I'm inclined to blame / credit the media more than anything. They tend to celebrate liberal victories, bring awareness to their positive aspects, and decry conservative victories shedding light on their negative aspects. This may be naive, but it seems like a simple explanation thay fits the data?
It's likely that these policy victories are catalysts for intense rounds of coverage. Abortion was never a non-issue, but there was a media surge around it when the Supreme Court decision leaked which continued for several months afterward.
IDK, they foresaw that Russia was going to invade Ukraine while pretty much all the MSM bashers were mocking them for that idea. Pretty good foresight.
There was a lot of outrage, for one thing. (I was in high school.) Roe overturned the abortion laws which people of 49 out of 50 states had voted for. That's why it's so ironic to me that so many people are indignant that Roe was overturned by "unelected judges."
Obviously true. Liberal news is not just CNN and MSNBC, it is also what comes on after a football game is over. 60 Minutes, for example follows CBS's NFL coverage. 60 minutes has had several scandals where they warped coverage to make conservatives look bad. Most high profile being the Bush one, but overall the program is far to the left of the electorate, and it is not an outlier.
CNN is not liberal news anymore. The primary shareholder donates to Trump, and the new CEO is also in line. Reporters who are too liberal, or who have refused to capitulate, have been fired.
Recently I had noticed that CNN was was doing just as Realus says, trying to look more balanced, and perhaps going so far as lose the respect of not only conservatives but liberals (excuse the black and white terms), by making quips that were completely unsupported by evidence. When the story first broke of Biden's possession of classified materials, one of CNN's first reports on this read exactly like something out of Fox News, making Biden appear just as blameworthy as Trump but actually worse since he's a hypocrite. That's how the report was slanted. This made me look into who is running things at CNN. Some reports suggest that while CNN is still liberal, we can expect it to become increasingly conservative.
Maybe worse because Presidents are covered by Presidential Records Act when they leave office and have unilateral declassification authority and Vice Presidents, as Biden was when he took the documents, have no such privileges at all?
That's a good story but CNN is still extremely liberal. This is a common theme among liberal "news" organizations. If they think they are losing all credibility (and ratings) they will make a show of being "balanced" or conservative even. But its a few articles or shows.
Heck even the NYT prints 5 to 10 political articles a year without massive liberal bias. That's 5 to 10. Not 5% to 10%.
I think they do this for reputation and to salve their own conscience and self esteem. I mean few people in the US, even journalists, want to admit they are just paid propagandists.
What makes you think of Douthat as a centrist? I tend to think of hand-wringing about cultural decadence and the decline of institutional religion as pretty firmly in the right's wheelhouse.
Zaslav (CEO of WBD which owns CNN) is a Democrat, but he is more pragmatic than Woke. I see him as fitting into the old-time Hollywood producer archetype -- a left-of-center Jew who prioritizes business over politics. E.g. Spielberg.
Looking at my screen, the Newhouse family is the LARGEST shareholder of WBD, but at an 8% stake, I wouldn't call them the PRIMARY shareholder, which to me implies control. I think this is really Zaslav's game at the moment and to the degree he's under shareholder pressure, it's over performance and not politics.
You have to be bonkers to think CNN is a moderate news organization. Perhaps compared to Mother Jones, but its primetime lineup is: Jake Tapper, Wolf Blitzer, Erin Burnett, and Anderson Cooper. Not a single Romney voter to be found. More lockstep Biden voters than Fox is lockstep Trump (Bret Baier is a well documented moderate Democrat) They still employ Don Lemon. The median story at CNN remains from a POV far to the left of the median voter or congressman.
We didn't do grade point averages in my day, I'll have to see if I can convert my Leaving Cert results!
EDIT: Okay, I found a website which was more confusing than helpful, so I converted my Irish final grades into US equivalents. I don't have "credits/hours" so I can't multiply my points for grade x credits/hours for class.
So: (1) Turn Irish grades into US grades - using Secondary School
Funny, I would say that this blog clearly leans Right. Perhaps it varies with the topic under discussion? (edit: or did you mean the blog itself rather than the comments? Scott's politics seem a bit more tricky to pin down.)
Scott has described himself as "vaguely centrist", and I think that's about all we're going to get.
I tend to think the blog gets more conservative commentators because it criticizes liberals more. Especially when it first started out, it had more of a feel of "reasonable liberal critiques leftist extremism". Unfortunately, this brought in a good number of conservatives who don't apply Scott's degree of charity and thought to their own analyses and just want to rant about how the eeeevul liberals are destroying civilization.
It's the opposite of most other intellectual spaces I've seen on the internet, where the conservatives generally have to hold themselves to a higher standard of reason and civility than the liberals majority do in order to be accepted by them.
Scott definitely leans left overall, but he often questions the orthodoxy of the left so he's not considered culturally left and ends up attracting a decent readership on the right. He also has some opinions that are right-coded or libertarian, such as his thoughts on feminism (which he doesn't talk about anymore).
We don't have a great way to measure political lean of the readers who don't post (Scott's survey will have that, but I also question it's worth in measuring "the blog" since they don't have a very visible presence). Of those that do post, there's a lot of range, with most people closer to centrist than the more extreme of either major political faction. On certain topics, such as gay marriage, "the blog" holds a very leftward view. On other topics, such as economic theory, "the blog" leans pretty heavily to the right (free market). Then there's some weird niche things like HBD where there are almost no places on the internet that tolerate discussion about it, so people come here to throw in their two cents about it. Scott barely tolerates that either, and clamps down on too direct of a discussion.
If I had to characterise (my impression of) Scott’s position, I tend to think he’s vaguely leftish centre but with genuine curiosity and a fair number of views that *I* don’t think are right wing, but have become caught up in the culture war. By contrast, I always read the Less Wrong crowd as generally rightish (and a bit elitist) in the way I expected a lot of ‘Rationalist’ techies to be, and EY in particular always read fairly rightish to me (certainly to *my* right), but a few years back I encountered a few who thought they (and EY) were all super left wing and that anyone who criticised them or anything they wrote must be right wing! Which was surprising.
But I don’t think ‘left’ and ‘right’ are especially useful terms, as they mostly seem to be tribal labels and generally people I know and have real conversations with hold views that are all over the place by the labels.
The real difference with Scott, apart from his openness, is that while he would think it was very useful and important to have the computer model what the impact would be of ‘kill all the poor’, he would be horrified by the idea that any answer to that would make you more or less likely to actually ‘kill all the poor’. Whereas I got the uneasy impression in some other ‘Rationalist’ circles that there would be some results from the computer that would make them actively work towards ‘kill all the poor’. https://youtube.com/watch?v=owI7DOeO_yg But maybe they’ve changed: I decided, on that basis, to stay away from them years ago.
You've got to be careful there. It's true that they make themselves look bad to ME, but not necessarily to those who agree with them. I remember a research study LONG ago where they found that in TV episodes of (?? Archie Bunker??), the liberals thought it was an argument for liberal views, and the conservatives though it was an argument for conservative views.
You are assuming that media leads public opinion more than it responds to it. But media has an incentive to respond to the mood of its audience. (A quick google gives me this recent 538 article showing media coverage of the economy responds to public opinion not vice versa https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/media-coverage-doesnt-actually-determine-public-opinion-on-the-economy/ ). Not sure if anyone has done similar studies for any of the examples listed
I don't think the economy is a good proxy to use on purely cultural war policies. No one comes to their conclusion on abortion the way they do about economic policy.
There's a lot of overlap, but I've got to admit that frequently I can't understand HOW people come to their conclusion on abortion. I've got the strong suspicion that people don't know, so they make up a story to justify their decision.
It's not that hard. If you think the foetus is a person, then abortion is murder. If you don't, it's just a medical procedure. Performative misunderstanding is so dull.
IIUC, most pregnancies spontaneously abort, usually early enough that it looks like just a heavy period. Is it murder to not protect those?
FWIW, I consider any cell bearing a human genetic code to be human, at least in potentia. And I don't consider it actually human until it can respond sensibly. And there's a gradation in between those positions, which I don't have defined. After all, it's reasonably possible that one could take some skin cells and grow a clone of the person sampled. We can't do it yet, or at least probably not, but I expect that we'll be able to within a decade. And I'm not going to stop showering because of that.
The "drawing a hard line" isn't what happens in the world, and I don't see how anyone could think that it is. Hard lines are drawn by people for their convenience. (Yes, it's *very* convenient, but it's still artificial. Once you look closely, any apparent clear separation between things in contact gets fuzzy. Are your guts inside you or on the surface? Well, it depends on how you're looking at things. Lots of really small animals treat them as a protected area of the surface. [I'm thinking of tapeworms in particular here, but they aren't alone.])
That doesn't seem to track increasing Republican support for gay marriage though, assuming Republicans are mostly paying attention to conservative media.
You're right, that isn't really explained. I'm speaking in ignorance here, but maybe there wasn't a major conservative media backlash against the Supreme Court gay marriage decision? Or not a sustained one?
Asserted without evidence that conservatives mostly pay attention to conservative media. If a conservative watches the NFL or any other sports league they are being exposed to progressive media. The news programs that come on after said sports will also be dominated by progressive-leaning reporting. If they stay up later and become part of the ever-dwindling audiences of late night comedy they are again watching very left wing media.
Fox News is pretty dang influential, you'd think it'd be able to swing the conservative demographic on at least one of those issues if that was what was happening
Most (overwhelmingly, as you note) journalists are Democrats, and story coverage is somewhat liberal but not in the sense that they're scheming against Republicans or just left-leaning equivalents of Fox or Breitbart or something. They make a serious effort to be "balanced" between the two parties. When it comes to unconscious bias, it's better-described as urban than "liberal," though there's some overlap there on social issues. On foreign policy, they are kind of "pro-establishment;" on economic policy, they're center-right; on culture, they're hopelessly left. Like, they might try to be fair to religious people, but there's no sense at all that God is real and acting in the world (remember that like 40% of the population in America is creationist), racism and "homophobia" are seen as obviously wrong and evil (and are more broadly defined than most people would define them), etc. And I think they are more deferential to Republicans than they are to Democrats (basically reflected in the fact that they are happy to be accused of partisan bias by Democrats and scared of the accusation from Republicans--naturally because in both cases it plays against common criticisms).
In combination with liberals being more interested in winning policy battles and conservatives being more interested in winning the culture war, that explains why both liberals and conservatives think the media is biased against them. It is on the issues that matter most to them.
The Newsroom TV series explained the phenomenon best:
“
Charlie: We did the news.
Leona: For the left.
Charlie: For the center.
Leona: Are you fucking out of your mind–?!
Charlie: For the center, Leona! Facts... are the center. Facts. We don't pretend that certain facts are in dispute to give the appearance of fairness to people who don't believe them. Balance is irrelevant to me. It has nothing to do with the truth, logic, or reality. He didn't go on the air telling people to give peace a chance, but evolution? The jury's back on that one.”
No. Wall Street Journal would probably be the closest because it is business focused, but the newsroom most definitely still skews significantly "left".
Whereas no credentials at all are needed to be sarcastic on the Internet, a fact for which I am grateful (even as I get into trouble for being sarcastic on the Internet).
You're assuming a uni-direcrional causation, which I think is questionable.
Media coverage reflects the opinions of the target audience more so than drives public views. This is an empirical question which has been studied. Some evidence shows that because people select their media to start with in order to confirm their views, the causal role of media in opinion formation is less than people often think.
I see two separate statements you're making, and one of them is much more defensible than the other.
One, the media has a liberal bias. This seems pretty clearly true to me, as NYT and CNN are what people think of as the "mainstream media", rather than Fox. Clutzy brings up "60 Minutes", which I've never consciously watched, but I'm willing to believe him that it's a random program that doesn't need to have a partisan spin but which has a liberal bias.
The other is that the mainstream media is actually a major driver of what people's opinions are. This may have been true when it was more truly mainstream, but now it's a truism that the media is biased. If everyone who leans conservative expects not to trust NYT, CNN, and wouldn't agree with them anyway, why would NYT and CNN trumpeting how bad a conservative victory is move even Republicans to react against it?
(An interesting theory raised below is that these polls are answered by the same types of people who answer political-horse-race polls, selecting against "silent Trump voters" etc.)
"Relative to the current status quo, are you pro-choice or pro-life" is a question that would produce the observed pattern, and it's plausible that many or most people would interpret the question this way, consciously or unconsciously.
I don't know about that. The labels "pro-choice" and "pro-life" have been firmly entrenched for decades as absolute positions, even if there's some variation in gradation among different people's definition (e.g. some interpret "pro-choice" as including those who support keeping abortion legal but personally think it's always immoral, others as thinking that abortion should be legal only in a narrow range of cases, others as being a body autonomy absolutist, etc.).
I think the gradation in definitions is precisely the point, and it depends on the context. If Roe is the law, and I am for abortion being legal only for serious compelling reasons, then I am pro-life, right? Against abortion on demand, so "pro-life with exceptions", one would say. But now, if I live in a state where abortion is banned without exceptions, or if that's an imminent proposal, then holding the same position I'd be called pro-choice, since I'm against that ban. This may well be enough to explain the entire polling change, although I do think backlashes happen as well.
This could be part of it. As an example, I have thought for a long time that abortion should be banned after 12 except for life of mother/child, but should be legal before that. Let's say I live in Texas and was polled this question each time. Before Dobbs, I want Roe v. Wade overturned so I say I'm pro life, to indicate my support for the conservative effort to appoint originalist justices. Post Dobbs, same question, I say I'm pro choice, to indicate to my current state government that they went to far, and should allow abortions up to 12 weeks. I think people like that could be a large amount of the change.
What *I* would do is interpret the question as biased, and decline to answer it. This is because of the connotations of the terms used. Or I might say "both".
Now if you asked me whether I thought the human population should increase, that I could answer.
I think it's the media is liberal, and they do $(a few different things) to convince everyone the conservatives are evil, and everyone agrees for a while. I suppose if I were serious about proving/disproving my hunch (it is, alas, only a hunch) I would go back to the 1990's, or some other time when one could argue the media had a conservative bias, and find similar events during that time and see if there was a conservative-direction backlash.
Back in the '90s I had to debate in school whether there was a liberal bias in the news. There was a 1993 Bill Clinton quote that I discussed where he said
"I have fought more damn battles here for more things than any President has in 20 years with the possible exception of Reagan's first budget and not gotten one damn bit of credit from the knee-jerk liberal press, and I am sick and tired of it, and you can put that it your damn article.".
Even back then there seemed to be the perception that the media had a liberal bias, otherwise it probably wouldn't have come up for debate. And ostensibly they were being too hard on Clinton, although I tend to think he was feigning outrage as politicians do.
Interestingly that quote came a few days before the Waco siege, and his popularity continued to take a dip to some historically low numbers. I was too young at the time to have a real sense of whether the media was being fair to him, but I'm not sure how easily even a liberal media could have put a positive spin on Waco.
The thing is, a right wing media that wanted to could easily have put a positive spin on Waco. They've done that kind of things several times. (But for right wing coverage it usually has to be our heroic soldiers in a foreign country. [Soldiers is just typical. Any US govt. employee being either aggressive or defensive will do.])
But, yeah, the doctrines of the left make defending that kind of action quite difficult.
Bear in mind Clinton ran as a "third way" centrist, and he was certainly in his rhetoric, and to some real extent in his policies, significantly to the right of traditional Democrats. (For example, he was definitely to the right of Joe Biden, even the 2020 Joe Biden.)
Theory 1: Individual liberal policies poll much better than liberal politicians as a whole. Events that crystalize politics around specific tangible policies may end up favoring liberals.
Theory 2: Maybe the "shy Tory" effect is actually stronger for liberals, or at least liberal policies, than we realize. Perhaps there's a significant cohort of people don't want to be one of those bleeding heart liberals or blue-haired feminists attitudinally but when it comes down to actual women being forced to carry unwanted babies they line up on the liberal side.
This is probably the best answer. Pluralities or even majorities of Republican voters often are shown to oppose Republican policies. The issue is probably that left-wing cultural-war stuff is unpopular but left-leaning policies are popular, which is why Republicans generally want elections to be about whose side one is on in the culture wars and Democrats want you to ignore culture wars.
A simple way to make an electoral killing: Start selling social conservatism and a mildly leftist economic lean in one package. The demand is there, but both parties studiously refuse to provide.
In Europe, there are parties along these lines but a lot of their representatives are village idiots for the simple reason that being part of said parties is hideously low status partly due to media coverage. (And not recent coverage at that, all the "respectable" media has told eg. me that immigration criticism is racism for all my life)
There was a little rhetoric in that direction at times, but in terms of actual policy I don't think anything he did can really be described as economically on the left. Maybe the trade stuff but calling that leftist is pretty debatable.
The question of whether Trump is economically on the left depends on whether you stand with Milton Friedman's "to spend is to tax" stance or with Dick Cheney's "deficits don't matter". For the Friedmanites he's way out to the left, but among the Cheneyistas he ain't
It's tricky to pull off, though. Republicans who do it are seen as not being legitimately committed to the leftist economic lean, and Democrats who do it are still tied to Twitter purplehairs by the rightist media.
For gay marriage the line could be that they won't repeal they wouldn't persue any expansion.
For abortion they could offer a middle ground (low term length and reasonable exceptions for health and rapee) as a federal guarantee and say states should make their own laws to suit them
I mean, I think somewhere in there is a belief structure that the median voter holds (note that this is not what I believe):
1. Abortion should be generally legal and isn't really murder in the first trimester, but certain mainstream Democrat positions on it are scary and, while rare, possibly murder (babies born alive left to die, abortion up to the moment of birth).
2. To oppose gay marriage is homophobic, but sexualized teachings and displays in front of children are weird and gross. Self-identified trans people are sort of nuts and society shouldn't revolve around them, but live and let live if they're not hurting anybody. Biological males shouldn't compete in girls' sports, and minors shouldn't be given trans surgery or hormone therapy.
3. Intact families are ideal. While no-fault divorce should remain freely available, fathers and mothers are both important and should be encouraged to get and stay married. The well-being of children ought to be prioritized over libertine sexual desires. Parents should have more say over their own children than teachers and "experts".
Of course, a politician of either party offering these views is going to most likely meet impossible opposition in the primary.
For the last point, making marriage not a legal concept (id est, no law has a different effect based on marital status) would probably be your best bet.
This was Trump 100%. He campaigned on culture war issues plus was against immigration and free trade. He also supported universal health care and opposed cutting entitlements although that was obviously empty rhetoric.
My instinct is this strategy would perform very well in US general elections, but would usually lose in party primaries. Last election, extreme candidates performed very well in primaries, but underperformed in the general election. Lauren Boebert is an example of this having barely won in her historically red district by only a few hundred votes. Democrats even experimented with this phenomenon by running ads supporting more extreme GOP candidates in some places, so they would have a weaker opponent in the general election. Seems to have worked in a couple cases.
I think the sample size is too small to draw any meaningful conclusions. If this was a systematic pattern with decades of history I would be much more inclined to try to draw some conclusions, but otherwise I think each backlash is specific to the policy in question.
It may also be part selection bias: the last congressional session passed hundreds of bills, most of them didn't have backlash, so the baseline is to expect no shift in public opinion over the implementation of an idea (maybe unless the implementation is uniquely bad, like how brexit turned into a giant mess that left nobody happy).
Related possibility: the polling firms don't have a genuinely representative set of people labelled Republican. That is, the "Republicans" in their sample are only notionally so. Polling firms have research that shows this. Look for pro-social bias.
I am pretty sure this is true. In December, I answered a phone call from a survey organization asking it I would support a state constitutional amendment guaranteeing bodily autonomy for women in response to Dobbs. I said I would not, which led to many questions about how they could change it to get my support. When I explain my views (pro-life with exceptions for health of the mother/child), the pollster paused and said, “Okay, I have to write something down. He then started asking questions for another minute or so, after which the call cut off mid-question. We are pretty sure he reached out to a supervisor, who arranged to cut off the call. Thus my survey was incomplete and could be excluded from the results.
That sounds like an internal poll run by some organization that wanted to sponsor such an amendment and wanted data to inform decisions about how to frame and promote it, not the kind of poll that gets published as an estimated snapshot of public opinion.
Number of undecideds and level of salience is probably a factor. Pre Dobbs a lot of Americans who never really thought about abortion wouldn't report strong feelings on it, but when Dobbs passed it rapidly increased in salience, and so reported pro choice.
In general a big salient event probably pushes undecideds towards the most popular side, since they are likely to break down the same way as the rest of the population when exposed to more information. In the gay marriage case majority support was already for gay marriage, so undecideds mostly tipped that way.
I think Richard Hanania's observation that liberals are more tuned-in to politics and care more about politics than conservatives do can provide some explanation.
Would this imply that liberalism is more "scalable" as a movement? Like, can liberalism increase its level of political power in the country in a way conservatism cannot?
Thank you for the SSC link! As a true disciple, I read that post before, ofc. But, omg, it was and is a nice one. - I try to dig the ouroboros thing ... it seems good, but dunno, maybe it's just the font ...
Not as much a fan of Bastable either, but I had recently read it so I decided to include it mainly because of his points about how the general left narrative of fighting injustice is far more activating than the right narrative of defend against alleged existential risk.
I thought the bonstable article as decent initially, but upon further reflection it seems like he was half cribbing moldbug and half promoting a facile agonism.
I also dont think its particularly edifying to characterize the magna carta as the first step of progressivism. Sure enhanced rights and procedural due process, but rights for aristocrats as against the crown..
I'd theorize this happens when people think they can hold an opinion that will never come into effect. It probably felt nice for some people to vote for Trump in a rage against the machine, but when he came into power, they had to live with his actions, not just the message their ballot signaled. Similar story for abortion: I was talking to one of my closest friends a few days before the draft leaked; he said he wished abortion were illegal but "knew" the Court would never budge, and so it remained an abstract, lukewarm conviction. After the decision, the ensuing chaos, and a billion testimonies, he's now pro-choice. Maybe the decision encouraged people to proselytize outside their normal bubbles and punctured echo chambers; perhaps more people who knew the arguments and weighed them had their scales tipped. Not sure of any other examples to test this hypothesis against, but I'd love to hear some. (Edited for clarity and to remove Markdown syntax—sorry, first post <3)
A possible counterexample is the support for government healthcare post ACA, since it didn't really change, despite individual aspects of it like coverage for pre-existing conditions becoming accepted status quo. Though possibly its a case of people not connecting specifics to general principle. "Government healthcare" is sufficiently vague people can still say they oppose it while saying medicaid should be protected
Democrat policies are typically ones that don't produce identifiable victims. For example, the BLM movement generally resulted in increased homicide, but no individual homicide is 100% attributable to BLM. OTOH, a deported person is a crying person to have on camera. See, e.g. woman's tears as a superweapon.
Then it is a big problem for your theory that BLM-associated rioting and the "defund the police" slogan actually produced a *huge* backlash. It's the only reason Trump was even competitive in 2020.
Even far-lefties like David Shor have been talking about how the BLM backlash cost Democrats in 2020.
It's because when people are given conservative policies they realize those policies are terrible (abortion bans result in horrible criminalization regimes) whereas when they are given liberal policies they realize those policies are fine (gay marriage does not in fact undermine civilization and does not affect anyone's life negatively).
Recent US politics is maybe a bad example of the general phenomenon, given ideological polarization. The republican base is smaller and therefore further from the median voter. So a GOP victory is something with 30% popular support passing, not one with 50%. Would be interesting to do a comparison with a country with a more proportional system and centrist coalition based governance. (Germany maybe?)
This is the most interesting theory in the comments! I strongly appreciate that it can give clear predictions without simply accepting a political viewpoint.
In short: popular backlash is more likely when the governing coalition represents a minority. And perhaps: the smaller the minority, the more likely the backlash.
Trump won with minority support. The current SCOTUS majority did as well.
In the past, SCOTUS has been well to the left of the public, e.g. in decisions striking down segregated schooling and capital punishment. And those did provoke quite a backlash.
Congress has usually been slightly to the right of the public due to gerrymandering, but this changed in 2022 and going forward it's possible that will continue. If so, then it's possible there will be Congressional decisions that spark a right-leaning backlash.
Okay, maybe that's a bit nuts and someone needs to go tell some perverts no, but at least we believe in science and people aren't so ideologically compromised they can't answer "What is a woman?"
...oh, there's a film made to mock that very pathology?
Well, at least they're not letting bearded men convicted for sex crimes into women's prisons because they say s---
Fine, at least the cops still hate kiddy di-- they're visiting people for "being untoward towards paedophiles"?
If you think there weren't naked guys in Bugs Bunny masks -- not to mention leashes and collars -- parading around in public decades before Obergefell, you probably need to get out more often.
Not to mention nobody questions how, after hundreds of thousands of years of human civilization during which every sane human being would have considered it important, inasmuch as it were possible, for all children to have a mother, we now have no problem with children being raised by two men...
Right, "inasmuch as it were possible." But since most of these kids are orphans, they are supposed to remain in foster care until a straight couple comes along? That might be preferable, I suppose, but if so you need to make an actual argument, rather than what every sane human used to think, but no longer does. Every sane human being for hundreds of thousands of years believed lots of things that you, I am sure, think are nonsense, unless you happen to be a pro-slavery flat-Earther animist or the like.
There are plenty of man-woman couples who have to wait for years to adopt. Gay marriage is not suddenly solving a problem (that never existed) for orphaned kids.
I think the onus is on those who have decided that a basic biological fact of nature (in most species and certainly in human beings), ie. that offspring are primarily raised by the female figure, no longer matters at all. Why shouldn't that be subject to extensive scientific study before we decide that it has no negative effects on the child or on society in general? But no, we have done no studies. In the space of about 15 years we have unilaterally thrown hundreds of thousands of years of human wisdom and experience out the window.
And I firmly disbelieve that every sane person ever thought slavery (in the sense of chattel slavery and not castigative slavery) was a good and natural thing, in the same way that they would have thought the relationship between a mother and child was. I think that is an unfair comparison.
And yet there are also plenty of children who wait for years to be adopted. Not to mention intercountry adoptions. The point is that, unless there are zero children waiting for adoption, the argument that "inasmuch as it were possible" children should have a mother in the household is not much of an argument against permitting a male couple, or even a single male, to adopt. Note that this has nothing to do with gay marriage per se (nor did your comment, which was about adoption), because the argument applies equally to adoption by single men.
The comparison with slavery is not unfair because the point is not that they are identical, but that the rationale is the same. And here is what the Sultan of Morocco said in 1842, when asked by the British government what he was doing to suppress the slave trade: " "the traffic in slaves is a matter on which all sects and nations have agreed from the time of the sons of Adam . . . up to this day -- and we are not aware of its being prohibited by the laws of any sect, and no one need ask this question, the same being manifest to both high and low and requires no more demonstration than the light of day." Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East, p. 151. Why should we find your argument more convincing than yours?
I'm not sure that arguments from biology are strongly relevant to adoption; the biologically natural thing in many species is surely to let orphaned children die.
I'm confused by the assertion that there is not a problem for orphaned kids. If orphaned kids simply don't exist anymore, why does it matter who is allowed to adopt them? If orphans do exist (and I think we're in agreement that they do), could you break down your argument a little more? For example, you might be claiming one of several things:
1. Remaining in foster care until adulthood should be expected to be preferable to getting adopted by a family that doesn't have a stable heterosexual marriage.
2. Remaining in foster care until adulthood should be expected to be preferable to getting adopted by a family that doesn't have at least one woman (so e.g. adoption by a single mother or a lesbian couple is fine, adoption by a single father or a gay couple is not).
3. Adoption by a gay couple would on average be an improvement over foster care, but allowing gay couples to adopt does not lead to children getting adopted faster, and leads to worse experiences for the children once adopted (i.e. there are no benefits to allowing gay couples to adopt).
4. Adoption by a gay couple would on average be an improvement over foster care (there is a benefit to allowing gay adoption), but the benefit of waiting a little longer and getting adopted by a straight couple would be greater (there is a cost to allowing gay adoption); and the cost outweighs the benefit.
For what it's worth, my personal sense is that adoption is better than foster care (ruling out 1 and 2), and I'd expect increasing the supply of families who may adopt to decrease the time to adoption (ruling out 3), though I can imagine data that would convince me otherwise. That leaves arguing something like option 4, in which fundamentally you're pitting arguments from biology against arguments from culture. My own sense is that humans are *very* cultural animals and culture would win -- but before arguing about that, I would want to make sure that we don't diverge earlier!
"Same-sex couples raising children are four times more likely than their different-sex counterparts to be raising an adopted child. An estimated 16,000 same-sex couples are raising more than 22,000 adopted children in the US.
Among those under age 50 who are living alone or with a spouse or partner, nearly half of LGBT women (48%) are raising a child under age 18 along with a fifth of LGBT men (20%).
Same-sex couple parents and their children are more likely to be racial and ethnic minorities.
Childrearing among same-sex couples is most common in Southern, Mountain West, and Midwest regions of the country. States with the highest proportions of same-sex couples raising biological, adopted or step children include Mississippi (26%), Wyoming (25%), Alaska (23%), Idaho (22%), and Montana (22%).
LGBT individuals and same-sex couples raising children evidence some economic disadvantage.
Single LGBT adults raising children are three times more likely than comparable non-LGBT individuals to report household incomes near the poverty threshold.
Married or partnered LGBT individuals living in two-adult households with children are twice as likely as comparable non-LGBT individuals to report household incomes near the poverty threshold.
The median annual household income of same-sex couples with children under age 18 in the home is lower than comparable different-sex couples ($63,900 versus $74,000, respectively)."
So now let's compare adoption figures and foster care figures for the non-LGBT, if we can:
"Adoptions from foster care have declined for two years in a row. In FY 2021 (the most recent year from which the data has been reported), the number of children adopted with public child welfare agency involvement was 54,240. This is a decrease from 66,208 in FY 2019 and 57,881 in FY 2020.
Currently, there are 391,098 children in foster care, compared to 408,000 children in FY 2020 and 426,000 in FY 2019. Neglect remains the primary reason children enter foster care, followed by parental substance abuse. The average age of children in foster care is eight (8) years old — 44% of kids in foster care are nine (9) years and older. Finding foster and adoptive placements for these older kids is particularly challenging.
About 25% of children in foster care cannot reunify with parents or other kinship relatives. Approximately 37% were adopted or placed in a guardianship relationship. The average time spent in care for a foster child was 21.7 months. In FY2021, more than 113,000 children were waiting in foster care for an adoptive family."
Not all the children in foster care *are* eligible for adoption:
"In 2021, according the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services:
On any given day, over 391,000 children are living in the U.S. foster care system and the number has been rising. Over 113,000 of these children are eligible for adoption and they will wait, on average, almost three years for an adoptive family.
53% of the children and youth who left foster care were reunited with their families or living with a relative; 25% were adopted.
More than 48,000 youth in U.S. foster care live in institutions, group homes, and other environments, instead of with a family.
Of the 53,500 children and youth who were adopted in 2021:
55% were adopted by their foster parent(s) and 34% by a relative.
29% were age nine years or older and the average age of adoption is six years old.
Of the families who adopted children from foster care, 68% were married couples, 25% single females, 3% single males, and 4% unmarried couples.
93% of the parents rely on adoption subsidies and/or vital post-adoption services to help meet the children's varied, and often costly, needs."
So if we look at the LGBT group of adoptive parents, it's the lesbians who are adopting rather than the gays, and the non-white more than the white; from my own impression, the rich gay guys who want kids go for surrogate pregnancies rather than adoptions. But that's only my own impression.
Also, there may not be that many babies for adoption (as distinct from older kids in foster care):
"And, as we’ve heard a million times, there are so many babies out there who need a good home.
But that is not actually true. Adopting a baby or toddler is much more difficult than it was a few decades ago. Of the nearly 4 million American children who are born each year, only about 18,000 are voluntarily relinquished for adoption. Though the statistics are unreliable, some estimates suggest that dozens of couples are now waiting to adopt each available baby. Since the mid-1970s—the end of the so-called baby-scoop era, when large numbers of unmarried women placed their children for adoption—the percentage of never-married women who relinquish their infants has declined from nearly 9 percent to less than 1 percent."
So if you want a baby, you'll probably go the surrogate pregnancy route (if you can afford it) rather than wait for the possibility of adopting a baby.
Eh, I don't know. I guess I used to feel this way. But it's really not that bad. Sure, your examples are of tacky and low behavior, but other than that...
About the pedophiles, I think we are still working out how to process the fact they exist. Hatred and outrage really are not the best solutions, but neither is full acceptance a solution, like that time those French intellectuals signed a petition to do away with age of consent laws. It's tricky. Probably the solution will involve recognizing them as sick people, not judging them for it.
Age of consent is a poor and vague heuristic at best, so doing away with those laws isn't intrinsically a bad idea if better options are available. I think emancipation in general should be more accessible to teens that feel they are mature enough to vote or engage in other adult activities.
Yeah, teens are a gray area, but those French demons wanted to fuck literal children. It's really not the same. It would be interesting to see how we as a society would go about evaluating the maturity of a teenager, it could be a worthwhile exercise.
Marriage has declined since gay marriage was legalized, and some courts have started to recognize polygamous pairings. Megan McArdle on this subject pointed out years ago that the negative effects of policies pooh-poohed by their supporters don't cause those policies to be rejected:
> some courts have started to recognize polygamous pairings
Got a source for that? I've only had a brief look at Wikipedia but you'd think any actual recognition whould show up there. Utah has maybe decriminalised it in part, but that's a long way from recognition.
I will note also that Scalia predicted the court would eventually rule in favor of SSM based on the logic of earlier decisions, and was dismissed at the time by Kennedy (who ultimately ruled in favor of SSM.
That seems like a reasonable explanation for the two examples that you cite, but there are also examples of liberal policies becoming unpopular, such as Defund The Police and the 1994 federal AWB.
I think there was backlash against Trump's policies even before he implemented them; I also don't think the average person is capable of noticing whether "protectionism" is going well or poorly, aside from maybe the general state of the economy, which was fine under early Trump.
I think the problem might be that Trump was some kind of big outlier.
Or it might be that the polls you checked were some kind of big outliers. I remember finding the "trust in media rose" one dubious back then, and four years of the trend going in the opposite direction later it just looks obviously wrong. The gun control one also appears to have been an one-off.
Protectionism is an outlier in that it was a Democrat position until Trump. Many Republicans I know make a point of saying Trump was always a Democrat until he decided to run for president, and probably would have preferred to run as one if he had seen a way to win the primary on that side.
Yeah this is an interesting point. There were clear victims for news stories to latch onto _after_ the policies were implemented (manufacturing in the US was hurt by the steel tarrifs; farmers were hurt by the aggricultural tarrifs); there were clear stories of "made in the US" businesses being damaged by those policies.
But as you say, before the policies were implemented, it was more of a wonkish / theoretical objection. And indeed, it's weird that support for international trade rose even in the Republican base, even as the "populist / protectionist wave" took hold.
I was a bit hazy on the timelines, and so I looked up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_tariffs -- the steel tarrifs were March 2018. I don't recall (and can't find reference to) other tarrifs going into place in 2017, but I guess there was some sabre-rattling at that time.
Do you believe that in all cases of two men or two women raising children, that there would have been a suitable straight couple that could raise said child instead?
By the figures I looked up, it's more that children are adopted by lesbian, rather than gay, couples:
"Among those under age 50 who are living alone or with a spouse or partner, nearly half of LGBT women (48%) are raising a child under age 18 along with a fifth of LGBT men (20%)."
I had my hackles raised years back by a gushing and indeed fawning article in some outlet I can't even remember now, about a gay couple and their surrogate babies. They outsourced this of course to poor Third World women (so the old feminist trope about using women as broodmares didn't count for the brave new liberal world when it came to babies on demand) and in order to have the two desired babies (one fathered by each of the men), they of course implanted multiple embryos, because you can never be sure (or at least back then, IVF couldn't be sure) that the pregnancy would 'take'.
Surprise surprise, both women became pregnant with twins. And of course, then they had to decide to abort one of each set, because while the customers - I mean, the happy couple exercising their human right to have a family - might have been prepared for *two* babies, *four* would have been too much.
But that was done, and the pregnancies went to term, and now we had the reporter doing the piece about the great guys and their cute babies and wasn't it all just *fantastic* that now we were modern and liberal enough for this to happen? Never mind the exploitation of poor women. Never mind selective abortion. Never mind treating children as commodities to be bought and paid for, and the customer selects the options they want, and the inconvenient extras are tidily aborted as unwanted slop.
And then people wonder why I'm a social conservative.
I'm not Deiseach - and I'm fine with whatever relationship that is not 1-man-on-1-woman as long as you don't call it marriage -, but what gets me in that story is how the fact of "gay couple" instantly activated the "good boy" subsystem in whatever journalist who wrote it.
Under *any* *other* circumstances, any ***single*** one of :
1- Using women **literally** like in Handmaiden's Tale
2- Aborting children for financial convenience
Would have provoked, at the very least, a "I'm not sure your mother raised you well" kind of coverage, if not the outright negative and outraged type.
But, the subject here is 2 gays - two not one! - so we can't do that, instead we have to fawn and "ooohhh" and "aaahh" about how magnificent and utterly stunning it is.
And those are the same people that use "Misogynistic" as some ultimate insult, along with the 2 other classics of "Racist" and "Transphobic".
I'm not sure the link is as inextricable as you make it; when I tried to ask Google for statistics about the beneficiaries of gestational surrogacy, it instead pulled up a story about the Kardashians using it to avoid a high-risk pregnancy. Given there's many more rich straight couples than gay ones, I wouldn't be shocked if most of the children born to surrogate mothers ended up with a straight couple. (If you find actual statistics about this, do teach me your search algorithm.)
As for the extent to which this is degrading to the surrogate mother, this *is* a change of topic from the original "think of the children," but I'm curious if you find wet nursing similarly repulsive? It's largely technologically obsolete, of course, which makes this a safe hypothetical. (One reason I ask is that I found my own pregnancy far less inconvenient than attempting to breastfeed; apparently I'm a much better mare than cow.)
1- It doesn't involve taking using a women's body like a thing then throwing it.
2- It doesn't involve taking the baby from his\her rightful mother, never to be seen again.
3- It's minimally-invasive to all parties involved.
4- There is a centuries old tradition of using it in nearly all cultures, and thus people are better adapted and protocol-ed in navigating the relationship.
I'd say the pattern is just that if people like how the change worked out, there's no backlash, whereas if it causes obvious trouble, there's a backlash. Dobbs->10yo victim->backlash. Gay marriage & Obamacare->happy gay couples & more folks insured->no backlash.
You could argue that this is about media bias, but I'd challenge that: if there were obvious problems after the gay marriage or Obamacare changes, CNN and Fox would both have been all over them.
You could say the public is biased in favor of policies that cause no obvious trouble (most people don't care much about curbing oil use until climate change starts affecting them personally)... well, of course they are.
Oh, come on. "The media" (which is a thousand things, not one entity) didn't conjure up a backlash, it just cashed in on the (entirely reasonable) outrage over the tragic results of the ruling. If the pro-life position was left wing (and the pro-choice position was right wing), Fox would have trumpeted the 10yo victim just as loudly.
On Obamacare, you make good points, but those were short term implementation details, and once the system stabilized, it's been a boon to millions and a problem for just a few. If most people actually knew someone who lost their doctor, we'd probably have seen a backlash. As it was, although initially it was rocky, many people actually knew someone who finally got access to decent health care.
The point I was making is, "the media" is both pro-life and pro-choice and a thousand other things. Sure, if every media outlet monolithically suppressed pro-choice stories and promoted pro-life ones, then you'd only hear pro-life stories. But unless you know Kermit personally, you heard about him from... the media! Some of the media publicized the 10yo victim. I'm guessing even you noticed that many media outlets vociferously praised Dobbs and downplayed the victims' situations, cast aspersions on the doctor who sent the 10yo out of state. The public, by and large, sympathized with the victims, not with the downplayers.
While I'm pretty sure I don't think the media as a whole has the tendencies you think it does, I'm not saying it doesn't have any identifiable tendencies. Specifically, one of the media's obvious tendencies is to report what opinion leaders of many stripes, including politicians, are saying. However, the media is far from monolithic, and just because you've personally fixated on this Kermit story as the thing you believe the media should have focused on if it didn't have the bias you imagine it has doesn't make it so. (FWIW, I remember hearing about the Kermit case back when it was in the news, and I can assure you, it wasn't from the likes of redstate.com. Pick any random mainstream outlet from NPR to Fox, and Google can show you that your random outlet ran dozens of stories about it.)
As I mentioned, much of the media coverage around the Dobbs decision did feature pro-life opinions, complete with the stories the pro-lifers chose to focus on. If pro-life politicians had been bleating about Kermit at the time, we'd all have had to put up with the media rehashing that, over and over, just like, in fact, we had to put up with much of the media endlessly repeating how "fanciful and unlikely" (to quote that fringe outlet called the Wall Street Journal) the story of the 10yo was and how biased the child-abuse doctor who publicized the case obviously was--until the rapist interfered with their narrative by confessing.
And if the pendulum swings back and even late-term abortions are made fully legal, and then another abortion doctor is found to be killing live-born children, you can be sure the media will tell us all about that as well.
Since we're going to be talking about characteristics of the media determining whether or not we've all heard about the 10-year-old's abortion: there was a moment in that story when it was being massively blown up in conservative media because they'd all gone and decided (rather absurdly) that it had been proven to be a hoax perpetrated by a local newspaper reporter. I don't know for sure whether or not it was that supposed hoax call-out that was the moment that transitioned the story from just local media to national media - but it was definitely that conservative wave (more precisely - conservatives in my social media feeds keying off it) that first brought the story to my eyeballs
It's an extremely unlikely case, though; how many ten year olds are capable of getting pregnant? And the situation was horribly murky, that this child was being raped at age nine by a 27 year old man associated with her family.
And other things I was reading at the time that in some Hispanic immigrant communities/culture, having this kind of age disparity was normal and accepted - not the extreme of being 10, but from 13 onwards having a 'boyfriend', even a much older 'boyfriend' as part of being a woman now (post-puberty) and for reasons of poverty, seeking status or escaping a bad home situation, or even being more or less sold into it as the family paying off some kind of debt or obligation:
The accused is Guatemalan and there's a story alleging that the mother of the girl defended him, though it's extremely sketchy and translated from Spanish:
The entire story is a terrible one. And for all the outrage over the denial of the abortion, I haven't seen corresponding outrage about how the hell did it happen that this girl ended up pregnant after being raped by an older man? Well, the trial is supposed to go forward this month, we may hear more about it.
But the media didn't know about the story until the doctor in Indiana who performed the abortion publicised it, although with details concealed; so this was someone who was on the pro-choice side, to put it mildly. And I'm not surprised conservatives didn't believe the story as reported - it was too pat, too good an example of what the pro-abortion side had been pushing, and there were no corroborations known at the time.
FWIW, I've seen reports that girls are becoming sexually mature earlier than they used to. I'm not convinced by the reasons offered, but I'm willing to accept the fact. 10 is still really early, but 12 wouldn't be that unusual, and even 11 wouldn't strain my credulity to the point where I'd go fact checking.
P.S.: This doesn't imply that their bones are finished growing. Or that it's reasonable that they should get pregnant. Just that it shouldn't be surprising if it happens earlier than one would traditionally expect.
P.P.S.: The direct evidence I have for this is sketchy, and basically is my wife's report of the appearance of girls she's been teaching (I saw the girls, but depend on my wife's report for judgement of how early the development was happening). For pregnancies I'm relying on reports from sources I haven't validated. These reports were written around 2005 and were in print, but not in a medical journal, so if you don't want to believe them feel free.
I do wonder if she isn't chronologically older than her recorded age, as she seems to be from an immigrant family and paperwork might not line up. Possibly TMI but I started puberty at 11 (which was a shock to my mother, she wasn't expecting to have to explain all this to me until about age 14 which was when she started).
This guy was having sex with the girl when she was 9 and that's when she became pregnant, which *does* seem exceptionally early - unless, as I said, she is actually a year or two older than her recorded age, or she had a medical condition like early puberty or something.
Regardless of all that, any bastard who has sex with a child of that age whether she's 9 or 12 and whether she's started bleeding so she's a 'real' woman now should be dragged out in public and undergo the severer penalties of public punishment of earlier times.
Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII, was married at around the age of 12 (her date of birth was uncertain so she could have been any age from 12-14) and was both pregnant and a widow by the age of 13 (or 15, if we take the earlier birth date).
She only ever had one child, even though she was married three times, and even contemporary sources put this down to her having become pregnant at such a young age which was considered much too young. And that was married at 12-14, not being pimped out by her family at age 9.
Lets test your assumption that the media at large would trumpet a similar story that made a left wing position sound bad. Lets go to some large news websites and search for "Zulock"
Now, you, person who trusts the media to report on things probably are thinking, "what the heck is a Zulock." Well a Zulock is one of two homosexual pedophiles who made child porn with their adopted sons. To find this out you only need to go to the responsible reporters at, *checks notes* Townhall.com Oh.
What do you know, that case also wasn't reported in the national media. Hmm, guess we should outlaw heterosexual marriage too, since obviously marriage leads to child abuse. If a major politician was talking about Zulock (or McCall), the national media would have reported on it.
More importantly: when an individual who is a member of a given category commits a terrible crime, that does not imply that people who are members of that category commit terrible crimes more often than others.
There was at least one sad case back around the time Katherine Jefferts Schori was Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church, so some time after 2006. I only became aware of it because I was following some Episcopalian bloggers at the time (and their troubles made a change from the turmoil in my own church re: the sex abuse scandals).
Local gay married couple who were pillars of the community, but one guy was especially a pillar being involved with his local (Episcopalian) church who adopted a black kid as their son. Wonderful feel-good story for the time, especially when the Anglican Wars over gay rights and gay clergy were going on.
Turns out, pillar was sexually abusing the kid. I don't mean this as any kind of gotcha about anyone, but I don't know if it ever made national news. I think the media would report on it if they knew about it, but it's not the kind of story they go looking for. Impeccably liberal denomination with all the right views on sexism, racism, climate change, contraception, abortion, divorce, gay rights, trans rights? With female clergy, gay and lesbian clergy, even up to the level of bishops? The kind of denomination that the Catholic Church is always told it should be for the modern world?
No, the newshounds of the press aren't going to go sniffing around that kind of place for stories. You might do an exposé of the local Catholic diocese and win a prize for it, but you'll get no thanks for slinging mud at the people on the right side of history.
That's the point: not that they don't or won't cover such stories, but that they don't go looking for them and they have to dragged by the scruff of the neck to cover them when the story becomes too loud to be ignored.
The only real "trouble" which such policies might cause are, potentially, for the children adopted into a gay marriage who are forced to live a motherless life, and, obviously, the unborn babies who are aborted. Since neither of these groups are capable of complaint, the policies are not likely to cause much backlash.
When the court makes a decision that catches up to where the public has been moving for years (e.g., Obergefell) it doesn't cause a backlash, but when the court makes a big decision that changes the status quo on an issue where the public has been stagnant for years (e.g., Dobbs) it causes a backlash.
You claim that the Obamacare chart shows no change, but to me it really looks like there's a higher pre-2008 plateau and then a lower post-2008 level that gradually starts moving upward again around 2014 (when the law starts coming into effect and Republicans start campaigning on taking it away).
