Have opinions shifted since the election?

I wanted to know whether all the brouhaha since the 2016 election has led to any fundamental shifts in views. The answer, in short, is: maybe a little; we should raise a caution flag but not send out the emergency rescue vehicles.

I conducted national surveys in  2014-15 for a study of trust, and ran another one last month (June), with a similar sampling method and some of the same items. The earlier surveys focused particularly on views of diversity. I was surprised to find at that time that there was near-consensual support for what I called “strong diversity” – not just tolerance, but belief in the value of active multiculturalism. Two of those items, which were  repeated in the new round, were:

• People from other places and cultures help us to grow, we should learn from them.
• People should be encouraged to celebrate their cultural, ethnic, religious, and linguistic differences.

In the first round, 78% agreed with the first and 83% with the second. I found this quite surprising: these items seemed to me to touch directly on the culture wars and the contested notion of multiculturalism. When I wrote them I expected a lot of negative responses. Yet it appeared they had in fact become very widely accepted as the right way to think and speak.

Some might object: Well, but this is just people saying what they think they ought to say, to avoid feeling guilty about their real beliefs. If that were the case, one might expect that Trump’s election would have taken the lid off: people might feel it was now ok to voice their real objections to multiculturalism.

The results suggest a little of this, but only a little. There was some decline on both the strong diversity items above: 4% on the first, 6% on the second. There was a 3% decline on “I expect the government to ensure that diverse people are included and respected.” None of these proves much alone, but together they suggest a very small reduction in endorsement of multiculturalism. Yet support for it remains very high: this is far from an unleashing of a torrent.These add to a sense of a small conservative shift, at least verbal.

There were similar decreases in some items on government activism: 3.5% that government should regulate market forces; 2% on wanting government to ensure that everyone is provided for. These add to the impression of a quite small conservative shift.

Altogether, I think the Trump phenomenon has enabled some people with conservative leanings to express more openly their skepticism about multiculturalism. But it has not much shifted the center of gravity, which continues – again, to my surprise – to endorse, the multiculturalist view at an over 75% rate.

Two items of a different sort do trouble me. Two of the biggest declines were a 9% drop in “We all depend on each other, so we have work together,” and a 7% drop in “It is important to try to understand people we don't agree with.” When I put these together with a lot of other evidence, I see gathering evidence of increasing polarization – not wanting to deal with political disagreement.

One way of reading the whole pattern (including some evidence I haven’t detailed here) is that both liberals and conservatives are moving a bit towards more openness in their views, less willing to shade their opinions to meet a perceived unifying consensus. Openness is good, but rejection of a desire to seek agreement is, I think very dangerous. These data don’t show a crisis, but a kind of polarization that – as I have indicated in other posts – could be a grave threat to our democracy.

Why Trump supporters stick with him

Liberals are continually amazed that Trump's supporters stick with him no matter what outrages he commits: we keep thinking, "This time he's gone too far," and we keep being wrong. Here's why:

1. Trump voters, in the main, think the system is rigged against them.

81% of Trump voters say that “Compared to 50 years ago, life for people like me is worse” – (vs only 19% of Clinton voters).

2. When people feel the system is rigged against them, they vote for whoever promises to smash it.

That’s Trump. And he’s doing quite a good job of smashing it. If that’s what you want, he’s your man.

3. When those who are identified with the rigged system -- that is, us -- act outraged, that means – for Trump voters – that he must be doing the right thing.

Therefore: The more outraged we are, the more they support him.

Where the Right is not wrong, part 3: The value of personal responsibility

Below: Part 1: Experts don't know everything
              Part 2: regulations are often burdensome

One of the weird things that result from polarization is that perfectly sensible ideas become distorted  by association with one side. The Right has taken ownership of the idea of “personal responsibility”. For the Left, that now smells of a cover for not wanting to help those in need. Reds seek to cut programs like welfare because, from their perspective, they want to encourage personal responsibility; from our Blue point of view, that just leaves the poor in the lurch and robs  them of opportunity. We believe government has a responsibility to help, and we do not believe that voluntary charity from communities or individuals is adequate. This disagreement quickly spirals into mutual recriminations, with the Right accusing the Left of coddling the poor just to win votes and power, and the Left accusing the Right of covering avarice and heartlessness under a false value of responsibility.

