Essentially Contested America

For years it’s been taken for granted that demographically the United States is a conservative nation. I always ask which demographic groups are conservative. Factory workers? Single moms? African Americans? Gays and lesbians? Further, the standard polling typically asks from such plebeian questions as “Do you identify more with the Republicans or Democrats?” Or perhaps, “Should we raise taxes to cure the problems of social security? However, polling rarely raises any questions that hypothesize change circumstances. For example, suppose a pollster asks whether we should raise the taxes of the richest one percent of the population to cure the ills of social security. That might elicit a very different response. In any event, check out Eric Lotke’s article over at TomPaine.CommonSense as well as Isaiah J. Poole’s comment.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 14th, 2007 at 3:59 am and is filed under Conservatism, Politics, United States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.