My recollection was that gay marriage repeatedly lost referendums and had its earliest victories in the courts. Prop 8 to amend the California constitution was because their court had declared SSM constitutionally required, but then that amendment got ruled unconstitutional as well. The courts seemed to be in the lead of the public, with them if anything following after it got legitimized and coming to accept it as the status quo.
In 2008, support for gay marriage was at 40% and support for gay people ("are gay relations morally wrong?") was at 50%.
In 2015, support for gay marriage was at 60% and support for gay people was at 65%.
I think it's fair to say the courts were ahead of the people on Obergefell, but not nearly as far ahead as during those "earliest victories" you're referring to. From 2009 to 2013, gay marriage was mostly instituted by legislatures and/or directly by the voters. After that the courts started sweeping things up, and Obergefell only affected 30% of the population (for the other 70% it was already legal).
I didn't mean to imply otherwise. The 70% is relevant only because it spread the discontent out over multiple decisions and multiple years.
By the time Obergefell happened, it was reasonably popular, and had looked inevitable for a while (cause of all the lower court decisions), and didn't affect very many people anyways. It was only marginally ahead of the citizenry, and in line with precedent from lower courts. I understand that the comment I responded too was just about public opinion, so this point is tangential
There was a clear long term trend in public opinion and the court cases were only ever a little bit ahead of it (Iowa was probably the farthest ahead). This is very different from the situation with the court cases that provoked backlash, where the court was injecting itself into a stable public opinion environment.
I like this explanation and think it's likely to have high weight in the explanatory model. I'm not sure how well this applies to the Trump tarrifs though. Any thoughts? (Of course we don't need a mono-causal explanation.)
Maybe there is a way to fit it, with a narrative something like "most Republicans didn't really buy into the anti-trade stuff, they went along with Trump for other issues they thought were more important such as illegal immigration. So when he started to seriously talk about tarrifs, this pushed Republicans to shift their political center of gravity to supporting trade."
Any time there is a big mass shooting that gets a ton of media coverage, support for new gun control laws spikes up, but eventually settles back down to its pre-shooting baseline. It will be interesting to see if the same thing plays out with Dobbs. Support for abortion was extremely stable for decades. Is this a shock to the system that will return to the baseline, or the establishment of a new baseline?
The trend of support for a policy seems like a mix of two different trends- how much people support a particular outcome, and how much they think the policy supports that outcome.
In the case of gay marriage, there's growing support for the outcome of gay people getting married, and the policy of legalizing it clearly supported that outcome both before and after Obergefell, so the trend just represents the cultural shift.
In the case of abortion, however, the median person probably supports something like what you see in most European countries- protection for early term abortions and consistent outlawing of late term abortions. During the Roe v. Wade era, "pro-life" policy moved things closer to that outcome, while after its repeal, "pro-choice" policy does the same thing, so the trend looks like a sudden reversal even when the outcomes people want haven't shifted much. It's not that people always want a moderate outcome and will react thermostatically to policy changes- it's just the new policies may or may not overshoot the desired outcome, and that desire also shifts over time independently of policy.
I'll bet a lot of the Trump backlash was a similar sort of thing.
For some of these examples, I think a relevant factor is "beliefs as attire". People sometimes claim to believe "nobody should ever murder an unborn child" or "international trade is bad for the economy" when they mean to express "boo feminism" or "boo China", but when these become actual policy options they're forced to reconsider whether they take these beliefs literally or only seriously. In contrast, "people should be able to marry same-sex partners if they want to" is plausibly straightforward enough to be mostly believed or rejected on the merits, and nobody is shocked when this policy is implemented and works pretty much as expected.
I'm aware that this phenomenon happens on both sides of the culture war, if that's what you're implying. "Police should be abolished" is often an expressive belief meaning "boo cops", not "I'd like to live in a neighborhood with no police", making police abolition vulnerable to backlash; "murderers should die for their crimes, even if we make a mistake sometimes" is a policy that does what it says on the box and is fairly resistant to backlash.
The choice of examples of liberal "wins" not creating political backlash against liberalism is insufficiently precise and elides some pretty important individual features, particularly those of the Obergefell decision, that adequately explain why these instances don't disprove (or even counsel against) the thermostatic effect theory.
Let's be more specific, with an actual example. Indeed, if backlash only happened when conservatives got political wins, one would expect public support for the death penalty to have stayed the same or come down during the 1970's moratorium period. But this is not what happened. Gallup historical polling data (available here: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1606/death-penalty.aspx) shows a major and immediate increase in support for the death penalty following the landmark liberal Furman decision by the Supreme Court (which banned every existing death penalty regime), from below 50% to over 65% in less than 3 years. This is because, just as with the Dobbs decision, the Court weighed in on a contested political topic and pulled hard towards one direction, satisfying one group but creating comparatively greater anger and resentment on the other side.
This latter part happened to some extent in 2015 with Obergefell as well. However, it was immediately moderated (and eventually outweighed) by the fact that the decision was seen as the culmination of a decades-long movement to make homosexuality acceptable in "normie" culture. As such, lots of previously closeted gay people felt safe to come out to formerly homophobic (or potentially homophobic) family members, friends, or acquaintances.
I am convinced that the massive increase in support for LGB rights (and the GOP's rapid removal of anti-gay rhetoric from its platforms and public discussion in the 2nd half of the 2010s) was primarily because legal, political, and cultural changes caused more gay people to come out, and therefore more heterosexual people realized that others they knew quite well and got along with great were actually homosexual. It's a meme to say that "I have one black friend, how can I be racist?", but if SO MANY people all around you whom you had previously thought of as fundamentally good actually turn out to be gay, that makes it super difficult to keep believing that gay people are evil (or thay being gay is inherently bad). Homosexuality simply became normalized through exposure.
This is what makes it a bad case study for political wins and the thermostatic effect, because the real "win" wasn't making gay marriage legal (if this was the only thing that has happened, you WOULD have seen public opinion shift towards the right), but rather creating an environment that allowed centrists (and even socially slightly-right-of-center people) to realize that those who are homosexual or bisexual are just... normal people, and that you shouldn't get in the way of normal people living their lives and marrying each other.
Do you have evidence of a big increase in people coming out after Obergefell?
I fully agree that this was a big part of the opinion shift, but I understand it to have taken place gradually from 1969 through the '00s. I struggle to imagine that many people waited until July 2015 to come out.
As a liberal example, I would expect the recent rise of BLM to result in a strong downturn in support for racial-justice causes. Anyone have any data on that?
I think it's largely tied in to how high a probability you assign to the new law/policy either affecting 'you', directly, or (to a lesser extent) producing what you think are fundamentally unfair outcomes. The abortion case is a great example of this: Most people can imagine a scenario where a young woman they know (daughter, grand daughter, niece, etc) might really need to get an abortion, or they can at least imagine a case where a young woman to whom they are generally sympathetic would want/need one, so you see a backlash.
You don't see a backlash with issues like gay marriage because for all the chest-beating about 'the decline of Christian values, blah blah decadence blah blah', it isn't adversely affecting anyone you know or whom you would be sympathetic. So two gay guys get married, and move in down the block: That's....not really changing anything? You might be a little grossed out if you see them holding hands when they're out for a walk, but on the other hand you probably know first-hand some gay people (even if you live in a small town in the middle of nowhere), and likely have some sympathy for them even if you don't agree with their lifestyle.
Looked at this way, you can see some possible laws/policies originating from the left that could (or have) create(d) a significant backlash. These include:
1) Banning meat consumption.
2) Mandating 'CRT' classes in schools.
3) Allowing transgender boys to play girls' sports.
4) Using tax dollars for reparations (this is a big one. If you want to see us toss race relations 80 years into the past, give everyone who identifies as black 'x million' and watch what happens.)
5) Vaccine mandates/passports
6) Open borders
7) Total repeal of drug laws
By contrast, here are some policies/laws you can see originating from the left that would not (or have not) have/had this effect:
1) 'Common sense' gun control laws (no sales to felons, waiting periods, etc).
Big upvote on this reply on the left-aligned policies that can cause backlash. Perfect examples - I'd love to see data on some of these and would bet many would match the Roe chart.
From my single data point of experience, I was very much aligned with the mainstream harm reduction philosophy until a few years back, when my west coast city's very liberal drug laws became even more liberalized, and now my thinking is completely in the other direction - I've radically changed my view on what constitutes "harm" and how to "reduce" it. So I would definitely be one of those people on the polls who would have gone from "pro" to "anti" after a policy win. This is partly due to how it's affected me personally (needles/foil everywhere, encounters with people in crisis, etc). But it's also linked to the the fundamentally unfair outcomes you reference - I'm deeply affected by the humanitarian crisis I view as resulting from policies and attitudes like this - like the one I shared until a few years ago.
I also agree with Guy's comment. I'm curious what city and what policy you're referring to that was aimed at "harm reduction" and actually increased harm, and if you have any thoughts about what policy would work better.
Oregon's Measure 110 in Nov 2020, specifically. Essentially there is now no legal pressure to stop drug use in Portland. I guess maybe it wasn't specifically a harm reduction measure - so my wording wasn't totally accurate? But it is directly linked to Guy's comment.
To be fair, this measure passed during a pandemic and at a time when policing and city support services were extremely limited during the pandemic, and at a time when the use of fentanyl was on the rise, so it's not possible for me to blame the rise I've seen in drug dealing, drug use, drug crises, overdoses, and people in states of true misery and despair etc on this policy. There are a lot of factors, but having spent time reading what street and drug outreach workers say, I feel confident that this has had a big hampering effect on driving people to treatment.
Like I said, I've recently shifted my views on this subject, so I'm still figuring out what I think is a more effective policy. I don't like mass incarceration, and I don't like tying up legal and policing resources with petty drug use, but I also don't think that "help is available if you feel like it" is very effective, and having a pathway to court-mandated treatment is important to stop what seems to be a strong pull toward the true wretched misery that I'm seeing everywhere now. I'm very much looking for an answer to that myself, but right now decriminalization seems to me to have been a mistake.
Interesting. I don't know much about it, but this makes me wonder if Portugal did something differently that made decriminalization work better there. Or is fentanyl causing worse trouble in Portugal too?
I don't know what's going on in Portugal now, but I do know their decriminalization came with much more persuasive measures to seek treatment, including property confiscation, I'm pretty sure, and even things like limiting travel, etc. It wasn't "call this hotline to get out of a fine that we're never going to make you pay anyway, and then when you call the hotline, you can just ask them for needles if you want".
But is there a government in the world who can look at a policy from abroad and just copy it wholesale without changing tons of the details that actually made it successful?
"... is there a government in the world who can look at a policy from abroad and just copy it wholesale without changing tons of the details that actually made it successful?"
D'accord! One might hope the default would be, "let's clone that successful policy and its implementation, since it's based on years – in Portugal's case, around two decades – of iterative improvement and hard-won experience. And only tweak it after we've had 2-3 years of practical experience that can guide any such changes."
Thanks for these thoughtful musings, elizamachine. Thanks, as well, for mentioning the potential impact of fentanyl (by itself and particularly as an adulterant in other drugs) on overdose deaths, one of the key measures of success or failure for any drug policy.
Have also seen, from afar, many scathing takes on what happened in Oregon (including Portland) in the aftermath of that measure passing.
In response to Neo's reply, there does seem to be some strong consensus that Portugal's well-heralded harm reduction approach towards drugs has, on balance, been a success, along with Switzerland's less-discussed approach. It seems likely there are some key differences between those – both in policy and implementation – and the mess we've seen in some US states and cities. (No matter if some of those US responses may have been inspired by Portugal's experience.)
One article briefly discussing at least two of the key reasons that Oregon has fallen short of the Portuguese model:
According to various quotes and summary assertions in that article, Measure 110 hasn't "yet translated into an improved care network for a state with the second-highest rate of substance use disorder in the nation and ranked 50th for access to [drug] treatment."
As well, Portugal's approach "is more vigorous than Oregon’s in getting people to treatment. There, “dissuasion commissions” pressure anyone caught using drugs to seek treatment." That's in contrast to Oregon's much laxer implementation, where in the first year of that state's new program, just 1% of those "ticketed for drug possession and given a hotline number" called that number. (Update: acknowledging elizamachine's highly similar point, in a reply above.)
The problem is that the Drug War had it backwards all along, and the current repeals don't fix the problem.
Selling unadulterated/properly labeled drugs to informed buyers is a victimless crime. That is, there is no victim to call the police. The only way to enforce a ban on such activity is violate constitutional norms.
Drug *abuse* often does have victims -- including pedestrians who have to walk past needles and poop. You don't need a police state to enforce laws against such blatant drug abuse. (Just as you don't need alcohol prohibition in order to enforce laws against public drunkenness.)
The wisest drug law reform was once proposed by .... The Onion.
I'm not entirely sure about the claim of "no effect" for the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare"), which existed in some form since at least 2009 and was something then-Senator Obama campaigned on in 2008, and it does seem like things trend downward for Republicans/Independents on that graph. (It doesn't clearly start in 2008, but that's kind of a "Does reality drive straight lines...?" conundrum.)
The following would be consistent with your data: many people don't think much about these issues and have opinions acquired from parents or neighbors or party. Then the issue becomes salient (per David Shor) so they think about it and most decide they agree with the liberals. To test this, are there cars where an issue became highly salient and the law did *not* change but opinions did?
I think the sample size it to small to draw meaningful conclusions, but pontificating in the absence of evidence is what the internet is best at, so...
It's possible that views are biased away from perceived extreme positions. We might be seeing opinions trying to regress toward the mean. So inasmuch as popular conception was that abortion was available and practiced with zero restrictions, many people hoped for something *slightly* more restrictive. With the Dobbs ruling, what we got, at least in some states, was a real extreme in the other direction, and so many people hope for something *less* restrictive.
Obgerfell didn't generally change the status quo much for most people. It didn't create a new extreme, it protected the norm in a number of states without forcing anything new in others.
On trade, many people might have felt that China had some sort of upper hand before Trump's edicts took effect, and wanted more consideration, but then felt that his edicts went much too far, and want something closer to the way things were before.
There was enough backlash to the ACA to help Trump get elected, so that's not nothing, but overall people were still able to get health insurance, and in fact more people were, and costs didn't skyrocket for most people, so there wasn't the same "avoid extremes" effect.
As a working theory, it fits those examples, but more examples might break it.
I'd be interested to see an analysis of the Trump tax cuts. I'd expect that to be a low-perceived-impact conservative victory which wouldn't have a backlash, but I don't actually know.
> Or maybe it’s because liberalism is “on the right side of history”, ie the direction things naturally tend, so nobody finds liberal victories surprising, whereas everyone finds conservative victories surprising and feels like they need to react against them.
This intuitively more plausible to me, but not in the context of whether these policies are ‘right’ or not, but rather the trend of public opinion.
Oh the graph showing the support for gay marriage, we can see that it has a clear upward trend—i.e., overall support for it goes up overtime.
Maybe these victories tend to accelerate public opinion in a certain direction if they’re particularly controversial.
The average person might read the Dobbs decision, and already slowly becoming more pro-choice, just becomes more so.
This could be because of the media, which does happen to be more left-wing, as Scott points out. These controversial decisions make political commentators rage, which then gets transmitted to NYT, CNN, FOX, etc., and then to other media outlets.
Perhaps the rate of change in these opinions is proportional to the overall exposure people have to them from the news, whereby a news cycle dominated by it increases the total amount, thereby changing opinions.
It would be really interesting for someone to model this, maybe by plotting keyword frequencies in the NYT for example versus the change in opinions for controversial issues.
>My impression of the post-Dobbs debate on abortion was that it centered on an incredibly sympathetic 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio who really needed an abortion but was having trouble getting one
I have always wondered why anti-abortionists aren't doing anything about this. It's *incredibly* easy to paint abortion in bad light, bring out just one of those using it as a "A type of birth control that involves surgery", all those promiscuous $CENSORED, the sheer amount of debauchery and sluttiness their life consists of, that without abortion they would have thought 20 times before engaging in.
And then there is all those who are like "I was doomed by my unexpected pregnancy to be a basic ass stay-at-home mother but then I killed my future child and now I'm a successful wage slave at $BIG_CORP, and managing other wage slaves even. Please don't take away our right to kill the unborn uwu" in the newspapers and on social media. They talk about this rather proudly too, so it's not like there is any extra cajoling or deceit needed to bring it out of them.
In contrast to this, a single docuementary about the sheer magic of a mini-person rising like a phoenix from a single fertilized cell is enough to maybe shift **at least** 15% to 20% of the least-fervant pro-abortion base. It's an Epic, really, a compressed retelling of the story of Evolution of multi-cellular and primate life, on the spatial scale of a single organism and the temporal scale of an evolutionary nanosecond. Bonus points for showing the cute babies that would-have-been-aborted fetuses grew into, and interviews with the fortunate mother who changed her mind.
If somebody told me about the abortion debate for the first time in a vacuum, I would have expected that it's the *pro-abortion* side that desperately needs good faith and a devil's advocate. That reality is the exact opposite is so surprising to me. From a purely Machiavellian perspective, ignoring all utility calculations about who's "really" right, the anti-abortion side is severely under-using some of the rhetorical and propagandist assets at their hand, chief among which is an instinctive, millions-years-ancient, literally life-or-death love for babies and their survival ingrained in nearly all humans, including violently misanthropic ones like me.
> Anti-abortionists can do anything they please, but if the media at large doesn't report it they're preaching only to the choir and don't have any opportunity to broaden their support.
This is a case where the right answer is "if you don't like what the media covers, be your own media and cover the things you want covered".
> It's *incredibly* easy to paint abortion in bad light, bring out just one of those using it as a "A type of birth control that involves surgery", all those promiscuous $CENSORED, the sheer amount of debauchery and sluttiness their life consists of, that without abortion they would have thought 20 times before engaging in.
I think a lot of people will just assume that such person without access to abortion will start a dysfunctional family, because there is a lot of debate about single mothers making bad life choices.
Also, people have a tendency to pay attention to horrific stories happening to exact people. And abortion bans generate a lot of such stories - Chazan or Izabela Sajbor cases are going to overshadow the most beautiful documentary about miracle of life. On the other hand, story about abortion lacks "victim" in a way, as the fetuses are not exactly seen as "whole" person - miscarriage/stillbirth are socially seen as something different than death of a child. This is also probably the reason why anti-abortion media are avoiding portraying fetuses in very early stages.
> Also, people have a tendency to pay attention to horrific stories happening to exact people.
> On the other hand, story about abortion lacks "victim" in a way
That's not true. I remember a story about a guy who rented a billboard and put up a photo of himself cradling the black, empty silhouette of a baby. The text was along the lines of "this would have been my son if my girlfriend hadn't had him aborted."
The girlfriend sued. I remarked on the story to my mother (an obstetrician) and she immediately opined that displaying such a billboard should be illegal because of the risk it created for doctors.
I later went and found the actual image of the billboard, and it's much tackier and crasser than I've made it sound above. But the argument is really easy to make sympathetically. I still think about this story as an example of making an argument much more forcefully than is usual.
On a very very similar note, I also still remember an anti-smoking PSA from the 90s or early 2000s. It showed an elderly man, presumably a grandfather, standing near a baby and encouraging the baby to stand. The baby does, and then takes a tentative step, and then gains confidence and starts trotting over to the grandfather... and then walks right through him as he fades to partial transparency, because he's a ghost who died of lung cancer long ago.
This PSA replaced the standard anti-smoking message, IF YOU SMOKE CIGARETTES, YOU WILL DIE AN EARLY, PAINFUL DEATH, with IF YOU SMOKE CIGARETTES, YOU WILL NOT BE THERE FOR YOUR GRANDCHILDREN'S FIRST STEPS. And that turned out to be a much stronger message. The sitcom Friends made a reference to this PSA. When I mentioned to a college friend, many years later, that I'd like to find a copy but I was having trouble finding it, she immediately responded "Yes, I know exactly the one you're talking about. I hate that commercial, I don't want to see it again, and I won't help you look for it."
I almost suspect that the reason that PSA didn't stick around longer was that the non-smoking public hated it so much.
So yes, it's easy to paint abortion in a bad light, and someone who wanted children but didn't get them makes a powerful and sympathetic victim.
(And if you know how to find a copy of the PSA, I'm still looking for it.)
Pro-abortion stories are more of "brainless newborn with other severe conditions waits for death from infection, after mother was denied abortion" or "woman dies in agony, due to doctors being scared to perform abortion".
And now compare from the news standpoint : a story of guy who wanted to be a father and found out that he won't be this time (like hundreds of other guys who's wife miscarried that day), and parents waiting for their newborn to finally die, so it would stop suffering so much. Yes, there is a lot to say about media and their vulture-like tendency towards extremely morbid cases, but this is kinda what the viewers are interested in.
Stories about woman losing ability to have children after botched abortions would be more sympathetic, but woman having abortions are not showed as sympathetic, although misguided people for most of the time, as this probably stands too close to "I want to have children, but I don't want to die horrible death in case of issues with pregnancy" argument.
> a story of guy who wanted to be a father and found out that he won't be this time (like hundreds of other guys who's wife miscarried that day)
This (the "normal" guys whose wives miscarry) is a pretty common story. It's always viewed as devastating. No one says "hey, that's no big deal, it happens all the time". I have a friend who miscarried after avowing the opinion that she didn't want any children. And it was very hard for her!
You remind me of an article I read on the topic of the common modern belief that people thousands of years ago didn't feel as sad as we do when their young children died, because that was such a common occurrence back then. The reality is worse than that - the death of young children was indeed very common, but as far as the evidence goes, ancient people felt at least as bad as we do about it. Tombstones erected for babies and toddlers say things like "her father cries for her every day".
>like hundreds of other guys who's wife miscarried that day
So a tragedy is a minor thing becaus it happens everyday ? Why, I got good news for you then
>woman dies in agony, due to doctors being scared to perform abortion
also happens everyday, much more outside of the western world than in, but also more than you imagine inside. No biggie.
>brainless newborn with other severe conditions waits for death from infection,
How is that preferable than killing the newborn in the womb ? And why is "Abortion for all till the 9th month" necessary to prevent what is clearly an extreme and special case that no one having it will have trouble proving it ?
I'm not from USA. In my country (Poland) you can currently abort a fetus only if the life of a mother is in danger (but as you see defining "in danger" may create some issues) or when a pregnancy is a result of rape. There was third clause, abortion in case of severe birth defects, but is was banned two years ago. So aside those two cases, there is no possible way to get abortion in country. This is not USA legal system, no precedences.
As for reasons why is preferable to abort in 22 week a severely defected fetus, instead of letting it die for a week - the outcome is the same, minus week of suffering for fetus and great distress for parents, first waiting for birth of a child that they knew it would die, and then waiting for said death. This is not a made up example, I mentioned it before - this is Chazan case. Abortion was denied in 22 week, the child was born, and half-died, half-rotten away, being pumped full of painkillers, because there was nothing else doctors can do. Nowadays, after the ban there won't be even discussion with doctor about abortion in such cases.
I though we were talking about propaganda, and I was talking from more media oriented perspective and what makes story more viral and visible. I've seen lately a lot of such propaganda (as I mentioned, it was hot topic here), and tried to guess why anti-abortion crowd uses certain tactics more than other. Also, I never tried to "quantify" tragedies, as suggest I do - I just compare stories that do make news here, and ones that do not. Yes, people are dying from medical failures and... Most of it doesn't end up in media. So it is "No biggie" in a way, that you won't have a massive coverage, causing massive backlash, causing changing in attitude.
But as you use statements that I never made, nor I agree with ("Abortion for all till the 9th month", WTF? ), I'll end this discussion here, as I'm not interested in playing a role of strawman opponent.
> ignoring all utility calculations about who's "really" right
There's your problem. Many of the actual people having opinions on abortion don't ignore the utility of abortion. They recognise and appreciate it, don't want it taken away, and will pursue illegal means to do it anyway when it is taken away as a legal option.
I agree, although I tend to think that any act that has majority support (over a period of time, where there is good information, other caveats may apply) is probably not morally wrong. This of course gets hairy when it's a majority only of a certain demographic, but that's why we politics.
Pretty sure that policy has only ever had majority support among the enslaved in (unfortunately historically common) cases where the alternative was death.
I didn't mean to say """if people were to ignore all utility calculations""", I meant to say """If we look at this as just a competition where one side has some tools they aren't using""".
>Many of the actual people having opinions on abortion don't ignore the utility of abortion. They recognise and appreciate it, don't want it taken away, and will pursue illegal means to do it anyway when it is taken away as a legal option.
Many of the actual people having opinions on drunk driving aren't ignoring the utility of drunk driving, they recognize and appreciate it, don't want it taken away and will pursue illegal means to do it anyway when taken away as a legal option.
And we take it away anyway, and jail their ass when they do it.
How about making it nominally a crime, but streamlined and destigmatized? Doc pays a fine based on the cost of the investigation (negligible if everyone's honest) but doesn't risk loss of license if otherwise acting as a competent professional, mom spends time officially in jail (but mostly just getting follow-up care) equal to the fetus's lifespan.
Of course, in the case of rape, dad's on the hook instead, maybe with a multiplier adjusted to reflect how heinous the consent situation was. Supportive spouse could also voluntarily step up to share the legal burden in the unlikely event of late-term medical necessity.
That's... fine by me. Except make the jailtime a little longer, nobody will respect a 9-month-max punishment. 3 years or so seems to be the minimum peope fear.
Also, abortion should be **more** stigmatized, not less. Extreme prejudice to *anyone* doing it out of anything else but rape, incest and severe birth defects in the baby. This needn't be translated into law, but murder should be trashy.
A program for drug addicts in... Hawaii, I believe... showed that a single day in jail can be a very effective deterrent, provided it's sufficiently swift and certain. "Extreme prejudice" sentencing just motivates people to find ways to avoid even being perceived the law, which ends up supporting a whole ecosystem of worse criminals.
"If somebody told me about the abortion debate for the first time in a vacuum, I would have expected that it's the *pro-abortion* side that desperately needs good faith and a devil's advocate."
Yes, this is what I really have a hard time reconciling in our modern society. From a purely scientific standpoint:
1. a fetus is clearly alive
2. it has Homo sapiens DNA, therefore it is human
3. if we polled everyone alive at the moment and asked them "do you wish you had never been born" I reckon the overwhelming answer would be that they prefer to have been born
4. killing of any other subset of living human beings (including murderous criminals) is illegal and considered morally illegitimate in most of Western society
So even not taking into account all the warm, fuzzy non-scientific stuff you mention, the fact that we massively support legal abortion in the way we do, is surprising, to say the least...
Cutting somebody's leg off, or prying open their ribcage to rip out their still-beating heart, is illegal and considered morally illegitimate... unless they've got severe gangrene in that foot, or you're a transplant surgeon operating with their consent, or otherwise causing a lesser harm only out of necessity to prevent some greater harm.
Point three seems to be a classic case of survivorship bias. Proper poll should also include e.g. suicide victims, and those who never made it as far as adulthood due to inadequate parental support, since warning signs of such an outcome are wildly over-represented among those actually seeking out an abortion. Unfortunately, starving infants and the afterlife are notoriously survey-resistant - when there's a spoken response at all, it's far below reasonable thresholds of statistical significance and replicability, or just a bunch of incoherent anguished wailing, or both.
I agree that life is not (on balance) good, I'm one of those who will respond to point (3) in the original comment you're replying to with no, my only reason for living is that those around me will get upset if I leave, this was the thing that pulled me from the edge when I was considering leaving too.
This doesn't change anything, helpless babies should be allowed to grow up and realize for themselves how utterly fucked up this horror show we call life is, nobody should be allowed to pull a trigger at them but them. As an analogy, consider a murderer who go around and kills 80-years-olds in neglectful nursery homes, he's probably doing them a favor, and yet neither the law nor even the most misanthropic morality will look kindly upon this murderer.
It's about autonomy, once a fetus grows a brain (which happens very early in pregnancy) then they deserve the right to self-determination. The same right that should be given to animals, by the way, but often doesn't because humans are murderous fucks, but that's a different conversation.
Well there are a lot of attempts to paint abortion in bad light. They are just not very memetically successful because as soon as you accuse women who need abortion in sluttiness the other side will very effectively counter it with "Have you just called this poor raped 10 years old girl a slut?"
Dunking on $BIG_CORP is not very successful move too, when it's the $BIG_CORP who has been paying for your movement. Appealing to the miracle of evolution will repel your creationist base.
As for millions-years-cuteness of babies, it's just not that impressives. Our anscestors evolved in a world where safe and available abortions didn't exist, babies needed to be cute enough so that their parents didn't kill them when they already born, not so cute to be a sufficient motivation to have them in the first place. Some people do not find babies cute at all, which is telling. And those who do, and are thinking about abortion, usually can just have their cute baby when they are ready for that and not as a result of unexpected pregnancy.
>very effectively counter it with "Have you just called this poor raped 10 years old girl a slut?"
Is this really an effective counter ? Have you tried using it in real life ? It will always be pretty clear who's pregnant because she's whoring around and who's pregnant because of rape. It will be the difference between jailtime and innocence in an effective and fair law.
I have always thought that the "strawman pro-abortionist" who replies to every argument against abortion with """What if a 10 year old is simultaneously gang raped and incest-raped, and as a result had 5 children all of them had birth defects and she's also quadriplegic and an orphan so she can't drive to a different state, what if this girl needed an abortion""" is a myth that only exists in reddit memes, but apparently that needs an update.
My own estimate is that your retort will make the pro abortion side more ridiculous and weak rather than less, but who knows. Only 1 way to find out, eh?
> the $BIG_CORP who has been paying for your movement
Just like they pay for everything in politics, doesn't prevent people from using them as a very successful strategy, eh ?. Who pays for Alexandra Cortez's campaigns ?
> Some people do not find babies cute at all
I have not encountered a single human being who is like this, and if I ever do I will categorically assume they are a psychopath in hiding till overwhelming evidence prove otherwise.
>have their cute baby when they are ready for that
Oh sure thing, there is plenty of time for that. As we all know, fertility in women is a square wave that stays on at the same amplitude from the first ovulation till menopause.
And, sure thing, "Kill this human being, we can have another one later" is a way of reasoning that a sane well-adjusted person will engage in.
Yes. I've seen the flow of such conversations multiple times. In general, arguments appealing to moral character and deservingness of the thing happening due to it, are effectively countered by pointing out that people who do not deserve that are clearly harmed too. If the worst case offender of X is hated more than the possible victim of absence of X is sympathetic, than maybe you still have a chance to successfully claim moral high ground, but sadly for pro-lifers, I guess, people just do not hate women having abundant sex life as much as child rape.
> Just like they pay for everything in politics
As a rule, the more you depend on Big Money the less critical you can be of it.
> I have not encountered a single human being who is like this
I mean if you tell everyone that you will consider them psychopaths if they don't find babies cute, no surprise you are in the dark about it. Also maybe pro-lifers naturally tend to be more susceptible to baby cuteness, so it can be typical minding.
Anyway, I'm this kind of person. For me babies are fine, just noting special. Definitely less cute than, say puppies. And I'm not even in the end of the spectrum. I know people who are actively disturbed by babies.
> Oh sure thing, there is plenty of time for that.
Yep, literal decades of fertility, even without taking into account such reproductive technologies as freezing egg cells. So most of the time "have a baby now or never" is clearly a false dilemma.
> And, sure thing, "Kill this human being, we can have another one later"
Sigh. If you fail this much at ideological Turing test, than no surprise you can't fantom why pro-life is loosing. Suffice to say, not all people buy into this non-central fallacy.
> I've seen the flow of such conversations multiple times.
Thank you for contributing to the memes.
> In general, arguments appealing to moral character and deservingness of the thing happening due to it, are effectively countered by pointing out that people who do not deserve that are clearly harmed too
Ok, I will bite.
In utility calculations, everything is scaled according to the probability of it happening (which is just taking the expectation).
Consider : I have a very good moral reason to hire an assassin to kill everyone who drinks alcohol :
1- If you drink, there is a small chance that you will drive while drunk, hitting and killing a raped 10 years old who is also an orphan and a poor street begger.
2- Since the imagined victim of (1) is so much sympathetic than those harmed by the policy of "Kill or imprison all those who drink alcohol", and also I'm pretty sure I can find actual cases of it happening, the policy will be supported by the public and endorsed by the legal system.
The reason the above reasoning doesn't have a leg to stand on is because of the marvelous invention called Probability Theory. How likely it is that a raped 10 years old who is also an orphan and a street beggar to chance on a drunk driver ? How much more likely than that it is that the poor alcoholics that you kill or imprison are mostly innocent people who rarely drive while on alcohol and don't harm anyone ? Multiply those probabilities by the sizes of the 2 population (People do this without realizing it).
This is the reason your ideology's typical response is not the own you think it is and a subject of ridicule, everybody knows how ridiculously unlikely it's for a 10 years old to be pregnant (and see another thread for why that's a possible reason that the girl in question had her age miscalculated, as she was an immigrant and that's likely to happen in those cases). Also rape victims in general are given the morning-after pills when they report to an authority, birth control is not touched by abortion legislation.
And, finally, everybody understands that law can and very often does make exceptions. And the vast vast majority of anti-abortionists including me are okay with exceptions for rape, incest and birth defects, so your "counter" is effectively just "What if all the things that you make exceptions for actually does happen?!!", and my own very reasonable counter-counter to that is "just make use of the exceptions that the law grants you lol".
>pro-lifers
Actually, I prefer anti-abortionists. There is no reason that an anti-abortionist should be pro life in general. I'm an anti-natalist for fuck's sake, I literally want all life in this Universe to end. Abortion is not bad because it ends lives, abortion is bad because it's a cowardly and a pathetic style of pseudo-murder. "Pro-life" would be running around and maximizing the amount of lives born per day per square meter I guess, I'm not into this, very much the opposite in fact. All I want is for people to not have the right to kill what is very likely a human just because they can't plan a budget or use birth control correctly.
Same thing with "Pro Choice", quit the bullshit euphemism, it's "Pro Abortion". It's an abortion debate, the 2 sides are "Pro Abortion" and "Anti Abortion".
> I guess, people just do not hate women having abundant sex life
Nothing that can't be fixed with propaganda, eh ? that's exactly why I said the anti-abortion side needs to work on their PR game.
Their mission isn't that difficult, most people are in fact disgusted by sluts very much in general. Raped 10 years olds need not enter into the picture in the first place, since an anti-abortion work of art will not frame it this way or involve them at all (Propaganda 101 : do NOT present all sides of the debate).
An anti-abortion work of art need just to put the camera on a slut whose entire fucked up lifestyle of whoring herself out for free is fundamentally secured by abortion as a safety net. Considering that sluts would love this opportunity to be (in)famous, and they already do it for free on their social media, that shouldn't be too hard.
The audience is smart enough to understand the implication that raped 10 year olds have different considerations, and law can give them their cake (punishing sluts) and let them eat it too (but not rape victims).
>As a rule, the more you depend on Big Money the less critical you can be of it.
Again, this is trivially falsifiable by looking at the loudest critcis of corporations literally anywhere. Corporations make this world go around. Youtube and Twitch are used by Socialists or even Marxists to spread anti-corporate messages. Politicians like Alexandra Cortez is (like all US politicians) living on corporate "donations", and this is one of her favorite topics whenever she can't find something to whine about. She's not alone.
And corporations are not a single monotlith, there is no reason you can't make fun of the murderer who killed her potential child so she can be a wage slave at $BIG_CORP_1, while still being funded by an unrelated $BIG_CORP_2, no ? Doesn't that happen everywhere and everyday ?
>I mean if you tell everyone that you will consider them psychopaths if they don't find babies cute, no surprise you are in the dark about it.
Why do you think that I run around telling everyone how I would respond if they told me how they feel about babies ?
Take my word for it that I don't, take comfort that nobody knows that I look down on the extremly suspicious trait of "Not liking the single most helpless and vulnerable and innocent members of their species", and I never saw anyone who volunteered the info.
>Also maybe pro-lifers naturally tend to be more susceptible to baby cuteness, so it can be typical minding.
Again, I literally don't give a single gram of care whether you or anyone else make a baby or not, or exactly how many babies you make, or when and how you make them. Zero care.
I just care that once you *do* have a baby that no one forced you to have, then you have no right in hell to harm him or her just because you aspire to be a better wage slave or you don't like the other party. I'm no more "Pro Lifer" than the guy who tells you not to torture cats is "Pro Feline".
>Yep, literal decades of fertility,
That's not how any of that works, women's fertility begin a sharp decline at the start of the 30s, hitting ground levels at the start of the 40s. (Menopause typically happen at 45 or so.)
So your upper limit for a pregnancy if you don't want to gamble is really only 30 or 35 max, which corresponds to a 1-1.5 decade assuming 20 as a start date. Egg freezing is a toy expensive technology with a mean success rate of barely 35% or so.
Anyway, I'm really not terribly interested in doing calculations for the maximum time someone can be a whore and still get away with a family she doesn't deserve. I called for the use of babies' cuteness in my original comment as a strategic weapon to make people (== neutrals and non-fanatic pro-abortionists) more interested in them as victims of abortion, because human moral reasoning is easily hacked using beauty and cuteness of the victim. My direct model of how this works is how environmentalism successfully used the beauty of some endangered animals to muster massive support and mobilize effective conservation efforts. Babies are literally the cutest thing as far as Evolution is concerned (pets are selected for their similarity to babies, and they evolved accordingly), so I'm saying this is a massive source of anti-abortion sentiments that the anti-abortionists aren't using optimally.
It's okay for me if the typical slut doesn't feel threatened that she won't be able to get a baby in time, that wasn't my angle of attack in the first place.
>you fail this much at ideological Turing test
Ehh, failing the ideological Turing test is not a fancy way of saying "You won't see things my way", it has a bit more naunced shade of meaning that that. The ideological Turing test is how much you can emulate an average opponent, if you can do it well enough to fool at least the median/mode opponent, then you succeed.
As a former pro-abortionist, I'm fairly confident I can emulate an average non-fanatic pro-abortionist well enough. I just don't want to, and there is also no need for it now. Trust me, you haven't seen me when I want to emulate an opponent, if you did then you won't know that I'm on the other side.
>pro-life is loosing.
I mean come on, is defeating a half-century old murder-pass really losing ? I do admit the anti-abortionist is locked in a vicious and unfavorable fight where it's often not given a fair voice, that much is my original comment, but it's not "losing" by any stretch, to the contrary. We are right now discussing the reaction to their massive victory.
>this non-central fallacy.
Are you implying that you are a non-central member of the category of pro-abortionists ? Because all I did was to summarize your assertion that :
>>> those [...] usually can just have their cute baby when they are ready for that and not as a result of unexpected pregnancy.
This is quite literally just saying "Whenever my baby in inconvenient for me, I can just kill em and make another one later". Oh, for sure, you're sugaring it a bit, but that's the minimal compression of your statment, that all what it says really. Are you saying that this is not how the vast majority of abortions are reasoned ? (It is, I can demonstrate some numbers about this.) Are you saying my summarization is a strawman ?
Look, you seem to be missing the point. I'm not trying to persuade you that appeal to raped underaged victims is an epistemologically good argument or a generalisable way to find ethical truth. I'm pointing out that it's an effective one from memetic replication perspective - the perspective you have originally proposed to talk about - and explaining why it's that.
> Actually, I prefer anti-abortionists.
As you wish. I commend this as an example of virtue of accuracy.
> I'm an anti-natalist
Okay, now I'm curious. What is your reason for being anti-natalist? Is it about minimizing the suffering of living beings? Or something else?
> Nothing that can't be fixed with propaganda, eh ?
Well then I guess you can count the whole current conservative side of the modern culture war as such propaganda. People who buy into slutshaming and general mysoginy are already at your side and are not considered high status. It's probably possible in theory to shift the societal consciousness back to pre-feminism times, granted infinite propaganda budget for conservatives and zero budget to their opponents but even this doesn't work as reliably as one might think, I'm saying this from the experience of living in Russia.
> law can give them their cake (punishing sluts) and let them eat it too (but not rape victims).
Because everybody knows that there is no intersection between the categories of women who have active sex life and rape victims...
> Babies are literally the cutest thing as far as Evolution is concerned
Adaptation executers not fitness maximizers. Again this kind of emotional blackmail works for some people, and anti-abortionists are using it all the time, it's just not as effective as you seem to think.
> As a former pro-abortionist, I'm fairly confident I can emulate an average non-fanatic pro-abortionist well enough
Then you shouldn't have problems to understand that people who support abortions generally do not think that embryos equals babies. The non-central
fallacy is in trying to frame abortion as a human murder. Yes, technically you can stretch the definition of a human to include embryos. But then embryas are an extremely non-central example of a human, lacking thoughts, feeling, social connections and any personality. All the qualities that matters and due to which murder is wrong. Thus your summary isn't accurate.
Again anti-abortionists can and do use this framework as a propaganda tool, it's just not that effective because it doesn't really correspond to the way people they want to lure intuitively categorise things.
I just so happen to believe that it's actually you who are missing my point.
I'm not trying to say that your "plea for the raped 10 year old" thing can (only) be defeated with some big brain epistemological machinery or statistical reasoning, I'm trying to say that it can be defeated with basic everyday reasoning that everyone already does automatically without realizing.
The memes making fun of this way of thinking on twitter and reddit are not made by some high-grade rationalist thinkers, they are made by common-grade social media users dunking on a manifestly ridiculous argument. Almost nobody is convinced by this, is what I'm saying. At least not anybody who isn't a "Shout your Abortion" fanatic.
I even suggest you play the devil's advocate game for a bit and go to a pro-abortion friend of yours, try to make them persuade you how a situation as vanishingly unlikely as "a raped-pregnant 10 years old" can trump or oppose a situation as likely as "a slut whoring around then running away to abort her responsibility". Pretend you're a skeptic neutral and try to make them explain it to you carefully as convincingly as they can. They won't be able to.
My **explanation** for *why* the argument is a ridiculous thing to believe might seem like a bit big-brained, but I think most people can instinctively know that it's bullshit, and that's enough for them.
>Is it about minimizing the suffering of living beings?
In a nutshell, yes. Arguments for anti-natalism are varied and many, but the simplest and most concise way to present it IMO is as a Pascal's Gamble : Once you have a child, you're at the mercy of the entire world, if anything harms your child (and plenty will), then you're responsible. But not having a child is a trivially-winning move : No matter how hellish the world get and how assholish people get, you're always gauranteed an easy A by just refusing to play the game altogether. Every parent in existence is a bad parent. (including mine, who I love very much and unconditionally forgive for bringing me to this world)
Not having children, of course, doesn't mean not raising children. Orphans exist, relatives exist.
>Well then I guess you can count the whole current conservative side of the modern culture war as such propaganda.
I don't count myself as conservative (and any one you know would probably not count me as one), vegetarianism and anti-natalism are not typical conservative positions. (though there is no reason they can't be, but they just aren't.)
But anyway, conservatives (small c) do understand the power of slut-shaming, and that's something I respect very much about them. But they don't play it hard enough in my view. And I haven't seen them play the abortion angle on it in particular, it's always from the general prespective. And that's the thing that should change.
>People who buy into slutshaming and general mysoginy are already at your side
Brotherly advice : If you want "Misogyny" to have any meaning at all, refrain from using it to denote holding sluts responsible for their actions.
I value women very much, indeed my vitriolic hatred for sluttiness stems from such deep respect. Furthermore, it's not slutty women alone who earn my contempt, it's "slutty" men too, although the word doesn't bite as much when you apply it that way, so there are other words to use in its place (fuckboy, e.g.). But the point is : Being a slut is not dependent on whether you're born with a dick or a slit between your legs. Just fucking close them and hide whatever you have inside, that way lies Virtue.
What can I say, being a slut is just fucking ugly and repulsive as hell.
>and are not considered high status.
Hmmm, citation needed. Assuming this is not just a subtle shade-throw at me for using a word you apparently hate.
This is not an accurate description of how social conservatism is viewed outside of progressive circle jerks. Outside of TED talks and Vice polemics, being a slut is almost unanimously viewed as a degrading and low-status, and making fun of sluts is - as far as I know - an extremly safe and fair-game thing to do. (especially if you restrict your venom to the heavy-hitters like - say - tinder users or onlyfan influncers, and not the more everyday sluts) Indeed, I sometimes *wince* at the extreme meanness people display towards sluts, they're still humans after all.
I wonder how we can prove which one of our conflicting assesments is right, perhaps we can ask a selection of people who view this thread whether they see statements of the form "Whores should have some responsbility" or "Sluts and their fucked up lifestyles" as low-status ? this wouldn't be much of anything but it's a start, feel free to define any other metric and suggest ways to measure it.
> It's probably possible in theory to shift the societal consciousness back to pre-feminism times
I'm telling you, my guy, that "societal consciousness" is not one big monolithic thing even on the scale of a single, small, local geography. You will be surprised at the number and the names of the places where it's still very heavily tabooed and policed and trash-talked to the nth degree to be a slut.
Thankfully, feminism has not ruined all women, not even a majority. Small mercies, eh ? Modest women are blooming flowers amidst the rubble.
>granted infinite propaganda budget for conservatives and zero budget to their opponents
Just stop summarily banning them on-sight from all the social media and see what they do after 2 or 3 years lol.
>I'm saying this from the experience of living in Russia.
Surprising, my stereotype of Russia and much of Eastern Europe is that it's conservative-by-default country where progressives are still heavily persecuted (which is not a thing I'm a fan of by the way, but it's not like progressives do any better in the areas they control).
Triple-check your social bubble and whether you live in Moscow or St. Petersburg vs. smaller cities, perhaps ?
(Anyway, I hope the war ends soon. I love Russia : difficult language, difficult (but lovely) people.)
>Because everybody knows that there is no intersection between the categories of women who have active sex life and rape victims...
Okay, fair. Sluts get raped sometimes, and when it happens they deserve all the same rights as any other rape victim.
I admit this is a hard problem, and sluts make it even harder by being so much of fucking sluts. Let us hope there is some threshold of "Burden of Evidence" such that proving that a slut was raped is moderately easy yet lying about it (i.e. being a slut then claiming you were raped to have an abortion) is reasonably hard. Even just shortening the abortion-pass to **Exactly** 1-month-old fetuses or younger would be an approximation of such a threshold to me.
And again, the morning-after pills are extremly effective and are always an option. A rape victim, or any of the people she reports the rape to, will always know to take them.
> anti-abortionists are using it all the time
What a strange thing then that I have never seen a single anti-abortion docuementary or video essay that plays this angle.
>it's just not as effective as you seem to think.
I honestly think you're deluding yourself, your way of thinking is a thing that you will be surprised at how utterly repulsive and low-status it is to hold in all but the most progressive circles.
Indeed, my belief is that anti-natalism's single biggest source of shame and low-status-ness is its association with this way of thinking, and people are very often surprised at how much I love babies and I can tell their opinion of anti-natalism improves slightly when they realize I don't believe it out of selfish hatred or indifference to the cutest members of our fucked up species.
>embryas are an extremely non-central example of a human, lacking thoughts, feeling, social connections and any personality. All the qualities that matters and due to which murder is wrong.
I have bad news for you : You just proved that killing newborns for convenience is morally okay.
Seriously, I played with newborns. Every single thing you say holds to the letter. They utterly lack any personality or even the ***concept*** of social relationships. Their smol cute head lack any thought you might call human. Some doctors in the past (and I mean like 30 years ago not the middle ages) even believed they don't have the ability to feel pain.