But let's step back for a moment. Personal responsibility is something we all value. Blues hope as much as Reds that our kids will learn this value. None of us believes that a good society is one in which people laze around waiting for government handouts. We all want a society in which people are engaged in meaningful work and can support their families and communities.

And we should recognize that none of us really knows how to get there. Even if government programs are critical for helping the disadvantaged - which we Blues do believe - we haven't solved the problem of what happens after that. There have of course been many theories and experiments in transitioning people from welfare, but I think it's fair to say that none has been a ringing success. But neither has relying on local community and personal responsibility.
The sociological view is that we need both. Government cannot operate effectively without support from communities, and communities are not sufficient to deal with the problems of complex societies without government. Is it so hard to keep both things in mind at once?

We do know that the Great Society programs of the 1960s and 1970s have not succeeded in improving the lives of many poor and minority people. Some Blues blame it on racism, which is a rather vague category; but even if it's true, that's exactly the point. Regulations cannot by themselves overcome racism or other forms of social resistance. Regulations work only when they operate together with growing social consensus.

We if the Left don't have much to say about how to build such a consensus. Faced with crises in government-based welfare programs, we generally stick to a one-note reply: do more of the same - increase the force and scope of the regulations. But much evidence indicated that this only increases the force and scope of the resistances and evasions. We have paid far too little attention to complementary strategies of community mobilization, especially among whites and the more affluent. And we have consistently underestimated the difficulty of building self reliant communities among the disadvantaged.

It certainly seems clear that personal responsibility is not enough: benevolence from the dominant community, and preaching the value of self reliance to the poor, are inadequate responses to the severe issues of inequality and poverty. But community and self reliance are good and necessary and should be part of the conversation.

Where the Right is not wrong, part 2: regulations are often burdensome

Regulations are often burdensome

Criticism of government regulation is a major theme of the Right. I used to think that was simply a cover for predatory business practices, pushed by wealthy executives. In part, of course, that is true. But at least two things have complicated the picture for me.

First, many of my unimpeachably liberal friends, engaged in social entrepreneurship or civil society projects, have complained about the crushing weight of regulations on their attempts at social betterment. One who builds zero energy buildings from a deep commitment to climate improvement is bogged down by contradictory and excessive city rules that often serve as an entryway to corruption. Another, in another city, finds efforts at housing for the poor caught in a maze of red tape. Doctors find that Medicare and Medicaid rules create enormous adverse incentives: for instance, they end up - through complex interactions among rules that no one intended - making it dramatically less lucrative to care for children than adults. I myself, as a Board members of the Freelancers Union, saw how Obamacare's rules, work the best of intentions, created many obstacles to innovation and plain hassle stay felt intrusive and unnecessary. We spent a great deal of time complaining about them.

Then, as a faculty member and University Senate representative at Rutgers, I have seen how the creep of undressing regulation had created a need for more and more layers of compliance offices, watchers watching the watchers, and petty procedures that eat up our time and raise our blood pressure. A few faculty members were once found to have padded their travel reports, generally in very minor ways, so the state demanded more control. Now all of us have had to increase our level of documentation manyfold, and an army of administrators has been hired to check on our forms, and another army to make sure nothing has slipped by the first line. And in order to justify their existence, they ask have to find reasons to reject a certain number of submissions, and we all scramble to catch up. Meanwhile there are gaping holes that they are unable to plug - we could certainly dodge the system if we put our minds to it. And when we're being treated with such mistrust, and losing money when invoices are rejected for stupid reasons, the temptation to dodge grows - everyone becomes more cynical.

This is the way regulation works, more or less inevitably: it starts with good intentions, to prevent abuses; but it can never cover all possibilities, it always creates unintended consequences and perverse incentives, it spread as it tries to plug the holes, and it undermines trust and collegiality.

Regulation works well only when it is a codification of what most people already believe is right. If most people are basically committed to honesty in their invoices, regulation works well to clarify and standardize exactly what that means, and to catch the rare deviants. But if the culture has degenerated to the point that no one expects honesty, regulation cannot rectify it. Indeed, they accelerate the decline, because no one feels is their responsibility any more. The same is true of regulation of businesses: when a business community feels that restrictions on pollution or rules about transactions are basically just, they see regulation as a positive because it sets a level playing field. But when they don't, there's no way government inspections can keep up with the ingenuity of violators.

When we of the Left see a need for regulation, we need to do the work of convincing the large majority of their rightness. Just passing a rule won't do it.