Left Center Left

In the comments, Lynne writes,

Polls don’t reflect that "by and large the country leans rightward on the political spectrum" if you poll on the issues.

Maybe. I still need to be convinced - does anyone have pointers to someone presenting this thesis, or a good resource for polling data? - but her comment does bring up the excellent point that there’s often a lag between policy positions that public opinion support and the political labels they identify with or are willing to endorse.

Still, even if more people support liberal positions than identify as liberal, we shouldn’t take too much satisfaction. Ideology matters. By which I don’t mean the common definition of ideology as "a systematic set of explicitly held political beliefs," but the Marxist sense of a widespread, unconscious political attitude that trumps rational positions. Eventually, especially on domestic issues, rubber may hit road and policy constraints become unavoidable: Congressmen and women need to pull the trigger on gutting Social Security or not, spending cuts with visible consequences have to be made or not, etc. And domestic policy already impacts people’s lives (their jobs, their businesses, their tax rate) to give more of them at least some vested interest in keeping up with policy substance over ideological stances. But for foreign policy, the specifics of the question are often far removed from the public’s knowledge (much less expertise).

Matt Yglesias pretty well sums up this dynamic:

Voters don’t have detailed views about foreign policy questions, and the strength of commitment to various kinds of views is hard to measure. Right before the Iraq War, polls showed a majority opposed to invading without a UN resolution. Then Bush failed to get a UN resolution, invaded, and polls showed strong popular support for his action. By the 2004 election, a lot of people had soured on the war again, but the White House was able to turn multilateralism into an albatross around Kerry’s neck even though polls still indicate that people like the UN, etc.

…Bush ran campaigns in 2000 and 2004 that offered almost contradictory national security messages. But he won on the national security issue both times! The common threads in both campaigns weren’t policy positions, but toughness as a personal quality and a vague-but-important notion of hard-nosed nationalism. That doesn’t mean anything at all can be made to work, but I think it does show that a politicians with an effective political team behind him does have a reasonable amount of latitude in terms of substantive positions he can take. You need to come across as tough and committed to defending America. But that’s more a question of how you say things than of what, exactly, you’re trying to say.

Liberals have, I think, a politically unfortunate (though substantively laudable) habit of doing the exact reverse of the Bush flip-flop between 2000 and 2004 and phrasing whatever it is they want to say in the least nationalistic way possible. People on both sides of the Iraq question have a habit of talking as if the interests of Iraqis are their primary concern because that sort of thing is how you capture the moral high ground in debates between left-of-center intellectual sorts. I’m a big time fuzzy-headed globalist myself, but I think we’re a distinct minority in the population. That tendency, rather than any particular policy views seems to me to be the big political problem.

Sorry for the extended quote. But I think Yglesias captures the voter dynamic around national security in the way that surprisingly few do. On one hand, you have those who rely on polling on specific issues, say public support of the Iraq War, and think the political analysis stops there, that the public is already latently convinced and it just takes a forthright stance to captuer their support. On the other hand you have the packagers, the political marketers and the Lakoffian framers, who theoretically should recognize that the medium is the message, but somehow either don’t recognize the right medium-message or can’t create one for their candidates. In the background, of course, are the structural constraints of a big-tent political coalition that includes both nationalist and anti-nationalist sentiment, and those who are pacifist on principle and those who oppose specific manifestations of neocon hawkishness. Indeed, not anything at all can be made to work.