(and by the way, it's entirely unfounded to assume that fetuses don't feel pain. We know that babies are born with the capacity to feel pain, and it would be one hell of a coincidence if they just so happened to develop that during the latest days. Pain is an extremly primitive and basic response, I expect it's the first thing that develops in their tiny brain. We certainly know that fetuses feel 'discomfort' : that's why they constantly shift inside the womb, and why that movement increases as delively approaches.)
So tell me, can parents kill their newborns for every reason they can kill their fetus ? If yes, I think your ideology is too ridiculous to argue and summarily false. If no, then you have to show how are fetuses different from newborns.
I live in the Midwest, and there's plenty of billboards featuring a cute photo of a baby (~4 months old, if I had to guess; awake, alert, and smiling) with text like "I had a heartbeat 18 days from conception" (there's a few other early milestones getting cited). So the magical cuteness of babies isn't going completely untapped, even if it's not being used maximally.
One reason it might not be as effective as you might expect is that while babies are cute, early fetuses aren't? In particular, in your hypothetical video, I'd probably eschew too much graphic imagery around fetal development, and spend screen time on children who are at least old enough to consciously smile.
The Obamacare graph pretty clearly does show a swing against government healthcare coinciding with Obama pushing for Obamacare. It’s also a bit misleading, because it disaggregates responses into three partisan categories, and so ignores people moving between the categories. The aggregated graph shows the effect more clearly (second graph): https://news.gallup.com/poll/4708/healthcare-system.aspx
ie the least pro-Government healthcare Democrats becoming Republicans (a) is a thing that happened, and (b) would probably increase how pro-Government healthcare both groups are.
But even ignoring that… looking at a 20 point fall among independents and saying “no effect” is definitely wrong.
The Obamacare one is very thermostatic. It's popular in 2007 then falls after that as it gains salience during the long very public build up to the passing of Obamacare. Then it stagnates and becomes popular again when Republicans start talking about Repealing Obamacare.
Or maybe because the left is better at coordinating social meanness and ostracism against conservative political ideas and those who support them than vice versa.
While I do believe media influence affects degree of the swing, I think there is merit to the thermostat concept. I just think people have a skewed idea of what the thermostat is measuring.
Complex trade policy? Mot people don't have a thermostat for that. They don't know what it is, how it works, or care to. But the media can hammer it hard and swap responses. Also keep in mind if your methodology for the poll is poor, it'll mask the don't care people. So with something like that you may have the number one answer be to hang up the phone and not waist their time. Normally this would be everyone without an opinion on trade policy so it works out. However if the media is hammering the issue, you may have a skewed population self selecting into the results rather than out because orange man bad per media.
Then with abortion, while the fact is most people are someplace between all the abortion and none of the abortion for an actual opinion, you are likely measuring which team you want to be associated with. Republicans are not uniformly driven on religious issues. A lot of republicans who are republicans on different issues were fine with it is an issue because they assumed it was a car the dog was never going to catch. The dog caught the car. Positions are being recalibrated. Some of the pro lifers are switching to an even more pro life stance and want it banned everywhere. Plenty of republicans would prefer not to hitch their horse to that wagon.
Healthcare? Perhaps it measured if people thought they were getting better health care from a fiscal point of view. People who saw the ACA as a huge failure for people who wanted single payer health care probably saw it as not a big improvement. Independents probably did the thing that independents do and decided that in the run up to enactment it was a political clown show they disapprove of. Republicans probably disapproved of it for a bunch of reasons. But then it got passed and lots of people got bought off with the subsidies and artificially low rates. Then premiums went up. Then the subsidies came to an end, so the brief uptick probably came to an end. Then post 2015 they start skewing with how much you hate Trump.
Gay marriage? The approval across the board is generally trending upwards and has been for years. I suspect the slope on the republican side will trend upward more sharply moving forward because for them you are likely measuring, in many cases, the calibration on their sense of moral peril. The "gay agenda" has now morphed into the "trans-agenda" and a lot of people concerned with that see the LGB portion of that as potential allies given the current direction of policy. There will also be a faction of Rs that just don't want to lose, don't care if gay people are married, and want it covered by defensible law rather than be beaten with a club that says "gay marriage and interracial marriage are next" post Dobbs.
The health care one seems somewhat thermostatic if you base it on when the opposition starts scaremongering and not when legislation actually passes. Democrats, Independents and Republicans each become less approving of Government Healthcare starting in 2008 when Obamacare is being passed and Death Panels were all over talk radio. Then D'S & I's become more approving of it when Obamacare is threatened with repeal in 2016.
I think some of it depends on really where the cultural norm sits for the politically disinterested. If something steps outside of their comfort window of norms, just enough, then they become engaged, usually in a backlashy kind of way. I know we've seen super high turnout post 2016, so maybe that supports this idea. Or maybe I'm just making crap up, dunno. I'm skeptical of the "liberal media wins" narrative because it seems too easy, but I live in the deep south so everytime I see a new channel on, its Fox or Newsmax declaring a woke crisis, so I probably get exposed to a whole lot more conservative doom porn than the avg ACX reader
Purely anecdotally, this number is non-negligible. I can think of at least two people in my life who (at least initially) believed that the supreme court decision had banned abortion nationwide.
I think that the overturning of Roe v Wade* really changed what it meant to be pro-life. Whereas it used to be “less supportive of abortion than Roe v Wade” it became “less supportive of abortion than the laws in my state” and those state laws changed very fast.
Something “against gay marriage” doesn’t have as much middle ground I think, so changes on it doesn’t change the meaning of “against gay marriage”
*technically it was Casey, not Roe v Wade that was overturned, but I’m choosing to be slightly inaccurate to stay with the standard way of denoting the abortion cases
It may be that people want some medium level of sexual liberation/libertinism, rather than some amount of gay marriage. The question shouldn't be whether opinion turned against gay marriage after Obergefell, but whether attitudes toward LGBT+ normalization efforts noticeably cooled. I'm not aware of a rigorous body of evidence suggesting that they did, but it seems plausible.
I agree this isn't enough data, but some ideas that occur to me:
Idea #1: Maybe you just happened to pick a rare thermostatic issue for the conservative side? The idea that lots of people want a medium amount of abortion seems intuitively plausible to me--there's a wide gap between a maximally-sympathetic abortion and a maximally-unsympathetic abortion, so it's easy for me to imagine someone wanting to draw a line somewhere between them. I have a much harder time imagining that people want a medium amount of gay marriage; examples of gay marriage strike me as having a much narrower range of sympathetic-ness.
Idea #2: I once read about a study (sorry, I don't have a link) that asked politicians to predict public opinion. They found that liberal politicians believed the public was more liberal and conservative politicians believed the public was more conservative--so far, so boring--but that when they polled the public directly, the public was even more liberal than the liberal politicians thought they were. (The study suggested that maybe corporate lobbying skews all politicians' perceptions of public sentiment in the conservative direction.)
If true, that could perhaps be a reason that the public tends to be angrier about conservative moves than liberal moves--the liberal moves end up having more support than the politicians expected, and the conservative moves less than the politicians expected.
I think the difference here is that the question is binary (for or against abortion), but the state fights have really been a matter of degrees (At how many weeks pregnant should abortion be illegal? Should there be exceptions for rape and incest?). Thus it's possible the issue has been reframed for those people in the middle - if you thought abortion should be illegal after the first trimester, but your state just voted on a law to ban it at 10 weeks, you might have initially believed you were against abortion, but now that you're opposed to the proposed law, you would describe yourself as being pro choice.
Looking for a "backlash" effect is fun, but not good science.
If we were to slow the reasoning down, here's what it would look like:
(1) there's a metaphor we sometimes use in conversation: "backlash". The metaphor says that people are sort of like rubber bands, and when you pull them too hard in one direction, they tend to "snap back" (or something). We apply this metaphor in certain situations, as a vivid way to tell a story, or help make sense, of something that happened.
Then there are two options:
(2A) We believe that "backlash" is not just a figure of speech, but that it actually refers to a stable explanatory object, that science can investigate. It's a process that takes place in different situations, has causal powers, etc.
(2B) We're not going to be scientific about it — we're not trying to fit this event into a larger account of how humans reason about politics. Instead, we'd like to use the metaphor "backlash" in this particular discussion, and we want to put a number on that metaphor.
There's not really a good reason to believe (2A). We don't have (for example) a good model of cognition that would predict backlash as consequence, making it a repeatable phenomenon in the individual. (I'm not saying it's impossible to construct — just that one hasn't been suggested here or elsewhere, as far as I know; it would be a graduate-level homework to build a Bayesian model, for example.) Furthermore, without a good model, we can't say in which circumstances it should or should not appear, and so we're already in danger of p-hacking.
Meanwhile, (2B) is scientism. You can put a number on the metaphor, and even a p-value, but it doesn't actually mean anything. You're not talking about scientific objects (for example), or appealing to a scientific explanation. You're using statistics to boost your metaphor above someone else's, but really all you're saying is "here is a pattern, that is statistically significant, and I am going to tell the following story about the pattern — it's 'backlash'."
One problem is that the graphs you're looking at only include "pro" and "anti". How many of those answers come from people who are really thinking "I've never really thought about it"? If there are large numbers of people answering essentially arbitrarily, what appears to be a controversial issue could actually just be a non-issue. Free trade seems like the obvious example -- it's hard to imagine average voters paying the slightest bit of attention to trade policy until there's a highly public change to it. In this case I would buy that the scale and direction of the change is due to Trump's unpopularity. Even some people who voted for him saw him as untrustworthy, so any major policy associated with him is going to have an uphill battle when it comes to public opinion. You could also look at the pro-life vs pro-choice graph: there's a big spike toward pro-choice at the start of the graph as well. Was abortion really more popular in the early 90s than it was in the 2000s, or was it just more in the public eye due to Casey reaffirming Roe in 1992?
The liberal vs conservative split is probably something of a coincidence. The conventional wisdom is that you can expand people's rights and benefits without backlash, but you can't take them away. Liberal policies tend to expand rights, conservative policies tend to take them away. People either don't notice or are actively happy about their rights being expanded, and they either don't notice or are actively angry about their rights being taken away. If a liberal policy were passed that hurt people, it would probably be unpopular.
Why not assume this is entirely due to centrists? Let's say there's a government policy which can be on a scale from 1 to 10. People describe themselves as pro-increase and pro-decrease. If I want the number to be at a 5, and it's currently at a 6, I'll tentatively describe myself as pro-decrease. As soon as the number moves to 4 then I'll flip to pro-increase.
In other words, maybe there's no backlash at all, and people in the center just went from wanting slightly less abortion to slightly more abortion when the amount of abortion decreased significantly.
Re Obamacare, (a) it does seem to have declined in the 2008-2010 period (which makes sense, it was a longer discussion than the dobbs decision and didn't come as a shock the way Trump's election win did), and (b) does seem to have suffered backlash by other metrics (Democrats lost the house in 2010 in a historic backlash, probably in large part due to thermostatic effects from obamacare). So I'm not sure it's strong counter-evidence.
One obvious distinction is that the overturning of Roe vs Wade came from the courts, not from politicians. Politicians are less likely to do unpopular things than courts are.
Obviously Obergefell was a court decision too, but I think my model is that courts do a mix of popular and unpopular things whereas politicians very heavily towards things they think are popular, so Dobbs, Obergefell and Obamacare are all "business as usual" that fit the trend I'm positing, whereas the swing in favour of international trade is an outlier that challenges it.
Possibly international trade was previously an obscure issue most people didn't have strong opinions on, and it suddenly becoming associated with an unpopular politician made it a proxy for "do you like Trump"? In this model the trend against it is nothing to do with whether Trump won a victory or not, the causal thing was him becoming associated with the cause.
Nope. This is to my mind very much reading the entrails of a goat and divining the minds of the gods. But it's a fabulous prompt for ideological debates of eternal interest.
I've often wondered whether certain beliefs function as predictions and other ones as markers of markers of tribal affiliation. If so, you'd expect "predictive" beliefs to be responsive to new evidence and "tribal beliefs" to not be responsive to presentation.
So if Trump champions protectionism in trade it might drive people's opinion on trade policy based on how much they like Trump. But if people predict that restricting abortion will cause people to be more careful about pregnancy, than stories of people who acted responsibly and still need an abortion would be likely to change their mind.
This is obviously somewhat post-hoc - it doesn't allow predictions of which positions will suffer from backlash, but it does suggest that political positions that are more rapidly reflected in outcomes are more likely to generate support/backlash depending on the outcome. That seem a bit like what is observed when it comes to things like gas prices - if Fox news says "Biden's anti-oil policies are pushing up the price of gas" then Biden's approval rating falls while gas is high.
If you look even at other Gallup data from the same page ( https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx ) the trend looks much less reactionary. Note for example that the figure in the post was for “asked after question on legality of abortion” whereas if you look at the table with “NOT asked after question on legality” we see a much smaller shift in line with fluctuations of previous years. One thing that likely changed after the ruling is people’s awareness of the law even in unaffected states.
I notice for the Trump issues you used figures from a number of different sources, which raises some flags for me about similar selectivity as the abortion data. Even if it’s a matter of honest search convenience, it makes the results a bit sketchy.
As you point out in the penultimate sentence, a handful of datapoints is selective even if the trends are consistent across polls, and your n~5 is really only 2 examples of the phenomenon. We can tell a story about reactionary responses to Trump without drawing general conclusions that the public is reactionary.
I cannot express the breadth or depth of my indifference to the reaction against Dobbs. To be clear, I'm an atheist, but very anti-abortion; if that's confusing to you, it shouldn't be. Atheists don't believe in god, they believe in humanity (or at least I do).
Abortion kills humans. Whatever you think of the debate about when life begins or when that life is human or any of those, I don't think they matter. A human fetus or embryo will, in almost all cases, mature into a human and be born. This includes the fact that miscarriages and natural abortions are reasonably common (if you try to lawyer me on this point, I will ignore you. You will not convince me). It is not tenable to claim that, by intervening at any particular point in this process where we have decided no morality attaches, we also free ourselves of the moral burden of preventing what comes next, which is to say, the birth of a human.
We live in a society that can barely bring itself to put to death multiple murderers, rape-murderers, and the like. And yet a significant fraction are okay with annihilating the most helpless and innocent people? It's close to the definition of insanity, as far as I'm concerned.
Roe v. Wade is one of the most abominable decisions of any court. It offends my morality (as just described), and it offends my professionalism as an attorney. No one, not a single commentator, attorney, or jurist, seriously defends the reasoning of Roe v. Wade, because it has none. It was made up from whole cloth. The concept of the trimester was literally invented by Blackmun.
Just on this basis alone, Dobbs is worthwhile and correct. Egregiously wrong decisions should not stand if there is any opportunity to overturn them. The second-worst decision ever, Korematsu v. United States, remains good law and will remain good law unless and until someone tries interning Americans again. This is in the nature of our appellate system.
Even if Dobbs leads to more abortion rather than less, which I sincerely doubt, it will have been worthwhile. Now, the people and their representatives will decide. Not every right needs to be constitutional. If the people's decision is contrary to my morality, I have means of fighting back. By contrast, there is no gainsaying the Supreme Court.
Last and certainly least, the conservative legal movement was founded to oppose Roe. If the Court had blinked this time, after so much work and so many disappointments like Casey, it would have discredited the entire movement. I don't agree with every or probably even most conservative legal thinkers, but I do think the movement has done real good for real people, and is a valuable force that has corrected the lawlessness of the post-war legal profession and courts.
I don't want to get into the ideological questions of what's good/bad, right/wrong here so much (I'm actually currently pregnant and have many thoughts on this issue!) but you make interesting points here, and this makes the post's topic an even more interesting question, specifically, given your specific expertise and moral/atheistic viewpoint. Where do you think the backlash and recent drop in support for pro-life policies is coming from? What would be your best guess at to why the poll looks like that?
> Whatever you think of the debate about when life begins or when that life is human or any of those, I don't think they matter.
> It is not tenable to claim that, by intervening at any particular point in this process where we have decided no morality attaches, we also free ourselves of the moral burden of preventing what comes next, which is to say, the birth of a human.
Judging the act by its future consequences doesn't let you restrict yourself to people who are pregnant. By this analysis, using birth control is just as bad.
And indeed that's been a fairly common perspective, but it appears to have zero currency among Americans.
Oh nonsense. Most zygotes in a uterus will become humans if left alone. Contrariwise, almost all oocytes and spermatazoa will never, and can never, become humans, because they aren't fertilized and won't be.
So? The argument isn't that you're harming a spermatozoon in the present by catching it in a condom in the present. The argument is that you're harming a human in the future by preventing its birth in the slightly earlier future. Remember?
>> It is not tenable to claim that, by intervening at any particular point in this process where we have decided no morality attaches, we also free ourselves of the moral burden of preventing what comes next, which is to say, the birth of a human.
The moral burden is that of preventing *an existing human being* from reaching the birth that would otherwise take place. There's a being in existence who has an interest in being born.
Acting to prevent such a being from ever coming into existence in the first place also produces the ultimate result of no birth taking place. But it's utterly different from a moral standpoint.
>> Whatever you think of the debate about when life begins or when that life is human or any of those, I don't think they matter.
We're specifically ignoring whether a fertilized egg is a human or not, because that doesn't matter. What matters is that we're preventing a human from being born in the future.
This argument stipulates that a fertilized egg is not an existing human being, and says that preventing the human from coming into existence is just as bad as taking it back out. And that applies to birth control as much as it applies to abortion.
Taking your argument to extremes, one could point out that a few tons of soil and rock contain the constituent atoms of dozens of potential humans. So if a technology ever became available (as it probably will one day) to extract and reconfigure these elements into viable humans, would we be morally obliged to use it to maximum capacity, like that mythical self-replicating all-powerful robot given a relentless drive to turn everything in the universe into paper clips?
Most reasonable people would agree that the moral center of gravity lies somewhere in between, before an embryo can properly said to be human. Also, let's not forget that nature herself performs many abortions on early-stage and even advanced-stage embryos!
>would we be morally obliged to use it to maximum capacity
No you wouldn't, you're just obligated to not use it to make a mini-human then kill it in cold blood.
Nobody forces you to have child-making sex (and if someone does, then that's the only thing that makes it okay to abort the result, for all the period between 0 month and 9 month). But if you did that out of your own free will, then you carry the result to the end.
It's as if you invited a homeless guy into your home for 9 month and then forced him out after 4 or 5. I don't know about others, but my own gut feelings say this a pretty obvious piece of shit move, why invite him if you're not going to make good on your promise ?
(off course, the actual object-level involves the much more horrendous act of **CREATING** a life out of thin air just to destroy it, but the analogy gets across the particular assholeness of extending an invitation and then revoking it unilaterally, Abortion also involves other assholeness the analogy doesn't get across.)
Taking your own argument to extremes, every single human on earth will die. Why should I be punished if I kill someone ? they were going to die anyway, Nature was going to kill them, possibly in more violent ways, I *merely* accelerated the process and made it a bit more merciful even.
It's all about determinism, the few tons of soil and rock isn't going to become human on its own anytime soon. But an embryo (whether it resulted from sex or a bunch of rocks) will pretty damn reliably transform into a human (almost 100% in a civilization which knows how to transform rock into embryos), to the point that its reasonable to consider it already human.
> let's not forget that nature herself performs many abortions on early-stage and even advanced-stage embryos
Nature also says the Strong do whatever the fuck they want and the Weak should suck it up. If we were to listen to Nature, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Morality is about replacing the Natural with the Just.
I consider myself a reasonable person and I think the only bright line you can draw is at conception. Anything else I consider sophistry.
That doesn't mean I oppose abortion under all circumstances, any more than I oppose the killing of innocents in warfare or some other exigent circumstances. Sometimes killing people, even innocent people, is what has to be done. But pretending that's not what we're doing is to my mind a cowardly attempt to evade the gravity of our action by subscribing to a soothing delusion. It bears an unpleasant similarity to Lebensunwertes Leben.
I consider myself a reasonable person and I think the only bright line you can draw is at viability. Having discarded embryos and carried a fetus to term and lived the brutality of childbirth, I don’t speak from a place of hypotheticals. Potato potahto?
The error margin here make this pretty useless (10 to 25% ? just a casual 15% worth of "it depends" ?)
There is also the caveat of "Before the woman even knows it". Medical Abortion only happens if the woman knows about the pregnancy (and several other things obviously), so from all pregnancies **Where you can consider an abortion**, the vast majority will reach completion safely if not (medically) aborted.
A. None of the policy victories shifted anyone's opinion.
B. The shift in reported opinion reflects people's stated values moving into line with (or toward) their actual values.
It's pretty easy to explain why a policy victory would cause people's stated values to move from a misrepresentation in the direction of honesty - if you stand by whatever you were saying before, the policy you purport to like might gather momentum and score even more victories. If you didn't like the first one, that would be bad.
It's also easy to explain why people might systematically misrepresent their own values; in fact, that's been a recent focus of activity because the phenomenon appears to be so common.
However, this theory gives you nothing in terms of your ability to predict which victories will cause backlashes.
I don't intend to claim that this theory is correct as to the two opinion shifts you discuss, but it doesn't have trouble explaining (1) why they happened and (2) why other policy shifts don't cause similar opinion shifts.
I think your analysis runs pretty far ahead of your data. For example, you say there's a clear backlash against Dobbs when you see a 6% shift in opinion (2nd graph), but you say nothing happened after Obergefell despite what looks like a 2-5% dip in support for gay marriage in 2015 (4th graph), depending on party. (Part of why it's hard to compare these graphs is that the y axis for the 2nd graph is magnified by ~2 compared to the 4th.) I'd be reluctant to draw sweeping conclusions from observing a 6% versus a 2-5% change in a noisy small sample. You might also be bemused by the fact that the Dobbs data stops while the issue is still very recent (2022), while the Obergefell data go on for another 7 years. Perhaps the Dobbs change is as ephemeral as the Obergefell data -- or maybe it represents a lasting shift. We'll have to wait to see.
I also think the link between the ACA and "government responsibility for healthcare" is pretty dubious. The ACA very carefully and loudly did *not* include a government-run option, because polls at the time suggested it would sink it politically (as well be completely unaffordable). The omission was widely decried at the time by people who like government-run healthcare, so it would be difficult for anyone paying any attention at the time to think the passage of the ACA represented the triumph of government-run healthcare. It was, if anything, on the contrary, good evidence that Americans wanted no such thing, even if they agreed healthcare was unreasonably expensive -- which means the thermostatic argument is weak.
The conservative victories you cite - e.g. an unqualified likely criminal being elected President, abortion ban - made the world worse almost without qualifications. There's no upside except a feeling of moral superiority for a small group of hardliners.
The liberal victories you cite - e.g. gay marriage legalization, improved access to healthcare - made the world better, almost without qualification. Yes, Obamacare kind of sucks but it is clearly better than what came before. Nobody is hurt by gay marriage and it improves some people's lives immensely.
So, look for this - does the policy come with almost all downside and little to no no upside? People probably won't like it. Is it almost all upside with little to no downside? People will like it.
From an outsider's perspective, the main problem with Obamacare is the insanely vast and punitive compensation awards in negligence cases. I believe in the US, legal insurance is the main expense which doctors, and thus their patients, face.
Surely it should be possible to agree a fixed set of penalities for various classes of medical mishaps, and put the wretched healthcare lawyers out of business! I mean if King Ethelbert could come up with an exhaustive list in the 600s AD, it shouldn't be that hard today! :-)
Damn, who would have thunk ? all the things you agree with make the world a better place, all the things you disagree with make the world a worse place.
It's astounding how much of a coincidence that is. It couldn't have been true but for a single set of beliefs, and that set happened to be yours from among all else.
And Not Only That, but also polled people have a reliable and immediate sensor with which to detect that the world has gone better or worse ? **and also** to trace that state delta into a single event or decision ? What an absolutely marvelous world.
Is your explanation a true explanation or a thinly veiled way of saying my so-called sarcasm ?
>an unqualified likely criminal being elected President,
Do you really think the ~70 million voter who favored Trump didn't have a single good reason to ? All 70 million of them were misguided or too dumb to see the obvious and naked truth that voting for Trump make the entire world a worse place without qualifcations ? Is this an actual unironic opinion you hold and are willing to bet money on ?
>abortion ban - made the world worse almost without qualifications. There's no upside except a feeling of moral superiority for a small group of hardliners.
Right, so if - say - 50 million people in the USA care about abortion (to underestimate), the oft-cited 40% figure that is pro life supporters would be 20 million. Twenty million person are just a small group of hardliners who want to make it worse for everybody else, to you.
---
In short, I don't really think you're sincere. Oh, you might very well *believe* the policies you like make the world a better place, but you **don't** believe that this is unambiguous and without caveats, and you **don't** believe that people reliably and universally can see that. If you have the slightest awareness about how many people believe otherwise, you can't be sincere.
Not speaking to trade here, but to Roe - I always felt that the overturning of Roe was the worst thing that could happen to the conservative movement. It was a brilliantly uniting quest against something that it's easy to form a strongly negative view on and see yourself as fighting for the voiceless, lending the movement a sense of moral righteousness and even a divine sense of duty. And there's the underdog facet of it too. The moral warriors fighting a huge, corrupt, system of death. I get that and though I definitely lean pro-choice, I'm sympathetic to the other side's points.
But once it's achieved, where is the unity? Where is the quest? It's done, the heroic party is disbanded, and there's no easy replacement for their motivation, though the debate about trans kids is moving into that same spotlight. It's not as potent, though. I feel like overturning Roe was a devastating mistake - the proverbial dog that caught the car and then had no idea what to do with it, or with itself. The chase was the point. I'm not surprised that as soon as it was achieved, opinions changed quickly. The whole thing was an ideological macguffin - only there to drive the story of a quest for glory and righteousness. But in epic quest stories, you usually end up finding out that the macguffin wasn't what you were *really* seeking all along. And I think that was very much the case here with Roe.
I would say, in addition to that, none of abortion’s victories at the ballot box go beyond Roe. Most of them don’t necessarily even go up to the level of Roe. Take Kansas. Abortion won’t be illegal there, but it likely won’t end up with Roe-level permissiveness either. Not even the bluest of states are seriously considering going beyond Roe, for now anyway. This is partly because of how radical Roe was.
But still, even with those victories, the status quo is much, much better than before Roe.
Could it be that abortion affects people more directly than some of those other issues? It doesn't really impact straight people of hay marriage is legal or illegal, but not being able to get an abortion when you want or need one does affect most of the population. Women especially, obviously, but also men to some degree. In large parts of the country, abortion is seen as a very evil thing, so there is an inclination to opose it, but when one is faced with the possibility that it might actually be banned, maybe then people switch to thinking in terms of how that affects them and change their minds?
My bet is that it has to do with the media being firmly controlled by the left, and able to whip people into a frenzy, scare them, and do things like find the scary stories and publicize them. We know that there's gotta be no shortage of edge case one off bad effects from any policy - it's like the Chinese robber fallacy. The question is whether these things are brought to the public, and if people grow to think they are central examples, and meaningful examples.
Abortion might be unique among these examples. I notice that in the health care and homosexuality polls, there isn't an option for "opposed to" the legislation, the way that there is for abortion. Anti-homosexuality certainly exists, but it isn't organized as a movement the same way that pro-life and pro-choice both are.
I'd guess that this affects polling. Pro-life scored a major victory, pro-choice suffered a major loss, how does that affect your opinion? As opposed to: Homosexuality scored a major victory, how does that affect your opinion?
I suspect this has to do with the 'grounding problem', a quirk of polling-methodology, rather than meaningful change in opinion.
When pollsters ask vague questions like 'are you pro-choice' or 'is international trade good', the participant grounds that question in terms of how it relates to the specific policy debate around that topic in the present. If the nature of the policy debate changes, then the answers change, even if the base opinions stay the same.
Let's relate this to the 5 examples you used.
1. Abortion - When democrats were winning, being pro-choice debate was more about 'how much abortion is too much' rather than 'should be ban abortions all together'. Afterall, Roe-v-wade had supreme court precedent. As an abortion-moderate, your "abortions are okay sometimes" opinion now lands you in the pro-choice category, while it would have put you in the pro-life category before.
2. Global Trade - The US bringing back manufacturing & out-right banning Chinese goods wasn't in anyone's wildest dream pre-2016. With the goalposts shifted, restrictions on global trade came to imply isolationism rather than incentivizing local industry. Opinions stayed the same, but now global trade means collaborative goo-faith middle-grounds instead of shipping industries out to China.
3. The meaning of Gay marriage never changed. So you see a continued steady increase in the base rate without much drastic change in direction or velocity.
4. Obamacare was seen as a compromise bill for facilitating govt. subsidized healthcare. Democrats didn't get what they wanted and Republicans got a handicapped and inefficient program. Republicans are now increasingly answering that "we don't want obamacare" and democrats are increasingly answering "we atleast want to keep obamacare, but we would have liked something better". Obamacare gave the 'govt. subsidized healthcare' question grounding, but the outcome itself was not particularly appealing to either democrats and republicans. So while consensus opinion on govt. subsidized healthcare continues to evade us, giving it the concrete form of obamacare, also allowed people to have strong views on it. (this the polarization)
> n = ~5
Just say n=4. I reread this 3 times looking for the 5th example.
Across those 4 examples, I think my hypothesis holds. Opinions don't change, but a change in grounding changes how polls are answered.
Is there a counterexample to your thesis in your second plot? What caused the big jump in support for the "pro-life" position between 1996 and 1998?
This was the Clinton era of controversy over things like partial birth abortions, and while I don't remember every single detail of how the debate played out I think it was a general era of victory for the pro-abortion side.
Overall I think it's an interesting thesis but needs more than two examples each way before it starts to look convincing.
I have a very salient memory from '98 of finding myself in a very left-leaning social environment in Chicago, and a gay socialist atheist with whom I was acquainted saying, "I'm of course pro-choice, but partial-birth abortion, pretty sure that's murder," and the rest of the group generally nodding along. I couldn't see that sort of thing happening today.
I feel like in the trump case, trump had the ability to change what it meant for someone to be "in favour of international trade". Before, if you asked someone their opinion on such things, there answer would be understood in terms of the present world order, which was strongly in favour of intl. trade. So to say they were against it would imply they were in favour of something more median. Trump was far off to the other side, so people felt the need to qualify that they weren't quite that extreme. In the abortion case, I imagine a slightly different effect: people felt like they ought to be against abortion, but still wanted to be able to get an abortion if they needed it. They wanted moral points from opposing it, but didn't actually want the status quo to change. This was fine, because the issue was decided by the supreme court, and thus totally out of anybodies hands - until it wasn't. The democrat cases listed are of a different nature. Gay marriage is an extremely simple policy proposition, that nobody can really be confused about. Either the gays can marry, or they can't. Health is different in that the democrats were forced to take an extremely moderate position. They might have wanted a full on nhs style government run hospital system, but in order to work with republicans they needed something barely different from the status quo. Anyone against public health care before won't be *more* against it in reaction, nor will anyone in favour decide this is too extreme for them. The general character, in other words, is that people react like this too *extreme* changes that go farther than they like, and not to moderate changes that are more in line with what they expected.
It's weird. This all makes intuitive sense to me, but I'm not sure I can name it. Some of it is certainly the media effect you mention, but I think there's more to it than that.
I am not surprised there are different reactions, as the two primary examples (1) pro-life vs. pro-choice and (2) gay marriage are different in kind. Of course, they're similar in that you can't be a little bit pregnant, and you can't be a little bit married. However, there's a healthy debate about when abortion should be legal. There's no such disagreement on a continuous scale for gay marriage (unless we want to roll the poly debate into this). It's two adults, yes or no.
Speaking of adults, adults can be studied, understood, and empathized with. Americans could see gay people before and after the decision and understand if their assumptions about their sincerity and dignity bore out. On abortion, the impact of significantly reduced access to abortion, especially in cases where it threatens the mother's life, is now a fact. Even if you hated the idea of abortion, this is real, significant, legible human harm to reckon with in the wake of the Supreme Court decision. On the other side of the same issue, human life at the scale of a few cells is much more abstract, though its fragility and helplessness raise the emotional stakes of a decision.
Maybe the backlash represents a lot of people discovering, though experience, the effects of policies after they've been implemented, and changing their opinions based on that information. Like, if you don't pay a lot of attention to the media or don't trust it, you might not be updating until things actually change. Or maybe it just takes people like that long periods to update their priors.
I think what you're looking at is an effect of narrowing the issue at hand.
In an open context, "pro-choice" can mean a lot of things. In the context immediately following the recent SCOTUS ruling, the context was more confined.
I'd guess if the pre-ruling poll question was worded so as to match the ruling itself closely, you'd fjnd a significantly smaller change in association with the ruling.
Too much overthinking here. True, (program x) cant be empirically quantified by one formula, but that does not mean phenom is "totally random." Examples complex but: Obergfell primarily recognized by smart gays and lesbians in 2015, but not general population; same logic applies to ObamaCare. Few voters fully understood it (that's hard btw) in 2010. Remember Holmes: "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience."
I think the problem with the Obamacare example is that it just wasn't a large change. The poll question is "Government should be responsible for health care". There are not very many people who would say that government was not responsible for their health care before Obamacare and government is responsible for it afterwards. It was just a minor tweak to the system, compared to, say, a single-payer system or a government-run medical system.
In the context of abortion, a change along the policy spectrum of similar magnitude to the Obamacare change would have been a change of 2-3 weeks in the latest date for getting an abortion under most circumstances. I doubt such a tweak would have produced a backlash.
For gay marriage, and most other things on both sides of the spectrum, the change is gradual, widespread, and follows a predictable pattern. But when something sudden happens (eg, San Francisco doing same sex marriages at the decision of the city clerk) then there is a backlash (proposition 8, in this case). This is because a bunch of people revisit thier latent opinions in the face of a sudden and newsworthy event, and that intensifies soft biases against the thing, without affecting soft biases in favor.
I don't think your two examples work: On the one hand, there were many widely publicized problems with Obamacare, from it being far more expensive than promised to Obama's lie that you could keep your insurance if you liked your insurance to the fact the computer kept breaking down for weeks after its introduction so that people spent hours trying unsuccessfully to register.
As for the young rape victim (certainly a tragedy) she had to take a 2 hour car ride from Ohio to Indiana to get the treatment she wanted. As you know, people with terminal illnesses often have to travel across the nation or even internationally if they can afford it to get the latest available therapies, so while certainly inconvenient and unfair and unfortunate, the girl was not forced into a back alley or forced to carry to term, but only required to drive 2 hours. Granted, the MSM played it up dramatically, but I'm sure there are many people in prison who wish their actions would have been legal had they only been able to drive two hours.
So, to summarize, I don't think everyone saw Obamacare as no big deal and the young rape victim's plight as horrific. So the explanatory force you see is, IMHO, less than you believe.
I think there's a genie out the bottle effect. Conservativism thrives best when that which it conserves is existing. If you have to restrict something in order to create something to conserve again, it comes off as more authoritarian than conservative.
The big problem with such reasoning is there haven't been that many real conservative victories, and a couple of the biggies were signed into law by Jimmy Carter (deregulating prices for trucking and passenger air).
When I was young, concealed carry and homeschooling were outside the Overton Window. I don't see a huge reaction against either. Most of the concern I hear about from the center is "assault weapons."
One could say that BLM is a reaction against conservative policing policies going back to the Nixon days, but boy, was that reaction a long time coming.
How about private ownership of gold bullion? Did that produce a backlash? (I'm too young to remember.)
The really interesting part of this is the intersection between "the right side of history" and "liberals control more of the media", or perhaps in the space between these concepts.
Things seem to be trending in a direction, and also everything that anyone thinks (including about trends) is filtered through a variety of media-influenced biases. The older post about "do republicans care about babies or do they want to control women?" is an example -- we don't live in a reality of actual stuff that we sometimes have opinions about. Rather our only view on the stuff by which we're surrounded is an uncountable number of lenses (including suppositions about out-group thoughts and motivations). Nobody cares only about borders, abortions, trade, or any of these things -- we care about thoughts about what we're supposed to care about to belong to a team, what 'good' people care about or think, what will most spite the hypothesized-but-probably-imaginary bad people (anything from 'ha f**k you patriarchs!" to "haha look at these wh***s cry now that they can't abort babies!"), and too many more to count.
The people who 'control' the media (by being the media, not by plotting in smoke-filled rooms) are chock full of the same lenses. The lenses (in them, and subsequently in the rest of us -- not that we don't have other ways of getting the lenses, whether it's positive or negative experiences at bible camp or that time the girlfriend had a pregnancy scare or how sick we are of hearing a drunken racist uncle or shrill wine-aunt talk about this issue) create the illusion of trend, and create the trend, and create the space in which we look for trends, and create the ideology of caring about which side of the trend we're on, and whether we're scared or depressed or angry about our position vis-a-vis the trend, etc.
Liberals control the media? Really? Rupert Murdock's newspapers. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are pretty Libertarian. The editorial boards of the NY Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal are not known for their liberal polemics—and even their liberal columnists aren't very. Talk radio is completely right-wing. MSNBC is the only news station that leans liberal (and not so much anymore). Anyway, from my perspective most of the MSM seems pretty right-wing. Of course, I'm a damn commie. ;-)
Elon Musk bought twitter less than half a year ago, and hasn't made any substantial changes that would make anyone distinguish twitter under him from twitter under anyone else.
Jeff Bezos owning WP doesn't prevent it from going all "DemOCracY dIeS In DarKNesS" and the rest of the familiar bullshit, I keep begging people to distinguish between actual Leftism and whatever the fuck that gets called by its name in America. The American doppelganger is entirely harmless to billionaires, attractive even, it's just an invitation that certain identities scream their perceived oppressions incessantly and forever.
> the NY Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal are not known for their liberal polemics
Yet another category error for failing to distinguish 2 different meanings of Left and Right.
Simple question : when was the last time any one of those published an Op-Ed for someone anti-abortion ? Repeat the exercise for pro-abortion ?
> Talk radio is completely right-wing.
And when was the last time that riled people up or drove anything ?
>The editorial boards of the NY Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal are not known for their liberal polemics—and even their liberal columnists aren't very.
I mean this with all possible respect: what are you smoking and where can I get some.
Nowhere in the 1619 Project did they demand the abolition of private property or the liquidation of the haute bourgeoisie. Therefore the NYT is right-wing.
If affirmative action gets repealed, the next generation of elites will disproportionately be Asians who know or suspect they are the beneficiaries of affirmative action repeal. I'm tentatively optimistic about that future.
Would be good to compare with what is happening in other countries in the world. It is not a given that the media leans left,liberal. Here in Australia for example all the commercial media leans conservative (The Guardian online newspaper is the only exception). The public though tends to trust the ABC, which the conservatives claim leans Left but I think most of the public trusts.
I profoundly disagree that there was no backlash to Obamacare -- I might even voice an opinion like 'the backlash to Obamacare is the central political event in the United States in the 21st century': https://news.gallup.com/poll/4708/healthcare-system.aspx
Consider the second chart on that graph. 69% of Americans thought there should be universal healthcare in 2007. This crashed to a 50/50 tie when Obamacare was passed, and then further crashed to 42% when the rollout was considered a failure, in 2014. It's since recovered to 56% over the last several years, but this is still lower than any number *ever* recorded before 2009. Obamacare damaged the universal healthcare movement in this country in a way that it has still not really recovered from.
(But I think your broader point stands: it is true that there was no backlash to Obergefell, legalizing gay marriage, and a large backlash to Dobbs, which permitted states to legalize abortion. I wonder if there's some aspect of 'sometimes political victories reveal that beliefs were really belief in belief' here? For instance, while 50% of the population might have thought they were pro-life, the possibility of abortion actually getting restricted revealed that some were not; you could observe this by seeing that something like ~80% of Down's syndrome babies are aborted. 70% might have thought they were in favor of universal healthcare, but they had not considered the reality of greater government intervention in the healthcare sector. But something like rising support for gay marriage was real, not a 'belief in belief'. Of course these are often hard to tease out).
The simpler explanation is that a large chunk (plurality?) of the population favors a policy that is more restrictive than Roe but more permissive than Texas. Say, a fifteen week ban or something. Dobbs made Roe no longer salient but Texas very much so, hence you could go from `pro life' (relative to status quo) to `pro choice' with no change in the object level position.
Not understanding why you chose these particular issues and not others. For example, at least some liberals seemed to win a big victory with the post-George Floyd killing upsurge in support for defunding the police. Then, when that policy was at least partially implemented in several major metropolitan areas, support for defunding, and for "Black Lives Matter" seemed to collapse pretty precipitously. In other words, a large backlash effect. Isn't this pretty germane to your point?
The only major piece of legislation passed during the Trump administration was a big tax cut, and I don't perceive there was much of a backlash effect on that. (But I haven't seen statistics) Again, isn't that germane?
If we're gonna test how backlashes break down along politically partisan lines, shouldn't we look at a better survey of issues? Otherwise, it just seems to be speculation. It is true that politics are the most partisan I can remember them, and that there's backlash fairly often, but I can't see any pattern to it, other than people reacting to the implementation of the specific policy.
Oh, the Dobbs decision means, women can't get early abortions or even abortions in cases of rape and incest can't get them in many states, and even can't get healthcare that might be deemed an abortion by extremist local authorities? Oops. Oh, defunding the police doesn't actually either get rid of discrimination by police or make people safer? Oops. Makes some sense to me, anyway.
I think both these things have in common, they are strongly ideological measures applied to very practical problems, not usually a formula for success in even a limited democracy such as the USA.
It may be apropos of nothing but I found the Ohioan rape victim story to be perhaps the darkest joke told around the whole overturning of Roe. The speed with which that story was dropped the instant particulars began to leak out into the wider world was something to behold, and the uniformity of its embargo was fun to observe as well. I personally bet it would never be brought up again, seeing you mention it here I can only attribute to your distance from the Overton window.
Isn't the obvious theory that what predicts backlash is the extent to which it was a surprise to voters on the losing side? Backlash here means a sudden shift as a result of the victory. When I'm expecting a political deciscion to go against me either I'm already activated by this prospect so I won't contribute to a post-victory shift or I'm unlikely to be activated by the victory actually happening.
Yes, high-information voters knew that Roe was likely to be overturned but tons of normal everyday ppl had just accepted legal abortion as a fact of life and tuned out yet more people squawking about the republican threat to pro-choice. When the court overturned the case that population suddenly realized there was a real threat to legal abortion and started/shifted their votes.
Similarly re: Trump. A lot of liberals basically assumed he couldn't possibly win. Even to the point of cheering him on. So did quite a few conservatives. When he one it created an "ohh shit" moment where ppl suddenly thought: I gotta actually get out and vote to make sure Trump doesn't get his way.
Loosening morals or cultural laws (aside from rules against murder, theft etc) feels good, and the people who protest stop caring as much once they see nothing bad happened. Eve and the snake.
Tightening laws on the other hand affects people clearly and directly
I've thought about this a lot, and I think there are two main factors.
First, it takes a while for a political change to actually take effect legally or take hold in society, and the backlash only happens then. So no real backlash to the appointments of Kavanaugh and Barrett, even though they were widely expected to result in the overturning or weakening of Roe. Only when it actually happened was there a backlash, since there are real effects of it that people can see (and some of them people inevitably won't like, as with any change), and it's no longer just an abstract idea.
Second, backlash only happens when the opposite party makes a big deal of it, which they only do if it's a winning strategy. The republicans ran firmly against gay marriage in 2012, and lost. After that they moved away from the issue and stopped talking about it, for obvious electoral reasons, and so there was little basis for a coordinated backlash. If I remember right several conservative commentators switched their positions on the issue during Obama's second term.
On the other hand, the democrats won in 2020 on a clearly pro-choice platform, and that galvanised their opposition to Dobbs, meaning they and their media kept talking about it, producing a backlash. I suspect that if Romney had won and gay marriage had still been legalised there'd have been a strong conservative backlash.
Here are two ways to test this theory, for anyone who has the relevant statistics. See if there was a backlash to PC/wokeness and cancel culture during Trump's term when those things (begun during Obama's second) largely took hold in society. (And after Trump ran successfully against them). And see if there was little or no backlash to American global military dominance during Bush's second term, after the democrats ran against it and lost.
I don't it's totally fair to say "the abortion ruling was a straightforward policy change with no extra personality component."
Certainly it wasn't as provocative as Trump (few things are), but the Dobbs decision was mired in scandal. There was violation of Stare Decisis (I don't endorse this description, but it was part of public perception) and the leak. More importantly, there were years of questioning the legitimacy of the court leading up to this, related to the manner in which the conservative supermajority was installed. That story, an integral part of Dobbs, is intimately tied to Trump himself, seeing as he appointed the conservative majority and all three of his appointees were "Trump-scale" spectacles.
Look at Supreme Court job approval, it went from +20 to -20 in 2 years, and half that change came before Dobbs. I don't think it's trivial to rule out the hypothesis that Abortion became more popular in part because the pro-life movement is now associated with an unpopular court.
"Look at Supreme Court job approval, it went from +20 to -20 in 2 years, and half that change came before Dobbs."
But how much of that was the commentary which went from "The Supreme Court is making decisions I like, that's how it is supposed to work, you guys just have to accept that this is it and this is law, sorry I don't make the rules" to "The Supreme Court is making decisions I don't like, it is illegitimate, do away with it!"
If you mean "how much of that shift in job approval was because of Dobbs," then I think it's fair to say "at most half."
If you mean "how much did media coverage affect SCOTUS's approval" then I would say lots and lots, but this was well underway before Dobbs happened so it's possible that pre-existing media landscape was why people widely viewed Dobbs as illegitimate while Obergefell was accepted quickly.
I'll also say that the commentary you describe was not a pure media creation. The decision not to vote on Garland was a huge shift in politicization of the court, and a decrease in perceived legitimacy after that was not at all surprising (though not inevitable either, until subsequent events lined up perfectly to maximize the effect).
In the EU, there is freedom of movement in that anyone from any of the EU member-states can move for work to another member state.
When Eastern countries like Poland joined in 2004, there was, however, a transitional regime where immigration from the newer members to the older ones could be limited for a time: member states were allowed to limit immigration inflows if they chose.
The UK was one of the few member-states that kept its borders open to all EU citizens. Backlash against immigration exploded and now the UK is not a member of the EU.
Also wanted to mention immigration as a 'liberal' example. In Germany, when many refugees entered, right-wing parties rose in importance, both at the beginning of the 90ies, and in 2015 and following.
I don't know exactly how this relates to polls of 'should we have more immigration / less immigration' or 'more liberal vs. more restrictive refugee policies'. The question also would be tricky, because obviously 'more / less' would be compared by respondents to a non-issue & low number in some years, and to an issue perceived as manageable 'crisis' and a high number of refugees in other years. I think part of that dynamic might be hidden in the pro-life / pro-choice question as well.
I think you get the backlash when the original position was membership signalling and/or trolling the other side, and seemed unrealistic.
So when there was no realistic prospect of an abortion ban, there was no downside to supporting it. Once once comes in, suddenly there are practical ramifications that affect you - even if male, it's going to affect your sex life - and the women in your life.
Same goes for Trump. It must have been great fun supporting him to "own the libs" etc. Less so to see him in actual power.
And somewhere in there is a learned instinct to shift the Overton Window by supporting extreme positions you don't really want to see actualised.
