he managed to keep. Despite his harsh and jarring rhetoric, his strident ideology, and his proclivity for veering off toward pseudo-science, Ehrlich was embraced into the bosom of the American academy. .... But perhaps this shouldn’t surprise at all. Though polemical and extreme in so many of his formulations, Ehrlich’s pronouncements on the human condition were largely in consonance with the moral panic about the 'population explosion' that swept through the American Establishment during the Cold War era."* But the New York Times obituary mentioned a detail that suggests a different possibility--Ehrlich was a frequent guest on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show.  So maybe his ideas were popular among the sort of people who watched the Tonight Show:  that is, a broad range of people.  

In 1974, a Gallup Poll asked "SOME PEOPLE FEEL THAT THE WORLD WILL REACH THE POINT SOMEDAY WHERE, BECAUSE OF POPULATION AND ECONOMIC GROWTH, THERE WON'T BE ENOUGH WATER, LAND, FOOD, AND OTHER NATURAL RESOURCES FOR EVERYBODY. OTHER PEOPLE BELIEVE THAT THE WORLD CAN CONTINUE TO GROW WITHOUT RUNNING INTO SERIOUS SHORTAGES BECAUSE SOMEBODY WILL ALWAYS BE ABLE TO SOLVE THESE PROBLEMS. DO YOU, YOURSELF, FEEL THAT SOONER OR LATER WORLD POPULATION AND ECONOMIC GROWTH WILL HAVE TO BE REGULATED TO AVOID SERIOUS SHORTAGES, OR NOT?"  62% said yes and 30% said no.  It was asked again in 1976:   65% said yes and 27% said no.  

Using the 1976 survey, here are "yes" answers by self-rated ideology 

Very liberal                                54%                
Moderately liberal                     76%
Middle of the road                     74%

Moderately conservative            66%
Very conservative                       58%
Don't know                                 70%

Support seems to have been somewhat higher in the middle (and those who didn't choose a label) and lower in the extremes.  Why wasn't there a straightforward relationship?  I think it's because there were two offsetting factors:  on the one hand, environmentalism was associated with concern about overpopulation; on the other hand, the Malthusian position suggested that trying to help poor people would be futile or harmful, giving it an affinity with conservatism, 

Not college graduate                      67%

College graduate                            79%

College graduates were more likely to think that regulation would be necessary.  But if we restrict it to whites:

Not college graduate                      73%

College graduate                            80%

The difference by education is smaller (and not statistically significant).  The reason that restricting it to whites makes a difference is that blacks were much less likely to think that regulation would be necessary (divided about 50/50) and less likely to be college graduates.  I considered a few other group differences:  men and younger people were a bit more likely to agree, and there were no clear differences by religion.  I'm not sure why race was so important--I just tried it because it's a standard control variable.  But the general point is that it wasn't just the "Establishment": most people were concerned about the "population explosion," to the point of supporting a policy that would now be regarded as pretty extreme. That's not hard to understand:  world population was growing rapidly, and people often think in terms of a fixed stock of resources.  

*As a sociologist, I have to note that this is an example of the dumbing down of the term "moral panic" to  be just a way of dismissing something as not a real problem.  In the original sense, the "moral" part was important.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]