The Conscience of a Liberal

below average. So a government program that taxes everyone while providing benefits to everyone is bound to look like a good deal to most Americans.

The redistributive aspect of Medicare is characteristic of the welfare state as a whole. Means-tested programs like Medicaid and food stamps obviously redistribute income, but so do middle-class entitlements. Americans in the bottom 60 percent of earners can expect to receive significantly more in Social Security benefits than they paid in FICA taxes, while those in the top 20 percent can expect to receive less than they paid.[3]

Given this, we should expect public opinion to move left as income inequality increases—that is, voters should become more supportive of programs that tax the rich and provide benefits to the population at large. This is to some extent borne out by polling: Even as the Republican Party was moving far to the right, public opinion surveys suggest that the public, if anything, moved slightly to the left.

The main source of information on long-term trends in U.S. public opinion is American National Election Studies, an organization that has been asking consistent questions in public polls going back, in some cases, to the 1950s. The most revealing are three questions that bear more or less directly on the size of government and the generosity of the welfare state.

One question addresses medical care, asking people to place themselves on a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 representing strong support for a government plan that covers medical costs, and 7 support for relying on private payments and insurance companies. In 1972, 37 percent of those surveyed answered 1, 2, or 3, showing support for government health insurance, while 35 percent answered 5, 6, or 7. In 2004 support for government health insurance was up to 42 percent, while opposition was down to 27 percent.

A second question asks whether the government should “see to it that every person has a job and a good standard of living.” In 1972, 28 percent thought the government should do that, while 40 percent thought the government “should just let each person get ahead on their own.” In 2004 those numbers were 31 and 42 percent respectively—there were fewer fence-sitters or undecided, but the average position was unchanged.

Finally, a third question asks whether the government should provide more or fewer services and spending. Unfortunately, that question only goes back to 1982, when 32 percent wanted smaller government, 25 percent bigger. By 2004 only 20 percent wanted smaller government, while 43 percent wanted bigger government.

These data suggest that the electorate has, if anything, moved to the left. Maybe it hasn’t moved leftward as much as one might have expected given rising inequality. But public opinion, unlike the Republican Party, hasn’t shifted sharply to the right. Yet the fact is that the Republicans keep winning elections—an observation that lost some but by no means all its force after the 2006 midterm. What explains the GOP’s electoral success?

Kansas on Our Minds

A movement that seeks to cut taxes while dismantling the welfare state has inherent problems winning mass public support. Tax cuts, especially the kind of tax cuts movement conservatives want, deliver most of their benefits to a small minority of the population, while the pain from a weakened safety net hits far more widely. Organization and money can to some extent make up for the inherent unpopularity of conservative policies—but winning elections normally requires that movement conservates find some way to change the subject.

In his famous 2004 book, What’s the Matter with Kansas? Thomas Frank offered a bleak picture of working-class voters easily duped, again and again, by sideshows:

The trick never ages, the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital-gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization efforts. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.[4]

How true is this picture? I was bowled over by Frank’s book when it appeared, and I still think it’s a masterfully written essay on movement conservatism’s genius at exploiting emotional issues and its hypocrisy on governing priorities. But political scientists, notably my Princeton colleague Larry Bartels—who wrote a scholarly response titled “What’s the Matter with What’s the Matter with Kansas?”—have called into question the extent to which working-class voters really have been duped.

The reality is that voting has become more, not less, class-based over time, which is just what you’d expect given the change in the nature of the Republican Party. In the fifties and sixties the GOP was run by men following Eisenhower’s doctrine of “modern Republicanism,” men who accepted the legacy of the New Deal. In those decades high-income whites were barely more likely to consider themselves Republicans, or vote for Republican candidates, than were low-income whites. Since movement conservatism took over the GOP, however, a strong class division has emerged. The affluent increasingly vote Republican, while lower-income whites, especially outside the South, are actually more likely to vote Democratic than they were half a century ago.

Still, something has allowed movement conservatism to win elections despite policies that should have been unpopular with a majority of the voters. So let’s talk about the noneconomic issues that conservatives have exploited, starting with the issue that Frank oddly didn’t mention in that glorious rant: race.

Philadelphia

Ask the man or woman in the street to free-associate on the name Ronald Reagan, and he or she will probably answer “tax cuts” or “defeating communism.” But Reagan didn’t start his run for the presidency with rallies on economic or foreign policy. During his 1976 bid for the Republican nomination, he made his mark by grossly exaggerating a case of welfare fraud in Chicago, introducing the term “welfare queen.”[5] He didn’t mention the woman’s race; he didn’t need to. He began his 1980 campaign with a speech on states’ rights at the county fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, the town where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. Everyone got the message.

Considering how much has been written about the changes in American politics over the past generation, how much agonizing there has been about the sources of Democratic decline and Republican ascendancy, it’s amazing how much of the whole phenomenon can be summed up in just five words: Southern whites started voting Republican.

Before I discuss this political shift, let’s get some historical perspective. The United States has been politically to the right of other advanced countries for a long time. Spending on subsidies and transfers—basically, welfare state spending—has been a smaller share of GDP in the United States than in Europe since the nineteenth century. By 1937 European countries were already spending as much on welfare-state programs, relative to the size of their economies, as the United States would be spending in 1970, after the creation of Medicare and Medicaid.

What explains this difference? That’s an old question, going back at least to Werner Sombart’s 1906 book, Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? The difference has been attributed to everything from high wages—“All socialist utopias come to grief,” wrote Sombart, “on roast beef and apple pie”[6]—to underlying cultural attitudes. But the most systematic recent assessment, by Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote, three Harvard economists, concluded that the most important factor in America’s enduring exceptionalism is probably race: Racial discord plays a critical role in determining beliefs about the poor. Since minorities are highly over-represented amongst the poorest Americans, any income-based redistribution measures will redistribute particularly to minorities. The opponents of redistribution have regularly used race based rhetoric to fight left-wing policies. Across countries, racial fragmentation is a powerful predictor of redistribution. Within the US, race is the single most important predictor of support for welfare. America’s troubled race relations are clearly a major reason for the absence of an American welfare state.[7]

This conclusion is borne out both by the history of political fights over key welfare-state programs and by