Wouldn't that go in the other direction? America is a very unusually left-wing country, relative to the rest of the world. Practically the only countries that are further left are those in Europe, the Anglosphere, and a small handful of allied countries.
I really don't know where this idea that "the rest of the developed world" or "the international community" is far to the left of America comes from. It's almost never backed up by any evidence; do you have for example polling that shows this? And why would anyone expect dozens of different western countries, all with different cultures and histories, to all have basically the exact same "left of America" political climate? It's such an extraordinarily unlikely claim, and to see it repeated over and over without evidence just stuns me really.
On abortion and the Anglosphere particularly, this is odd. Ireland banned it except for maternal life until a few years ago. Most Australian states had significant legal restrictions until a little over a decade ago, even if their enforcement was patchy. And last I checked the UK required some valid social reason to perform it, not being legal-on-demand as under Roe. Not to mention, as is often pointed out, that most of Europe has a cutoff much earlier and well to the right of Roe.
Finally, I find it offensive to suggest the Anglosphere says ""Really, America, you serious??!" on abortion. Not just that we have less pro-life people than America (which may or may not be true, haven't looked at polls, but from personal experience I doubt it) but that we actually find it INCOMPREHENSIBLE that anyone could care about protecting unborn life, which you seem to be implying. That's a downright sociopathic attitude, and ascribing it to "Europe & the Anglosphere" is not only wrong but insulting.
"I really don't know where this idea that "the rest of the developed world" or "the international community" is far to the left of America comes from. "
-Electing actual, open communists to government?
-Welfare states seen as the obvious function of government?
-Acceptance that some ideas are illegal, and the government should decide what is and isn't allowed to be thought?
-Literally every "right" that the people possess have a "...unless the government decides it's bad" attached to it (also applies to Canada).
Huh. This is a tangential point, but I always tend to assume this idea comes from the American left, as a sort of unifying myth, that "our utopian project already exists, in the International Community [whatever the hell that means], we're not radical at all!" But you're obviously a conservative and you remind me that I see the same idea from the American right fairly often. I'm curious: regardless of whether it's true, why do you think trumpeting this claim is helpful to the right? It seems to me that it just plays into the left's narrative, that US conservative values are "out of step" and "swimming against the tide of history" and all the other crap they say. Not to mention you makes things more difficult for conservatives in other countries, who have to deal with accusations they're somehow unpatriotic by "importing" such "foreign", "American" values as freedom of speech and individualism.
Now as to the claim itself. I'm Australian and assuming we're part of the International Community (again, whatever the hell that means), we are well to the right of America on immigration (bipartisan support for tightly controlled borders). We also put same-sex marriage to a referendum instead of having it mandated by courts. This may be a minor point, but I was shocked when I first realised that two things that are not taxed here, inheritances and prize money, ARE taxed in America, which just seems oppressive and unnatural to me (though I'm sure sure I can defend that instinct rationally). And of course we have a King, even if he doesn't live here, which is historically THE foundational difference between left and right. Although we have lower criminal sentences and weaker police powers than America, the main reason for this is that we have much lower crimes rates, so I'm not sure if that's right or left on the whole. On the flip side we have universal healthcare and strict gun control. So it's not remotely clear whether we are to the overall right or left of America, and I suspect the same is true for many other countries.
"Electing actual, open communists to government?"
Which countries do this? Certainly not Australia, and I'm pretty sure not Canada or the UK either. There are definitely some, but what on earth does that say about the ones that don't? Remember this is a claim about the entire "international community" outside of America, not some parts of it.
"Welfare states seen as the obvious function of government?"
How do you define this? The US has a large welfare state. What's the dividing line between that and "obvious function of government"?
"Acceptance that some ideas are illegal, and the government should decide what is and isn't allowed to be thought?"
Allowed to be THOUGHT? Which countries have laws like this? If you mean allowed to be publically expressed, then you're right that's a shameful feature of almost every non-US country. But that's mostly because of certain Supreme Court decisions interpreting the First Amendment expansively, not the political climate itself. Do you really think California and Massachusetts wouldn't adopt laws like that if they weren't unconstitutional?
"Literally every "right" that the people possess have a "...unless the government decides it's bad" attached to it (also applies to Canada)."
True, and in fact in Australia we have no bill of rights at all. But this goes both ways. As I understand Canada's "notwithstanding" clause, they could elect a socially conservative government tomorrow that could ban abortion, overturn same-sex marriage, and other such things no matter what the courts have ruled on them simply by declaring that "notwithstanding those decisions, we're putting this into effect for five years anyway". Whereas in the US it took DECADES of successive Republican governments, each one firmly pro-life, to slowly reshape the Supreme Court and eventually allow elected state governments to freely decide the issue. And in Australia a bill of rights was proposed in 2009 by the left and blocked by conservative opposition, rightly not wanting an American system where controversial social issues are decided by courts (usually in a left-wing direction) instead of the people.
"Guns?"
No argument on the facts, but I question the usefulness of this to model left and right internationally. It seems as much a matter of particular US cultural attitudes to guns that aren't shared by many other countries. And logically, one would expect the "ban guns to protect the safety of society" to be a right-wing position. Essentially, particular historical and cultural factors in the US have turned this otherwise right-coded position into a left-coded one, and also made the issue much more salient and important than elsewhere, and using this to demonstrate the US is to the right of other places seems misguided. (And I say this as an Australian who supports the right to own and carry a gun).
I'm not a conservative, but thank you for indicating I can pass the Ideological Turing test. It's actually a very simple heuristic, just take any difference that existed between the US and USSR, can use those as the basis for coding RW/LW with the US being right.
A foundational myth of the US is that it rebelled against European powers, so emphasizing their anti-Euroness makes the right "more American than thou." The left ceded this a long time ago and continues to do so every time they point to purported good outcomes of their preferred policies across the pond. Plus the US left has done a really good job of equating patriotism with jingoism and racism, so that solidifies US = Right Wing even more in the internal logic.
Re: Commies in government, it doesn't matter how often it happen, what matters is that it happens at all. I don't know how old you are, but way back in the 20th century communists became the absolute worst thing ever as far as USians were concerned. Anyone even vaguely siding with the Soviets was anathema. Even today, it's as baffling to me to see people openly supporting the philosophy of Pol Pot and Mao as it would be for a German to deal with a literal Nazi running for office.
In a country as large and as mobile as the US, you can find polities that will contradict any generalization. Of course NY and CA would implement totalitarian statist policies if they could. But the stereotype/false binary is that the US right values individualism, and the US left values collectivism (even though the right can always justify their favored impositions with a "good of society" argument.)
I'm very unclear what overall point you're making, and if we even really disagree with each other. Could you state your thesis in a sentence?
The rest of this response is assuming you're still arguing the US is indeed to the right of the "international community".
"It's actually a very simple heuristic, just take any difference that existed between the US and USSR, can use those as the basis for coding RW/LW with the US being right."
This doesn't seem like a helpful heuristic to me. It can make no sense of gay rights, foreign military action/imperialism, and the death penalty, to name a few issues that have been very salient left/right divisions in the last few decades. I appreciate your attempt, but I have spent a large part of my life trying obsessively to figure out what the hell "left" and "right" actually mean, and come to the conclusion that they are very vague and slippery concepts and highly context-dependent. They definitely mean SOMETHING, but what they mean is very hard to clearly define.
"A foundational myth of the US is that it rebelled against European powers, so emphasizing their anti-Euroness makes the right "more American than thou.""
Right. So what you're saying is that within the American internal logic a position like republicanism (that elsewhere is considered left-wing) is right-wing? That makes sense. Similarly, I think the right in many European countries is associated with stability, continuity and public order, so many of the militant, anti-establishment movements of the American "right", from the Tea Party to Qanon, are not seen as conservative at all in their internal logic (though I could be wrong about this). And certainly freely available guns is something horrifying to a lot of countries' conservatives, in the same category as freely available drugs. Thus if each culture has its own internal left-right spectrum, comparing different countries along such a spectrum becomes pretty meaningless, right?
"Re: Commies in government, it doesn't matter how often it happen, what matters is that it happens at all."
But it surely matters WHERE it happens, right? In Australia, as far as I know there has never been an open communist elected to any level of government since the second world war. (Unless you count the so-called "watermelon" faction of the Greens; look it up if you really want to know). So what possible relevance does "commies in government" have to whether my country is to the left of yours? It just sounds like you're treating the Western world outside America as one country...
"I don't know how old you are, but way back in the 20th century communists became the absolute worst thing ever as far as USians were concerned. Anyone even vaguely siding with the Soviets was anathema."
Young enough to be born after the cold war and have no memory of that. It doesn't seem to still be quite like that.
"Even today, it's as baffling to me to see people openly supporting the philosophy of Pol Pot and Mao as it would be for a German to deal with a literal Nazi running for office."
Me too, but most of the communists I've seen are Trotskyists who maintain a fantasy that Lenin and Trotsky were wonderful utopians who were creating a perfect society until Stalin took over and turned it into a nightmare. And that nightmare was actually just a restoration of capitalism in a different form. And every single other communist country was controlled by Stalinists and thus not really communist at all. Stupid and naïve, certainly, but they don't see themselves as evil.
"But the stereotype/false binary is that the US right values individualism, and the US left values collectivism (even though the right can always justify their favored impositions with a "good of society" argument.)"
It seems to me you're doing this libertarian thing where you define the right as being anti-government, and put anarchism on the far right and fascism along with communism on the far left. (Or are you, since you call it a stereotype and false binary? I'm a bit confused what your position is.) I mean, you can do that, and say that controlled borders and traditional marriage aren't really right-wing positions at all. But then you're simply speaking a different language to most people who talk of left and right, and meaningful conversation is impossible. (Without strictly defining or "tabooing" these words). I will grant that IF you're saying the US is more LIBERTARIAN than most of the western world, then I think I agree (though with still a few exceptions).
I am arguing that the RW in the US sees the US as to the right of... well, pretty much everyone. It's part of the "American Exceptionalism" thingy. And I am claiming that the LW in the US agrees, no doubt in part in an attempt to dissociate themselves form those RWers. You see this when the LW assumes that all of Europe agrees with them on everything and then get baffled when you point out that unlimited abortion up to and somewhat after the moment of birth isn't actually common over there. Also, journalists' incredulity when Pope Francis didn't support abortion was amusing to me.
" It just sounds like you're treating the Western world outside America as one country..."
...yes? This is amazingly common to both the left and right.
If you're finding factual flaws or logical inconsistencies, it's because I'm talking about the internal mythology of some (many? most?) Americans. Just like the media, facts are curated to support a narrative. Contradictions are deprecated.
My first thought on this is that the left actually has an effective machine for influencing peoples' outward opinions, and they use big events to coordinate on particular issues. A widespread change requires hyperfocusing on one thing, so that everyone opposed hears the push coming from all around simultaneously.
The right has no equivalent machine that can push politics on the public; no one shifts their attitude due to "public pressure" from the right, on anything. There's never a flood of right-wing arguments and slogans that everyone hears at once, complete with support from every major corporation, most media entities, public protests, pushy individuals, the internet, etc., to generate an illusion of a public consensus.
I suspect part of it is just normal navigation. When you’re far from your destination, you follow the large highways or get on the trains that go in your general direction. But when you get closer to your destination, you need to make some choices, and figure out more precisely where you want to go. You’ll probably spend some bandwidth to take onboard a higher resolution map (i.e. think things through more carefully).
This is reinforced when, in times of heightened debate, relevant info and good arguments are prolific. So you encounter more solid counter-arguments to your own position, often forcing you to modify and nuance your views.
And I don’t believe the trend just goes leftward (see anti-woke sentiment), but rather toward some perceived political center or locus (x, but not a fanatic), that balances the concerns people have taken onboard.
Of course, these centers and loci are partly determined by social and psychological factors (the Overton window and personal biases), but also by objective reality (economic and biological factors). Currently, the political center in the west is pretty socially and economically liberal.
You can see it in that many or most people will modify their views when they see they may have to own the uncertainty and salient, negative consequences of those views. (I’m not sure there are many salient, negative consequences of Obergefell for most people, which may be why we haven’t seen a big counter-reaction.)
It’s everywhere, including on Twitter, in business meetings, and among friends out drinking: Someone will argue vociferously for some strategy or option, building up how amazing it would be to build the wall, or buy crypto, or follow a certain marketing strategy, or go sing karaoke. But when they suddenly, often to their own surprise, get buy-in, they will immediately modify their language and try to curb everyone’s expectations.
What's going on with disappearing comments? Are we being quietly censored or is there a bug in Substack swallowing comments?
This is the second time, to my knowledge, that a comment of mine has disappeared from a comment thread with no notice. The first time, there was a possibility that I'd composed the comment and forgotten to go through the formality of posting it. But that definitely hasn't happened here, because I have email about a response to my now-vanished comment. What gives?
Pretty sure there's a blacklist of certain words and phrases that will stop a post from posting. There may or may not be a list somewhere. If you're using a controversial phrase try changing it to something else and seeing if it goes through.
Like I said, I have email from Substack containing a response to my comment. It posted, but it's gone now. And to the best of my recollection, there was nothing even faintly controversial about it.
I don't remember the exact text. I'll give you a ROT26 of my best approximation:
> I don't think this is a good fit with the examples in the post. In the first example, Donald Trump enacts left-wing trade policies and the opinions of liberals and conservatives both shift right. In the second example, the Supreme Court strikes down left-wing social policies and the opinions of liberals and conservatives both shift left.
And that went through as well. This is weird, those are the only two phrases I thought might be no-no in my previous comment.
Unless it's operating on the old algorithm of "you have posted too many comments too quickly, we think you're a spam bot so we're blocking you" which I have fallen afoul of elsewhere?
A while back I tried to make a post about AI being able to create fake news, that got eaten multiple times. I assumed 'fake news' was triggering auto-censor, but maybe it was just glitchy that day.
Since that went through, my last guess is maybe there's an auto-censor for new posters specifically, and once you hit twenty posts or something it stops. I don't want to make another account to test it.
Interesting - I tried posting an earlier version of this comment and Substack hit me with "Something went wrong" so I must have used a no-no word somewhere, though I can't think what.
Revised version below:
"And then there is all those who are like "I was doomed by my unexpected pregnancy to be a basic ass stay-at-home mother but then I killed my future child and now I'm a successful wage slave at $BIG_CORP, and managing other wage slaves even. Please don't take away our right to kill the unborn uwu" in the newspapers and on social media."
That makes me think of the Chesterton poem, let me quote it here:
The Song of Education by G. K. Chesterton
III. For the Creche
Form 8277059, Sub-Section K
I remember my mother, the day that we met,
A thing I shall never entirely forget;
And I toy with the fancy that, young as I am,
I should know her again if we met in a tram.
But mother is happy in turning a crank
That increases the balance in somebody's bank;
And I feel satisfaction that mother is free
From the sinister task of attending to me.
They have brightened our room, that is spacious and cool,
With diagrams used in the Idiot School,
And Books for the Blind that will teach us to see;
But mother is happy, for mother is free.
For mother is dancing up forty-eight floors,
For love of the Leeds International Stores,
And the flame of that faith might perhaps have grown cold,
With the care of a baby of seven weeks old.
For mother is happy in greasing a wheel
For somebody else, who is cornering Steel;
And though our one meeting was not very long,
She took the occasion to sing me this song:
"O, hush thee, my baby, the time will soon come
When thy sleep will be broken with hooting and hum;
There are handles want turning and turning all day,
It feels worth pointing out that the pro-gay-marriage chart has two downward spikes; one in 2012 when Windsor was decided, and one in 2016 when Obergefell was. So by that standard we should see abortion return to normal trends later this year.
I feel like the years-long clusterfuck of Brexit could explain the prolonged upswing of international trade love. Likewise the Trump administration had stories of sterilizing immigrants and sending them away without their children, which would change minds on immigration policies.
What tends to happen with these hot topics is that people who didn't really think that much about them end up evaluating/re-evaluating them once it becomes a hot topic. This may of course look more like introspection, or more like just adopting the ideas held by your friend group, depending on the person. The reason why you have these shocks is just that suddenly 10+ years' worth of changing minds happen over a short time interval of perhaps 1-2 months. It's just like the "stochastic clocks" in financial theory, if you have heard... sometimes there just is a very intense amount of market behavior one day.
The reason why the shocks happen in the liberal direction is unironically "cthulhu always swims left" all over again. But why worry? I think 4/5 of those are good myself and I expect the 80-20 rule to continue holding for the foreseeable future. To the extent that liberals hold bad ideas they tend to be bad ideas in the sense that they make them unpleasant to talk with, or they make their families cringe at the dinner table. Their ideas are not usually (too) bad in the sense that they're a terrible direction to develop national policy in.
Someone who thought Roe was trash but is ok with a European style 16 week cutoff used to be pro-life, now with the shifted landscape they are pro-choice
Have you considered the possibility that people who were pro-life before didn’t realise that their commitments were closer to pro-choice until the decision?
But the international trade thing didn't get walked back with Biden. If anything, the Biden regime has been tougher on China than Trump was. The poll results reflect the hoi polloi's virtue signaling against the bad orange man, while the actual decision makers have a free hand since no one normally pays attention to foreign policy anyway.
I think that at any given time there are way, way to many issues to think about consciously and to be constantly updating our beliefs on each and every one of them, even if we are professional opinion-havers. So, for most of them, we default to the dominant ideological position (the "common sense") until the issue comes into our focus for whatever reason and only then we are kinda forced to think more thoroughly about it (and maybe change our minds).
I eat meat without considering its ethical consequences until I gaze into the eyes of a living cow that is about to be killed and seems to know it and fear it or I see some vegan activists on tv or read a blog post or whatever.
I think your social bubble is seriously influencing what policies you see as having "a backlash"; I'd say the strongest backlash effect I've seen was against the ACA, which resulted in a historic defeat for the Republicans, which many were claiming would be the end of the Republican party, into a historic victory in the next election cycle.
There are two significant issues. First, separating people out by affiliation erases the backlash effect when it causes people to switch affiliation - which I think was a much more powerful part of the effect with respect to the ACA compared to other issues (The ACA coincided with an increase in conservative affiliation by 4, and a decrease in liberal affiliation by 4). Second, the polls there aren't asking about the actual policy, but a different policy entirely - the ACA isn't government-run healthcare, and the mandate, which was a central point of the backlash, was in fact a massive gift to privately-held insurance companies. I expect you'd see a radically different picture if you asked about support for mandatory health insurance.
There are a few key ingredients in a backlash.
The biggest is novelty. The public doesn't have the energy for a backlash about the same issue every year; I think this is the most important part of Obergefell, which clearly has a backlash among all parties in the graph you posted. It's just that the majority of the available backlash energy was exhausted in 2013, when ten states legalized gay marriage. People still got annoyed in 2015, but it lacked staying power, because most people were already tired of talking about it.
The next is that the policy is boolean, but the subject of the policy is not; polling and voting tends to be directional in these cases, rather than about desired policy outcomes. Abortion is perfect here; the majority of US citizens want some abortion restrictions, but do not want it to be completely illegal. In the pre-Dobbs political context, if you want some abortion restrictions (and this issue is important to you), you are in a sense on the same side as people who want abortion to be illegal. In the post-Dobbs political context, if you want some abortion restrictions, you're in opposition to the people who want abortion to be illegal. Directional polling is hugely significant.
And, finally, identity. Your identity group has to care about the issue - and keep caring about the issue. To some extent this ties in with novelty - if I look around, and the people I'm trying to fit in with don't seem to care that much, I'm not going to try to appear to care too much. If many people are exhausted of the issue, this makes my identity group appear not to care that much about the issue, so I'm not going to make too much of an effort either.
My understanding is that we went from one of the most permissive abortion regimes in many states to one of the least permissive in many states (when compared to international norms).
I'd credit this one to some people holding the position of "relative to third-trimester abortions I'm pro-life" and "relative to a complete ban on abortion I'm pro-choice."
My initial reaction is to endorse the "media effect" thing, but that's because I always forget that most of the U.S. follows deeply unhinged conservative media instead of somewhat unhinged liberal media.
Instead of looking inward I'm just gonna revise my hypothesis to save it even though the facts have proven it wrong - most people in the U.S. don't consume any news media at all and instead form opinions based on opinions based on opinions based on...based on opinion makers - prestige media like WaPo and NYT.
These graphs show only PRO and CONTRA, they don't show fraction of those who don't have an opinion. And the truth is - in the end - everyone on every question is either-or, rarely there can be a political question that truly doesn't matter, but a lot of people just can't / don't want to spend resources on analyzing which side they are slightly leaning from the middle.
So, my pet theory - those who were pro mostly stayed pro, those who were contra mostly stayed contra and the changes are due to people in the middle more pushed to make a decision when their opponents win. And why it happens sometimes and not always is due to the fraction of "hidden pro" / "hidden contra" in the middle - on some questions it's far from 50/50...
It's clear in the health care graph that there was a huge drop in support for government healthcare as Obamacare was being widely discussed in 2008-2009. Looks like a 20 point drop among independents! There wasn't backlash after it passed because the backlash had already happened. So the idea that there's no backlash against Democratic priorities seems definitely wrong. As for why the backlash happened before the law passed, this probably reflects the different dynamics between long public legislative processes vs. supreme court decisions.
Surprisingly you are missing the second most obvious (aside from Liberal dominance in the media): maybe the polls are also influenced heavily by Liberal power and not lying just like the media doesn't lie.
It's pretty easy to create a poll to say almost anything you want. And if you don't get the results you want with one poll, just do a few more. Then report out the poll that give the right answer.
There are confounding variables on these examples. Your Republican examples are about taking things away (trade access, abortion access) while your Democratic examples are about getting or protecting something (gay rights, single payer healthcare).
It may just be that in the examples you've selected, the Republicans picked less popular fights than the Democrats. Taking things away is not popular.
Suppose the following: the public doesn't want abortion access taken away. However, they're not paying attention to day-to-day political signaling, possibly because they're tired and don't have time. Then, when SCOTUS does overturn it, nobody's priorities or stance actually changed. All that changed was the public's ranking of where the fires are. That would be sufficient to explain the effect we see.
I think we have a deep cultural bias in the west and particularly America in favor of change and progress. We love innovation. Our attitude towards the past ranges from a contemptuous dismissal to hatred and resentment.
All in all its worked out pretty great, its given us scientific and technological powers beyond imagining. Its made us the richest, freest, most powerful civilization ever. Its abolished slavery and aristocracy most other antediluvian forms of arbitrary hierarchy.
But that same impulse for change has led us into all kinds of mistakes and crimes and disasters along the way. Nationalism and hyper-nationalism and fascism were progressive in their day. Eugenics was progressive in its day. Lobotomy was progressive in its day. The Indian residential schools were progressive in their day. Its only with hindsight that we re-code everything failed and monstrous as right wing or reactionary.
Conservatives want to conserve what's working now, or was working 10 minutes ago, and they always have. There's nobody in our politics that thinks the revolutions of 1688, or 1776, or 1865 were bad and want to go back. There's hardly anyone left who seriously proposes undoing the New Deal -- or at least not the parts of it we're still doing. If today's progressives even knew what a NRA blue eagle was they'd say it was right wing and fascist-adjacent.
Progressivism is a random walk, moving us in every direction. Sometimes it works, and that's great. Sometimes it doesn't work so great. When the wrong directions are finally recognized, they're either forgotten or re-coded as reactionary and right wing in our historical imagination.
The asymmetry is that conservatives are willing to follow the rules and accept their opponents' victories as legitimate, but liberals are not. The clearest example of this is that conservates worked within the system and established rules to get Roe overturned, but liberals are already beginning to treat the Supreme Court as illegitimate. And of course this is starting to change for conservatives as well, since you can't have one side flout the rules _forever_ and still claim that the rules actually hold.
Idea: US political messaging is targeted at an ingroup, disregarding how it's perceived by an outgroup. Maybe the exact same hype and media that brings political "success" is what polarizes the opposition, so we should expect them to be coupled. No idea how to validate this, esp. with respect to your examples, but I think we'd somehow need to quantify the framing and intensity of messaging around a topic. Legislative/court victories should be minimally coupled since they probably don't depend much on messaging, while elections/ballot questions should be tightly coupled because of all the advertising? Supreme court leak confounds your example because it stirred up so much media coverage? Idk, curious if this resonates with anyone.
Do you actually see an effect on abortion views? I'll spare you the Fenyman quotation.
Because what I see is pretty much a series of coin flips, or draws from a box with white and red beads.
You buried your lede: "Or maybe this is totally random and I shouldn’t try to conclude things from n = ~5 examples." Statistical thinking is what helps cure apophenia. If you are going to be a rationalist be serious when looking at data.
I think it's related to focus of attention. People tend to accept what those they respect (for whatever reason) tell them is proper, as long as there's no effect. When it becomes real, they start thinking how it might affect them and those they care about. Liberal causes, on the average, tend to positively affect more people than they (obviously) harm. Conservative the opposite. People here has to be understood as "those who do or could respond to surveys".
I've got beliefs about how the (obviously) maps onto reality, but they don't follow "liberal vs. conservative" lines.
Is it possible that left-wing media gets angry about politics while right-wing media just counters whatever left-wing media is saying (thus allowing them to set the topic of debate)?
The typical non-evangelical conservative voter didn't really care that much about abortion, but sympathized with fighting coastal elites (read: the Supreme Court) telling them what to do. Pro-life was an easy cause for conservative politicians to adopt without risking anything.
Once the Supreme Court withdrew feds from the abortion business, non-evangelical conservatives had nothing left to sympathize with. Now that red-state conservatives actually have the burden of implementing policy, the simplicity and upside of the pro-life cause has evaporated.
It’s precisely that, which side owns the Cathedral institutions and can thus generate backlash among independents. In the USA and W. Europe that is of course, progressives.
The "direction things naturally tend" argument makes most sense to me. It's as if there is sort of a "ratcheting" mechanism as the general public mood slides slowly in the direction that most commonly is called liberal.
When things push in that "forwards" direction (not intending to make a value judgement here), it's like a frog in boiling water, most people just tend to shrug and go along with it. Yes many people will cry about the degeneracy of modern culture, but the specific policy positions get more and more unfashionable over time and the mean conservative/reactionary stakes out more and more leftward territory as the decades go by. How big of a persuadable audience could someone gather in 2023 arguing against interracial marriage, for example? Even the prominent conservative voices today express a lot of opinions that would be very, very left not too long ago (notice how lots of conservative commentators had at least a few complimentary things to say about Bernie Sanders).
Whereas big swings that go against the "ratchet" give lots of people the sense that something has gone *very* wrong vis-a-vis the direction that things are "supposed" to be. People as a general rule can be OK with complacency but they HATE to backslide (a lot of the MAGA psychology is "we had more status in the past"). Which is why the center-left (and the median American really is center-left) that is mostly OK with the slow or even stalled-out advance of progressivism can get very seriously perturbed when Roe gets struck down.
The average American voter is desensitized to the idea that things will move moderately leftwards over the course of their lifespan. (how many times have you heard someone say "our grandkids will probably think it's outrageous that we ate as much meat as we do"). From that point on the distribution, "lots of progress" is about as equally far from the middle as "no progress", which means that "backwards progress" (or perceived backwards progress) is even farther away from expectations than lots of progress.
I'm imagining a story where public opinion drifts around, and but people refrain from really identifying with a position until there is a catalyzing event, at which point people begin to firmly identity with the positions that they've been gravitating toward. Perhaps a month before the abortion ruling, there are a lot of people who have become gradually more pro-choice, but their shift doesn't necessarily mean a different position on a survey. Then the ruling happens, and they realize that they need to "pick a side" and so it looks like a rapid shift happens.
According to this story, the effect might not show up in situations where people have reason to identify with the position before the catalyzing event, or where the catalyzing event might not cause people to want to snap to an identity.
UCLA economist Brian Wheaton has a paper on this with n>5 I think. Here is the abstract: "Do laws affect the beliefs and attitudes held by the public? Using data from the ANES,
the GSS, and Gallup along with a difference-in-differences identification strategy, I find robust
evidence that virtually every major U.S. social policy law of the past half-century has induced
significant backlash. That is, the public moved in the opposite ideological direction of each law. I
show that my results are consistent with a model whereby individuals care about the ideological
beliefs of other members of their society – such as their children and peers – but only have
imperfect ability to influence said beliefs, which are also influenced by the law and the actions of
others. I empirically test the implications of said model; for instance, I show that the backlash is
successfully transmitted to children, more persistent in ideologically-homogeneous communities,
and exists on both sides of the political spectrum. Furthermore, I provide evidence against a
I think there's a connection between this and prior discussions on "belief" vs. "belief in belief."
That is, there exists some number of people who take positions on political issues because they believe they believe them, or they want to be the kind of person who believes them (maybe call this "aspirational belief.") There's no immediate cost to holding these kinds of positions as long as they're in opposition to the status quo or strongly entrenched as the status quo.
For example, if I'm a devout Catholic, I should be strongly opposed to abortion in almost all cases. The strongest way to oppose something in a democratic society is to try to make it illegal. As long as abortion remains a protected right and I don't actually personally need one, I can safely believe that I believe it should be illegal. But when the *Dobbs* ruling comes down and I'm confronted with the real possibility that I or someone I care about might be affected by a total abortion ban, maybe I start to question whether the law is the right tool to express my moral conviction.
On that theory, the victories that are likely to result in backlash are the ones where some poll respondents are expressing something other than how they want the future to look. Someone who says they support overturning *Roe* may just be saying "abortion is bad;" someone who says they oppose free trade or immigration may just be saying "the modern global economy has left my community behind;" someone who says same-sex marriage should be illegal may just be saying "I'm a Christian."
The majority of respondents in either case may actually believe that the policy they're supporting is good. But some fraction of them just believe they believe that because that's what people with their values/emotions/identity are supposed to believe.
I think the reason you can only pull up conservative examples on the national scale is that the liberal issues with this dynamic tend to be local. It's easy to imagine ways it could play out on a national scale in a hypothetical universe where the far left had more power at the federal level: polled support for slavery reparations would drop even lower than it already is if there were a real chance that white people were going to be differentially-taxed to fund large cash payments for the descendants of slaves. But in real life, most of the left monkey's paws are local concerns like housing/homelessness, school policy...the stuff that dominates local elections in blue cities.
I think the most interesting aspect of the Gallup poll is that the 2022 poll began on May 2nd, the same day the Supreme Court draft memo was released. It could be a coincidence. Gallup starts this poll in early May every year. The case was argued in early December 2021 and the decision made in late June 2021. The opinion had to be written before it could be leaked. So there may have only been a couple months of time in which it could be leaked, so April-May might have been a natural time to leak it.
Even if we grant the leaked memo would have had a similar effect if released a week before the poll, that still leaves about a 10% likelihood of it coinciding with the start of the poll. And it's obviously even less likely that it happens to be released on the exact day the poll starts by chance. Even if the leaker didn't know the exact start day for sure, Gallup is very consistent in starting in the first few days of May, so they'd have stood a good shot of releasing it on the actual first day of polling by chance.
This makes me entertain the possibility that the leaker deliberately timed the leak to coincide with the Gallup poll so that they'd pick up the salience of the issue in their polling. If that on balance led more people with earnest pro-choice views to take the survey, that could explain the shift in expressed support without actually reflecting a shift in real opinions.
Having worked in a call center for a year, my experience is that people are much more likely to answer the phone if they perceive participating in the call as being valuable to them. It would not surprise me that pro-choice people who just discovered Roe v. Wade was about to be overturned for real viewed the ability to express their views in a survey as being of unusually high value at that time, and chose to take those calls more often than they normally do.
My best hypothesis to explain why this happens after some political victories and not others is that expressing support for a popular political view is most useful when fighting against an unpopular position or person that has nevertheless achieved political victory. "You may have won formal power, but most people don't like you and we're going to make sure you know it and we know it." Under this hypothesis, people would tend to respond to surveys more when they've just suffered a loss despite holding a politically popular position.
According to Gallup, 80-90% of people support some level of abortion access and 70% support gay marriage. Support for government guaranteeing access to healthcare is 50-60%. Victories in favor of gay marriage and government access to healthcare were politically popular, so under my hypothesis, people don't feel that participating in a survey would be an especially useful. The majority who support gay marriage and government healthcare feel that their institutions are reflecting their belief, and those who are against feel that wielding public opinion is unlikely to be a useful way to fight back.
Trump lost the popular vote, and international trade was a majority favorable position before 2016. So this again fits my hypothesis in which the victory of an overall politically unpopular figure leads to a surge in willingness to take the time to make expressions of support for the popular position. This surge in expressiveness then gets picked up by polls.
After the abortion ruling there has been an obvious uptick in stories about ridiculous injustices due to abortion being illegal, probably in part because they're topical, in part because they get a lot of clicks, and in part because there are more actually relevant things happening as a result of the ruling (directly or indirectly -- like some people now can't easily get abortions, but also maybe some anti-abortion people are galvanized to be annoying about it after the ruling). So the average member of the public might be more generally aware of how bad abortion restriction is to people than they were before the ruling, and hence their opinion might swing in favor of abortion.
I mention this to say that it's important to keep in mind that this cause & effect is not simply "the media tends liberal -> more abortion horror stories -> more anti-abortion sentiment". The causal diagram also has a node for "abortion restriction is actually inhumane" (or if you don't like that phrasing, "abortion restriction causes major and easily preventable problems for people"), and this is also a cause of "more abortion horror stories". (It's also a cause of "the media tends liberal" but that's probably less important). This is an argument against the simplistic stance (expressed in another thread) that "well the media tends liberal so that's probably the main explanation for backlashes against conservative victories". Part of the backlash is _caused_ by the bad thing that liberals not-coincidentally tend not to like (abortion restriction being actually really bad for people).
Anyway this is also the reason that liberalism is on the right side of history: the stances weren't randomly assigned to conservative vs liberal camps; they've assigned based on whether they're, like, good stances, and the good stances are usually going to be on the right side of history. Or, in my biased opinion: the liberals took all the good stances on social issues so no wonder they come out ahead in the long term. (It's not at all clear to me that economic stances weren't basically randomly assigned though.)
>Maybe because liberals control more of the media than conservatives; when conservatives win something, the media does a good job making everyone panic that conservative ideas are taking over, and convinces them to do a thermostatic reaction. But when liberals win something, most people either don’t hear about it or don’t hear anyone telling them to worry, so they don’t.
I like how Scott buries the actual answer in a few subclauses of one paragraph.
I find it hard to believe that Americans are more pro trade than ever before. Maybe my perceptions are just wrong, or maybe people have a different idea about what it means to be pro trade, so you can’t compare the top line number.
Also far fewer Americans have heartfelt strong positions on trade policy than on, say, abortion or gun rights. Simple yes/no polling doesn't reflect those differences in depth of feeling.
I don't know that it's clear that they aren't willing to pay $2 more for widgets, as opposed to being too lazy to look for a "Made in America" label. How would you tell the difference?
It is not irrational for someone to say "I want to do X but not closely related X', and I don't want to be bothered by this, so let's just ban/regulate/overtax X' and eliminate it from the market". It's selfish, in that it denies options to other people. but it's a rational sort of selfishness that for various values of X is common across the political spectrum.
Is it possible we're running into some signaling that might be explained by game theory? That is, opposing abortion might be +1 more virtuous until enough people oppose it, abortion is banned, and then it switches to -3 abortion is actually illegal. People then readjust to try to relegalize abortion, but once it's legal/accepted opposing it becomes more virtuous again. If this model is correct then similar effects might be seen for liberal policies like more extreme energy policies.
I think being extremely pro "green energy" or "anti-racist" probably benefits from the same signaling game theory. Maybe there are some examples of this sort of thing happening locally and getting pushback.
> Or maybe it’s because liberalism is “on the right side of history”, ie the direction things naturally tend
As a slightly weaker/less-universal explanation, is it possible that there is some non-partisan conception of "quality" of policy, that is orthogonal to the partisan dimension, and which most people are capable of honestly assessing (sometimes in advance, but much more easily after the fact)? By which I mean, for a given partisan position, a "good" policy would actually give precisely the disired effects when the plan makes contact with reality, and the "bad" policy has unintended consequences and does harm, perhaps doesn't even improve the thing it was targeted at.
For example, Trump's tarrifs did substantial harm to US businesses, and those knock-on effects had to be countered with direct subsidies. A better policy for that position might have been to go out with some subsidies at the same time; even Republicans recognized that it was just a bad implementation.
Pro-life Republicans want less access to abortion, but my understanding of the polling is that most don't want a total ban, which is what Dobbs produced in some states. So enacting that policy resulted in much more serious consequences than most Republicans were actually in favor of (even if Republicans in a given Red state might have got broadly what they hoped for inside that state).
A problem with this analysis would be Scott's point that the "support for international trade" increased _before_ the tarrifs were implemented. I think this suggests that there is no monocausal explanation for this; we have to include press coverage as a major driver of sentiment in addition to ex post analysis of side-effects.
But even then, quality and content still matters; I think there's only so much that the press can convince people to support. Without any specific proposal to reduce trade, one might say "sure trade is OK I suppose, but I do have some concerns about {globalization and sweatshop labor | NAFTA taking our jobs | colonialism | wars in the middle east | insert ambi-partisan objection here}". On the other hand, with a specific proposal for less trade (say the Trumpist protectionist agenda), now we have a concrete position to argue against, and so if one doesn't support that specific agenda, one might move from "undecided on trade" to "enemy of my enemy is my friend, I support trade against this form of anti-trade".
So, three related possibilities: bad quality of policy evaluated ex post, press coverage of policy ex post, and a process for coalescing opposition in response to a specific policy.
1) Defund the Police and BLM generally basically collapsed in popularity after the November 2020 election.
In fact I would say this is Round X in this typical dance on how the public views crime since the 60s.
2) COVID NPIs basically collapsed after the Omicron wave (I would argue the second Youngkin won in November 2021, but some time elapsed to save face). If public health tried to try shit again, I think it would get slapped down.
3) Although the Republican Party in general couldn't take advantage of the above, certain Republicans could (Ron DeSantis, etc).
> Defund the Police and BLM generally basically collapsed in popularity after the November 2020 election.
Actually, they collapsed in the summer of 2020, which is why the election was so close. Capitalizing on the BLM backlash was practically Trump's entire campaign strategy.
Yea. Indeed they were politically dead on arrival. I live in a deeply-blue part of a deeply-blue state -- precincts which no Republican has come close to winning in decades -- and around here "Defund the Police" was an eye-roll punchline by Labor Day of 2020.
There were gigantic riots all over the country, which were attended by democrat politicians in the middle of a pandemic they said justified stay at home orders.
BLM flags were put up all around the world. English soccer players were taking a knee.
Nearly every single company made their workers go through mandatory CRT struggle sessions reminiscent of the cultural revolution.
Biden got more votes than any president in history by a wide margin.
No, it was in full swing at that point.
BLM collapsed as people started to understand what it meant. The struggle sessions and the crime spike removed any ambiguity. And with trump gone one had to face it head on rather then channel it through one’s opinion on trump.
Even if you don't want to listen to anything else, you can just *look at the graph* posted by fellow right winger trebuchet elsewhere in these comments and that would make it obvious enough that the backlash started in the summer.
This seems more situational than pattern-based. What if we looked at progressive ideas like "low-income housing projects," "cut back your use of energy," and "defunding the police"? Sure, these are not policy victories, but they're still policy ideas that had some level of implementation at different points in time.
In other words, are you doing some selection bias based on framing it exclusively as policy victories vs. political salience of the core ideas?
Another obvious (to me) hypothesis is that democrats are disadvantaged in Congress and in the courts, so they can only get wins on issues where they have popular support, whereas conservatives can get wins on issues with less support thus producing greater backlash.
Yea I had that thought as well. E.g. Republicans in a 50-50 or 51-49 Senate represent far fewer voters than their Dem counterparts do; but national opinion polls on an issue are usually simply national in their samples.
I think the most relevant analogy to Obamacare would be the TCJA. Was there a major backlash to TCJA (I'm not aware of one, but I haven't looked). If not, that would be a strike against "liberal propaganda controls everything" and evidence in favor of "laws that do popular things don't cause a backlash".
It's also worth noting that Obamacare got a lot more popular in 2017 once Republicans seriously started trying to kill it.
The media bias theory makes the most sense. Most mainstream media sources are skewed left. This includes 3 of 4 broadcast networks, 2 of 3 cable news networks, the NYT, NPR and so on:
I’ve also noticed that the major news aggregators that supply the news to our browsers and phones (Google, Apple) favor these sources. That means the “default” news most people see will overwhelmingly skew left — unless you intentionally curate your news to include sources from the right. The one exception is Fox, but I think most people are acutely aware of Fox’s bias, so it’s different than some other sources that are perceived to be neutral and are not.
Seems like in the abortion rights and Trump free trade cases, new constraints were put on the populace; or, alternatively, freedoms were taken away. In the former, a right that previously was taken for granted was put into question; in the latter, trade faced new restrictions that, in principle, limited businesses’ options relative to the status quo and drove up costs for everyone.
In the Obamacare and gay marriage cases, constraints were taken away / freedoms were added. The lives of people with insurance and heterosexual unions weren’t really different after those events, nor did the potential for significant change really increase.
Generally, people don’t like when freedoms (or anything really) are taken away. Also, they don’t really care when new freedoms they won’t exercise are gained. I don’t think you need to invoke left/right dynamics to make sense of this, though I’m sure they might affect the intensity of the reactions.
Also, with respect to the small number of examples, maybe you could look at sentiments after different COVID restrictions, prohibition, women’s suffrage, civil rights, and/or Brexit if we’re including non-American events.
There doesn't have to be the same reason for two similar reactions. The Trump backlash could be rooted in how individually shitty he is, while the post-Dobbs reaction could be about something else.
If you do want to find a common factor here's a possibility: events making some people focus on an issue more deeply than they have previously. Pollsters have terminology for this which I do not remember right now, but the basic idea is that a lot of the time a certain fraction of public opinion about issue X is not based on a lot of deep thought or strong feeling for/against X. But then something happens (e.g. the SCOTUS suddenly and sharply changes the policy reality of X) to make some people give X some real thought for the first time.
And the Trump factor could be synergistic with that. E.g. people having no strong opinions about immigration policy being startled and turned off by Trump's open racism towards immigrants (I have one of these in my own household), which makes them more likely to respond a certain way when asked by a pollster.
I agree with other commentators that it's basically about whether the "win" has immediate trouble associated with it that was ignored when pushing the belief, because the belief was really about something else (e.g. abortion is often about traditional family values and don't be promiscuous, defund the police was really about inadequate training and empathy in some high profile cases). It was kind of a posture. In fact I'd say voting for Trump itself was kind of like that for some people. Things are so bad I'm gonna vote for TRUMP! Oh wow, he won, what happens now.
You could speculate about how long-term goals play into this. For example, short-term pain might be more apparent than long-term gain, short-term pain might cause more backlashes (not that there is any long-term gain, but that it would suddenly take a backseat, for example if liberals just shut off all the oil overnight).
I'm going to hypothesise three different sources of backlash.
1) The Trump: This one is all personality. A big figure becomes associated with a policy and people who don't like that person turn against the policy.
2) The Insulation Effect, AKA, The Abortion: This backlash requires people who don't like a policy, but feel safe to advocate it. Imagine if you will a Republican woman making a trade with a bible thumping preacher "I'll vote for your abortion policies if you vote for my tax cuts". Because the supreme court will strike down any anti abortion law this trade costs her little. But as soon as Rowe vs Wade is struck down she has to seriously consider whether those tax cuts are worth control over her reproductive system. So all the people who were pro-abortion as a political trade, as tribal signalling, basically anything except genuinely believing abortion is evil. They all have to reconsider.
3) The Enemy Victory, AKA, The Brexit: This one is straight forward. The backlash comes from people who were always against a policy moving from passive support to active vocal support once their policy is under threat. If you like being a member of the EU in 2000 you probably don't think about your membership much. Tomorrow the sun shall rise and you shall be an EU citizen. In 2016 campaigning could make the difference between membership or leaving, so you campaign hard.
P.S. I think there's some of 1 in the backlash to Rowe vs Wade. I'm sure clips of politicians talking about said 10 year old triggered people's disgust in the same way that Trump can.
If a government takes *turns* whacking both sides of an issue which divides us, that's not justice. Government should only intercede when we've had enough dialogue and evidence to reach a super-majority on ethically-charged issues. It's safer to be conservative about the *application* of government in the ethical sphere.
Implicit in the question is an assumption that voter opinion on specific issues can be modelled statistically *without taking into account what the issues are*. One can go a surprisingly long way, and yet there really is more to politics than simply rolling dice. Decisions have impact, and whether they make life better or worse is not entirely subjective.
After a decision is made, if life becomes noticeably worse, one may expect some backlash. Whether or not this will happen isn't something you can predict *purely* by looking at which tribe made the decision or what political colour it is. You have to also consider the actual effect.
Unfortunately, whose life a decision makes better and whose worse is much more difficult to quantify than how many people style themselves red vs blue, and so people keep pumping their intuition engines with the latter as a poor proxy for the former, beliving the output uncritically then being surprised when it fails to match reality.
Prediction: The upcoming (and all but certain IMHO) demise of affirmative action/racial preferences in higher education will be broadly mildly-popular despite being narrowly extremely-unpopular.
My guess would be that policy changes that are perceived to increase the typical voter's ability to do as they please are unlikely to provoke significant backlash, but new restrictions on perceived freedom will tend to create backlash.
People just don't like it very much when they're told a freedom they've come to expect is being taken away. Even someone who is nominally opposed to abortion on a moral level may balk once they realize the government is *actually* going to force them to carry a fetus to term.
But when a new freedom is introduced, for instance gay marriage, it doesn't really hit the same way. Even if you're opposed, your life isn't actually changed. Your theoretical opposition is still mostly theoretical, and will tend to erode over time as people do the thing you don't like and the world carries on just fine.
I'll expand to say I don't think this is because voters are ideologically libertarian or anything - that's why I emphasize "perceived ability to do as they please." A regulation on a shady business practice that people don't like is less likely to provoke backlash because most people won't parse that as affecting their own day-to-day freedom.
This is why, for instance, trans rights debates become so heated. Proponents see themselves as advocating for the freedom of people to identify as they please. Opponents feel like they are being told they have to learn a bunch of new language rules or be canceled. Both sides feel like any slide in the opposite direction is a blow to their and their loved ones ability to do as they please on a day-to-day basis.
Part of it is that Democrats tend to be more, well, democratic: they are more likely to pick fights and policies which already have widespread public support (it wasn't so long ago that Obama publicly disavowed gay marriage, for example). This is in part due to the voting system (Democrats are the urban party and Republicans the rural one, and the voting system gives rural voters outsized power, so Democrats need way more popular for equal electoral performance than Republicans do), and in part due to Republicans really having gone off the deep end recently (I think Hanania's recent take at https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-the-media-is-honest-and-good is the correct one on this: their extremely low standards for truthfulness in allied media are causing their core voter base to increasingly lose their grip on reality).
Another thing is that on some topics, one side is just right (or at the very least, significantly more convincing to the average person after careful consideration and examination of arguments). So while the topic is low-salience, people tend to think whatever their preferred media thinks; but once it becomes a major point of discussion, most people can't / won't avoid engaging with arguments from both sides, and truth might override ideology. This happened with abortion, IMO: until it was regulated by courts, the average person did not have much reason to care; once it ended up on ballots and became a point of intense national debate, people reexamined their views, and pro-life views are just harder to defend.
Trump is a bit of an exception, I think, because he tried to take the Republican party in a new direction, so for a while his proposals went against both the liberal press narrative and the conservative think-tank narrative. (And it surely didn't help that he was incredibly unpopular at the time + did not look very competent at being a president.) So that was a combination of the issues suddenly becoming more salient + his ideas not really having an intellectual "heartland".
Scott, If I read your source on the abortion graph right the 2022 datapoint is from May and Dobbs was decided in June. So this may not be the effect you are looking for.
The Dobbs decision was leaked in early May; while it was in late May / early June theoretically possible that SCOTUS could change its mind, most public discourse started in May based on the assumption that Roe and Casey were going down.
That's a fair point. I guess I didn't see it that way. I wasn't at all sure that I believed the 'leak'. It was so obviously done as an attempt to push the court Tha I didn't view the issue as settled at all, though I suppose in what direction it was intended to push the court and whether or not it succeeded are questions for after the leaders identity is established.
I seem to remember most people being very uncertain of which way the court would jump until it was all settled.
So, this is sort of a modified version of the effect Scott was writing about-a predecisipn backlash, in fact a backlash specifically intended to prevent the decision it was in (p)reaction to. Whatever the leakers intention was the intent of the backlashers was to prevent the decision which actually happened. So maybe the backlash in general is the same as this specific case-the whole backlash sort of whipped up by a contrived incident, more propaganda driven than organic grassroots?
For me the clue is in the names “conservative” and “progressive”. People vote for conservatives to maintain a status quo/tradition and for progressives to make change. I can understand why there would be backlash if conservatives made changes, and why there is so little surprise when the same is made by progressives.
The media is certainly a big part of the equation, but aside from that: people have an aversion to losing their rights. They may not be very happy about their political enemies gaining rights, but they'll panic and get angry if you try to take something from them, particularly if they used to take it for granted.
On the other hand, if an issue doesn't concern them particularly and they don't have strong convictions about it (no religious beliefs, no partisan solidarity), they may have an interest in picking the victor's side (particularly if they're surrounded by people who have strong convictions about it).
If the mechanism that causes a backlash is seeing the results of a decision, then you are not going to get a backlash every time, because people are not going to hate what they see.every time. Similarly, if the mechanism is a public debate, that might change minds, but not alway.
The huge tea party victory in the 2010 midterms seems like a pretty big backlash against the Obama presidency. For that matter, Trump himself seems a lot like a backlash against Obama. Those are pretty big conservative backlashes against liberal victories. Are you counting them?
There is a tendency towards the belief that there are only two positions you can publicly take: fully support or fully oppose. In reality most people have nuanced positions and faced with a sudden loss of rights might flip from oppose to support. If this is true then looking for cases where liberals want to take away rights should provide a mirror case.
I think that at least part of the answer requires an *honest* understanding of why the "losing" side is against whatever the issue is. Such honesty is, of course, not exactly common...
In the case of gay rights, I think the explanation is pretty simple. The issue of gayness (being honest now, as opposed to the usual story) I think was primarily viewed by its opponents as set of anti-bourgeois values and morals. And why wouldn't it have been so? In the late 60s/early 70s gayness presented as an all-party all-the-time lifestyle built on endless drugs, zero personal responsibility, and destruction of the family:
The infamous 1972 Gay Men’s Liberation demands looked to most people like a demand for legalized pedophilia and does the usual political yutting thing of throwing in multiple demands that have zero to do with gayness but an awful lot to do with making themselves unpopular with most of America.
Read the above document. THAT is what most people thought they were protecting America from in the 1970s, and who can blame them...
What happened in, I guess the 90s, is that a smart enough group of gay people managed to wrest control of the agenda away from these lunatics and worked hard to ensure that the ONLY issue on the table was gayness. Not gayness and how the military sucks. No gayness and how the family should be abolished. Not gayness and drug legalization. NO OTHER CRAP except gayness and laws related to that. And it turns out that, big fscking surprise, Americans did not have a problem with gayness per se, once it was stripped of the lunacy.
To the extent that other agendas like "racism" or "sexism" win without backlash, it would be by following the same agenda. But it appears that both of these are in too deep in terms of having defined a totalizing world view that is anti-bourgeois and anti most of what Americans support (including such basics as decency, honesty, truth, and rationality).
In a sense I think you have the story backwards. Both race and sex got most of what was reasonable in the late 60s and early 70s, but were not content to take the win and build on that; they created a backlash by refusing to take yes for an answer.
Gay rights stand out as being a rare case in history where common sense prevailed, where the winning group was content to accept its winnings, shut up, and stop fighting. If gay marriage had immediately been followed by other items on that 1972 agenda ("Americans remain as homophobic as ever, until they are willing to destroy that most homophobic and repressive institution of all, the family!!!") yes, there would have been, and would continue to be, massive backlash.
Probably been said before, but have you considered that trump caused a lingering "rage against conservatives" effect? does the trend to not backlash against liberal victories but to do backlash against conservative ones exist before trump as well?
The media also found and amplified said story…any victims of liberal policies are not sought out and suppressed when they come forward (detransitioners, COVID vaccine injured people being 2 examples)
The abortion, medical care, gay marriage issues impact people's lives directly. If the Right supported real policy that would have a positive, realizable benefit on people's lives, you would not see this effect. Since the Right stands for the rights and privilege of a privileged or successful minority, any real policy they propose is not going to have this sort of property.
Trade is an abstract thing, so people have no direct feel for it. Free trade is good for rich people, who control media. Hence media will work to change opinion to oppose what they oppose like Trump's tariffs. To test this idea, look at opinion on how much tax rich people pay and how that is affected (or not affected) by conservative-supported tax cuts.
Did this get cut off early? I see section 1 but no others, and it seems to end rather abruptly for you.
You're right that I shortened it and forgot to remove the I - thanks for reminding me!
I'm inclined to blame / credit the media more than anything. They tend to celebrate liberal victories, bring awareness to their positive aspects, and decry conservative victories shedding light on their negative aspects. This may be naive, but it seems like a simple explanation thay fits the data?
Implicit in your hypo is that the middle segment of swing opinion havers watch “liberal” news. I guess I’m not sure. Maybe?
What I mean is — if these media outlets had the sway and bias you claim, why wouldn’t they be effect in changing opinions *before* these events too?
It's likely that these policy victories are catalysts for intense rounds of coverage. Abortion was never a non-issue, but there was a media surge around it when the Supreme Court decision leaked which continued for several months afterward.
The Two Minutes Hate only works when there is a focused target. The media is incapable of foresight, so they have to be reactionary.
IDK, they foresaw that Russia was going to invade Ukraine while pretty much all the MSM bashers were mocking them for that idea. Pretty good foresight.
They predicted a war in 2022 that had been going on since 2014. Bravo? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_War
What happened when Roe v Wade dropped originally? ( I can't research right now.)
There was a lot of outrage, for one thing. (I was in high school.) Roe overturned the abortion laws which people of 49 out of 50 states had voted for. That's why it's so ironic to me that so many people are indignant that Roe was overturned by "unelected judges."
Obviously true. Liberal news is not just CNN and MSNBC, it is also what comes on after a football game is over. 60 Minutes, for example follows CBS's NFL coverage. 60 minutes has had several scandals where they warped coverage to make conservatives look bad. Most high profile being the Bush one, but overall the program is far to the left of the electorate, and it is not an outlier.
CNN is not liberal news anymore. The primary shareholder donates to Trump, and the new CEO is also in line. Reporters who are too liberal, or who have refused to capitulate, have been fired.
I'll admit I'm extremely surprised to hear this considering CNN's history. How on Earth did something like that happen?
Recently I had noticed that CNN was was doing just as Realus says, trying to look more balanced, and perhaps going so far as lose the respect of not only conservatives but liberals (excuse the black and white terms), by making quips that were completely unsupported by evidence. When the story first broke of Biden's possession of classified materials, one of CNN's first reports on this read exactly like something out of Fox News, making Biden appear just as blameworthy as Trump but actually worse since he's a hypocrite. That's how the report was slanted. This made me look into who is running things at CNN. Some reports suggest that while CNN is still liberal, we can expect it to become increasingly conservative.
Maybe worse because Presidents are covered by Presidential Records Act when they leave office and have unilateral declassification authority and Vice Presidents, as Biden was when he took the documents, have no such privileges at all?
That's a good story but CNN is still extremely liberal. This is a common theme among liberal "news" organizations. If they think they are losing all credibility (and ratings) they will make a show of being "balanced" or conservative even. But its a few articles or shows.
Heck even the NYT prints 5 to 10 political articles a year without massive liberal bias. That's 5 to 10. Not 5% to 10%.
I think they do this for reputation and to salve their own conscience and self esteem. I mean few people in the US, even journalists, want to admit they are just paid propagandists.
NYT columnists include centrist Ross Douthat and John McWhorter, a center-leftist who often covers racial issues from a center-right perspective
What makes you think of Douthat as a centrist? I tend to think of hand-wringing about cultural decadence and the decline of institutional religion as pretty firmly in the right's wheelhouse.
Imagine thinking the CEO and "primary shareholder" matters more than the people that are literally writing and reporting the news.
Zaslav (CEO of WBD which owns CNN) is a Democrat, but he is more pragmatic than Woke. I see him as fitting into the old-time Hollywood producer archetype -- a left-of-center Jew who prioritizes business over politics. E.g. Spielberg.
Looking at my screen, the Newhouse family is the LARGEST shareholder of WBD, but at an 8% stake, I wouldn't call them the PRIMARY shareholder, which to me implies control. I think this is really Zaslav's game at the moment and to the degree he's under shareholder pressure, it's over performance and not politics.
You have to be bonkers to think CNN is a moderate news organization. Perhaps compared to Mother Jones, but its primetime lineup is: Jake Tapper, Wolf Blitzer, Erin Burnett, and Anderson Cooper. Not a single Romney voter to be found. More lockstep Biden voters than Fox is lockstep Trump (Bret Baier is a well documented moderate Democrat) They still employ Don Lemon. The median story at CNN remains from a POV far to the left of the median voter or congressman.
CNN is still rated Left with high confidence:
https://www.allsides.com/news-source/cnn-media-bias
The funny thing is that you don't need to warp coverage to make conservatives look bad. They do it all on their own.
How very liberal of you to make such a comment.
And to think, I graduated H.S. with just a 1.8 GPA.
We didn't do grade point averages in my day, I'll have to see if I can convert my Leaving Cert results!
EDIT: Okay, I found a website which was more confusing than helpful, so I converted my Irish final grades into US equivalents. I don't have "credits/hours" so I can't multiply my points for grade x credits/hours for class.
So: (1) Turn Irish grades into US grades - using Secondary School
https://www.scholaro.com/db/countries/Ireland/Grading-System
(2) Turn US grades into points
https://www.scholaro.com/gpa-calculator/
(3) Multiply points by credits, then divide total by total number of credits
Can't multiply "3.00 points x 3 credits = 9 total points" so, going just by the raw marks (average of the points from step 2), it's 3.00 GPA? Maybe?
One thing I like about this blog is, despite leaning left, it seems to attract those interested in objective truth. With certain notable exceptions...
I identify as conservative (though not Republican). I apparently look bad.
Funny, I would say that this blog clearly leans Right. Perhaps it varies with the topic under discussion? (edit: or did you mean the blog itself rather than the comments? Scott's politics seem a bit more tricky to pin down.)
My impression is Scott's politics have a slight but quirky right lean while commenters lean pretty hard to the libertarian right.
Scott has described himself as "vaguely centrist", and I think that's about all we're going to get.
I tend to think the blog gets more conservative commentators because it criticizes liberals more. Especially when it first started out, it had more of a feel of "reasonable liberal critiques leftist extremism". Unfortunately, this brought in a good number of conservatives who don't apply Scott's degree of charity and thought to their own analyses and just want to rant about how the eeeevul liberals are destroying civilization.
It's the opposite of most other intellectual spaces I've seen on the internet, where the conservatives generally have to hold themselves to a higher standard of reason and civility than the liberals majority do in order to be accepted by them.
Scott definitely leans left overall, but he often questions the orthodoxy of the left so he's not considered culturally left and ends up attracting a decent readership on the right. He also has some opinions that are right-coded or libertarian, such as his thoughts on feminism (which he doesn't talk about anymore).
We don't have a great way to measure political lean of the readers who don't post (Scott's survey will have that, but I also question it's worth in measuring "the blog" since they don't have a very visible presence). Of those that do post, there's a lot of range, with most people closer to centrist than the more extreme of either major political faction. On certain topics, such as gay marriage, "the blog" holds a very leftward view. On other topics, such as economic theory, "the blog" leans pretty heavily to the right (free market). Then there's some weird niche things like HBD where there are almost no places on the internet that tolerate discussion about it, so people come here to throw in their two cents about it. Scott barely tolerates that either, and clamps down on too direct of a discussion.
If I had to characterise (my impression of) Scott’s position, I tend to think he’s vaguely leftish centre but with genuine curiosity and a fair number of views that *I* don’t think are right wing, but have become caught up in the culture war. By contrast, I always read the Less Wrong crowd as generally rightish (and a bit elitist) in the way I expected a lot of ‘Rationalist’ techies to be, and EY in particular always read fairly rightish to me (certainly to *my* right), but a few years back I encountered a few who thought they (and EY) were all super left wing and that anyone who criticised them or anything they wrote must be right wing! Which was surprising.
But I don’t think ‘left’ and ‘right’ are especially useful terms, as they mostly seem to be tribal labels and generally people I know and have real conversations with hold views that are all over the place by the labels.
The real difference with Scott, apart from his openness, is that while he would think it was very useful and important to have the computer model what the impact would be of ‘kill all the poor’, he would be horrified by the idea that any answer to that would make you more or less likely to actually ‘kill all the poor’. Whereas I got the uneasy impression in some other ‘Rationalist’ circles that there would be some results from the computer that would make them actively work towards ‘kill all the poor’. https://youtube.com/watch?v=owI7DOeO_yg But maybe they’ve changed: I decided, on that basis, to stay away from them years ago.
You've got to be careful there. It's true that they make themselves look bad to ME, but not necessarily to those who agree with them. I remember a research study LONG ago where they found that in TV episodes of (?? Archie Bunker??), the liberals thought it was an argument for liberal views, and the conservatives though it was an argument for conservative views.
All In The Family, a show which could never be produced nowadays.
You are assuming that media leads public opinion more than it responds to it. But media has an incentive to respond to the mood of its audience. (A quick google gives me this recent 538 article showing media coverage of the economy responds to public opinion not vice versa https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/media-coverage-doesnt-actually-determine-public-opinion-on-the-economy/ ). Not sure if anyone has done similar studies for any of the examples listed
That's true! It's hard to get the direction of causation correct. Probably it's at least a little bidirectional
I don't think the economy is a good proxy to use on purely cultural war policies. No one comes to their conclusion on abortion the way they do about economic policy.
There's a lot of overlap, but I've got to admit that frequently I can't understand HOW people come to their conclusion on abortion. I've got the strong suspicion that people don't know, so they make up a story to justify their decision.
It's not that hard. If you think the foetus is a person, then abortion is murder. If you don't, it's just a medical procedure. Performative misunderstanding is so dull.
I largely agree, but I’ll add that lifestyle choices wrt sex adds a motivated reasoning component on both sides
Agree about motivated reasoning - but not sure it applies on both sides.
IIUC, most pregnancies spontaneously abort, usually early enough that it looks like just a heavy period. Is it murder to not protect those?
FWIW, I consider any cell bearing a human genetic code to be human, at least in potentia. And I don't consider it actually human until it can respond sensibly. And there's a gradation in between those positions, which I don't have defined. After all, it's reasonably possible that one could take some skin cells and grow a clone of the person sampled. We can't do it yet, or at least probably not, but I expect that we'll be able to within a decade. And I'm not going to stop showering because of that.
The "drawing a hard line" isn't what happens in the world, and I don't see how anyone could think that it is. Hard lines are drawn by people for their convenience. (Yes, it's *very* convenient, but it's still artificial. Once you look closely, any apparent clear separation between things in contact gets fuzzy. Are your guts inside you or on the surface? Well, it depends on how you're looking at things. Lots of really small animals treat them as a protected area of the surface. [I'm thinking of tapeworms in particular here, but they aren't alone.])
Do newborn babies respond sensibly?
Just read this after posting a comment below: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/which-political-victories-cause-backlash/comment/12055275
You might find this interesting:
http://culturalcognition.squarespace.com/blog/2013/8/8/partisan-media-are-not-destroying-america.html
That doesn't seem to track increasing Republican support for gay marriage though, assuming Republicans are mostly paying attention to conservative media.
You're right, that isn't really explained. I'm speaking in ignorance here, but maybe there wasn't a major conservative media backlash against the Supreme Court gay marriage decision? Or not a sustained one?
Asserted without evidence that conservatives mostly pay attention to conservative media. If a conservative watches the NFL or any other sports league they are being exposed to progressive media. The news programs that come on after said sports will also be dominated by progressive-leaning reporting. If they stay up later and become part of the ever-dwindling audiences of late night comedy they are again watching very left wing media.
Fox News is pretty dang influential, you'd think it'd be able to swing the conservative demographic on at least one of those issues if that was what was happening
I don't think people are really so easily manipulated or that the media is actually as liberal as some of you think.
Most (overwhelmingly, as you note) journalists are Democrats, and story coverage is somewhat liberal but not in the sense that they're scheming against Republicans or just left-leaning equivalents of Fox or Breitbart or something. They make a serious effort to be "balanced" between the two parties. When it comes to unconscious bias, it's better-described as urban than "liberal," though there's some overlap there on social issues. On foreign policy, they are kind of "pro-establishment;" on economic policy, they're center-right; on culture, they're hopelessly left. Like, they might try to be fair to religious people, but there's no sense at all that God is real and acting in the world (remember that like 40% of the population in America is creationist), racism and "homophobia" are seen as obviously wrong and evil (and are more broadly defined than most people would define them), etc. And I think they are more deferential to Republicans than they are to Democrats (basically reflected in the fact that they are happy to be accused of partisan bias by Democrats and scared of the accusation from Republicans--naturally because in both cases it plays against common criticisms).
In combination with liberals being more interested in winning policy battles and conservatives being more interested in winning the culture war, that explains why both liberals and conservatives think the media is biased against them. It is on the issues that matter most to them.
The Newsroom TV series explained the phenomenon best:
“
Charlie: We did the news.
Leona: For the left.
Charlie: For the center.
Leona: Are you fucking out of your mind–?!
Charlie: For the center, Leona! Facts... are the center. Facts. We don't pretend that certain facts are in dispute to give the appearance of fairness to people who don't believe them. Balance is irrelevant to me. It has nothing to do with the truth, logic, or reality. He didn't go on the air telling people to give peace a chance, but evolution? The jury's back on that one.”
I’d be absolutely shocked if there was even 1 Republican for every 99 Democrats in the newsroom of prestige papers.
Does america not have an equivalent of the Telegraph?
No. Wall Street Journal would probably be the closest because it is business focused, but the newsroom most definitely still skews significantly "left".
I have observed a decided leftward shift in the WSJ in the past couple of years.
Because of the need for a high school diploma to get a journalism job? /S
Whereas no credentials at all are needed to be sarcastic on the Internet, a fact for which I am grateful (even as I get into trouble for being sarcastic on the Internet).
You can't stop me by demanding qualifications!
You're assuming a uni-direcrional causation, which I think is questionable.
Media coverage reflects the opinions of the target audience more so than drives public views. This is an empirical question which has been studied. Some evidence shows that because people select their media to start with in order to confirm their views, the causal role of media in opinion formation is less than people often think.
I'm inclined to agree, except hardcore republicans watch right news, so they should produce a similar bounce.
I see two separate statements you're making, and one of them is much more defensible than the other.
One, the media has a liberal bias. This seems pretty clearly true to me, as NYT and CNN are what people think of as the "mainstream media", rather than Fox. Clutzy brings up "60 Minutes", which I've never consciously watched, but I'm willing to believe him that it's a random program that doesn't need to have a partisan spin but which has a liberal bias.
The other is that the mainstream media is actually a major driver of what people's opinions are. This may have been true when it was more truly mainstream, but now it's a truism that the media is biased. If everyone who leans conservative expects not to trust NYT, CNN, and wouldn't agree with them anyway, why would NYT and CNN trumpeting how bad a conservative victory is move even Republicans to react against it?
(An interesting theory raised below is that these polls are answered by the same types of people who answer political-horse-race polls, selecting against "silent Trump voters" etc.)
"Relative to the current status quo, are you pro-choice or pro-life" is a question that would produce the observed pattern, and it's plausible that many or most people would interpret the question this way, consciously or unconsciously.
I don't know about that. The labels "pro-choice" and "pro-life" have been firmly entrenched for decades as absolute positions, even if there's some variation in gradation among different people's definition (e.g. some interpret "pro-choice" as including those who support keeping abortion legal but personally think it's always immoral, others as thinking that abortion should be legal only in a narrow range of cases, others as being a body autonomy absolutist, etc.).
I think the gradation in definitions is precisely the point, and it depends on the context. If Roe is the law, and I am for abortion being legal only for serious compelling reasons, then I am pro-life, right? Against abortion on demand, so "pro-life with exceptions", one would say. But now, if I live in a state where abortion is banned without exceptions, or if that's an imminent proposal, then holding the same position I'd be called pro-choice, since I'm against that ban. This may well be enough to explain the entire polling change, although I do think backlashes happen as well.
This could be part of it. As an example, I have thought for a long time that abortion should be banned after 12 except for life of mother/child, but should be legal before that. Let's say I live in Texas and was polled this question each time. Before Dobbs, I want Roe v. Wade overturned so I say I'm pro life, to indicate my support for the conservative effort to appoint originalist justices. Post Dobbs, same question, I say I'm pro choice, to indicate to my current state government that they went to far, and should allow abortions up to 12 weeks. I think people like that could be a large amount of the change.
What *I* would do is interpret the question as biased, and decline to answer it. This is because of the connotations of the terms used. Or I might say "both".
Now if you asked me whether I thought the human population should increase, that I could answer.
I think it's the media is liberal, and they do $(a few different things) to convince everyone the conservatives are evil, and everyone agrees for a while. I suppose if I were serious about proving/disproving my hunch (it is, alas, only a hunch) I would go back to the 1990's, or some other time when one could argue the media had a conservative bias, and find similar events during that time and see if there was a conservative-direction backlash.
Maybe some things during Bill Clinton's reign?
The media was equally liberal in the 90s. You'd probably have to go back to the Eisenhower era to test this idea.
Back in the '90s I had to debate in school whether there was a liberal bias in the news. There was a 1993 Bill Clinton quote that I discussed where he said
"I have fought more damn battles here for more things than any President has in 20 years with the possible exception of Reagan's first budget and not gotten one damn bit of credit from the knee-jerk liberal press, and I am sick and tired of it, and you can put that it your damn article.".
Even back then there seemed to be the perception that the media had a liberal bias, otherwise it probably wouldn't have come up for debate. And ostensibly they were being too hard on Clinton, although I tend to think he was feigning outrage as politicians do.
Interestingly that quote came a few days before the Waco siege, and his popularity continued to take a dip to some historically low numbers. I was too young at the time to have a real sense of whether the media was being fair to him, but I'm not sure how easily even a liberal media could have put a positive spin on Waco.
The thing is, a right wing media that wanted to could easily have put a positive spin on Waco. They've done that kind of things several times. (But for right wing coverage it usually has to be our heroic soldiers in a foreign country. [Soldiers is just typical. Any US govt. employee being either aggressive or defensive will do.])
But, yeah, the doctrines of the left make defending that kind of action quite difficult.
Bear in mind Clinton ran as a "third way" centrist, and he was certainly in his rhetoric, and to some real extent in his policies, significantly to the right of traditional Democrats. (For example, he was definitely to the right of Joe Biden, even the 2020 Joe Biden.)
Theory 1: Individual liberal policies poll much better than liberal politicians as a whole. Events that crystalize politics around specific tangible policies may end up favoring liberals.
Theory 2: Maybe the "shy Tory" effect is actually stronger for liberals, or at least liberal policies, than we realize. Perhaps there's a significant cohort of people don't want to be one of those bleeding heart liberals or blue-haired feminists attitudinally but when it comes down to actual women being forced to carry unwanted babies they line up on the liberal side.
This is probably the best answer. Pluralities or even majorities of Republican voters often are shown to oppose Republican policies. The issue is probably that left-wing cultural-war stuff is unpopular but left-leaning policies are popular, which is why Republicans generally want elections to be about whose side one is on in the culture wars and Democrats want you to ignore culture wars.
A simple way to make an electoral killing: Start selling social conservatism and a mildly leftist economic lean in one package. The demand is there, but both parties studiously refuse to provide.
In Europe, there are parties along these lines but a lot of their representatives are village idiots for the simple reason that being part of said parties is hideously low status partly due to media coverage. (And not recent coverage at that, all the "respectable" media has told eg. me that immigration criticism is racism for all my life)
> Start selling social conservatism and a mildly leftist economic lean in one package
Isn't that exactly what Trump was about?
There was a little rhetoric in that direction at times, but in terms of actual policy I don't think anything he did can really be described as economically on the left. Maybe the trade stuff but calling that leftist is pretty debatable.
The question of whether Trump is economically on the left depends on whether you stand with Milton Friedman's "to spend is to tax" stance or with Dick Cheney's "deficits don't matter". For the Friedmanites he's way out to the left, but among the Cheneyistas he ain't
It's tricky to pull off, though. Republicans who do it are seen as not being legitimately committed to the leftist economic lean, and Democrats who do it are still tied to Twitter purplehairs by the rightist media.
You have to somehow sell “social conservatism + pro choice + gay marriage”, which is pretty hard.
For gay marriage the line could be that they won't repeal they wouldn't persue any expansion.
For abortion they could offer a middle ground (low term length and reasonable exceptions for health and rapee) as a federal guarantee and say states should make their own laws to suit them
I mean, I think somewhere in there is a belief structure that the median voter holds (note that this is not what I believe):
1. Abortion should be generally legal and isn't really murder in the first trimester, but certain mainstream Democrat positions on it are scary and, while rare, possibly murder (babies born alive left to die, abortion up to the moment of birth).
2. To oppose gay marriage is homophobic, but sexualized teachings and displays in front of children are weird and gross. Self-identified trans people are sort of nuts and society shouldn't revolve around them, but live and let live if they're not hurting anybody. Biological males shouldn't compete in girls' sports, and minors shouldn't be given trans surgery or hormone therapy.
3. Intact families are ideal. While no-fault divorce should remain freely available, fathers and mothers are both important and should be encouraged to get and stay married. The well-being of children ought to be prioritized over libertine sexual desires. Parents should have more say over their own children than teachers and "experts".
Of course, a politician of either party offering these views is going to most likely meet impossible opposition in the primary.
For the last point, making marriage not a legal concept (id est, no law has a different effect based on marital status) would probably be your best bet.
I don't think that most social conservatives would be happy with that.
If it was framed as "getting government out of marriage" I think it'd have a shot.
This was Trump 100%. He campaigned on culture war issues plus was against immigration and free trade. He also supported universal health care and opposed cutting entitlements although that was obviously empty rhetoric.
I think you just invented the New Deal Coalition.
My instinct is this strategy would perform very well in US general elections, but would usually lose in party primaries. Last election, extreme candidates performed very well in primaries, but underperformed in the general election. Lauren Boebert is an example of this having barely won in her historically red district by only a few hundred votes. Democrats even experimented with this phenomenon by running ads supporting more extreme GOP candidates in some places, so they would have a weaker opponent in the general election. Seems to have worked in a couple cases.
The problem with #1 is that we're looking at how well a policy polls over time. The policy polling better could only explain a level, not change.
I think the sample size is too small to draw any meaningful conclusions. If this was a systematic pattern with decades of history I would be much more inclined to try to draw some conclusions, but otherwise I think each backlash is specific to the policy in question.
It may also be part selection bias: the last congressional session passed hundreds of bills, most of them didn't have backlash, so the baseline is to expect no shift in public opinion over the implementation of an idea (maybe unless the implementation is uniquely bad, like how brexit turned into a giant mess that left nobody happy).
Related possibility: the polling firms don't have a genuinely representative set of people labelled Republican. That is, the "Republicans" in their sample are only notionally so. Polling firms have research that shows this. Look for pro-social bias.
I am pretty sure this is true. In December, I answered a phone call from a survey organization asking it I would support a state constitutional amendment guaranteeing bodily autonomy for women in response to Dobbs. I said I would not, which led to many questions about how they could change it to get my support. When I explain my views (pro-life with exceptions for health of the mother/child), the pollster paused and said, “Okay, I have to write something down. He then started asking questions for another minute or so, after which the call cut off mid-question. We are pretty sure he reached out to a supervisor, who arranged to cut off the call. Thus my survey was incomplete and could be excluded from the results.
That sounds like an internal poll run by some organization that wanted to sponsor such an amendment and wanted data to inform decisions about how to frame and promote it, not the kind of poll that gets published as an estimated snapshot of public opinion.
Agreed, mostly. Otoh, there is one systematic pattern of "backlash" : mid-terms usu. go worse for the party that won the presidency.
Number of undecideds and level of salience is probably a factor. Pre Dobbs a lot of Americans who never really thought about abortion wouldn't report strong feelings on it, but when Dobbs passed it rapidly increased in salience, and so reported pro choice.
In general a big salient event probably pushes undecideds towards the most popular side, since they are likely to break down the same way as the rest of the population when exposed to more information. In the gay marriage case majority support was already for gay marriage, so undecideds mostly tipped that way.
I think Richard Hanania's observation that liberals are more tuned-in to politics and care more about politics than conservatives do can provide some explanation.
Would this imply that liberalism is more "scalable" as a movement? Like, can liberalism increase its level of political power in the country in a way conservatism cannot?
Yes as proven almost without fail by the past half century of american politics
Yes. Obviously, yes. Don't just look at the past half century, look at past half millennia.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/
https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/ouroboros-theory
Thank you for the SSC link! As a true disciple, I read that post before, ofc. But, omg, it was and is a nice one. - I try to dig the ouroboros thing ... it seems good, but dunno, maybe it's just the font ...
Not as much a fan of Bastable either, but I had recently read it so I decided to include it mainly because of his points about how the general left narrative of fighting injustice is far more activating than the right narrative of defend against alleged existential risk.
I thought the bonstable article as decent initially, but upon further reflection it seems like he was half cribbing moldbug and half promoting a facile agonism.
I also dont think its particularly edifying to characterize the magna carta as the first step of progressivism. Sure enhanced rights and procedural due process, but rights for aristocrats as against the crown..
Political victories which do not meet the approval of the hegemonic class.
I'd theorize this happens when people think they can hold an opinion that will never come into effect. It probably felt nice for some people to vote for Trump in a rage against the machine, but when he came into power, they had to live with his actions, not just the message their ballot signaled. Similar story for abortion: I was talking to one of my closest friends a few days before the draft leaked; he said he wished abortion were illegal but "knew" the Court would never budge, and so it remained an abstract, lukewarm conviction. After the decision, the ensuing chaos, and a billion testimonies, he's now pro-choice. Maybe the decision encouraged people to proselytize outside their normal bubbles and punctured echo chambers; perhaps more people who knew the arguments and weighed them had their scales tipped. Not sure of any other examples to test this hypothesis against, but I'd love to hear some. (Edited for clarity and to remove Markdown syntax—sorry, first post <3)
A possible counterexample is the support for government healthcare post ACA, since it didn't really change, despite individual aspects of it like coverage for pre-existing conditions becoming accepted status quo. Though possibly its a case of people not connecting specifics to general principle. "Government healthcare" is sufficiently vague people can still say they oppose it while saying medicaid should be protected
Democrat policies are typically ones that don't produce identifiable victims. For example, the BLM movement generally resulted in increased homicide, but no individual homicide is 100% attributable to BLM. OTOH, a deported person is a crying person to have on camera. See, e.g. woman's tears as a superweapon.
Then it is a big problem for your theory that BLM-associated rioting and the "defund the police" slogan actually produced a *huge* backlash. It's the only reason Trump was even competitive in 2020.
Even far-lefties like David Shor have been talking about how the BLM backlash cost Democrats in 2020.
Agree-- police and criminal justice reform fall into this category as well.
It's because when people are given conservative policies they realize those policies are terrible (abortion bans result in horrible criminalization regimes) whereas when they are given liberal policies they realize those policies are fine (gay marriage does not in fact undermine civilization and does not affect anyone's life negatively).
Recent US politics is maybe a bad example of the general phenomenon, given ideological polarization. The republican base is smaller and therefore further from the median voter. So a GOP victory is something with 30% popular support passing, not one with 50%. Would be interesting to do a comparison with a country with a more proportional system and centrist coalition based governance. (Germany maybe?)
This is the most interesting theory in the comments! I strongly appreciate that it can give clear predictions without simply accepting a political viewpoint.
In short: popular backlash is more likely when the governing coalition represents a minority. And perhaps: the smaller the minority, the more likely the backlash.
Trump won with minority support. The current SCOTUS majority did as well.
In the past, SCOTUS has been well to the left of the public, e.g. in decisions striking down segregated schooling and capital punishment. And those did provoke quite a backlash.
Congress has usually been slightly to the right of the public due to gerrymandering, but this changed in 2022 and going forward it's possible that will continue. If so, then it's possible there will be Congressional decisions that spark a right-leaning backlash.
Yes the obvious answer is this. Gay marriage passed, and all the supposed bad things clearly did not happen, people's net happiness just went up.
Thank goodness there are no naked men in Bugs Bunny masks parading around in broad dayli--- https://i.imgur.com/6J23Sjx.png
Fuck, well, at least kids aren't being taught pole dancing by half-naked wo--- https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1562841193439825920
Okay, maybe that's a bit nuts and someone needs to go tell some perverts no, but at least we believe in science and people aren't so ideologically compromised they can't answer "What is a woman?"
...oh, there's a film made to mock that very pathology?
Well, at least they're not letting bearded men convicted for sex crimes into women's prisons because they say s---
Fine, at least the cops still hate kiddy di-- they're visiting people for "being untoward towards paedophiles"?
Ok, the sky is still blue, at least? Please?
If you think there weren't naked guys in Bugs Bunny masks -- not to mention leashes and collars -- parading around in public decades before Obergefell, you probably need to get out more often.
True. But we weren't expected to fly flags celebrating them for a designated month of the year.
Not to mention nobody questions how, after hundreds of thousands of years of human civilization during which every sane human being would have considered it important, inasmuch as it were possible, for all children to have a mother, we now have no problem with children being raised by two men...
Right, "inasmuch as it were possible." But since most of these kids are orphans, they are supposed to remain in foster care until a straight couple comes along? That might be preferable, I suppose, but if so you need to make an actual argument, rather than what every sane human used to think, but no longer does. Every sane human being for hundreds of thousands of years believed lots of things that you, I am sure, think are nonsense, unless you happen to be a pro-slavery flat-Earther animist or the like.
There are plenty of man-woman couples who have to wait for years to adopt. Gay marriage is not suddenly solving a problem (that never existed) for orphaned kids.
I think the onus is on those who have decided that a basic biological fact of nature (in most species and certainly in human beings), ie. that offspring are primarily raised by the female figure, no longer matters at all. Why shouldn't that be subject to extensive scientific study before we decide that it has no negative effects on the child or on society in general? But no, we have done no studies. In the space of about 15 years we have unilaterally thrown hundreds of thousands of years of human wisdom and experience out the window.
And I firmly disbelieve that every sane person ever thought slavery (in the sense of chattel slavery and not castigative slavery) was a good and natural thing, in the same way that they would have thought the relationship between a mother and child was. I think that is an unfair comparison.
And yet there are also plenty of children who wait for years to be adopted. Not to mention intercountry adoptions. The point is that, unless there are zero children waiting for adoption, the argument that "inasmuch as it were possible" children should have a mother in the household is not much of an argument against permitting a male couple, or even a single male, to adopt. Note that this has nothing to do with gay marriage per se (nor did your comment, which was about adoption), because the argument applies equally to adoption by single men.
The comparison with slavery is not unfair because the point is not that they are identical, but that the rationale is the same. And here is what the Sultan of Morocco said in 1842, when asked by the British government what he was doing to suppress the slave trade: " "the traffic in slaves is a matter on which all sects and nations have agreed from the time of the sons of Adam . . . up to this day -- and we are not aware of its being prohibited by the laws of any sect, and no one need ask this question, the same being manifest to both high and low and requires no more demonstration than the light of day." Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East, p. 151. Why should we find your argument more convincing than yours?
I'm not sure that arguments from biology are strongly relevant to adoption; the biologically natural thing in many species is surely to let orphaned children die.
I'm confused by the assertion that there is not a problem for orphaned kids. If orphaned kids simply don't exist anymore, why does it matter who is allowed to adopt them? If orphans do exist (and I think we're in agreement that they do), could you break down your argument a little more? For example, you might be claiming one of several things:
1. Remaining in foster care until adulthood should be expected to be preferable to getting adopted by a family that doesn't have a stable heterosexual marriage.
2. Remaining in foster care until adulthood should be expected to be preferable to getting adopted by a family that doesn't have at least one woman (so e.g. adoption by a single mother or a lesbian couple is fine, adoption by a single father or a gay couple is not).
3. Adoption by a gay couple would on average be an improvement over foster care, but allowing gay couples to adopt does not lead to children getting adopted faster, and leads to worse experiences for the children once adopted (i.e. there are no benefits to allowing gay couples to adopt).
4. Adoption by a gay couple would on average be an improvement over foster care (there is a benefit to allowing gay adoption), but the benefit of waiting a little longer and getting adopted by a straight couple would be greater (there is a cost to allowing gay adoption); and the cost outweighs the benefit.
For what it's worth, my personal sense is that adoption is better than foster care (ruling out 1 and 2), and I'd expect increasing the supply of families who may adopt to decrease the time to adoption (ruling out 3), though I can imagine data that would convince me otherwise. That leaves arguing something like option 4, in which fundamentally you're pitting arguments from biology against arguments from culture. My own sense is that humans are *very* cultural animals and culture would win -- but before arguing about that, I would want to make sure that we don't diverge earlier!
"But since most of these kids are orphans, they are supposed to remain in foster care until a straight couple comes along?"
You know I always have to go looking for figures when claims like this are made, don't you?
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/lgbt-parenting-us/
"Same-sex couples raising children are four times more likely than their different-sex counterparts to be raising an adopted child. An estimated 16,000 same-sex couples are raising more than 22,000 adopted children in the US.
Among those under age 50 who are living alone or with a spouse or partner, nearly half of LGBT women (48%) are raising a child under age 18 along with a fifth of LGBT men (20%).
Same-sex couple parents and their children are more likely to be racial and ethnic minorities.
Childrearing among same-sex couples is most common in Southern, Mountain West, and Midwest regions of the country. States with the highest proportions of same-sex couples raising biological, adopted or step children include Mississippi (26%), Wyoming (25%), Alaska (23%), Idaho (22%), and Montana (22%).
LGBT individuals and same-sex couples raising children evidence some economic disadvantage.
Single LGBT adults raising children are three times more likely than comparable non-LGBT individuals to report household incomes near the poverty threshold.
Married or partnered LGBT individuals living in two-adult households with children are twice as likely as comparable non-LGBT individuals to report household incomes near the poverty threshold.
The median annual household income of same-sex couples with children under age 18 in the home is lower than comparable different-sex couples ($63,900 versus $74,000, respectively)."
So now let's compare adoption figures and foster care figures for the non-LGBT, if we can:
https://creatingafamily.org/adoption-category/adoption-blog/adoption-cost-length-time/
"Adoptions from foster care have declined for two years in a row. In FY 2021 (the most recent year from which the data has been reported), the number of children adopted with public child welfare agency involvement was 54,240. This is a decrease from 66,208 in FY 2019 and 57,881 in FY 2020.
Currently, there are 391,098 children in foster care, compared to 408,000 children in FY 2020 and 426,000 in FY 2019. Neglect remains the primary reason children enter foster care, followed by parental substance abuse. The average age of children in foster care is eight (8) years old — 44% of kids in foster care are nine (9) years and older. Finding foster and adoptive placements for these older kids is particularly challenging.
About 25% of children in foster care cannot reunify with parents or other kinship relatives. Approximately 37% were adopted or placed in a guardianship relationship. The average time spent in care for a foster child was 21.7 months. In FY2021, more than 113,000 children were waiting in foster care for an adoptive family."
Not all the children in foster care *are* eligible for adoption:
http://www.ccainstitute.org/resources/fact-sheets
"In 2021, according the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services:
On any given day, over 391,000 children are living in the U.S. foster care system and the number has been rising. Over 113,000 of these children are eligible for adoption and they will wait, on average, almost three years for an adoptive family.
53% of the children and youth who left foster care were reunited with their families or living with a relative; 25% were adopted.
More than 48,000 youth in U.S. foster care live in institutions, group homes, and other environments, instead of with a family.
Of the 53,500 children and youth who were adopted in 2021:
55% were adopted by their foster parent(s) and 34% by a relative.
29% were age nine years or older and the average age of adoption is six years old.
Of the families who adopted children from foster care, 68% were married couples, 25% single females, 3% single males, and 4% unmarried couples.
93% of the parents rely on adoption subsidies and/or vital post-adoption services to help meet the children's varied, and often costly, needs."
So if we look at the LGBT group of adoptive parents, it's the lesbians who are adopting rather than the gays, and the non-white more than the white; from my own impression, the rich gay guys who want kids go for surrogate pregnancies rather than adoptions. But that's only my own impression.
Also, there may not be that many babies for adoption (as distinct from older kids in foster care):
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/10/adopt-baby-cost-process-hard/620258/
"And, as we’ve heard a million times, there are so many babies out there who need a good home.
But that is not actually true. Adopting a baby or toddler is much more difficult than it was a few decades ago. Of the nearly 4 million American children who are born each year, only about 18,000 are voluntarily relinquished for adoption. Though the statistics are unreliable, some estimates suggest that dozens of couples are now waiting to adopt each available baby. Since the mid-1970s—the end of the so-called baby-scoop era, when large numbers of unmarried women placed their children for adoption—the percentage of never-married women who relinquish their infants has declined from nearly 9 percent to less than 1 percent."
So if you want a baby, you'll probably go the surrogate pregnancy route (if you can afford it) rather than wait for the possibility of adopting a baby.
Eh, I don't know. I guess I used to feel this way. But it's really not that bad. Sure, your examples are of tacky and low behavior, but other than that...
About the pedophiles, I think we are still working out how to process the fact they exist. Hatred and outrage really are not the best solutions, but neither is full acceptance a solution, like that time those French intellectuals signed a petition to do away with age of consent laws. It's tricky. Probably the solution will involve recognizing them as sick people, not judging them for it.
Age of consent is a poor and vague heuristic at best, so doing away with those laws isn't intrinsically a bad idea if better options are available. I think emancipation in general should be more accessible to teens that feel they are mature enough to vote or engage in other adult activities.
Yeah, teens are a gray area, but those French demons wanted to fuck literal children. It's really not the same. It would be interesting to see how we as a society would go about evaluating the maturity of a teenager, it could be a worthwhile exercise.
Marriage has declined since gay marriage was legalized, and some courts have started to recognize polygamous pairings. Megan McArdle on this subject pointed out years ago that the negative effects of policies pooh-poohed by their supporters don't cause those policies to be rejected:
https://fireflydove.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/a-libertarian-view-of-gay-marriage/
> Marriage has declined since gay marriage was legalized
Well yes, but continuing a trend since 1980 with much greater declines prior to 2000.
https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/2020/4/marriage-rate-blog-test
> some courts have started to recognize polygamous pairings
Got a source for that? I've only had a brief look at Wikipedia but you'd think any actual recognition whould show up there. Utah has maybe decriminalised it in part, but that's a long way from recognition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_polygamy_in_the_United_States
https://www.unz.com/isteve/judge-rules-in-favor-of-polygamy/
https://harvardlawreview.org/2022/03/threes-company-too-the-emergence-of-polyamorous-partnership-ordinances/
I will note also that Scalia predicted the court would eventually rule in favor of SSM based on the logic of earlier decisions, and was dismissed at the time by Kennedy (who ultimately ruled in favor of SSM.
That seems like a reasonable explanation for the two examples that you cite, but there are also examples of liberal policies becoming unpopular, such as Defund The Police and the 1994 federal AWB.
I think there was backlash against Trump's policies even before he implemented them; I also don't think the average person is capable of noticing whether "protectionism" is going well or poorly, aside from maybe the general state of the economy, which was fine under early Trump.
I think the problem might be that Trump was some kind of big outlier.
Or it might be that the polls you checked were some kind of big outliers. I remember finding the "trust in media rose" one dubious back then, and four years of the trend going in the opposite direction later it just looks obviously wrong. The gun control one also appears to have been an one-off.
Protectionism is an outlier in that it was a Democrat position until Trump. Many Republicans I know make a point of saying Trump was always a Democrat until he decided to run for president, and probably would have preferred to run as one if he had seen a way to win the primary on that side.
Yeah this is an interesting point. There were clear victims for news stories to latch onto _after_ the policies were implemented (manufacturing in the US was hurt by the steel tarrifs; farmers were hurt by the aggricultural tarrifs); there were clear stories of "made in the US" businesses being damaged by those policies.
But as you say, before the policies were implemented, it was more of a wonkish / theoretical objection. And indeed, it's weird that support for international trade rose even in the Republican base, even as the "populist / protectionist wave" took hold.
I was a bit hazy on the timelines, and so I looked up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_tariffs -- the steel tarrifs were March 2018. I don't recall (and can't find reference to) other tarrifs going into place in 2017, but I guess there was some sabre-rattling at that time.
I would argue that the lives of children adopted into a gay marriage, and thereby forced to grow up without a mother, are indeed negatively affected.
(Also, obviously, the lives of some unborn babies are negatively affected by legal abortion)
Do you believe that in all cases of two men or two women raising children, that there would have been a suitable straight couple that could raise said child instead?
By the figures I looked up, it's more that children are adopted by lesbian, rather than gay, couples:
"Among those under age 50 who are living alone or with a spouse or partner, nearly half of LGBT women (48%) are raising a child under age 18 along with a fifth of LGBT men (20%)."
I had my hackles raised years back by a gushing and indeed fawning article in some outlet I can't even remember now, about a gay couple and their surrogate babies. They outsourced this of course to poor Third World women (so the old feminist trope about using women as broodmares didn't count for the brave new liberal world when it came to babies on demand) and in order to have the two desired babies (one fathered by each of the men), they of course implanted multiple embryos, because you can never be sure (or at least back then, IVF couldn't be sure) that the pregnancy would 'take'.
Surprise surprise, both women became pregnant with twins. And of course, then they had to decide to abort one of each set, because while the customers - I mean, the happy couple exercising their human right to have a family - might have been prepared for *two* babies, *four* would have been too much.
But that was done, and the pregnancies went to term, and now we had the reporter doing the piece about the great guys and their cute babies and wasn't it all just *fantastic* that now we were modern and liberal enough for this to happen? Never mind the exploitation of poor women. Never mind selective abortion. Never mind treating children as commodities to be bought and paid for, and the customer selects the options they want, and the inconvenient extras are tidily aborted as unwanted slop.
And then people wonder why I'm a social conservative.
This seems to be primarily an objection to surrogate motherhood, rather than to adoption by gay (or lesbian) couples. Did you intend to change topics?
The 2 are inextricably linked, no ?
I'm not Deiseach - and I'm fine with whatever relationship that is not 1-man-on-1-woman as long as you don't call it marriage -, but what gets me in that story is how the fact of "gay couple" instantly activated the "good boy" subsystem in whatever journalist who wrote it.
Under *any* *other* circumstances, any ***single*** one of :
1- Using women **literally** like in Handmaiden's Tale
2- Aborting children for financial convenience
Would have provoked, at the very least, a "I'm not sure your mother raised you well" kind of coverage, if not the outright negative and outraged type.
But, the subject here is 2 gays - two not one! - so we can't do that, instead we have to fawn and "ooohhh" and "aaahh" about how magnificent and utterly stunning it is.
And those are the same people that use "Misogynistic" as some ultimate insult, along with the 2 other classics of "Racist" and "Transphobic".
I'm not sure the link is as inextricable as you make it; when I tried to ask Google for statistics about the beneficiaries of gestational surrogacy, it instead pulled up a story about the Kardashians using it to avoid a high-risk pregnancy. Given there's many more rich straight couples than gay ones, I wouldn't be shocked if most of the children born to surrogate mothers ended up with a straight couple. (If you find actual statistics about this, do teach me your search algorithm.)
As for the extent to which this is degrading to the surrogate mother, this *is* a change of topic from the original "think of the children," but I'm curious if you find wet nursing similarly repulsive? It's largely technologically obsolete, of course, which makes this a safe hypothetical. (One reason I ask is that I found my own pregnancy far less inconvenient than attempting to breastfeed; apparently I'm a much better mare than cow.)
>you find wet nursing similarly repulsive?
I do not. Here's my justifications why :
1- It doesn't involve taking using a women's body like a thing then throwing it.
2- It doesn't involve taking the baby from his\her rightful mother, never to be seen again.
3- It's minimally-invasive to all parties involved.
4- There is a centuries old tradition of using it in nearly all cultures, and thus people are better adapted and protocol-ed in navigating the relationship.
I'd say the pattern is just that if people like how the change worked out, there's no backlash, whereas if it causes obvious trouble, there's a backlash. Dobbs->10yo victim->backlash. Gay marriage & Obamacare->happy gay couples & more folks insured->no backlash.
You could argue that this is about media bias, but I'd challenge that: if there were obvious problems after the gay marriage or Obamacare changes, CNN and Fox would both have been all over them.
You could say the public is biased in favor of policies that cause no obvious trouble (most people don't care much about curbing oil use until climate change starts affecting them personally)... well, of course they are.
Oh, come on. "The media" (which is a thousand things, not one entity) didn't conjure up a backlash, it just cashed in on the (entirely reasonable) outrage over the tragic results of the ruling. If the pro-life position was left wing (and the pro-choice position was right wing), Fox would have trumpeted the 10yo victim just as loudly.
On Obamacare, you make good points, but those were short term implementation details, and once the system stabilized, it's been a boon to millions and a problem for just a few. If most people actually knew someone who lost their doctor, we'd probably have seen a backlash. As it was, although initially it was rocky, many people actually knew someone who finally got access to decent health care.
The point I was making is, "the media" is both pro-life and pro-choice and a thousand other things. Sure, if every media outlet monolithically suppressed pro-choice stories and promoted pro-life ones, then you'd only hear pro-life stories. But unless you know Kermit personally, you heard about him from... the media! Some of the media publicized the 10yo victim. I'm guessing even you noticed that many media outlets vociferously praised Dobbs and downplayed the victims' situations, cast aspersions on the doctor who sent the 10yo out of state. The public, by and large, sympathized with the victims, not with the downplayers.
While I'm pretty sure I don't think the media as a whole has the tendencies you think it does, I'm not saying it doesn't have any identifiable tendencies. Specifically, one of the media's obvious tendencies is to report what opinion leaders of many stripes, including politicians, are saying. However, the media is far from monolithic, and just because you've personally fixated on this Kermit story as the thing you believe the media should have focused on if it didn't have the bias you imagine it has doesn't make it so. (FWIW, I remember hearing about the Kermit case back when it was in the news, and I can assure you, it wasn't from the likes of redstate.com. Pick any random mainstream outlet from NPR to Fox, and Google can show you that your random outlet ran dozens of stories about it.)
As I mentioned, much of the media coverage around the Dobbs decision did feature pro-life opinions, complete with the stories the pro-lifers chose to focus on. If pro-life politicians had been bleating about Kermit at the time, we'd all have had to put up with the media rehashing that, over and over, just like, in fact, we had to put up with much of the media endlessly repeating how "fanciful and unlikely" (to quote that fringe outlet called the Wall Street Journal) the story of the 10yo was and how biased the child-abuse doctor who publicized the case obviously was--until the rapist interfered with their narrative by confessing.
And if the pendulum swings back and even late-term abortions are made fully legal, and then another abortion doctor is found to be killing live-born children, you can be sure the media will tell us all about that as well.
Since we're going to be talking about characteristics of the media determining whether or not we've all heard about the 10-year-old's abortion: there was a moment in that story when it was being massively blown up in conservative media because they'd all gone and decided (rather absurdly) that it had been proven to be a hoax perpetrated by a local newspaper reporter. I don't know for sure whether or not it was that supposed hoax call-out that was the moment that transitioned the story from just local media to national media - but it was definitely that conservative wave (more precisely - conservatives in my social media feeds keying off it) that first brought the story to my eyeballs
It's an extremely unlikely case, though; how many ten year olds are capable of getting pregnant? And the situation was horribly murky, that this child was being raped at age nine by a 27 year old man associated with her family.
And other things I was reading at the time that in some Hispanic immigrant communities/culture, having this kind of age disparity was normal and accepted - not the extreme of being 10, but from 13 onwards having a 'boyfriend', even a much older 'boyfriend' as part of being a woman now (post-puberty) and for reasons of poverty, seeking status or escaping a bad home situation, or even being more or less sold into it as the family paying off some kind of debt or obligation:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/may/02/mexico-lost-generation-young-girls-innocence-education
The accused is Guatemalan and there's a story alleging that the mother of the girl defended him, though it's extremely sketchy and translated from Spanish:
https://www.telemundo.com/noticias/noticias-telemundo/crimen-y-violencia/la-madre-de-la-nina-de-10-anos-violada-en-ohio-defiende-al-joven-que-c-rcna38236
The entire story is a terrible one. And for all the outrage over the denial of the abortion, I haven't seen corresponding outrage about how the hell did it happen that this girl ended up pregnant after being raped by an older man? Well, the trial is supposed to go forward this month, we may hear more about it.
But the media didn't know about the story until the doctor in Indiana who performed the abortion publicised it, although with details concealed; so this was someone who was on the pro-choice side, to put it mildly. And I'm not surprised conservatives didn't believe the story as reported - it was too pat, too good an example of what the pro-abortion side had been pushing, and there were no corroborations known at the time.
FWIW, I've seen reports that girls are becoming sexually mature earlier than they used to. I'm not convinced by the reasons offered, but I'm willing to accept the fact. 10 is still really early, but 12 wouldn't be that unusual, and even 11 wouldn't strain my credulity to the point where I'd go fact checking.
P.S.: This doesn't imply that their bones are finished growing. Or that it's reasonable that they should get pregnant. Just that it shouldn't be surprising if it happens earlier than one would traditionally expect.
P.P.S.: The direct evidence I have for this is sketchy, and basically is my wife's report of the appearance of girls she's been teaching (I saw the girls, but depend on my wife's report for judgement of how early the development was happening). For pregnancies I'm relying on reports from sources I haven't validated. These reports were written around 2005 and were in print, but not in a medical journal, so if you don't want to believe them feel free.
I do wonder if she isn't chronologically older than her recorded age, as she seems to be from an immigrant family and paperwork might not line up. Possibly TMI but I started puberty at 11 (which was a shock to my mother, she wasn't expecting to have to explain all this to me until about age 14 which was when she started).
This guy was having sex with the girl when she was 9 and that's when she became pregnant, which *does* seem exceptionally early - unless, as I said, she is actually a year or two older than her recorded age, or she had a medical condition like early puberty or something.
Regardless of all that, any bastard who has sex with a child of that age whether she's 9 or 12 and whether she's started bleeding so she's a 'real' woman now should be dragged out in public and undergo the severer penalties of public punishment of earlier times.
Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII, was married at around the age of 12 (her date of birth was uncertain so she could have been any age from 12-14) and was both pregnant and a widow by the age of 13 (or 15, if we take the earlier birth date).
She only ever had one child, even though she was married three times, and even contemporary sources put this down to her having become pregnant at such a young age which was considered much too young. And that was married at 12-14, not being pimped out by her family at age 9.
Lets test your assumption that the media at large would trumpet a similar story that made a left wing position sound bad. Lets go to some large news websites and search for "Zulock"
CNN: Nothing
https://www.cnn.com/search?q=Zulock&from=0&size=10&page=1&sort=newest&types=all§ion=
New York Times: Nothing
https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=zulock
Washington Post: 2 Results, for names sort of like, but not Zulock
https://www.washingtonpost.com/search/?query=Zulock&facets=%7B%22time%22%3A%22all%22%2C%22sort%22%3A%22relevancy%22%2C%22section%22%3A%5B%5D%2C%22author%22%3A%5B%5D%7D
Now, you, person who trusts the media to report on things probably are thinking, "what the heck is a Zulock." Well a Zulock is one of two homosexual pedophiles who made child porn with their adopted sons. To find this out you only need to go to the responsible reporters at, *checks notes* Townhall.com Oh.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/miacathell/2023/01/17/zulock-case-pt-1-n2618219
True enough, gay and straight people alike can be sadistic criminals. *checks google* https://wcyb.com/news/tennessee-news/parents-charged-with-selling-daughters-into-child-pornography
What do you know, that case also wasn't reported in the national media. Hmm, guess we should outlaw heterosexual marriage too, since obviously marriage leads to child abuse. If a major politician was talking about Zulock (or McCall), the national media would have reported on it.
More importantly: when an individual who is a member of a given category commits a terrible crime, that does not imply that people who are members of that category commit terrible crimes more often than others.
There was at least one sad case back around the time Katherine Jefferts Schori was Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church, so some time after 2006. I only became aware of it because I was following some Episcopalian bloggers at the time (and their troubles made a change from the turmoil in my own church re: the sex abuse scandals).
Local gay married couple who were pillars of the community, but one guy was especially a pillar being involved with his local (Episcopalian) church who adopted a black kid as their son. Wonderful feel-good story for the time, especially when the Anglican Wars over gay rights and gay clergy were going on.
Turns out, pillar was sexually abusing the kid. I don't mean this as any kind of gotcha about anyone, but I don't know if it ever made national news. I think the media would report on it if they knew about it, but it's not the kind of story they go looking for. Impeccably liberal denomination with all the right views on sexism, racism, climate change, contraception, abortion, divorce, gay rights, trans rights? With female clergy, gay and lesbian clergy, even up to the level of bishops? The kind of denomination that the Catholic Church is always told it should be for the modern world?
No, the newshounds of the press aren't going to go sniffing around that kind of place for stories. You might do an exposé of the local Catholic diocese and win a prize for it, but you'll get no thanks for slinging mud at the people on the right side of history.
That's the point: not that they don't or won't cover such stories, but that they don't go looking for them and they have to dragged by the scruff of the neck to cover them when the story becomes too loud to be ignored.
What do you think the Catholic priest scandal was, in the majority?
A) A pedophilia scandal;
B) A homosexual pedarasty scandal.
I seem to recall a tremendous amount of negative media coverage over Obamacare, to the point that it reached me up here in Canada.
There was a lot of negative media coverage over Obamacare before it passed. Afterwards coverage was dropped.
FWIW, I'm opposed Obamacare, because it's mainly a payoff to the health insurance companies. Insurance is a really bad model for health coverage.
That said, I've know several people who only have coverage because of Obamacare. My objections are about "details of the implementation".
The only real "trouble" which such policies might cause are, potentially, for the children adopted into a gay marriage who are forced to live a motherless life, and, obviously, the unborn babies who are aborted. Since neither of these groups are capable of complaint, the policies are not likely to cause much backlash.
When the court makes a decision that catches up to where the public has been moving for years (e.g., Obergefell) it doesn't cause a backlash, but when the court makes a big decision that changes the status quo on an issue where the public has been stagnant for years (e.g., Dobbs) it causes a backlash.
You claim that the Obamacare chart shows no change, but to me it really looks like there's a higher pre-2008 plateau and then a lower post-2008 level that gradually starts moving upward again around 2014 (when the law starts coming into effect and Republicans start campaigning on taking it away).
My recollection was that gay marriage repeatedly lost referendums and had its earliest victories in the courts. Prop 8 to amend the California constitution was because their court had declared SSM constitutionally required, but then that amendment got ruled unconstitutional as well. The courts seemed to be in the lead of the public, with them if anything following after it got legitimized and coming to accept it as the status quo.
Prop 8 was in 2008, Obergefell was in 2015.
In 2008, support for gay marriage was at 40% and support for gay people ("are gay relations morally wrong?") was at 50%.
In 2015, support for gay marriage was at 60% and support for gay people was at 65%.
I think it's fair to say the courts were ahead of the people on Obergefell, but not nearly as far ahead as during those "earliest victories" you're referring to. From 2009 to 2013, gay marriage was mostly instituted by legislatures and/or directly by the voters. After that the courts started sweeping things up, and Obergefell only affected 30% of the population (for the other 70% it was already legal).
Wrong, most of that 70% was through lower federal court rulings that Obergefell retrospectively legitimised.
I didn't mean to imply otherwise. The 70% is relevant only because it spread the discontent out over multiple decisions and multiple years.
By the time Obergefell happened, it was reasonably popular, and had looked inevitable for a while (cause of all the lower court decisions), and didn't affect very many people anyways. It was only marginally ahead of the citizenry, and in line with precedent from lower courts. I understand that the comment I responded too was just about public opinion, so this point is tangential
There was a clear long term trend in public opinion and the court cases were only ever a little bit ahead of it (Iowa was probably the farthest ahead). This is very different from the situation with the court cases that provoked backlash, where the court was injecting itself into a stable public opinion environment.
I like this explanation and think it's likely to have high weight in the explanatory model. I'm not sure how well this applies to the Trump tarrifs though. Any thoughts? (Of course we don't need a mono-causal explanation.)
Maybe there is a way to fit it, with a narrative something like "most Republicans didn't really buy into the anti-trade stuff, they went along with Trump for other issues they thought were more important such as illegal immigration. So when he started to seriously talk about tarrifs, this pushed Republicans to shift their political center of gravity to supporting trade."
2022 May 2-22: pro-choice = 55% pro-life = 39%
2021 May 3-18: pro-choice = 49% pro-life = 47%
Legal under any, Legal under most, Legal only in a few, Illegal in all, No opinion
2022 May 2-22 any=35%, most=18%, few=32%, never=13%, no opion=2%
2021 May 3-18 any=32%, most=13%, few=33%, never=19%, no opion=3%
Any time there is a big mass shooting that gets a ton of media coverage, support for new gun control laws spikes up, but eventually settles back down to its pre-shooting baseline. It will be interesting to see if the same thing plays out with Dobbs. Support for abortion was extremely stable for decades. Is this a shock to the system that will return to the baseline, or the establishment of a new baseline?
The trend of support for a policy seems like a mix of two different trends- how much people support a particular outcome, and how much they think the policy supports that outcome.
In the case of gay marriage, there's growing support for the outcome of gay people getting married, and the policy of legalizing it clearly supported that outcome both before and after Obergefell, so the trend just represents the cultural shift.
In the case of abortion, however, the median person probably supports something like what you see in most European countries- protection for early term abortions and consistent outlawing of late term abortions. During the Roe v. Wade era, "pro-life" policy moved things closer to that outcome, while after its repeal, "pro-choice" policy does the same thing, so the trend looks like a sudden reversal even when the outcomes people want haven't shifted much. It's not that people always want a moderate outcome and will react thermostatically to policy changes- it's just the new policies may or may not overshoot the desired outcome, and that desire also shifts over time independently of policy.
I'll bet a lot of the Trump backlash was a similar sort of thing.
For some of these examples, I think a relevant factor is "beliefs as attire". People sometimes claim to believe "nobody should ever murder an unborn child" or "international trade is bad for the economy" when they mean to express "boo feminism" or "boo China", but when these become actual policy options they're forced to reconsider whether they take these beliefs literally or only seriously. In contrast, "people should be able to marry same-sex partners if they want to" is plausibly straightforward enough to be mostly believed or rejected on the merits, and nobody is shocked when this policy is implemented and works pretty much as expected.
This is just the fundamental attribution error
I'm aware that this phenomenon happens on both sides of the culture war, if that's what you're implying. "Police should be abolished" is often an expressive belief meaning "boo cops", not "I'd like to live in a neighborhood with no police", making police abolition vulnerable to backlash; "murderers should die for their crimes, even if we make a mistake sometimes" is a policy that does what it says on the box and is fairly resistant to backlash.
The choice of examples of liberal "wins" not creating political backlash against liberalism is insufficiently precise and elides some pretty important individual features, particularly those of the Obergefell decision, that adequately explain why these instances don't disprove (or even counsel against) the thermostatic effect theory.
Let's be more specific, with an actual example. Indeed, if backlash only happened when conservatives got political wins, one would expect public support for the death penalty to have stayed the same or come down during the 1970's moratorium period. But this is not what happened. Gallup historical polling data (available here: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1606/death-penalty.aspx) shows a major and immediate increase in support for the death penalty following the landmark liberal Furman decision by the Supreme Court (which banned every existing death penalty regime), from below 50% to over 65% in less than 3 years. This is because, just as with the Dobbs decision, the Court weighed in on a contested political topic and pulled hard towards one direction, satisfying one group but creating comparatively greater anger and resentment on the other side.
This latter part happened to some extent in 2015 with Obergefell as well. However, it was immediately moderated (and eventually outweighed) by the fact that the decision was seen as the culmination of a decades-long movement to make homosexuality acceptable in "normie" culture. As such, lots of previously closeted gay people felt safe to come out to formerly homophobic (or potentially homophobic) family members, friends, or acquaintances.
I am convinced that the massive increase in support for LGB rights (and the GOP's rapid removal of anti-gay rhetoric from its platforms and public discussion in the 2nd half of the 2010s) was primarily because legal, political, and cultural changes caused more gay people to come out, and therefore more heterosexual people realized that others they knew quite well and got along with great were actually homosexual. It's a meme to say that "I have one black friend, how can I be racist?", but if SO MANY people all around you whom you had previously thought of as fundamentally good actually turn out to be gay, that makes it super difficult to keep believing that gay people are evil (or thay being gay is inherently bad). Homosexuality simply became normalized through exposure.
This is what makes it a bad case study for political wins and the thermostatic effect, because the real "win" wasn't making gay marriage legal (if this was the only thing that has happened, you WOULD have seen public opinion shift towards the right), but rather creating an environment that allowed centrists (and even socially slightly-right-of-center people) to realize that those who are homosexual or bisexual are just... normal people, and that you shouldn't get in the way of normal people living their lives and marrying each other.
Do you have evidence of a big increase in people coming out after Obergefell?
I fully agree that this was a big part of the opinion shift, but I understand it to have taken place gradually from 1969 through the '00s. I struggle to imagine that many people waited until July 2015 to come out.
As a liberal example, I would expect the recent rise of BLM to result in a strong downturn in support for racial-justice causes. Anyone have any data on that?
Not really. Big spike after George Floyd's death, then a return to what it was prior to that. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/09/27/support-for-black-lives-matter-declined-after-george-floyd-protests-but-has-remained-unchanged-since/ft_2021-09-27_blm_01/
I think it's largely tied in to how high a probability you assign to the new law/policy either affecting 'you', directly, or (to a lesser extent) producing what you think are fundamentally unfair outcomes. The abortion case is a great example of this: Most people can imagine a scenario where a young woman they know (daughter, grand daughter, niece, etc) might really need to get an abortion, or they can at least imagine a case where a young woman to whom they are generally sympathetic would want/need one, so you see a backlash.
You don't see a backlash with issues like gay marriage because for all the chest-beating about 'the decline of Christian values, blah blah decadence blah blah', it isn't adversely affecting anyone you know or whom you would be sympathetic. So two gay guys get married, and move in down the block: That's....not really changing anything? You might be a little grossed out if you see them holding hands when they're out for a walk, but on the other hand you probably know first-hand some gay people (even if you live in a small town in the middle of nowhere), and likely have some sympathy for them even if you don't agree with their lifestyle.
Looked at this way, you can see some possible laws/policies originating from the left that could (or have) create(d) a significant backlash. These include:
1) Banning meat consumption.
2) Mandating 'CRT' classes in schools.
3) Allowing transgender boys to play girls' sports.
4) Using tax dollars for reparations (this is a big one. If you want to see us toss race relations 80 years into the past, give everyone who identifies as black 'x million' and watch what happens.)
5) Vaccine mandates/passports
6) Open borders
7) Total repeal of drug laws
By contrast, here are some policies/laws you can see originating from the left that would not (or have not) have/had this effect:
1) 'Common sense' gun control laws (no sales to felons, waiting periods, etc).
2) Massive infrastructure spending
3) Higher taxes on rich people
4) Stronger anti-trust legislation
5) Increases in social security payments
Big upvote on this reply on the left-aligned policies that can cause backlash. Perfect examples - I'd love to see data on some of these and would bet many would match the Roe chart.
From my single data point of experience, I was very much aligned with the mainstream harm reduction philosophy until a few years back, when my west coast city's very liberal drug laws became even more liberalized, and now my thinking is completely in the other direction - I've radically changed my view on what constitutes "harm" and how to "reduce" it. So I would definitely be one of those people on the polls who would have gone from "pro" to "anti" after a policy win. This is partly due to how it's affected me personally (needles/foil everywhere, encounters with people in crisis, etc). But it's also linked to the the fundamentally unfair outcomes you reference - I'm deeply affected by the humanitarian crisis I view as resulting from policies and attitudes like this - like the one I shared until a few years ago.
I also agree with Guy's comment. I'm curious what city and what policy you're referring to that was aimed at "harm reduction" and actually increased harm, and if you have any thoughts about what policy would work better.
Oregon's Measure 110 in Nov 2020, specifically. Essentially there is now no legal pressure to stop drug use in Portland. I guess maybe it wasn't specifically a harm reduction measure - so my wording wasn't totally accurate? But it is directly linked to Guy's comment.
To be fair, this measure passed during a pandemic and at a time when policing and city support services were extremely limited during the pandemic, and at a time when the use of fentanyl was on the rise, so it's not possible for me to blame the rise I've seen in drug dealing, drug use, drug crises, overdoses, and people in states of true misery and despair etc on this policy. There are a lot of factors, but having spent time reading what street and drug outreach workers say, I feel confident that this has had a big hampering effect on driving people to treatment.
Like I said, I've recently shifted my views on this subject, so I'm still figuring out what I think is a more effective policy. I don't like mass incarceration, and I don't like tying up legal and policing resources with petty drug use, but I also don't think that "help is available if you feel like it" is very effective, and having a pathway to court-mandated treatment is important to stop what seems to be a strong pull toward the true wretched misery that I'm seeing everywhere now. I'm very much looking for an answer to that myself, but right now decriminalization seems to me to have been a mistake.
Interesting. I don't know much about it, but this makes me wonder if Portugal did something differently that made decriminalization work better there. Or is fentanyl causing worse trouble in Portugal too?
I don't know what's going on in Portugal now, but I do know their decriminalization came with much more persuasive measures to seek treatment, including property confiscation, I'm pretty sure, and even things like limiting travel, etc. It wasn't "call this hotline to get out of a fine that we're never going to make you pay anyway, and then when you call the hotline, you can just ask them for needles if you want".
But is there a government in the world who can look at a policy from abroad and just copy it wholesale without changing tons of the details that actually made it successful?
"... is there a government in the world who can look at a policy from abroad and just copy it wholesale without changing tons of the details that actually made it successful?"
D'accord! One might hope the default would be, "let's clone that successful policy and its implementation, since it's based on years – in Portugal's case, around two decades – of iterative improvement and hard-won experience. And only tweak it after we've had 2-3 years of practical experience that can guide any such changes."
Thanks for these thoughtful musings, elizamachine. Thanks, as well, for mentioning the potential impact of fentanyl (by itself and particularly as an adulterant in other drugs) on overdose deaths, one of the key measures of success or failure for any drug policy.
Have also seen, from afar, many scathing takes on what happened in Oregon (including Portland) in the aftermath of that measure passing.
In response to Neo's reply, there does seem to be some strong consensus that Portugal's well-heralded harm reduction approach towards drugs has, on balance, been a success, along with Switzerland's less-discussed approach. It seems likely there are some key differences between those – both in policy and implementation – and the mess we've seen in some US states and cities. (No matter if some of those US responses may have been inspired by Portugal's experience.)
One article briefly discussing at least two of the key reasons that Oregon has fallen short of the Portuguese model:
https://nowthisnews.com/news/oregons-drug-decriminalization-gets-poor-marks-on-audit
According to various quotes and summary assertions in that article, Measure 110 hasn't "yet translated into an improved care network for a state with the second-highest rate of substance use disorder in the nation and ranked 50th for access to [drug] treatment."
As well, Portugal's approach "is more vigorous than Oregon’s in getting people to treatment. There, “dissuasion commissions” pressure anyone caught using drugs to seek treatment." That's in contrast to Oregon's much laxer implementation, where in the first year of that state's new program, just 1% of those "ticketed for drug possession and given a hotline number" called that number. (Update: acknowledging elizamachine's highly similar point, in a reply above.)
The problem is that the Drug War had it backwards all along, and the current repeals don't fix the problem.
Selling unadulterated/properly labeled drugs to informed buyers is a victimless crime. That is, there is no victim to call the police. The only way to enforce a ban on such activity is violate constitutional norms.
Drug *abuse* often does have victims -- including pedestrians who have to walk past needles and poop. You don't need a police state to enforce laws against such blatant drug abuse. (Just as you don't need alcohol prohibition in order to enforce laws against public drunkenness.)
The wisest drug law reform was once proposed by .... The Onion.
https://www.theonion.com/drugs-now-legal-if-user-is-employed-1819566391
I'm not entirely sure about the claim of "no effect" for the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare"), which existed in some form since at least 2009 and was something then-Senator Obama campaigned on in 2008, and it does seem like things trend downward for Republicans/Independents on that graph. (It doesn't clearly start in 2008, but that's kind of a "Does reality drive straight lines...?" conundrum.)
I would also question whether the abortion ruling can truly be said to have no personality component - there was plenty of coverage related to President Trump, and related to the series of events that led to the current composition of the Supreme Court, e.g. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/24/roe-v-wade-decision-trump-takes-credit-for-supreme-court-abortion-ruling.html
The following would be consistent with your data: many people don't think much about these issues and have opinions acquired from parents or neighbors or party. Then the issue becomes salient (per David Shor) so they think about it and most decide they agree with the liberals. To test this, are there cars where an issue became highly salient and the law did *not* change but opinions did?
I think the sample size it to small to draw meaningful conclusions, but pontificating in the absence of evidence is what the internet is best at, so...
It's possible that views are biased away from perceived extreme positions. We might be seeing opinions trying to regress toward the mean. So inasmuch as popular conception was that abortion was available and practiced with zero restrictions, many people hoped for something *slightly* more restrictive. With the Dobbs ruling, what we got, at least in some states, was a real extreme in the other direction, and so many people hope for something *less* restrictive.
Obgerfell didn't generally change the status quo much for most people. It didn't create a new extreme, it protected the norm in a number of states without forcing anything new in others.
On trade, many people might have felt that China had some sort of upper hand before Trump's edicts took effect, and wanted more consideration, but then felt that his edicts went much too far, and want something closer to the way things were before.
There was enough backlash to the ACA to help Trump get elected, so that's not nothing, but overall people were still able to get health insurance, and in fact more people were, and costs didn't skyrocket for most people, so there wasn't the same "avoid extremes" effect.
As a working theory, it fits those examples, but more examples might break it.
I'd be interested to see an analysis of the Trump tax cuts. I'd expect that to be a low-perceived-impact conservative victory which wouldn't have a backlash, but I don't actually know.
> Or maybe it’s because liberalism is “on the right side of history”, ie the direction things naturally tend, so nobody finds liberal victories surprising, whereas everyone finds conservative victories surprising and feels like they need to react against them.
This intuitively more plausible to me, but not in the context of whether these policies are ‘right’ or not, but rather the trend of public opinion.
Oh the graph showing the support for gay marriage, we can see that it has a clear upward trend—i.e., overall support for it goes up overtime.
Maybe these victories tend to accelerate public opinion in a certain direction if they’re particularly controversial.
The average person might read the Dobbs decision, and already slowly becoming more pro-choice, just becomes more so.
This could be because of the media, which does happen to be more left-wing, as Scott points out. These controversial decisions make political commentators rage, which then gets transmitted to NYT, CNN, FOX, etc., and then to other media outlets.
Perhaps the rate of change in these opinions is proportional to the overall exposure people have to them from the news, whereby a news cycle dominated by it increases the total amount, thereby changing opinions.
It would be really interesting for someone to model this, maybe by plotting keyword frequencies in the NYT for example versus the change in opinions for controversial issues.
>My impression of the post-Dobbs debate on abortion was that it centered on an incredibly sympathetic 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio who really needed an abortion but was having trouble getting one
I have always wondered why anti-abortionists aren't doing anything about this. It's *incredibly* easy to paint abortion in bad light, bring out just one of those using it as a "A type of birth control that involves surgery", all those promiscuous $CENSORED, the sheer amount of debauchery and sluttiness their life consists of, that without abortion they would have thought 20 times before engaging in.
And then there is all those who are like "I was doomed by my unexpected pregnancy to be a basic ass stay-at-home mother but then I killed my future child and now I'm a successful wage slave at $BIG_CORP, and managing other wage slaves even. Please don't take away our right to kill the unborn uwu" in the newspapers and on social media. They talk about this rather proudly too, so it's not like there is any extra cajoling or deceit needed to bring it out of them.
In contrast to this, a single docuementary about the sheer magic of a mini-person rising like a phoenix from a single fertilized cell is enough to maybe shift **at least** 15% to 20% of the least-fervant pro-abortion base. It's an Epic, really, a compressed retelling of the story of Evolution of multi-cellular and primate life, on the spatial scale of a single organism and the temporal scale of an evolutionary nanosecond. Bonus points for showing the cute babies that would-have-been-aborted fetuses grew into, and interviews with the fortunate mother who changed her mind.
If somebody told me about the abortion debate for the first time in a vacuum, I would have expected that it's the *pro-abortion* side that desperately needs good faith and a devil's advocate. That reality is the exact opposite is so surprising to me. From a purely Machiavellian perspective, ignoring all utility calculations about who's "really" right, the anti-abortion side is severely under-using some of the rhetorical and propagandist assets at their hand, chief among which is an instinctive, millions-years-ancient, literally life-or-death love for babies and their survival ingrained in nearly all humans, including violently misanthropic ones like me.
A quick perusal of the NY Times website indicates that it covers the March for Life every year.
> Anti-abortionists can do anything they please, but if the media at large doesn't report it they're preaching only to the choir and don't have any opportunity to broaden their support.
This is a case where the right answer is "if you don't like what the media covers, be your own media and cover the things you want covered".
> It's *incredibly* easy to paint abortion in bad light, bring out just one of those using it as a "A type of birth control that involves surgery", all those promiscuous $CENSORED, the sheer amount of debauchery and sluttiness their life consists of, that without abortion they would have thought 20 times before engaging in.
I think a lot of people will just assume that such person without access to abortion will start a dysfunctional family, because there is a lot of debate about single mothers making bad life choices.
Also, people have a tendency to pay attention to horrific stories happening to exact people. And abortion bans generate a lot of such stories - Chazan or Izabela Sajbor cases are going to overshadow the most beautiful documentary about miracle of life. On the other hand, story about abortion lacks "victim" in a way, as the fetuses are not exactly seen as "whole" person - miscarriage/stillbirth are socially seen as something different than death of a child. This is also probably the reason why anti-abortion media are avoiding portraying fetuses in very early stages.
> Also, people have a tendency to pay attention to horrific stories happening to exact people.
> On the other hand, story about abortion lacks "victim" in a way
That's not true. I remember a story about a guy who rented a billboard and put up a photo of himself cradling the black, empty silhouette of a baby. The text was along the lines of "this would have been my son if my girlfriend hadn't had him aborted."
The girlfriend sued. I remarked on the story to my mother (an obstetrician) and she immediately opined that displaying such a billboard should be illegal because of the risk it created for doctors.
I later went and found the actual image of the billboard, and it's much tackier and crasser than I've made it sound above. But the argument is really easy to make sympathetically. I still think about this story as an example of making an argument much more forcefully than is usual.
On a very very similar note, I also still remember an anti-smoking PSA from the 90s or early 2000s. It showed an elderly man, presumably a grandfather, standing near a baby and encouraging the baby to stand. The baby does, and then takes a tentative step, and then gains confidence and starts trotting over to the grandfather... and then walks right through him as he fades to partial transparency, because he's a ghost who died of lung cancer long ago.
This PSA replaced the standard anti-smoking message, IF YOU SMOKE CIGARETTES, YOU WILL DIE AN EARLY, PAINFUL DEATH, with IF YOU SMOKE CIGARETTES, YOU WILL NOT BE THERE FOR YOUR GRANDCHILDREN'S FIRST STEPS. And that turned out to be a much stronger message. The sitcom Friends made a reference to this PSA. When I mentioned to a college friend, many years later, that I'd like to find a copy but I was having trouble finding it, she immediately responded "Yes, I know exactly the one you're talking about. I hate that commercial, I don't want to see it again, and I won't help you look for it."
I almost suspect that the reason that PSA didn't stick around longer was that the non-smoking public hated it so much.
So yes, it's easy to paint abortion in a bad light, and someone who wanted children but didn't get them makes a powerful and sympathetic victim.
(And if you know how to find a copy of the PSA, I'm still looking for it.)
Pro-abortion stories are more of "brainless newborn with other severe conditions waits for death from infection, after mother was denied abortion" or "woman dies in agony, due to doctors being scared to perform abortion".
And now compare from the news standpoint : a story of guy who wanted to be a father and found out that he won't be this time (like hundreds of other guys who's wife miscarried that day), and parents waiting for their newborn to finally die, so it would stop suffering so much. Yes, there is a lot to say about media and their vulture-like tendency towards extremely morbid cases, but this is kinda what the viewers are interested in.
Stories about woman losing ability to have children after botched abortions would be more sympathetic, but woman having abortions are not showed as sympathetic, although misguided people for most of the time, as this probably stands too close to "I want to have children, but I don't want to die horrible death in case of issues with pregnancy" argument.
> a story of guy who wanted to be a father and found out that he won't be this time (like hundreds of other guys who's wife miscarried that day)
This (the "normal" guys whose wives miscarry) is a pretty common story. It's always viewed as devastating. No one says "hey, that's no big deal, it happens all the time". I have a friend who miscarried after avowing the opinion that she didn't want any children. And it was very hard for her!
You remind me of an article I read on the topic of the common modern belief that people thousands of years ago didn't feel as sad as we do when their young children died, because that was such a common occurrence back then. The reality is worse than that - the death of young children was indeed very common, but as far as the evidence goes, ancient people felt at least as bad as we do about it. Tombstones erected for babies and toddlers say things like "her father cries for her every day".
>like hundreds of other guys who's wife miscarried that day
So a tragedy is a minor thing becaus it happens everyday ? Why, I got good news for you then
>woman dies in agony, due to doctors being scared to perform abortion
also happens everyday, much more outside of the western world than in, but also more than you imagine inside. No biggie.
>brainless newborn with other severe conditions waits for death from infection,
How is that preferable than killing the newborn in the womb ? And why is "Abortion for all till the 9th month" necessary to prevent what is clearly an extreme and special case that no one having it will have trouble proving it ?
I'm not from USA. In my country (Poland) you can currently abort a fetus only if the life of a mother is in danger (but as you see defining "in danger" may create some issues) or when a pregnancy is a result of rape. There was third clause, abortion in case of severe birth defects, but is was banned two years ago. So aside those two cases, there is no possible way to get abortion in country. This is not USA legal system, no precedences.
As for reasons why is preferable to abort in 22 week a severely defected fetus, instead of letting it die for a week - the outcome is the same, minus week of suffering for fetus and great distress for parents, first waiting for birth of a child that they knew it would die, and then waiting for said death. This is not a made up example, I mentioned it before - this is Chazan case. Abortion was denied in 22 week, the child was born, and half-died, half-rotten away, being pumped full of painkillers, because there was nothing else doctors can do. Nowadays, after the ban there won't be even discussion with doctor about abortion in such cases.
I though we were talking about propaganda, and I was talking from more media oriented perspective and what makes story more viral and visible. I've seen lately a lot of such propaganda (as I mentioned, it was hot topic here), and tried to guess why anti-abortion crowd uses certain tactics more than other. Also, I never tried to "quantify" tragedies, as suggest I do - I just compare stories that do make news here, and ones that do not. Yes, people are dying from medical failures and... Most of it doesn't end up in media. So it is "No biggie" in a way, that you won't have a massive coverage, causing massive backlash, causing changing in attitude.
But as you use statements that I never made, nor I agree with ("Abortion for all till the 9th month", WTF? ), I'll end this discussion here, as I'm not interested in playing a role of strawman opponent.
> ignoring all utility calculations about who's "really" right
There's your problem. Many of the actual people having opinions on abortion don't ignore the utility of abortion. They recognise and appreciate it, don't want it taken away, and will pursue illegal means to do it anyway when it is taken away as a legal option.
I agree, although I tend to think that any act that has majority support (over a period of time, where there is good information, other caveats may apply) is probably not morally wrong. This of course gets hairy when it's a majority only of a certain demographic, but that's why we politics.
>I agree, although I tend to think that any act that has majority support (over a period of time, where there is good information
Slavery good ?
Pretty sure that policy has only ever had majority support among the enslaved in (unfortunately historically common) cases where the alternative was death.
I didn't mean to say """if people were to ignore all utility calculations""", I meant to say """If we look at this as just a competition where one side has some tools they aren't using""".
>Many of the actual people having opinions on abortion don't ignore the utility of abortion. They recognise and appreciate it, don't want it taken away, and will pursue illegal means to do it anyway when it is taken away as a legal option.
Many of the actual people having opinions on drunk driving aren't ignoring the utility of drunk driving, they recognize and appreciate it, don't want it taken away and will pursue illegal means to do it anyway when taken away as a legal option.
And we take it away anyway, and jail their ass when they do it.
How about making it nominally a crime, but streamlined and destigmatized? Doc pays a fine based on the cost of the investigation (negligible if everyone's honest) but doesn't risk loss of license if otherwise acting as a competent professional, mom spends time officially in jail (but mostly just getting follow-up care) equal to the fetus's lifespan.
Of course, in the case of rape, dad's on the hook instead, maybe with a multiplier adjusted to reflect how heinous the consent situation was. Supportive spouse could also voluntarily step up to share the legal burden in the unlikely event of late-term medical necessity.
That's... fine by me. Except make the jailtime a little longer, nobody will respect a 9-month-max punishment. 3 years or so seems to be the minimum peope fear.
Also, abortion should be **more** stigmatized, not less. Extreme prejudice to *anyone* doing it out of anything else but rape, incest and severe birth defects in the baby. This needn't be translated into law, but murder should be trashy.
A program for drug addicts in... Hawaii, I believe... showed that a single day in jail can be a very effective deterrent, provided it's sufficiently swift and certain. "Extreme prejudice" sentencing just motivates people to find ways to avoid even being perceived the law, which ends up supporting a whole ecosystem of worse criminals.
"If somebody told me about the abortion debate for the first time in a vacuum, I would have expected that it's the *pro-abortion* side that desperately needs good faith and a devil's advocate."
Yes, this is what I really have a hard time reconciling in our modern society. From a purely scientific standpoint:
1. a fetus is clearly alive
2. it has Homo sapiens DNA, therefore it is human
3. if we polled everyone alive at the moment and asked them "do you wish you had never been born" I reckon the overwhelming answer would be that they prefer to have been born
4. killing of any other subset of living human beings (including murderous criminals) is illegal and considered morally illegitimate in most of Western society
So even not taking into account all the warm, fuzzy non-scientific stuff you mention, the fact that we massively support legal abortion in the way we do, is surprising, to say the least...
Cutting somebody's leg off, or prying open their ribcage to rip out their still-beating heart, is illegal and considered morally illegitimate... unless they've got severe gangrene in that foot, or you're a transplant surgeon operating with their consent, or otherwise causing a lesser harm only out of necessity to prevent some greater harm.
Point three seems to be a classic case of survivorship bias. Proper poll should also include e.g. suicide victims, and those who never made it as far as adulthood due to inadequate parental support, since warning signs of such an outcome are wildly over-represented among those actually seeking out an abortion. Unfortunately, starving infants and the afterlife are notoriously survey-resistant - when there's a spoken response at all, it's far below reasonable thresholds of statistical significance and replicability, or just a bunch of incoherent anguished wailing, or both.
> unless they've got severe gangrene in that foot
Babies are not gangrene.
I agree that life is not (on balance) good, I'm one of those who will respond to point (3) in the original comment you're replying to with no, my only reason for living is that those around me will get upset if I leave, this was the thing that pulled me from the edge when I was considering leaving too.
This doesn't change anything, helpless babies should be allowed to grow up and realize for themselves how utterly fucked up this horror show we call life is, nobody should be allowed to pull a trigger at them but them. As an analogy, consider a murderer who go around and kills 80-years-olds in neglectful nursery homes, he's probably doing them a favor, and yet neither the law nor even the most misanthropic morality will look kindly upon this murderer.
It's about autonomy, once a fetus grows a brain (which happens very early in pregnancy) then they deserve the right to self-determination. The same right that should be given to animals, by the way, but often doesn't because humans are murderous fucks, but that's a different conversation.
Well there are a lot of attempts to paint abortion in bad light. They are just not very memetically successful because as soon as you accuse women who need abortion in sluttiness the other side will very effectively counter it with "Have you just called this poor raped 10 years old girl a slut?"
Dunking on $BIG_CORP is not very successful move too, when it's the $BIG_CORP who has been paying for your movement. Appealing to the miracle of evolution will repel your creationist base.
As for millions-years-cuteness of babies, it's just not that impressives. Our anscestors evolved in a world where safe and available abortions didn't exist, babies needed to be cute enough so that their parents didn't kill them when they already born, not so cute to be a sufficient motivation to have them in the first place. Some people do not find babies cute at all, which is telling. And those who do, and are thinking about abortion, usually can just have their cute baby when they are ready for that and not as a result of unexpected pregnancy.
>very effectively counter it with "Have you just called this poor raped 10 years old girl a slut?"
Is this really an effective counter ? Have you tried using it in real life ? It will always be pretty clear who's pregnant because she's whoring around and who's pregnant because of rape. It will be the difference between jailtime and innocence in an effective and fair law.
I have always thought that the "strawman pro-abortionist" who replies to every argument against abortion with """What if a 10 year old is simultaneously gang raped and incest-raped, and as a result had 5 children all of them had birth defects and she's also quadriplegic and an orphan so she can't drive to a different state, what if this girl needed an abortion""" is a myth that only exists in reddit memes, but apparently that needs an update.
My own estimate is that your retort will make the pro abortion side more ridiculous and weak rather than less, but who knows. Only 1 way to find out, eh?
> the $BIG_CORP who has been paying for your movement
Just like they pay for everything in politics, doesn't prevent people from using them as a very successful strategy, eh ?. Who pays for Alexandra Cortez's campaigns ?
> Some people do not find babies cute at all
I have not encountered a single human being who is like this, and if I ever do I will categorically assume they are a psychopath in hiding till overwhelming evidence prove otherwise.
>have their cute baby when they are ready for that
Oh sure thing, there is plenty of time for that. As we all know, fertility in women is a square wave that stays on at the same amplitude from the first ovulation till menopause.
And, sure thing, "Kill this human being, we can have another one later" is a way of reasoning that a sane well-adjusted person will engage in.
> Is this really an effective counter ?
Yes. I've seen the flow of such conversations multiple times. In general, arguments appealing to moral character and deservingness of the thing happening due to it, are effectively countered by pointing out that people who do not deserve that are clearly harmed too. If the worst case offender of X is hated more than the possible victim of absence of X is sympathetic, than maybe you still have a chance to successfully claim moral high ground, but sadly for pro-lifers, I guess, people just do not hate women having abundant sex life as much as child rape.
> Just like they pay for everything in politics
As a rule, the more you depend on Big Money the less critical you can be of it.
> I have not encountered a single human being who is like this
I mean if you tell everyone that you will consider them psychopaths if they don't find babies cute, no surprise you are in the dark about it. Also maybe pro-lifers naturally tend to be more susceptible to baby cuteness, so it can be typical minding.
Anyway, I'm this kind of person. For me babies are fine, just noting special. Definitely less cute than, say puppies. And I'm not even in the end of the spectrum. I know people who are actively disturbed by babies.
> Oh sure thing, there is plenty of time for that.
Yep, literal decades of fertility, even without taking into account such reproductive technologies as freezing egg cells. So most of the time "have a baby now or never" is clearly a false dilemma.
> And, sure thing, "Kill this human being, we can have another one later"
Sigh. If you fail this much at ideological Turing test, than no surprise you can't fantom why pro-life is loosing. Suffice to say, not all people buy into this non-central fallacy.
> I've seen the flow of such conversations multiple times.
Thank you for contributing to the memes.
> In general, arguments appealing to moral character and deservingness of the thing happening due to it, are effectively countered by pointing out that people who do not deserve that are clearly harmed too
Ok, I will bite.
In utility calculations, everything is scaled according to the probability of it happening (which is just taking the expectation).
Consider : I have a very good moral reason to hire an assassin to kill everyone who drinks alcohol :
1- If you drink, there is a small chance that you will drive while drunk, hitting and killing a raped 10 years old who is also an orphan and a poor street begger.
2- Since the imagined victim of (1) is so much sympathetic than those harmed by the policy of "Kill or imprison all those who drink alcohol", and also I'm pretty sure I can find actual cases of it happening, the policy will be supported by the public and endorsed by the legal system.
The reason the above reasoning doesn't have a leg to stand on is because of the marvelous invention called Probability Theory. How likely it is that a raped 10 years old who is also an orphan and a street beggar to chance on a drunk driver ? How much more likely than that it is that the poor alcoholics that you kill or imprison are mostly innocent people who rarely drive while on alcohol and don't harm anyone ? Multiply those probabilities by the sizes of the 2 population (People do this without realizing it).
This is the reason your ideology's typical response is not the own you think it is and a subject of ridicule, everybody knows how ridiculously unlikely it's for a 10 years old to be pregnant (and see another thread for why that's a possible reason that the girl in question had her age miscalculated, as she was an immigrant and that's likely to happen in those cases). Also rape victims in general are given the morning-after pills when they report to an authority, birth control is not touched by abortion legislation.
And, finally, everybody understands that law can and very often does make exceptions. And the vast vast majority of anti-abortionists including me are okay with exceptions for rape, incest and birth defects, so your "counter" is effectively just "What if all the things that you make exceptions for actually does happen?!!", and my own very reasonable counter-counter to that is "just make use of the exceptions that the law grants you lol".
>pro-lifers
Actually, I prefer anti-abortionists. There is no reason that an anti-abortionist should be pro life in general. I'm an anti-natalist for fuck's sake, I literally want all life in this Universe to end. Abortion is not bad because it ends lives, abortion is bad because it's a cowardly and a pathetic style of pseudo-murder. "Pro-life" would be running around and maximizing the amount of lives born per day per square meter I guess, I'm not into this, very much the opposite in fact. All I want is for people to not have the right to kill what is very likely a human just because they can't plan a budget or use birth control correctly.
Same thing with "Pro Choice", quit the bullshit euphemism, it's "Pro Abortion". It's an abortion debate, the 2 sides are "Pro Abortion" and "Anti Abortion".
> I guess, people just do not hate women having abundant sex life
Nothing that can't be fixed with propaganda, eh ? that's exactly why I said the anti-abortion side needs to work on their PR game.
Their mission isn't that difficult, most people are in fact disgusted by sluts very much in general. Raped 10 years olds need not enter into the picture in the first place, since an anti-abortion work of art will not frame it this way or involve them at all (Propaganda 101 : do NOT present all sides of the debate).
An anti-abortion work of art need just to put the camera on a slut whose entire fucked up lifestyle of whoring herself out for free is fundamentally secured by abortion as a safety net. Considering that sluts would love this opportunity to be (in)famous, and they already do it for free on their social media, that shouldn't be too hard.
The audience is smart enough to understand the implication that raped 10 year olds have different considerations, and law can give them their cake (punishing sluts) and let them eat it too (but not rape victims).
>As a rule, the more you depend on Big Money the less critical you can be of it.
Again, this is trivially falsifiable by looking at the loudest critcis of corporations literally anywhere. Corporations make this world go around. Youtube and Twitch are used by Socialists or even Marxists to spread anti-corporate messages. Politicians like Alexandra Cortez is (like all US politicians) living on corporate "donations", and this is one of her favorite topics whenever she can't find something to whine about. She's not alone.
And corporations are not a single monotlith, there is no reason you can't make fun of the murderer who killed her potential child so she can be a wage slave at $BIG_CORP_1, while still being funded by an unrelated $BIG_CORP_2, no ? Doesn't that happen everywhere and everyday ?
>I mean if you tell everyone that you will consider them psychopaths if they don't find babies cute, no surprise you are in the dark about it.
Why do you think that I run around telling everyone how I would respond if they told me how they feel about babies ?
Take my word for it that I don't, take comfort that nobody knows that I look down on the extremly suspicious trait of "Not liking the single most helpless and vulnerable and innocent members of their species", and I never saw anyone who volunteered the info.
>Also maybe pro-lifers naturally tend to be more susceptible to baby cuteness, so it can be typical minding.
Again, I literally don't give a single gram of care whether you or anyone else make a baby or not, or exactly how many babies you make, or when and how you make them. Zero care.
I just care that once you *do* have a baby that no one forced you to have, then you have no right in hell to harm him or her just because you aspire to be a better wage slave or you don't like the other party. I'm no more "Pro Lifer" than the guy who tells you not to torture cats is "Pro Feline".
>Yep, literal decades of fertility,
That's not how any of that works, women's fertility begin a sharp decline at the start of the 30s, hitting ground levels at the start of the 40s. (Menopause typically happen at 45 or so.)
So your upper limit for a pregnancy if you don't want to gamble is really only 30 or 35 max, which corresponds to a 1-1.5 decade assuming 20 as a start date. Egg freezing is a toy expensive technology with a mean success rate of barely 35% or so.
Anyway, I'm really not terribly interested in doing calculations for the maximum time someone can be a whore and still get away with a family she doesn't deserve. I called for the use of babies' cuteness in my original comment as a strategic weapon to make people (== neutrals and non-fanatic pro-abortionists) more interested in them as victims of abortion, because human moral reasoning is easily hacked using beauty and cuteness of the victim. My direct model of how this works is how environmentalism successfully used the beauty of some endangered animals to muster massive support and mobilize effective conservation efforts. Babies are literally the cutest thing as far as Evolution is concerned (pets are selected for their similarity to babies, and they evolved accordingly), so I'm saying this is a massive source of anti-abortion sentiments that the anti-abortionists aren't using optimally.
It's okay for me if the typical slut doesn't feel threatened that she won't be able to get a baby in time, that wasn't my angle of attack in the first place.
>you fail this much at ideological Turing test
Ehh, failing the ideological Turing test is not a fancy way of saying "You won't see things my way", it has a bit more naunced shade of meaning that that. The ideological Turing test is how much you can emulate an average opponent, if you can do it well enough to fool at least the median/mode opponent, then you succeed.
As a former pro-abortionist, I'm fairly confident I can emulate an average non-fanatic pro-abortionist well enough. I just don't want to, and there is also no need for it now. Trust me, you haven't seen me when I want to emulate an opponent, if you did then you won't know that I'm on the other side.
>pro-life is loosing.
I mean come on, is defeating a half-century old murder-pass really losing ? I do admit the anti-abortionist is locked in a vicious and unfavorable fight where it's often not given a fair voice, that much is my original comment, but it's not "losing" by any stretch, to the contrary. We are right now discussing the reaction to their massive victory.
>this non-central fallacy.
Are you implying that you are a non-central member of the category of pro-abortionists ? Because all I did was to summarize your assertion that :
>>> those [...] usually can just have their cute baby when they are ready for that and not as a result of unexpected pregnancy.
This is quite literally just saying "Whenever my baby in inconvenient for me, I can just kill em and make another one later". Oh, for sure, you're sugaring it a bit, but that's the minimal compression of your statment, that all what it says really. Are you saying that this is not how the vast majority of abortions are reasoned ? (It is, I can demonstrate some numbers about this.) Are you saying my summarization is a strawman ?
Look, you seem to be missing the point. I'm not trying to persuade you that appeal to raped underaged victims is an epistemologically good argument or a generalisable way to find ethical truth. I'm pointing out that it's an effective one from memetic replication perspective - the perspective you have originally proposed to talk about - and explaining why it's that.
> Actually, I prefer anti-abortionists.
As you wish. I commend this as an example of virtue of accuracy.
> I'm an anti-natalist
Okay, now I'm curious. What is your reason for being anti-natalist? Is it about minimizing the suffering of living beings? Or something else?
> Nothing that can't be fixed with propaganda, eh ?
Well then I guess you can count the whole current conservative side of the modern culture war as such propaganda. People who buy into slutshaming and general mysoginy are already at your side and are not considered high status. It's probably possible in theory to shift the societal consciousness back to pre-feminism times, granted infinite propaganda budget for conservatives and zero budget to their opponents but even this doesn't work as reliably as one might think, I'm saying this from the experience of living in Russia.
> law can give them their cake (punishing sluts) and let them eat it too (but not rape victims).
Because everybody knows that there is no intersection between the categories of women who have active sex life and rape victims...
> Babies are literally the cutest thing as far as Evolution is concerned
Adaptation executers not fitness maximizers. Again this kind of emotional blackmail works for some people, and anti-abortionists are using it all the time, it's just not as effective as you seem to think.
> As a former pro-abortionist, I'm fairly confident I can emulate an average non-fanatic pro-abortionist well enough
Then you shouldn't have problems to understand that people who support abortions generally do not think that embryos equals babies. The non-central
fallacy is in trying to frame abortion as a human murder. Yes, technically you can stretch the definition of a human to include embryos. But then embryas are an extremely non-central example of a human, lacking thoughts, feeling, social connections and any personality. All the qualities that matters and due to which murder is wrong. Thus your summary isn't accurate.
Again anti-abortionists can and do use this framework as a propaganda tool, it's just not that effective because it doesn't really correspond to the way people they want to lure intuitively categorise things.
>Look, you seem to be missing the point.
I just so happen to believe that it's actually you who are missing my point.
I'm not trying to say that your "plea for the raped 10 year old" thing can (only) be defeated with some big brain epistemological machinery or statistical reasoning, I'm trying to say that it can be defeated with basic everyday reasoning that everyone already does automatically without realizing.
The memes making fun of this way of thinking on twitter and reddit are not made by some high-grade rationalist thinkers, they are made by common-grade social media users dunking on a manifestly ridiculous argument. Almost nobody is convinced by this, is what I'm saying. At least not anybody who isn't a "Shout your Abortion" fanatic.
I even suggest you play the devil's advocate game for a bit and go to a pro-abortion friend of yours, try to make them persuade you how a situation as vanishingly unlikely as "a raped-pregnant 10 years old" can trump or oppose a situation as likely as "a slut whoring around then running away to abort her responsibility". Pretend you're a skeptic neutral and try to make them explain it to you carefully as convincingly as they can. They won't be able to.
My **explanation** for *why* the argument is a ridiculous thing to believe might seem like a bit big-brained, but I think most people can instinctively know that it's bullshit, and that's enough for them.
>Is it about minimizing the suffering of living beings?
In a nutshell, yes. Arguments for anti-natalism are varied and many, but the simplest and most concise way to present it IMO is as a Pascal's Gamble : Once you have a child, you're at the mercy of the entire world, if anything harms your child (and plenty will), then you're responsible. But not having a child is a trivially-winning move : No matter how hellish the world get and how assholish people get, you're always gauranteed an easy A by just refusing to play the game altogether. Every parent in existence is a bad parent. (including mine, who I love very much and unconditionally forgive for bringing me to this world)
Not having children, of course, doesn't mean not raising children. Orphans exist, relatives exist.
>Well then I guess you can count the whole current conservative side of the modern culture war as such propaganda.
I don't count myself as conservative (and any one you know would probably not count me as one), vegetarianism and anti-natalism are not typical conservative positions. (though there is no reason they can't be, but they just aren't.)
But anyway, conservatives (small c) do understand the power of slut-shaming, and that's something I respect very much about them. But they don't play it hard enough in my view. And I haven't seen them play the abortion angle on it in particular, it's always from the general prespective. And that's the thing that should change.
>People who buy into slutshaming and general mysoginy are already at your side
Brotherly advice : If you want "Misogyny" to have any meaning at all, refrain from using it to denote holding sluts responsible for their actions.
I value women very much, indeed my vitriolic hatred for sluttiness stems from such deep respect. Furthermore, it's not slutty women alone who earn my contempt, it's "slutty" men too, although the word doesn't bite as much when you apply it that way, so there are other words to use in its place (fuckboy, e.g.). But the point is : Being a slut is not dependent on whether you're born with a dick or a slit between your legs. Just fucking close them and hide whatever you have inside, that way lies Virtue.
What can I say, being a slut is just fucking ugly and repulsive as hell.
>and are not considered high status.
Hmmm, citation needed. Assuming this is not just a subtle shade-throw at me for using a word you apparently hate.
This is not an accurate description of how social conservatism is viewed outside of progressive circle jerks. Outside of TED talks and Vice polemics, being a slut is almost unanimously viewed as a degrading and low-status, and making fun of sluts is - as far as I know - an extremly safe and fair-game thing to do. (especially if you restrict your venom to the heavy-hitters like - say - tinder users or onlyfan influncers, and not the more everyday sluts) Indeed, I sometimes *wince* at the extreme meanness people display towards sluts, they're still humans after all.
I wonder how we can prove which one of our conflicting assesments is right, perhaps we can ask a selection of people who view this thread whether they see statements of the form "Whores should have some responsbility" or "Sluts and their fucked up lifestyles" as low-status ? this wouldn't be much of anything but it's a start, feel free to define any other metric and suggest ways to measure it.
> It's probably possible in theory to shift the societal consciousness back to pre-feminism times
I'm telling you, my guy, that "societal consciousness" is not one big monolithic thing even on the scale of a single, small, local geography. You will be surprised at the number and the names of the places where it's still very heavily tabooed and policed and trash-talked to the nth degree to be a slut.
Thankfully, feminism has not ruined all women, not even a majority. Small mercies, eh ? Modest women are blooming flowers amidst the rubble.
>granted infinite propaganda budget for conservatives and zero budget to their opponents
Just stop summarily banning them on-sight from all the social media and see what they do after 2 or 3 years lol.
>I'm saying this from the experience of living in Russia.
Surprising, my stereotype of Russia and much of Eastern Europe is that it's conservative-by-default country where progressives are still heavily persecuted (which is not a thing I'm a fan of by the way, but it's not like progressives do any better in the areas they control).
Triple-check your social bubble and whether you live in Moscow or St. Petersburg vs. smaller cities, perhaps ?
(Anyway, I hope the war ends soon. I love Russia : difficult language, difficult (but lovely) people.)
>Because everybody knows that there is no intersection between the categories of women who have active sex life and rape victims...
Okay, fair. Sluts get raped sometimes, and when it happens they deserve all the same rights as any other rape victim.
I admit this is a hard problem, and sluts make it even harder by being so much of fucking sluts. Let us hope there is some threshold of "Burden of Evidence" such that proving that a slut was raped is moderately easy yet lying about it (i.e. being a slut then claiming you were raped to have an abortion) is reasonably hard. Even just shortening the abortion-pass to **Exactly** 1-month-old fetuses or younger would be an approximation of such a threshold to me.
And again, the morning-after pills are extremly effective and are always an option. A rape victim, or any of the people she reports the rape to, will always know to take them.
> anti-abortionists are using it all the time
What a strange thing then that I have never seen a single anti-abortion docuementary or video essay that plays this angle.
>it's just not as effective as you seem to think.
I honestly think you're deluding yourself, your way of thinking is a thing that you will be surprised at how utterly repulsive and low-status it is to hold in all but the most progressive circles.
Indeed, my belief is that anti-natalism's single biggest source of shame and low-status-ness is its association with this way of thinking, and people are very often surprised at how much I love babies and I can tell their opinion of anti-natalism improves slightly when they realize I don't believe it out of selfish hatred or indifference to the cutest members of our fucked up species.
>embryas are an extremely non-central example of a human, lacking thoughts, feeling, social connections and any personality. All the qualities that matters and due to which murder is wrong.
I have bad news for you : You just proved that killing newborns for convenience is morally okay.
Seriously, I played with newborns. Every single thing you say holds to the letter. They utterly lack any personality or even the ***concept*** of social relationships. Their smol cute head lack any thought you might call human. Some doctors in the past (and I mean like 30 years ago not the middle ages) even believed they don't have the ability to feel pain.
(and by the way, it's entirely unfounded to assume that fetuses don't feel pain. We know that babies are born with the capacity to feel pain, and it would be one hell of a coincidence if they just so happened to develop that during the latest days. Pain is an extremly primitive and basic response, I expect it's the first thing that develops in their tiny brain. We certainly know that fetuses feel 'discomfort' : that's why they constantly shift inside the womb, and why that movement increases as delively approaches.)
So tell me, can parents kill their newborns for every reason they can kill their fetus ? If yes, I think your ideology is too ridiculous to argue and summarily false. If no, then you have to show how are fetuses different from newborns.
I live in the Midwest, and there's plenty of billboards featuring a cute photo of a baby (~4 months old, if I had to guess; awake, alert, and smiling) with text like "I had a heartbeat 18 days from conception" (there's a few other early milestones getting cited). So the magical cuteness of babies isn't going completely untapped, even if it's not being used maximally.
One reason it might not be as effective as you might expect is that while babies are cute, early fetuses aren't? In particular, in your hypothetical video, I'd probably eschew too much graphic imagery around fetal development, and spend screen time on children who are at least old enough to consciously smile.
The Obamacare graph pretty clearly does show a swing against government healthcare coinciding with Obama pushing for Obamacare. It’s also a bit misleading, because it disaggregates responses into three partisan categories, and so ignores people moving between the categories. The aggregated graph shows the effect more clearly (second graph): https://news.gallup.com/poll/4708/healthcare-system.aspx
ie the least pro-Government healthcare Democrats becoming Republicans (a) is a thing that happened, and (b) would probably increase how pro-Government healthcare both groups are.
But even ignoring that… looking at a 20 point fall among independents and saying “no effect” is definitely wrong.
The Obamacare one is very thermostatic. It's popular in 2007 then falls after that as it gains salience during the long very public build up to the passing of Obamacare. Then it stagnates and becomes popular again when Republicans start talking about Repealing Obamacare.
Or maybe because the left is better at coordinating social meanness and ostracism against conservative political ideas and those who support them than vice versa.
While I do believe media influence affects degree of the swing, I think there is merit to the thermostat concept. I just think people have a skewed idea of what the thermostat is measuring.
Complex trade policy? Mot people don't have a thermostat for that. They don't know what it is, how it works, or care to. But the media can hammer it hard and swap responses. Also keep in mind if your methodology for the poll is poor, it'll mask the don't care people. So with something like that you may have the number one answer be to hang up the phone and not waist their time. Normally this would be everyone without an opinion on trade policy so it works out. However if the media is hammering the issue, you may have a skewed population self selecting into the results rather than out because orange man bad per media.
Then with abortion, while the fact is most people are someplace between all the abortion and none of the abortion for an actual opinion, you are likely measuring which team you want to be associated with. Republicans are not uniformly driven on religious issues. A lot of republicans who are republicans on different issues were fine with it is an issue because they assumed it was a car the dog was never going to catch. The dog caught the car. Positions are being recalibrated. Some of the pro lifers are switching to an even more pro life stance and want it banned everywhere. Plenty of republicans would prefer not to hitch their horse to that wagon.
Healthcare? Perhaps it measured if people thought they were getting better health care from a fiscal point of view. People who saw the ACA as a huge failure for people who wanted single payer health care probably saw it as not a big improvement. Independents probably did the thing that independents do and decided that in the run up to enactment it was a political clown show they disapprove of. Republicans probably disapproved of it for a bunch of reasons. But then it got passed and lots of people got bought off with the subsidies and artificially low rates. Then premiums went up. Then the subsidies came to an end, so the brief uptick probably came to an end. Then post 2015 they start skewing with how much you hate Trump.
Gay marriage? The approval across the board is generally trending upwards and has been for years. I suspect the slope on the republican side will trend upward more sharply moving forward because for them you are likely measuring, in many cases, the calibration on their sense of moral peril. The "gay agenda" has now morphed into the "trans-agenda" and a lot of people concerned with that see the LGB portion of that as potential allies given the current direction of policy. There will also be a faction of Rs that just don't want to lose, don't care if gay people are married, and want it covered by defensible law rather than be beaten with a club that says "gay marriage and interracial marriage are next" post Dobbs.
The health care one seems somewhat thermostatic if you base it on when the opposition starts scaremongering and not when legislation actually passes. Democrats, Independents and Republicans each become less approving of Government Healthcare starting in 2008 when Obamacare is being passed and Death Panels were all over talk radio. Then D'S & I's become more approving of it when Obamacare is threatened with repeal in 2016.
It looks to me like there was a ~5% dip after Obamacare was passed, for a couple of years.
Consider affirmative action in CA. Didn't that lash back pretty hard after the leg tried to institute it?
It seems worth noting that "backlash" in the form of responses to public opinion polls do not necessarily correspond to actual substantive change.
In the case of public trade, for example, Biden has kept Trump's tariffs.
I think some of it depends on really where the cultural norm sits for the politically disinterested. If something steps outside of their comfort window of norms, just enough, then they become engaged, usually in a backlashy kind of way. I know we've seen super high turnout post 2016, so maybe that supports this idea. Or maybe I'm just making crap up, dunno. I'm skeptical of the "liberal media wins" narrative because it seems too easy, but I live in the deep south so everytime I see a new channel on, its Fox or Newsmax declaring a woke crisis, so I probably get exposed to a whole lot more conservative doom porn than the avg ACX reader
I hope it doesn't apply to Bruen, and I expect it won't. Primarily because I think most people don't even know it happened, let alone what it was.
Could the change in abortion support reflect the number of people who mistakenly think the Supreme Court made abortion illegal?
Purely anecdotally, this number is non-negligible. I can think of at least two people in my life who (at least initially) believed that the supreme court decision had banned abortion nationwide.
I think that the overturning of Roe v Wade* really changed what it meant to be pro-life. Whereas it used to be “less supportive of abortion than Roe v Wade” it became “less supportive of abortion than the laws in my state” and those state laws changed very fast.
Something “against gay marriage” doesn’t have as much middle ground I think, so changes on it doesn’t change the meaning of “against gay marriage”
*technically it was Casey, not Roe v Wade that was overturned, but I’m choosing to be slightly inaccurate to stay with the standard way of denoting the abortion cases
It may be that people want some medium level of sexual liberation/libertinism, rather than some amount of gay marriage. The question shouldn't be whether opinion turned against gay marriage after Obergefell, but whether attitudes toward LGBT+ normalization efforts noticeably cooled. I'm not aware of a rigorous body of evidence suggesting that they did, but it seems plausible.
Right side of history ftw
I agree this isn't enough data, but some ideas that occur to me:
Idea #1: Maybe you just happened to pick a rare thermostatic issue for the conservative side? The idea that lots of people want a medium amount of abortion seems intuitively plausible to me--there's a wide gap between a maximally-sympathetic abortion and a maximally-unsympathetic abortion, so it's easy for me to imagine someone wanting to draw a line somewhere between them. I have a much harder time imagining that people want a medium amount of gay marriage; examples of gay marriage strike me as having a much narrower range of sympathetic-ness.
Idea #2: I once read about a study (sorry, I don't have a link) that asked politicians to predict public opinion. They found that liberal politicians believed the public was more liberal and conservative politicians believed the public was more conservative--so far, so boring--but that when they polled the public directly, the public was even more liberal than the liberal politicians thought they were. (The study suggested that maybe corporate lobbying skews all politicians' perceptions of public sentiment in the conservative direction.)
If true, that could perhaps be a reason that the public tends to be angrier about conservative moves than liberal moves--the liberal moves end up having more support than the politicians expected, and the conservative moves less than the politicians expected.
#1: Scott pointed out that lots of issues associated with Trump got less popular after he was elected.
> when they polled the public directly, the public was even more liberal than the liberal politicians thought they were.
It's trivial for people to construct polls to get this kind of result. Look into how these polls work under the covers and be appalled.
> The study suggested that maybe corporate lobbying skews all politicians' perceptions
Impossible for the pollsters to be less biased than "blame the evil corporations"!
I think the difference here is that the question is binary (for or against abortion), but the state fights have really been a matter of degrees (At how many weeks pregnant should abortion be illegal? Should there be exceptions for rape and incest?). Thus it's possible the issue has been reframed for those people in the middle - if you thought abortion should be illegal after the first trimester, but your state just voted on a law to ban it at 10 weeks, you might have initially believed you were against abortion, but now that you're opposed to the proposed law, you would describe yourself as being pro choice.
Looking for a "backlash" effect is fun, but not good science.
If we were to slow the reasoning down, here's what it would look like:
(1) there's a metaphor we sometimes use in conversation: "backlash". The metaphor says that people are sort of like rubber bands, and when you pull them too hard in one direction, they tend to "snap back" (or something). We apply this metaphor in certain situations, as a vivid way to tell a story, or help make sense, of something that happened.
Then there are two options:
(2A) We believe that "backlash" is not just a figure of speech, but that it actually refers to a stable explanatory object, that science can investigate. It's a process that takes place in different situations, has causal powers, etc.
(2B) We're not going to be scientific about it — we're not trying to fit this event into a larger account of how humans reason about politics. Instead, we'd like to use the metaphor "backlash" in this particular discussion, and we want to put a number on that metaphor.
There's not really a good reason to believe (2A). We don't have (for example) a good model of cognition that would predict backlash as consequence, making it a repeatable phenomenon in the individual. (I'm not saying it's impossible to construct — just that one hasn't been suggested here or elsewhere, as far as I know; it would be a graduate-level homework to build a Bayesian model, for example.) Furthermore, without a good model, we can't say in which circumstances it should or should not appear, and so we're already in danger of p-hacking.
Meanwhile, (2B) is scientism. You can put a number on the metaphor, and even a p-value, but it doesn't actually mean anything. You're not talking about scientific objects (for example), or appealing to a scientific explanation. You're using statistics to boost your metaphor above someone else's, but really all you're saying is "here is a pattern, that is statistically significant, and I am going to tell the following story about the pattern — it's 'backlash'."
One problem is that the graphs you're looking at only include "pro" and "anti". How many of those answers come from people who are really thinking "I've never really thought about it"? If there are large numbers of people answering essentially arbitrarily, what appears to be a controversial issue could actually just be a non-issue. Free trade seems like the obvious example -- it's hard to imagine average voters paying the slightest bit of attention to trade policy until there's a highly public change to it. In this case I would buy that the scale and direction of the change is due to Trump's unpopularity. Even some people who voted for him saw him as untrustworthy, so any major policy associated with him is going to have an uphill battle when it comes to public opinion. You could also look at the pro-life vs pro-choice graph: there's a big spike toward pro-choice at the start of the graph as well. Was abortion really more popular in the early 90s than it was in the 2000s, or was it just more in the public eye due to Casey reaffirming Roe in 1992?
The liberal vs conservative split is probably something of a coincidence. The conventional wisdom is that you can expand people's rights and benefits without backlash, but you can't take them away. Liberal policies tend to expand rights, conservative policies tend to take them away. People either don't notice or are actively happy about their rights being expanded, and they either don't notice or are actively angry about their rights being taken away. If a liberal policy were passed that hurt people, it would probably be unpopular.
Why not assume this is entirely due to centrists? Let's say there's a government policy which can be on a scale from 1 to 10. People describe themselves as pro-increase and pro-decrease. If I want the number to be at a 5, and it's currently at a 6, I'll tentatively describe myself as pro-decrease. As soon as the number moves to 4 then I'll flip to pro-increase.
In other words, maybe there's no backlash at all, and people in the center just went from wanting slightly less abortion to slightly more abortion when the amount of abortion decreased significantly.
That’s the thermostatic tendency he describes in the piece.
Re Obamacare, (a) it does seem to have declined in the 2008-2010 period (which makes sense, it was a longer discussion than the dobbs decision and didn't come as a shock the way Trump's election win did), and (b) does seem to have suffered backlash by other metrics (Democrats lost the house in 2010 in a historic backlash, probably in large part due to thermostatic effects from obamacare). So I'm not sure it's strong counter-evidence.
One obvious distinction is that the overturning of Roe vs Wade came from the courts, not from politicians. Politicians are less likely to do unpopular things than courts are.
Obviously Obergefell was a court decision too, but I think my model is that courts do a mix of popular and unpopular things whereas politicians very heavily towards things they think are popular, so Dobbs, Obergefell and Obamacare are all "business as usual" that fit the trend I'm positing, whereas the swing in favour of international trade is an outlier that challenges it.
Possibly international trade was previously an obscure issue most people didn't have strong opinions on, and it suddenly becoming associated with an unpopular politician made it a proxy for "do you like Trump"? In this model the trend against it is nothing to do with whether Trump won a victory or not, the causal thing was him becoming associated with the cause.
Am I the only one who fails to see any obvious change in some of those three plots?
Nope. This is to my mind very much reading the entrails of a goat and divining the minds of the gods. But it's a fabulous prompt for ideological debates of eternal interest.
I've often wondered whether certain beliefs function as predictions and other ones as markers of markers of tribal affiliation. If so, you'd expect "predictive" beliefs to be responsive to new evidence and "tribal beliefs" to not be responsive to presentation.
So if Trump champions protectionism in trade it might drive people's opinion on trade policy based on how much they like Trump. But if people predict that restricting abortion will cause people to be more careful about pregnancy, than stories of people who acted responsibly and still need an abortion would be likely to change their mind.
This is obviously somewhat post-hoc - it doesn't allow predictions of which positions will suffer from backlash, but it does suggest that political positions that are more rapidly reflected in outcomes are more likely to generate support/backlash depending on the outcome. That seem a bit like what is observed when it comes to things like gas prices - if Fox news says "Biden's anti-oil policies are pushing up the price of gas" then Biden's approval rating falls while gas is high.
See your penultimate sentence: I think you can explain your observations with selective data and a bit of luck.
For the abortion issue, if you look at pew data ( https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opinion-on-abortion/ ) what you see is a long term trend of increasing pro-choice with a change from 21-22 that’s comparable with previous years.
If you look even at other Gallup data from the same page ( https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx ) the trend looks much less reactionary. Note for example that the figure in the post was for “asked after question on legality of abortion” whereas if you look at the table with “NOT asked after question on legality” we see a much smaller shift in line with fluctuations of previous years. One thing that likely changed after the ruling is people’s awareness of the law even in unaffected states.
I notice for the Trump issues you used figures from a number of different sources, which raises some flags for me about similar selectivity as the abortion data. Even if it’s a matter of honest search convenience, it makes the results a bit sketchy.
As you point out in the penultimate sentence, a handful of datapoints is selective even if the trends are consistent across polls, and your n~5 is really only 2 examples of the phenomenon. We can tell a story about reactionary responses to Trump without drawing general conclusions that the public is reactionary.
I cannot express the breadth or depth of my indifference to the reaction against Dobbs. To be clear, I'm an atheist, but very anti-abortion; if that's confusing to you, it shouldn't be. Atheists don't believe in god, they believe in humanity (or at least I do).
Abortion kills humans. Whatever you think of the debate about when life begins or when that life is human or any of those, I don't think they matter. A human fetus or embryo will, in almost all cases, mature into a human and be born. This includes the fact that miscarriages and natural abortions are reasonably common (if you try to lawyer me on this point, I will ignore you. You will not convince me). It is not tenable to claim that, by intervening at any particular point in this process where we have decided no morality attaches, we also free ourselves of the moral burden of preventing what comes next, which is to say, the birth of a human.
We live in a society that can barely bring itself to put to death multiple murderers, rape-murderers, and the like. And yet a significant fraction are okay with annihilating the most helpless and innocent people? It's close to the definition of insanity, as far as I'm concerned.
Roe v. Wade is one of the most abominable decisions of any court. It offends my morality (as just described), and it offends my professionalism as an attorney. No one, not a single commentator, attorney, or jurist, seriously defends the reasoning of Roe v. Wade, because it has none. It was made up from whole cloth. The concept of the trimester was literally invented by Blackmun.
Just on this basis alone, Dobbs is worthwhile and correct. Egregiously wrong decisions should not stand if there is any opportunity to overturn them. The second-worst decision ever, Korematsu v. United States, remains good law and will remain good law unless and until someone tries interning Americans again. This is in the nature of our appellate system.
Even if Dobbs leads to more abortion rather than less, which I sincerely doubt, it will have been worthwhile. Now, the people and their representatives will decide. Not every right needs to be constitutional. If the people's decision is contrary to my morality, I have means of fighting back. By contrast, there is no gainsaying the Supreme Court.
Last and certainly least, the conservative legal movement was founded to oppose Roe. If the Court had blinked this time, after so much work and so many disappointments like Casey, it would have discredited the entire movement. I don't agree with every or probably even most conservative legal thinkers, but I do think the movement has done real good for real people, and is a valuable force that has corrected the lawlessness of the post-war legal profession and courts.
I don't want to get into the ideological questions of what's good/bad, right/wrong here so much (I'm actually currently pregnant and have many thoughts on this issue!) but you make interesting points here, and this makes the post's topic an even more interesting question, specifically, given your specific expertise and moral/atheistic viewpoint. Where do you think the backlash and recent drop in support for pro-life policies is coming from? What would be your best guess at to why the poll looks like that?
Well said!
Seconded. Very well said.
> Whatever you think of the debate about when life begins or when that life is human or any of those, I don't think they matter.
> It is not tenable to claim that, by intervening at any particular point in this process where we have decided no morality attaches, we also free ourselves of the moral burden of preventing what comes next, which is to say, the birth of a human.
Judging the act by its future consequences doesn't let you restrict yourself to people who are pregnant. By this analysis, using birth control is just as bad.
And indeed that's been a fairly common perspective, but it appears to have zero currency among Americans.
Oh nonsense. Most zygotes in a uterus will become humans if left alone. Contrariwise, almost all oocytes and spermatazoa will never, and can never, become humans, because they aren't fertilized and won't be.
So? The argument isn't that you're harming a spermatozoon in the present by catching it in a condom in the present. The argument is that you're harming a human in the future by preventing its birth in the slightly earlier future. Remember?
>> It is not tenable to claim that, by intervening at any particular point in this process where we have decided no morality attaches, we also free ourselves of the moral burden of preventing what comes next, which is to say, the birth of a human.
The moral burden is that of preventing *an existing human being* from reaching the birth that would otherwise take place. There's a being in existence who has an interest in being born.
Acting to prevent such a being from ever coming into existence in the first place also produces the ultimate result of no birth taking place. But it's utterly different from a moral standpoint.
That is not the moral burden:
>> Whatever you think of the debate about when life begins or when that life is human or any of those, I don't think they matter.
We're specifically ignoring whether a fertilized egg is a human or not, because that doesn't matter. What matters is that we're preventing a human from being born in the future.
This argument stipulates that a fertilized egg is not an existing human being, and says that preventing the human from coming into existence is just as bad as taking it back out. And that applies to birth control as much as it applies to abortion.
Taking your argument to extremes, one could point out that a few tons of soil and rock contain the constituent atoms of dozens of potential humans. So if a technology ever became available (as it probably will one day) to extract and reconfigure these elements into viable humans, would we be morally obliged to use it to maximum capacity, like that mythical self-replicating all-powerful robot given a relentless drive to turn everything in the universe into paper clips?
Most reasonable people would agree that the moral center of gravity lies somewhere in between, before an embryo can properly said to be human. Also, let's not forget that nature herself performs many abortions on early-stage and even advanced-stage embryos!
>would we be morally obliged to use it to maximum capacity
No you wouldn't, you're just obligated to not use it to make a mini-human then kill it in cold blood.
Nobody forces you to have child-making sex (and if someone does, then that's the only thing that makes it okay to abort the result, for all the period between 0 month and 9 month). But if you did that out of your own free will, then you carry the result to the end.
It's as if you invited a homeless guy into your home for 9 month and then forced him out after 4 or 5. I don't know about others, but my own gut feelings say this a pretty obvious piece of shit move, why invite him if you're not going to make good on your promise ?
(off course, the actual object-level involves the much more horrendous act of **CREATING** a life out of thin air just to destroy it, but the analogy gets across the particular assholeness of extending an invitation and then revoking it unilaterally, Abortion also involves other assholeness the analogy doesn't get across.)
Taking your own argument to extremes, every single human on earth will die. Why should I be punished if I kill someone ? they were going to die anyway, Nature was going to kill them, possibly in more violent ways, I *merely* accelerated the process and made it a bit more merciful even.
It's all about determinism, the few tons of soil and rock isn't going to become human on its own anytime soon. But an embryo (whether it resulted from sex or a bunch of rocks) will pretty damn reliably transform into a human (almost 100% in a civilization which knows how to transform rock into embryos), to the point that its reasonable to consider it already human.
> let's not forget that nature herself performs many abortions on early-stage and even advanced-stage embryos
Nature also says the Strong do whatever the fuck they want and the Weak should suck it up. If we were to listen to Nature, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Morality is about replacing the Natural with the Just.
I consider myself a reasonable person and I think the only bright line you can draw is at conception. Anything else I consider sophistry.
That doesn't mean I oppose abortion under all circumstances, any more than I oppose the killing of innocents in warfare or some other exigent circumstances. Sometimes killing people, even innocent people, is what has to be done. But pretending that's not what we're doing is to my mind a cowardly attempt to evade the gravity of our action by subscribing to a soothing delusion. It bears an unpleasant similarity to Lebensunwertes Leben.
I consider myself a reasonable person and I think the only bright line you can draw is at viability. Having discarded embryos and carried a fetus to term and lived the brutality of childbirth, I don’t speak from a place of hypotheticals. Potato potahto?
"A human fetus or embryo will, in almost all cases, mature into a human and be born" is contradicted by this page of search results: https://www.google.com/search?q=what+proportion+of+conceptions+naturally+abort
The error margin here make this pretty useless (10 to 25% ? just a casual 15% worth of "it depends" ?)
There is also the caveat of "Before the woman even knows it". Medical Abortion only happens if the woman knows about the pregnancy (and several other things obviously), so from all pregnancies **Where you can consider an abortion**, the vast majority will reach completion safely if not (medically) aborted.
> By contrast, there is no gainsaying the Supreme Court.
The constitution is changeable.
Fair.
Yes. Thank you for saying this. Captures my own feelings exactly.
This is one obvious theory:
A. None of the policy victories shifted anyone's opinion.
B. The shift in reported opinion reflects people's stated values moving into line with (or toward) their actual values.
It's pretty easy to explain why a policy victory would cause people's stated values to move from a misrepresentation in the direction of honesty - if you stand by whatever you were saying before, the policy you purport to like might gather momentum and score even more victories. If you didn't like the first one, that would be bad.
It's also easy to explain why people might systematically misrepresent their own values; in fact, that's been a recent focus of activity because the phenomenon appears to be so common.
However, this theory gives you nothing in terms of your ability to predict which victories will cause backlashes.
I don't intend to claim that this theory is correct as to the two opinion shifts you discuss, but it doesn't have trouble explaining (1) why they happened and (2) why other policy shifts don't cause similar opinion shifts.
I think your analysis runs pretty far ahead of your data. For example, you say there's a clear backlash against Dobbs when you see a 6% shift in opinion (2nd graph), but you say nothing happened after Obergefell despite what looks like a 2-5% dip in support for gay marriage in 2015 (4th graph), depending on party. (Part of why it's hard to compare these graphs is that the y axis for the 2nd graph is magnified by ~2 compared to the 4th.) I'd be reluctant to draw sweeping conclusions from observing a 6% versus a 2-5% change in a noisy small sample. You might also be bemused by the fact that the Dobbs data stops while the issue is still very recent (2022), while the Obergefell data go on for another 7 years. Perhaps the Dobbs change is as ephemeral as the Obergefell data -- or maybe it represents a lasting shift. We'll have to wait to see.
I also think the link between the ACA and "government responsibility for healthcare" is pretty dubious. The ACA very carefully and loudly did *not* include a government-run option, because polls at the time suggested it would sink it politically (as well be completely unaffordable). The omission was widely decried at the time by people who like government-run healthcare, so it would be difficult for anyone paying any attention at the time to think the passage of the ACA represented the triumph of government-run healthcare. It was, if anything, on the contrary, good evidence that Americans wanted no such thing, even if they agreed healthcare was unreasonably expensive -- which means the thermostatic argument is weak.
Preference falsification in the direction of a perceived trend?
I think this is really very simple.
The conservative victories you cite - e.g. an unqualified likely criminal being elected President, abortion ban - made the world worse almost without qualifications. There's no upside except a feeling of moral superiority for a small group of hardliners.
The liberal victories you cite - e.g. gay marriage legalization, improved access to healthcare - made the world better, almost without qualification. Yes, Obamacare kind of sucks but it is clearly better than what came before. Nobody is hurt by gay marriage and it improves some people's lives immensely.
So, look for this - does the policy come with almost all downside and little to no no upside? People probably won't like it. Is it almost all upside with little to no downside? People will like it.
I really think it's that simple.
From an outsider's perspective, the main problem with Obamacare is the insanely vast and punitive compensation awards in negligence cases. I believe in the US, legal insurance is the main expense which doctors, and thus their patients, face.
Surely it should be possible to agree a fixed set of penalities for various classes of medical mishaps, and put the wretched healthcare lawyers out of business! I mean if King Ethelbert could come up with an exhaustive list in the 600s AD, it shouldn't be that hard today! :-)
https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/560-975dooms.asp#The%20Laws%20of%20%C3%86thelberht
>I really think it's that simple.
Damn, who would have thunk ? all the things you agree with make the world a better place, all the things you disagree with make the world a worse place.
It's astounding how much of a coincidence that is. It couldn't have been true but for a single set of beliefs, and that set happened to be yours from among all else.
And Not Only That, but also polled people have a reliable and immediate sensor with which to detect that the world has gone better or worse ? **and also** to trace that state delta into a single event or decision ? What an absolutely marvelous world.
Nope, I explained why it's not just my opinion. But thanks for the sarcasm and rudeness, I really appreciated it.
Is your explanation a true explanation or a thinly veiled way of saying my so-called sarcasm ?
>an unqualified likely criminal being elected President,
Do you really think the ~70 million voter who favored Trump didn't have a single good reason to ? All 70 million of them were misguided or too dumb to see the obvious and naked truth that voting for Trump make the entire world a worse place without qualifcations ? Is this an actual unironic opinion you hold and are willing to bet money on ?
>abortion ban - made the world worse almost without qualifications. There's no upside except a feeling of moral superiority for a small group of hardliners.
Right, so if - say - 50 million people in the USA care about abortion (to underestimate), the oft-cited 40% figure that is pro life supporters would be 20 million. Twenty million person are just a small group of hardliners who want to make it worse for everybody else, to you.
---
In short, I don't really think you're sincere. Oh, you might very well *believe* the policies you like make the world a better place, but you **don't** believe that this is unambiguous and without caveats, and you **don't** believe that people reliably and universally can see that. If you have the slightest awareness about how many people believe otherwise, you can't be sincere.
> likely criminal being elected President,
Bill Clinton was not a conservative victory
#believeallwomen #unlesstheyaccusedemocrats
N.B., Dobbs did not ban abortion.
Not speaking to trade here, but to Roe - I always felt that the overturning of Roe was the worst thing that could happen to the conservative movement. It was a brilliantly uniting quest against something that it's easy to form a strongly negative view on and see yourself as fighting for the voiceless, lending the movement a sense of moral righteousness and even a divine sense of duty. And there's the underdog facet of it too. The moral warriors fighting a huge, corrupt, system of death. I get that and though I definitely lean pro-choice, I'm sympathetic to the other side's points.
But once it's achieved, where is the unity? Where is the quest? It's done, the heroic party is disbanded, and there's no easy replacement for their motivation, though the debate about trans kids is moving into that same spotlight. It's not as potent, though. I feel like overturning Roe was a devastating mistake - the proverbial dog that caught the car and then had no idea what to do with it, or with itself. The chase was the point. I'm not surprised that as soon as it was achieved, opinions changed quickly. The whole thing was an ideological macguffin - only there to drive the story of a quest for glory and righteousness. But in epic quest stories, you usually end up finding out that the macguffin wasn't what you were *really* seeking all along. And I think that was very much the case here with Roe.
See my comment below. It's a problem, but it's a good problem to have, as far as I'm concerned.
How do you respond to the fact that since Dobbs, abortion has won at the ballot box at least five and debatably eight times?
Already did in my much longer comment below.
You just said that there are "ways to fight it" and didn't elaborate. I am interested in your elaboration, if you would like to do so.
I would say, in addition to that, none of abortion’s victories at the ballot box go beyond Roe. Most of them don’t necessarily even go up to the level of Roe. Take Kansas. Abortion won’t be illegal there, but it likely won’t end up with Roe-level permissiveness either. Not even the bluest of states are seriously considering going beyond Roe, for now anyway. This is partly because of how radical Roe was.
But still, even with those victories, the status quo is much, much better than before Roe.
Thank you for the elaboration.
Could it be that abortion affects people more directly than some of those other issues? It doesn't really impact straight people of hay marriage is legal or illegal, but not being able to get an abortion when you want or need one does affect most of the population. Women especially, obviously, but also men to some degree. In large parts of the country, abortion is seen as a very evil thing, so there is an inclination to opose it, but when one is faced with the possibility that it might actually be banned, maybe then people switch to thinking in terms of how that affects them and change their minds?
My bet is that it has to do with the media being firmly controlled by the left, and able to whip people into a frenzy, scare them, and do things like find the scary stories and publicize them. We know that there's gotta be no shortage of edge case one off bad effects from any policy - it's like the Chinese robber fallacy. The question is whether these things are brought to the public, and if people grow to think they are central examples, and meaningful examples.
Abortion might be unique among these examples. I notice that in the health care and homosexuality polls, there isn't an option for "opposed to" the legislation, the way that there is for abortion. Anti-homosexuality certainly exists, but it isn't organized as a movement the same way that pro-life and pro-choice both are.
I'd guess that this affects polling. Pro-life scored a major victory, pro-choice suffered a major loss, how does that affect your opinion? As opposed to: Homosexuality scored a major victory, how does that affect your opinion?
I suspect this has to do with the 'grounding problem', a quirk of polling-methodology, rather than meaningful change in opinion.
When pollsters ask vague questions like 'are you pro-choice' or 'is international trade good', the participant grounds that question in terms of how it relates to the specific policy debate around that topic in the present. If the nature of the policy debate changes, then the answers change, even if the base opinions stay the same.
Let's relate this to the 5 examples you used.
1. Abortion - When democrats were winning, being pro-choice debate was more about 'how much abortion is too much' rather than 'should be ban abortions all together'. Afterall, Roe-v-wade had supreme court precedent. As an abortion-moderate, your "abortions are okay sometimes" opinion now lands you in the pro-choice category, while it would have put you in the pro-life category before.
2. Global Trade - The US bringing back manufacturing & out-right banning Chinese goods wasn't in anyone's wildest dream pre-2016. With the goalposts shifted, restrictions on global trade came to imply isolationism rather than incentivizing local industry. Opinions stayed the same, but now global trade means collaborative goo-faith middle-grounds instead of shipping industries out to China.
3. The meaning of Gay marriage never changed. So you see a continued steady increase in the base rate without much drastic change in direction or velocity.
4. Obamacare was seen as a compromise bill for facilitating govt. subsidized healthcare. Democrats didn't get what they wanted and Republicans got a handicapped and inefficient program. Republicans are now increasingly answering that "we don't want obamacare" and democrats are increasingly answering "we atleast want to keep obamacare, but we would have liked something better". Obamacare gave the 'govt. subsidized healthcare' question grounding, but the outcome itself was not particularly appealing to either democrats and republicans. So while consensus opinion on govt. subsidized healthcare continues to evade us, giving it the concrete form of obamacare, also allowed people to have strong views on it. (this the polarization)
> n = ~5
Just say n=4. I reread this 3 times looking for the 5th example.
Across those 4 examples, I think my hypothesis holds. Opinions don't change, but a change in grounding changes how polls are answered.
Is there a counterexample to your thesis in your second plot? What caused the big jump in support for the "pro-life" position between 1996 and 1998?
This was the Clinton era of controversy over things like partial birth abortions, and while I don't remember every single detail of how the debate played out I think it was a general era of victory for the pro-abortion side.
Overall I think it's an interesting thesis but needs more than two examples each way before it starts to look convincing.
I have a very salient memory from '98 of finding myself in a very left-leaning social environment in Chicago, and a gay socialist atheist with whom I was acquainted saying, "I'm of course pro-choice, but partial-birth abortion, pretty sure that's murder," and the rest of the group generally nodding along. I couldn't see that sort of thing happening today.
I feel like in the trump case, trump had the ability to change what it meant for someone to be "in favour of international trade". Before, if you asked someone their opinion on such things, there answer would be understood in terms of the present world order, which was strongly in favour of intl. trade. So to say they were against it would imply they were in favour of something more median. Trump was far off to the other side, so people felt the need to qualify that they weren't quite that extreme. In the abortion case, I imagine a slightly different effect: people felt like they ought to be against abortion, but still wanted to be able to get an abortion if they needed it. They wanted moral points from opposing it, but didn't actually want the status quo to change. This was fine, because the issue was decided by the supreme court, and thus totally out of anybodies hands - until it wasn't. The democrat cases listed are of a different nature. Gay marriage is an extremely simple policy proposition, that nobody can really be confused about. Either the gays can marry, or they can't. Health is different in that the democrats were forced to take an extremely moderate position. They might have wanted a full on nhs style government run hospital system, but in order to work with republicans they needed something barely different from the status quo. Anyone against public health care before won't be *more* against it in reaction, nor will anyone in favour decide this is too extreme for them. The general character, in other words, is that people react like this too *extreme* changes that go farther than they like, and not to moderate changes that are more in line with what they expected.
It's weird. This all makes intuitive sense to me, but I'm not sure I can name it. Some of it is certainly the media effect you mention, but I think there's more to it than that.
I am not surprised there are different reactions, as the two primary examples (1) pro-life vs. pro-choice and (2) gay marriage are different in kind. Of course, they're similar in that you can't be a little bit pregnant, and you can't be a little bit married. However, there's a healthy debate about when abortion should be legal. There's no such disagreement on a continuous scale for gay marriage (unless we want to roll the poly debate into this). It's two adults, yes or no.
Speaking of adults, adults can be studied, understood, and empathized with. Americans could see gay people before and after the decision and understand if their assumptions about their sincerity and dignity bore out. On abortion, the impact of significantly reduced access to abortion, especially in cases where it threatens the mother's life, is now a fact. Even if you hated the idea of abortion, this is real, significant, legible human harm to reckon with in the wake of the Supreme Court decision. On the other side of the same issue, human life at the scale of a few cells is much more abstract, though its fragility and helplessness raise the emotional stakes of a decision.
Maybe the backlash represents a lot of people discovering, though experience, the effects of policies after they've been implemented, and changing their opinions based on that information. Like, if you don't pay a lot of attention to the media or don't trust it, you might not be updating until things actually change. Or maybe it just takes people like that long periods to update their priors.
I think what you're looking at is an effect of narrowing the issue at hand.
In an open context, "pro-choice" can mean a lot of things. In the context immediately following the recent SCOTUS ruling, the context was more confined.
I'd guess if the pre-ruling poll question was worded so as to match the ruling itself closely, you'd fjnd a significantly smaller change in association with the ruling.
I mean, the data set is so small it could literally be coincidence? (I don’t think it is, but theoretically it could be.)
Too much overthinking here. True, (program x) cant be empirically quantified by one formula, but that does not mean phenom is "totally random." Examples complex but: Obergfell primarily recognized by smart gays and lesbians in 2015, but not general population; same logic applies to ObamaCare. Few voters fully understood it (that's hard btw) in 2010. Remember Holmes: "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience."
I think the problem with the Obamacare example is that it just wasn't a large change. The poll question is "Government should be responsible for health care". There are not very many people who would say that government was not responsible for their health care before Obamacare and government is responsible for it afterwards. It was just a minor tweak to the system, compared to, say, a single-payer system or a government-run medical system.
In the context of abortion, a change along the policy spectrum of similar magnitude to the Obamacare change would have been a change of 2-3 weeks in the latest date for getting an abortion under most circumstances. I doubt such a tweak would have produced a backlash.
I think it's a combination of speed and salience.
For gay marriage, and most other things on both sides of the spectrum, the change is gradual, widespread, and follows a predictable pattern. But when something sudden happens (eg, San Francisco doing same sex marriages at the decision of the city clerk) then there is a backlash (proposition 8, in this case). This is because a bunch of people revisit thier latent opinions in the face of a sudden and newsworthy event, and that intensifies soft biases against the thing, without affecting soft biases in favor.
I don't think your two examples work: On the one hand, there were many widely publicized problems with Obamacare, from it being far more expensive than promised to Obama's lie that you could keep your insurance if you liked your insurance to the fact the computer kept breaking down for weeks after its introduction so that people spent hours trying unsuccessfully to register.
As for the young rape victim (certainly a tragedy) she had to take a 2 hour car ride from Ohio to Indiana to get the treatment she wanted. As you know, people with terminal illnesses often have to travel across the nation or even internationally if they can afford it to get the latest available therapies, so while certainly inconvenient and unfair and unfortunate, the girl was not forced into a back alley or forced to carry to term, but only required to drive 2 hours. Granted, the MSM played it up dramatically, but I'm sure there are many people in prison who wish their actions would have been legal had they only been able to drive two hours.
So, to summarize, I don't think everyone saw Obamacare as no big deal and the young rape victim's plight as horrific. So the explanatory force you see is, IMHO, less than you believe.
I think there's a genie out the bottle effect. Conservativism thrives best when that which it conserves is existing. If you have to restrict something in order to create something to conserve again, it comes off as more authoritarian than conservative.
The big problem with such reasoning is there haven't been that many real conservative victories, and a couple of the biggies were signed into law by Jimmy Carter (deregulating prices for trucking and passenger air).
When I was young, concealed carry and homeschooling were outside the Overton Window. I don't see a huge reaction against either. Most of the concern I hear about from the center is "assault weapons."
One could say that BLM is a reaction against conservative policing policies going back to the Nixon days, but boy, was that reaction a long time coming.
How about private ownership of gold bullion? Did that produce a backlash? (I'm too young to remember.)
What the heck happened in 1996 - 1998?
The really interesting part of this is the intersection between "the right side of history" and "liberals control more of the media", or perhaps in the space between these concepts.
Things seem to be trending in a direction, and also everything that anyone thinks (including about trends) is filtered through a variety of media-influenced biases. The older post about "do republicans care about babies or do they want to control women?" is an example -- we don't live in a reality of actual stuff that we sometimes have opinions about. Rather our only view on the stuff by which we're surrounded is an uncountable number of lenses (including suppositions about out-group thoughts and motivations). Nobody cares only about borders, abortions, trade, or any of these things -- we care about thoughts about what we're supposed to care about to belong to a team, what 'good' people care about or think, what will most spite the hypothesized-but-probably-imaginary bad people (anything from 'ha f**k you patriarchs!" to "haha look at these wh***s cry now that they can't abort babies!"), and too many more to count.
The people who 'control' the media (by being the media, not by plotting in smoke-filled rooms) are chock full of the same lenses. The lenses (in them, and subsequently in the rest of us -- not that we don't have other ways of getting the lenses, whether it's positive or negative experiences at bible camp or that time the girlfriend had a pregnancy scare or how sick we are of hearing a drunken racist uncle or shrill wine-aunt talk about this issue) create the illusion of trend, and create the trend, and create the space in which we look for trends, and create the ideology of caring about which side of the trend we're on, and whether we're scared or depressed or angry about our position vis-a-vis the trend, etc.
Liberals control the media? Really? Rupert Murdock's newspapers. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are pretty Libertarian. The editorial boards of the NY Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal are not known for their liberal polemics—and even their liberal columnists aren't very. Talk radio is completely right-wing. MSNBC is the only news station that leans liberal (and not so much anymore). Anyway, from my perspective most of the MSM seems pretty right-wing. Of course, I'm a damn commie. ;-)
Relative to the median voter, the journalistic class and therefore all of the prestige media is left wing. That's NYT, WaPo, CNN, NPR...
Fox and talk radio are right of the median voter obviously.
>Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are pretty Libertarian.
Elon Musk bought twitter less than half a year ago, and hasn't made any substantial changes that would make anyone distinguish twitter under him from twitter under anyone else.
Jeff Bezos owning WP doesn't prevent it from going all "DemOCracY dIeS In DarKNesS" and the rest of the familiar bullshit, I keep begging people to distinguish between actual Leftism and whatever the fuck that gets called by its name in America. The American doppelganger is entirely harmless to billionaires, attractive even, it's just an invitation that certain identities scream their perceived oppressions incessantly and forever.
> the NY Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal are not known for their liberal polemics
Yet another category error for failing to distinguish 2 different meanings of Left and Right.
Simple question : when was the last time any one of those published an Op-Ed for someone anti-abortion ? Repeat the exercise for pro-abortion ?
> Talk radio is completely right-wing.
And when was the last time that riled people up or drove anything ?
>The editorial boards of the NY Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal are not known for their liberal polemics—and even their liberal columnists aren't very.
I mean this with all possible respect: what are you smoking and where can I get some.
Nowhere in the 1619 Project did they demand the abolition of private property or the liquidation of the haute bourgeoisie. Therefore the NYT is right-wing.
The conservatives appear poised to get a victory in the form of an affirmative action repeal. Based on the comments on this NYT article, it seems like liberals are largely neutral or supportive: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/15/us/affirmative-action-admissions-scotus.html#commentsContainer Will be an interesting test case to see how successful any backlash is.
If affirmative action gets repealed, the next generation of elites will disproportionately be Asians who know or suspect they are the beneficiaries of affirmative action repeal. I'm tentatively optimistic about that future.
Yeah if the states that have banned affirmative action already are any guide, colleges will just keep doing it anyway and face few consequences.
Would be good to compare with what is happening in other countries in the world. It is not a given that the media leans left,liberal. Here in Australia for example all the commercial media leans conservative (The Guardian online newspaper is the only exception). The public though tends to trust the ABC, which the conservatives claim leans Left but I think most of the public trusts.
I profoundly disagree that there was no backlash to Obamacare -- I might even voice an opinion like 'the backlash to Obamacare is the central political event in the United States in the 21st century': https://news.gallup.com/poll/4708/healthcare-system.aspx
Consider the second chart on that graph. 69% of Americans thought there should be universal healthcare in 2007. This crashed to a 50/50 tie when Obamacare was passed, and then further crashed to 42% when the rollout was considered a failure, in 2014. It's since recovered to 56% over the last several years, but this is still lower than any number *ever* recorded before 2009. Obamacare damaged the universal healthcare movement in this country in a way that it has still not really recovered from.
(But I think your broader point stands: it is true that there was no backlash to Obergefell, legalizing gay marriage, and a large backlash to Dobbs, which permitted states to legalize abortion. I wonder if there's some aspect of 'sometimes political victories reveal that beliefs were really belief in belief' here? For instance, while 50% of the population might have thought they were pro-life, the possibility of abortion actually getting restricted revealed that some were not; you could observe this by seeing that something like ~80% of Down's syndrome babies are aborted. 70% might have thought they were in favor of universal healthcare, but they had not considered the reality of greater government intervention in the healthcare sector. But something like rising support for gay marriage was real, not a 'belief in belief'. Of course these are often hard to tease out).
The simpler explanation is that a large chunk (plurality?) of the population favors a policy that is more restrictive than Roe but more permissive than Texas. Say, a fifteen week ban or something. Dobbs made Roe no longer salient but Texas very much so, hence you could go from `pro life' (relative to status quo) to `pro choice' with no change in the object level position.
Not understanding why you chose these particular issues and not others. For example, at least some liberals seemed to win a big victory with the post-George Floyd killing upsurge in support for defunding the police. Then, when that policy was at least partially implemented in several major metropolitan areas, support for defunding, and for "Black Lives Matter" seemed to collapse pretty precipitously. In other words, a large backlash effect. Isn't this pretty germane to your point?
The only major piece of legislation passed during the Trump administration was a big tax cut, and I don't perceive there was much of a backlash effect on that. (But I haven't seen statistics) Again, isn't that germane?
If we're gonna test how backlashes break down along politically partisan lines, shouldn't we look at a better survey of issues? Otherwise, it just seems to be speculation. It is true that politics are the most partisan I can remember them, and that there's backlash fairly often, but I can't see any pattern to it, other than people reacting to the implementation of the specific policy.
Oh, the Dobbs decision means, women can't get early abortions or even abortions in cases of rape and incest can't get them in many states, and even can't get healthcare that might be deemed an abortion by extremist local authorities? Oops. Oh, defunding the police doesn't actually either get rid of discrimination by police or make people safer? Oops. Makes some sense to me, anyway.
I think both these things have in common, they are strongly ideological measures applied to very practical problems, not usually a formula for success in even a limited democracy such as the USA.
It may be apropos of nothing but I found the Ohioan rape victim story to be perhaps the darkest joke told around the whole overturning of Roe. The speed with which that story was dropped the instant particulars began to leak out into the wider world was something to behold, and the uniformity of its embargo was fun to observe as well. I personally bet it would never be brought up again, seeing you mention it here I can only attribute to your distance from the Overton window.
Isn't the obvious theory that what predicts backlash is the extent to which it was a surprise to voters on the losing side? Backlash here means a sudden shift as a result of the victory. When I'm expecting a political deciscion to go against me either I'm already activated by this prospect so I won't contribute to a post-victory shift or I'm unlikely to be activated by the victory actually happening.
Yes, high-information voters knew that Roe was likely to be overturned but tons of normal everyday ppl had just accepted legal abortion as a fact of life and tuned out yet more people squawking about the republican threat to pro-choice. When the court overturned the case that population suddenly realized there was a real threat to legal abortion and started/shifted their votes.
Similarly re: Trump. A lot of liberals basically assumed he couldn't possibly win. Even to the point of cheering him on. So did quite a few conservatives. When he one it created an "ohh shit" moment where ppl suddenly thought: I gotta actually get out and vote to make sure Trump doesn't get his way.
Hecklers veto, plus right side of history.
Loosening morals or cultural laws (aside from rules against murder, theft etc) feels good, and the people who protest stop caring as much once they see nothing bad happened. Eve and the snake.
Tightening laws on the other hand affects people clearly and directly
I've thought about this a lot, and I think there are two main factors.
First, it takes a while for a political change to actually take effect legally or take hold in society, and the backlash only happens then. So no real backlash to the appointments of Kavanaugh and Barrett, even though they were widely expected to result in the overturning or weakening of Roe. Only when it actually happened was there a backlash, since there are real effects of it that people can see (and some of them people inevitably won't like, as with any change), and it's no longer just an abstract idea.
Second, backlash only happens when the opposite party makes a big deal of it, which they only do if it's a winning strategy. The republicans ran firmly against gay marriage in 2012, and lost. After that they moved away from the issue and stopped talking about it, for obvious electoral reasons, and so there was little basis for a coordinated backlash. If I remember right several conservative commentators switched their positions on the issue during Obama's second term.
On the other hand, the democrats won in 2020 on a clearly pro-choice platform, and that galvanised their opposition to Dobbs, meaning they and their media kept talking about it, producing a backlash. I suspect that if Romney had won and gay marriage had still been legalised there'd have been a strong conservative backlash.
Here are two ways to test this theory, for anyone who has the relevant statistics. See if there was a backlash to PC/wokeness and cancel culture during Trump's term when those things (begun during Obama's second) largely took hold in society. (And after Trump ran successfully against them). And see if there was little or no backlash to American global military dominance during Bush's second term, after the democrats ran against it and lost.
I don't it's totally fair to say "the abortion ruling was a straightforward policy change with no extra personality component."
Certainly it wasn't as provocative as Trump (few things are), but the Dobbs decision was mired in scandal. There was violation of Stare Decisis (I don't endorse this description, but it was part of public perception) and the leak. More importantly, there were years of questioning the legitimacy of the court leading up to this, related to the manner in which the conservative supermajority was installed. That story, an integral part of Dobbs, is intimately tied to Trump himself, seeing as he appointed the conservative majority and all three of his appointees were "Trump-scale" spectacles.
Look at Supreme Court job approval, it went from +20 to -20 in 2 years, and half that change came before Dobbs. I don't think it's trivial to rule out the hypothesis that Abortion became more popular in part because the pro-life movement is now associated with an unpopular court.
"Look at Supreme Court job approval, it went from +20 to -20 in 2 years, and half that change came before Dobbs."
But how much of that was the commentary which went from "The Supreme Court is making decisions I like, that's how it is supposed to work, you guys just have to accept that this is it and this is law, sorry I don't make the rules" to "The Supreme Court is making decisions I don't like, it is illegitimate, do away with it!"
I don't think I understand the question.
If you mean "how much of that shift in job approval was because of Dobbs," then I think it's fair to say "at most half."
If you mean "how much did media coverage affect SCOTUS's approval" then I would say lots and lots, but this was well underway before Dobbs happened so it's possible that pre-existing media landscape was why people widely viewed Dobbs as illegitimate while Obergefell was accepted quickly.
I'll also say that the commentary you describe was not a pure media creation. The decision not to vote on Garland was a huge shift in politicization of the court, and a decrease in perceived legitimacy after that was not at all surprising (though not inevitable either, until subsequent events lined up perfectly to maximize the effect).
In the EU, there is freedom of movement in that anyone from any of the EU member-states can move for work to another member state.
When Eastern countries like Poland joined in 2004, there was, however, a transitional regime where immigration from the newer members to the older ones could be limited for a time: member states were allowed to limit immigration inflows if they chose.
The UK was one of the few member-states that kept its borders open to all EU citizens. Backlash against immigration exploded and now the UK is not a member of the EU.
Also wanted to mention immigration as a 'liberal' example. In Germany, when many refugees entered, right-wing parties rose in importance, both at the beginning of the 90ies, and in 2015 and following.
I don't know exactly how this relates to polls of 'should we have more immigration / less immigration' or 'more liberal vs. more restrictive refugee policies'. The question also would be tricky, because obviously 'more / less' would be compared by respondents to a non-issue & low number in some years, and to an issue perceived as manageable 'crisis' and a high number of refugees in other years. I think part of that dynamic might be hidden in the pro-life / pro-choice question as well.
I also like the question at the end on how to predict backlash, but that's for a different place or comment.
I think you get the backlash when the original position was membership signalling and/or trolling the other side, and seemed unrealistic.
So when there was no realistic prospect of an abortion ban, there was no downside to supporting it. Once once comes in, suddenly there are practical ramifications that affect you - even if male, it's going to affect your sex life - and the women in your life.
Same goes for Trump. It must have been great fun supporting him to "own the libs" etc. Less so to see him in actual power.
And somewhere in there is a learned instinct to shift the Overton Window by supporting extreme positions you don't really want to see actualised.
Could be external influence. I.e. international community going "Really, America, you serious??!"
Wouldn't that go in the other direction? America is a very unusually left-wing country, relative to the rest of the world. Practically the only countries that are further left are those in Europe, the Anglosphere, and a small handful of allied countries.
Valid point. Replace "international community" with "Europe & the Anglosphere" in the original comment.
I really don't know where this idea that "the rest of the developed world" or "the international community" is far to the left of America comes from. It's almost never backed up by any evidence; do you have for example polling that shows this? And why would anyone expect dozens of different western countries, all with different cultures and histories, to all have basically the exact same "left of America" political climate? It's such an extraordinarily unlikely claim, and to see it repeated over and over without evidence just stuns me really.
On abortion and the Anglosphere particularly, this is odd. Ireland banned it except for maternal life until a few years ago. Most Australian states had significant legal restrictions until a little over a decade ago, even if their enforcement was patchy. And last I checked the UK required some valid social reason to perform it, not being legal-on-demand as under Roe. Not to mention, as is often pointed out, that most of Europe has a cutoff much earlier and well to the right of Roe.
Finally, I find it offensive to suggest the Anglosphere says ""Really, America, you serious??!" on abortion. Not just that we have less pro-life people than America (which may or may not be true, haven't looked at polls, but from personal experience I doubt it) but that we actually find it INCOMPREHENSIBLE that anyone could care about protecting unborn life, which you seem to be implying. That's a downright sociopathic attitude, and ascribing it to "Europe & the Anglosphere" is not only wrong but insulting.
"I really don't know where this idea that "the rest of the developed world" or "the international community" is far to the left of America comes from. "
-Electing actual, open communists to government?
-Welfare states seen as the obvious function of government?
-Acceptance that some ideas are illegal, and the government should decide what is and isn't allowed to be thought?
-Literally every "right" that the people possess have a "...unless the government decides it's bad" attached to it (also applies to Canada).
-Guns?
Huh. This is a tangential point, but I always tend to assume this idea comes from the American left, as a sort of unifying myth, that "our utopian project already exists, in the International Community [whatever the hell that means], we're not radical at all!" But you're obviously a conservative and you remind me that I see the same idea from the American right fairly often. I'm curious: regardless of whether it's true, why do you think trumpeting this claim is helpful to the right? It seems to me that it just plays into the left's narrative, that US conservative values are "out of step" and "swimming against the tide of history" and all the other crap they say. Not to mention you makes things more difficult for conservatives in other countries, who have to deal with accusations they're somehow unpatriotic by "importing" such "foreign", "American" values as freedom of speech and individualism.
Now as to the claim itself. I'm Australian and assuming we're part of the International Community (again, whatever the hell that means), we are well to the right of America on immigration (bipartisan support for tightly controlled borders). We also put same-sex marriage to a referendum instead of having it mandated by courts. This may be a minor point, but I was shocked when I first realised that two things that are not taxed here, inheritances and prize money, ARE taxed in America, which just seems oppressive and unnatural to me (though I'm sure sure I can defend that instinct rationally). And of course we have a King, even if he doesn't live here, which is historically THE foundational difference between left and right. Although we have lower criminal sentences and weaker police powers than America, the main reason for this is that we have much lower crimes rates, so I'm not sure if that's right or left on the whole. On the flip side we have universal healthcare and strict gun control. So it's not remotely clear whether we are to the overall right or left of America, and I suspect the same is true for many other countries.
"Electing actual, open communists to government?"
Which countries do this? Certainly not Australia, and I'm pretty sure not Canada or the UK either. There are definitely some, but what on earth does that say about the ones that don't? Remember this is a claim about the entire "international community" outside of America, not some parts of it.
"Welfare states seen as the obvious function of government?"
How do you define this? The US has a large welfare state. What's the dividing line between that and "obvious function of government"?
"Acceptance that some ideas are illegal, and the government should decide what is and isn't allowed to be thought?"
Allowed to be THOUGHT? Which countries have laws like this? If you mean allowed to be publically expressed, then you're right that's a shameful feature of almost every non-US country. But that's mostly because of certain Supreme Court decisions interpreting the First Amendment expansively, not the political climate itself. Do you really think California and Massachusetts wouldn't adopt laws like that if they weren't unconstitutional?
"Literally every "right" that the people possess have a "...unless the government decides it's bad" attached to it (also applies to Canada)."
True, and in fact in Australia we have no bill of rights at all. But this goes both ways. As I understand Canada's "notwithstanding" clause, they could elect a socially conservative government tomorrow that could ban abortion, overturn same-sex marriage, and other such things no matter what the courts have ruled on them simply by declaring that "notwithstanding those decisions, we're putting this into effect for five years anyway". Whereas in the US it took DECADES of successive Republican governments, each one firmly pro-life, to slowly reshape the Supreme Court and eventually allow elected state governments to freely decide the issue. And in Australia a bill of rights was proposed in 2009 by the left and blocked by conservative opposition, rightly not wanting an American system where controversial social issues are decided by courts (usually in a left-wing direction) instead of the people.
"Guns?"
No argument on the facts, but I question the usefulness of this to model left and right internationally. It seems as much a matter of particular US cultural attitudes to guns that aren't shared by many other countries. And logically, one would expect the "ban guns to protect the safety of society" to be a right-wing position. Essentially, particular historical and cultural factors in the US have turned this otherwise right-coded position into a left-coded one, and also made the issue much more salient and important than elsewhere, and using this to demonstrate the US is to the right of other places seems misguided. (And I say this as an Australian who supports the right to own and carry a gun).
I'm not a conservative, but thank you for indicating I can pass the Ideological Turing test. It's actually a very simple heuristic, just take any difference that existed between the US and USSR, can use those as the basis for coding RW/LW with the US being right.
A foundational myth of the US is that it rebelled against European powers, so emphasizing their anti-Euroness makes the right "more American than thou." The left ceded this a long time ago and continues to do so every time they point to purported good outcomes of their preferred policies across the pond. Plus the US left has done a really good job of equating patriotism with jingoism and racism, so that solidifies US = Right Wing even more in the internal logic.
Re: Commies in government, it doesn't matter how often it happen, what matters is that it happens at all. I don't know how old you are, but way back in the 20th century communists became the absolute worst thing ever as far as USians were concerned. Anyone even vaguely siding with the Soviets was anathema. Even today, it's as baffling to me to see people openly supporting the philosophy of Pol Pot and Mao as it would be for a German to deal with a literal Nazi running for office.
In a country as large and as mobile as the US, you can find polities that will contradict any generalization. Of course NY and CA would implement totalitarian statist policies if they could. But the stereotype/false binary is that the US right values individualism, and the US left values collectivism (even though the right can always justify their favored impositions with a "good of society" argument.)
I'm very unclear what overall point you're making, and if we even really disagree with each other. Could you state your thesis in a sentence?
The rest of this response is assuming you're still arguing the US is indeed to the right of the "international community".
"It's actually a very simple heuristic, just take any difference that existed between the US and USSR, can use those as the basis for coding RW/LW with the US being right."
This doesn't seem like a helpful heuristic to me. It can make no sense of gay rights, foreign military action/imperialism, and the death penalty, to name a few issues that have been very salient left/right divisions in the last few decades. I appreciate your attempt, but I have spent a large part of my life trying obsessively to figure out what the hell "left" and "right" actually mean, and come to the conclusion that they are very vague and slippery concepts and highly context-dependent. They definitely mean SOMETHING, but what they mean is very hard to clearly define.
"A foundational myth of the US is that it rebelled against European powers, so emphasizing their anti-Euroness makes the right "more American than thou.""
Right. So what you're saying is that within the American internal logic a position like republicanism (that elsewhere is considered left-wing) is right-wing? That makes sense. Similarly, I think the right in many European countries is associated with stability, continuity and public order, so many of the militant, anti-establishment movements of the American "right", from the Tea Party to Qanon, are not seen as conservative at all in their internal logic (though I could be wrong about this). And certainly freely available guns is something horrifying to a lot of countries' conservatives, in the same category as freely available drugs. Thus if each culture has its own internal left-right spectrum, comparing different countries along such a spectrum becomes pretty meaningless, right?
"Re: Commies in government, it doesn't matter how often it happen, what matters is that it happens at all."
But it surely matters WHERE it happens, right? In Australia, as far as I know there has never been an open communist elected to any level of government since the second world war. (Unless you count the so-called "watermelon" faction of the Greens; look it up if you really want to know). So what possible relevance does "commies in government" have to whether my country is to the left of yours? It just sounds like you're treating the Western world outside America as one country...
"I don't know how old you are, but way back in the 20th century communists became the absolute worst thing ever as far as USians were concerned. Anyone even vaguely siding with the Soviets was anathema."
Young enough to be born after the cold war and have no memory of that. It doesn't seem to still be quite like that.
"Even today, it's as baffling to me to see people openly supporting the philosophy of Pol Pot and Mao as it would be for a German to deal with a literal Nazi running for office."
Me too, but most of the communists I've seen are Trotskyists who maintain a fantasy that Lenin and Trotsky were wonderful utopians who were creating a perfect society until Stalin took over and turned it into a nightmare. And that nightmare was actually just a restoration of capitalism in a different form. And every single other communist country was controlled by Stalinists and thus not really communist at all. Stupid and naïve, certainly, but they don't see themselves as evil.
"But the stereotype/false binary is that the US right values individualism, and the US left values collectivism (even though the right can always justify their favored impositions with a "good of society" argument.)"
It seems to me you're doing this libertarian thing where you define the right as being anti-government, and put anarchism on the far right and fascism along with communism on the far left. (Or are you, since you call it a stereotype and false binary? I'm a bit confused what your position is.) I mean, you can do that, and say that controlled borders and traditional marriage aren't really right-wing positions at all. But then you're simply speaking a different language to most people who talk of left and right, and meaningful conversation is impossible. (Without strictly defining or "tabooing" these words). I will grant that IF you're saying the US is more LIBERTARIAN than most of the western world, then I think I agree (though with still a few exceptions).
I am arguing that the RW in the US sees the US as to the right of... well, pretty much everyone. It's part of the "American Exceptionalism" thingy. And I am claiming that the LW in the US agrees, no doubt in part in an attempt to dissociate themselves form those RWers. You see this when the LW assumes that all of Europe agrees with them on everything and then get baffled when you point out that unlimited abortion up to and somewhat after the moment of birth isn't actually common over there. Also, journalists' incredulity when Pope Francis didn't support abortion was amusing to me.
" It just sounds like you're treating the Western world outside America as one country..."
...yes? This is amazingly common to both the left and right.
If you're finding factual flaws or logical inconsistencies, it's because I'm talking about the internal mythology of some (many? most?) Americans. Just like the media, facts are curated to support a narrative. Contradictions are deprecated.
My first thought on this is that the left actually has an effective machine for influencing peoples' outward opinions, and they use big events to coordinate on particular issues. A widespread change requires hyperfocusing on one thing, so that everyone opposed hears the push coming from all around simultaneously.
The right has no equivalent machine that can push politics on the public; no one shifts their attitude due to "public pressure" from the right, on anything. There's never a flood of right-wing arguments and slogans that everyone hears at once, complete with support from every major corporation, most media entities, public protests, pushy individuals, the internet, etc., to generate an illusion of a public consensus.
I suspect part of it is just normal navigation. When you’re far from your destination, you follow the large highways or get on the trains that go in your general direction. But when you get closer to your destination, you need to make some choices, and figure out more precisely where you want to go. You’ll probably spend some bandwidth to take onboard a higher resolution map (i.e. think things through more carefully).
This is reinforced when, in times of heightened debate, relevant info and good arguments are prolific. So you encounter more solid counter-arguments to your own position, often forcing you to modify and nuance your views.
And I don’t believe the trend just goes leftward (see anti-woke sentiment), but rather toward some perceived political center or locus (x, but not a fanatic), that balances the concerns people have taken onboard.
Of course, these centers and loci are partly determined by social and psychological factors (the Overton window and personal biases), but also by objective reality (economic and biological factors). Currently, the political center in the west is pretty socially and economically liberal.
You can see it in that many or most people will modify their views when they see they may have to own the uncertainty and salient, negative consequences of those views. (I’m not sure there are many salient, negative consequences of Obergefell for most people, which may be why we haven’t seen a big counter-reaction.)
It’s everywhere, including on Twitter, in business meetings, and among friends out drinking: Someone will argue vociferously for some strategy or option, building up how amazing it would be to build the wall, or buy crypto, or follow a certain marketing strategy, or go sing karaoke. But when they suddenly, often to their own surprise, get buy-in, they will immediately modify their language and try to curb everyone’s expectations.
What's going on with disappearing comments? Are we being quietly censored or is there a bug in Substack swallowing comments?
This is the second time, to my knowledge, that a comment of mine has disappeared from a comment thread with no notice. The first time, there was a possibility that I'd composed the comment and forgotten to go through the formality of posting it. But that definitely hasn't happened here, because I have email about a response to my now-vanished comment. What gives?
Pretty sure there's a blacklist of certain words and phrases that will stop a post from posting. There may or may not be a list somewhere. If you're using a controversial phrase try changing it to something else and seeing if it goes through.
Like I said, I have email from Substack containing a response to my comment. It posted, but it's gone now. And to the best of my recollection, there was nothing even faintly controversial about it.
Could you ROT13 it to see if others agree it is uncontroversial?
I don't remember the exact text. I'll give you a ROT26 of my best approximation:
> I don't think this is a good fit with the examples in the post. In the first example, Donald Trump enacts left-wing trade policies and the opinions of liberals and conservatives both shift right. In the second example, the Supreme Court strikes down left-wing social policies and the opinions of liberals and conservatives both shift left.
Here's the link to the comment, from my email: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/which-political-victories-cause-backlash/comment/12052732
But what is a controversial phrase?
Testing: abortion is baby killing.
Okay, that one went through.
Testing: zinger
And that went through as well. This is weird, those are the only two phrases I thought might be no-no in my previous comment.
Unless it's operating on the old algorithm of "you have posted too many comments too quickly, we think you're a spam bot so we're blocking you" which I have fallen afoul of elsewhere?
A while back I tried to make a post about AI being able to create fake news, that got eaten multiple times. I assumed 'fake news' was triggering auto-censor, but maybe it was just glitchy that day.
Since that went through, my last guess is maybe there's an auto-censor for new posters specifically, and once you hit twenty posts or something it stops. I don't want to make another account to test it.
Interesting - I tried posting an earlier version of this comment and Substack hit me with "Something went wrong" so I must have used a no-no word somewhere, though I can't think what.
Revised version below:
"And then there is all those who are like "I was doomed by my unexpected pregnancy to be a basic ass stay-at-home mother but then I killed my future child and now I'm a successful wage slave at $BIG_CORP, and managing other wage slaves even. Please don't take away our right to kill the unborn uwu" in the newspapers and on social media."
That makes me think of the Chesterton poem, let me quote it here:
The Song of Education by G. K. Chesterton
III. For the Creche
Form 8277059, Sub-Section K
I remember my mother, the day that we met,
A thing I shall never entirely forget;
And I toy with the fancy that, young as I am,
I should know her again if we met in a tram.
But mother is happy in turning a crank
That increases the balance in somebody's bank;
And I feel satisfaction that mother is free
From the sinister task of attending to me.
They have brightened our room, that is spacious and cool,
With diagrams used in the Idiot School,
And Books for the Blind that will teach us to see;
But mother is happy, for mother is free.
For mother is dancing up forty-eight floors,
For love of the Leeds International Stores,
And the flame of that faith might perhaps have grown cold,
With the care of a baby of seven weeks old.
For mother is happy in greasing a wheel
For somebody else, who is cornering Steel;
And though our one meeting was not very long,
She took the occasion to sing me this song:
"O, hush thee, my baby, the time will soon come
When thy sleep will be broken with hooting and hum;
There are handles want turning and turning all day,
And knobs to be pressed in the usual way;
O, hush thee, my baby, take rest while I croon,
For Progress comes early, and Freedom too soon."
It feels worth pointing out that the pro-gay-marriage chart has two downward spikes; one in 2012 when Windsor was decided, and one in 2016 when Obergefell was. So by that standard we should see abortion return to normal trends later this year.
I feel like the years-long clusterfuck of Brexit could explain the prolonged upswing of international trade love. Likewise the Trump administration had stories of sterilizing immigrants and sending them away without their children, which would change minds on immigration policies.
What tends to happen with these hot topics is that people who didn't really think that much about them end up evaluating/re-evaluating them once it becomes a hot topic. This may of course look more like introspection, or more like just adopting the ideas held by your friend group, depending on the person. The reason why you have these shocks is just that suddenly 10+ years' worth of changing minds happen over a short time interval of perhaps 1-2 months. It's just like the "stochastic clocks" in financial theory, if you have heard... sometimes there just is a very intense amount of market behavior one day.
The reason why the shocks happen in the liberal direction is unironically "cthulhu always swims left" all over again. But why worry? I think 4/5 of those are good myself and I expect the 80-20 rule to continue holding for the foreseeable future. To the extent that liberals hold bad ideas they tend to be bad ideas in the sense that they make them unpleasant to talk with, or they make their families cringe at the dinner table. Their ideas are not usually (too) bad in the sense that they're a terrible direction to develop national policy in.
Someone who thought Roe was trash but is ok with a European style 16 week cutoff used to be pro-life, now with the shifted landscape they are pro-choice
Have you considered the possibility that people who were pro-life before didn’t realise that their commitments were closer to pro-choice until the decision?
But the international trade thing didn't get walked back with Biden. If anything, the Biden regime has been tougher on China than Trump was. The poll results reflect the hoi polloi's virtue signaling against the bad orange man, while the actual decision makers have a free hand since no one normally pays attention to foreign policy anyway.
I think that at any given time there are way, way to many issues to think about consciously and to be constantly updating our beliefs on each and every one of them, even if we are professional opinion-havers. So, for most of them, we default to the dominant ideological position (the "common sense") until the issue comes into our focus for whatever reason and only then we are kinda forced to think more thoroughly about it (and maybe change our minds).
I eat meat without considering its ethical consequences until I gaze into the eyes of a living cow that is about to be killed and seems to know it and fear it or I see some vegan activists on tv or read a blog post or whatever.
I think your social bubble is seriously influencing what policies you see as having "a backlash"; I'd say the strongest backlash effect I've seen was against the ACA, which resulted in a historic defeat for the Republicans, which many were claiming would be the end of the Republican party, into a historic victory in the next election cycle.
There are two significant issues. First, separating people out by affiliation erases the backlash effect when it causes people to switch affiliation - which I think was a much more powerful part of the effect with respect to the ACA compared to other issues (The ACA coincided with an increase in conservative affiliation by 4, and a decrease in liberal affiliation by 4). Second, the polls there aren't asking about the actual policy, but a different policy entirely - the ACA isn't government-run healthcare, and the mandate, which was a central point of the backlash, was in fact a massive gift to privately-held insurance companies. I expect you'd see a radically different picture if you asked about support for mandatory health insurance.
There are a few key ingredients in a backlash.
The biggest is novelty. The public doesn't have the energy for a backlash about the same issue every year; I think this is the most important part of Obergefell, which clearly has a backlash among all parties in the graph you posted. It's just that the majority of the available backlash energy was exhausted in 2013, when ten states legalized gay marriage. People still got annoyed in 2015, but it lacked staying power, because most people were already tired of talking about it.
The next is that the policy is boolean, but the subject of the policy is not; polling and voting tends to be directional in these cases, rather than about desired policy outcomes. Abortion is perfect here; the majority of US citizens want some abortion restrictions, but do not want it to be completely illegal. In the pre-Dobbs political context, if you want some abortion restrictions (and this issue is important to you), you are in a sense on the same side as people who want abortion to be illegal. In the post-Dobbs political context, if you want some abortion restrictions, you're in opposition to the people who want abortion to be illegal. Directional polling is hugely significant.
And, finally, identity. Your identity group has to care about the issue - and keep caring about the issue. To some extent this ties in with novelty - if I look around, and the people I'm trying to fit in with don't seem to care that much, I'm not going to try to appear to care too much. If many people are exhausted of the issue, this makes my identity group appear not to care that much about the issue, so I'm not going to make too much of an effort either.
My understanding is that we went from one of the most permissive abortion regimes in many states to one of the least permissive in many states (when compared to international norms).
I'd credit this one to some people holding the position of "relative to third-trimester abortions I'm pro-life" and "relative to a complete ban on abortion I'm pro-choice."
This is pretty obvious. The media
My initial reaction is to endorse the "media effect" thing, but that's because I always forget that most of the U.S. follows deeply unhinged conservative media instead of somewhat unhinged liberal media.
Instead of looking inward I'm just gonna revise my hypothesis to save it even though the facts have proven it wrong - most people in the U.S. don't consume any news media at all and instead form opinions based on opinions based on opinions based on...based on opinion makers - prestige media like WaPo and NYT.
These graphs show only PRO and CONTRA, they don't show fraction of those who don't have an opinion. And the truth is - in the end - everyone on every question is either-or, rarely there can be a political question that truly doesn't matter, but a lot of people just can't / don't want to spend resources on analyzing which side they are slightly leaning from the middle.
So, my pet theory - those who were pro mostly stayed pro, those who were contra mostly stayed contra and the changes are due to people in the middle more pushed to make a decision when their opponents win. And why it happens sometimes and not always is due to the fraction of "hidden pro" / "hidden contra" in the middle - on some questions it's far from 50/50...
It's clear in the health care graph that there was a huge drop in support for government healthcare as Obamacare was being widely discussed in 2008-2009. Looks like a 20 point drop among independents! There wasn't backlash after it passed because the backlash had already happened. So the idea that there's no backlash against Democratic priorities seems definitely wrong. As for why the backlash happened before the law passed, this probably reflects the different dynamics between long public legislative processes vs. supreme court decisions.
Surprisingly you are missing the second most obvious (aside from Liberal dominance in the media): maybe the polls are also influenced heavily by Liberal power and not lying just like the media doesn't lie.
It's pretty easy to create a poll to say almost anything you want. And if you don't get the results you want with one poll, just do a few more. Then report out the poll that give the right answer.
Simple.
There are confounding variables on these examples. Your Republican examples are about taking things away (trade access, abortion access) while your Democratic examples are about getting or protecting something (gay rights, single payer healthcare).
It may just be that in the examples you've selected, the Republicans picked less popular fights than the Democrats. Taking things away is not popular.
Suppose the following: the public doesn't want abortion access taken away. However, they're not paying attention to day-to-day political signaling, possibly because they're tired and don't have time. Then, when SCOTUS does overturn it, nobody's priorities or stance actually changed. All that changed was the public's ranking of where the fires are. That would be sufficient to explain the effect we see.
I think we have a deep cultural bias in the west and particularly America in favor of change and progress. We love innovation. Our attitude towards the past ranges from a contemptuous dismissal to hatred and resentment.
All in all its worked out pretty great, its given us scientific and technological powers beyond imagining. Its made us the richest, freest, most powerful civilization ever. Its abolished slavery and aristocracy most other antediluvian forms of arbitrary hierarchy.
But that same impulse for change has led us into all kinds of mistakes and crimes and disasters along the way. Nationalism and hyper-nationalism and fascism were progressive in their day. Eugenics was progressive in its day. Lobotomy was progressive in its day. The Indian residential schools were progressive in their day. Its only with hindsight that we re-code everything failed and monstrous as right wing or reactionary.
Conservatives want to conserve what's working now, or was working 10 minutes ago, and they always have. There's nobody in our politics that thinks the revolutions of 1688, or 1776, or 1865 were bad and want to go back. There's hardly anyone left who seriously proposes undoing the New Deal -- or at least not the parts of it we're still doing. If today's progressives even knew what a NRA blue eagle was they'd say it was right wing and fascist-adjacent.
Progressivism is a random walk, moving us in every direction. Sometimes it works, and that's great. Sometimes it doesn't work so great. When the wrong directions are finally recognized, they're either forgotten or re-coded as reactionary and right wing in our historical imagination.
The asymmetry is that conservatives are willing to follow the rules and accept their opponents' victories as legitimate, but liberals are not. The clearest example of this is that conservates worked within the system and established rules to get Roe overturned, but liberals are already beginning to treat the Supreme Court as illegitimate. And of course this is starting to change for conservatives as well, since you can't have one side flout the rules _forever_ and still claim that the rules actually hold.
Idea: US political messaging is targeted at an ingroup, disregarding how it's perceived by an outgroup. Maybe the exact same hype and media that brings political "success" is what polarizes the opposition, so we should expect them to be coupled. No idea how to validate this, esp. with respect to your examples, but I think we'd somehow need to quantify the framing and intensity of messaging around a topic. Legislative/court victories should be minimally coupled since they probably don't depend much on messaging, while elections/ballot questions should be tightly coupled because of all the advertising? Supreme court leak confounds your example because it stirred up so much media coverage? Idk, curious if this resonates with anyone.
Do you actually see an effect on abortion views? I'll spare you the Fenyman quotation.
Because what I see is pretty much a series of coin flips, or draws from a box with white and red beads.
You buried your lede: "Or maybe this is totally random and I shouldn’t try to conclude things from n = ~5 examples." Statistical thinking is what helps cure apophenia. If you are going to be a rationalist be serious when looking at data.
As to "Trump beliefs" - he's got beliefs?
I think it's related to focus of attention. People tend to accept what those they respect (for whatever reason) tell them is proper, as long as there's no effect. When it becomes real, they start thinking how it might affect them and those they care about. Liberal causes, on the average, tend to positively affect more people than they (obviously) harm. Conservative the opposite. People here has to be understood as "those who do or could respond to surveys".
I've got beliefs about how the (obviously) maps onto reality, but they don't follow "liberal vs. conservative" lines.
Is it possible that left-wing media gets angry about politics while right-wing media just counters whatever left-wing media is saying (thus allowing them to set the topic of debate)?
If right-wing media breaks it, it's not news, it's a conspiracy theory.
NPR ran a self-congratulatory piece about how they were deliberately not covering the Hunter Biden Laptop and how righteous they were for doing that.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/npr-explained-why-its-not-covering-the-hunter-biden-laptop-story-and-now-president-trumps-son-wants-to-defund-it-11603386611
The typical non-evangelical conservative voter didn't really care that much about abortion, but sympathized with fighting coastal elites (read: the Supreme Court) telling them what to do. Pro-life was an easy cause for conservative politicians to adopt without risking anything.
Once the Supreme Court withdrew feds from the abortion business, non-evangelical conservatives had nothing left to sympathize with. Now that red-state conservatives actually have the burden of implementing policy, the simplicity and upside of the pro-life cause has evaporated.
It’s precisely that, which side owns the Cathedral institutions and can thus generate backlash among independents. In the USA and W. Europe that is of course, progressives.
The "direction things naturally tend" argument makes most sense to me. It's as if there is sort of a "ratcheting" mechanism as the general public mood slides slowly in the direction that most commonly is called liberal.
When things push in that "forwards" direction (not intending to make a value judgement here), it's like a frog in boiling water, most people just tend to shrug and go along with it. Yes many people will cry about the degeneracy of modern culture, but the specific policy positions get more and more unfashionable over time and the mean conservative/reactionary stakes out more and more leftward territory as the decades go by. How big of a persuadable audience could someone gather in 2023 arguing against interracial marriage, for example? Even the prominent conservative voices today express a lot of opinions that would be very, very left not too long ago (notice how lots of conservative commentators had at least a few complimentary things to say about Bernie Sanders).
Whereas big swings that go against the "ratchet" give lots of people the sense that something has gone *very* wrong vis-a-vis the direction that things are "supposed" to be. People as a general rule can be OK with complacency but they HATE to backslide (a lot of the MAGA psychology is "we had more status in the past"). Which is why the center-left (and the median American really is center-left) that is mostly OK with the slow or even stalled-out advance of progressivism can get very seriously perturbed when Roe gets struck down.
The average American voter is desensitized to the idea that things will move moderately leftwards over the course of their lifespan. (how many times have you heard someone say "our grandkids will probably think it's outrageous that we ate as much meat as we do"). From that point on the distribution, "lots of progress" is about as equally far from the middle as "no progress", which means that "backwards progress" (or perceived backwards progress) is even farther away from expectations than lots of progress.
I'm imagining a story where public opinion drifts around, and but people refrain from really identifying with a position until there is a catalyzing event, at which point people begin to firmly identity with the positions that they've been gravitating toward. Perhaps a month before the abortion ruling, there are a lot of people who have become gradually more pro-choice, but their shift doesn't necessarily mean a different position on a survey. Then the ruling happens, and they realize that they need to "pick a side" and so it looks like a rapid shift happens.
According to this story, the effect might not show up in situations where people have reason to identify with the position before the catalyzing event, or where the catalyzing event might not cause people to want to snap to an identity.
UCLA economist Brian Wheaton has a paper on this with n>5 I think. Here is the abstract: "Do laws affect the beliefs and attitudes held by the public? Using data from the ANES,
the GSS, and Gallup along with a difference-in-differences identification strategy, I find robust
evidence that virtually every major U.S. social policy law of the past half-century has induced
significant backlash. That is, the public moved in the opposite ideological direction of each law. I
show that my results are consistent with a model whereby individuals care about the ideological
beliefs of other members of their society – such as their children and peers – but only have
imperfect ability to influence said beliefs, which are also influenced by the law and the actions of
others. I empirically test the implications of said model; for instance, I show that the backlash is
successfully transmitted to children, more persistent in ideologically-homogeneous communities,
and exists on both sides of the political spectrum. Furthermore, I provide evidence against a
variety of alternative models that would also generate backlash." and the link: https://www.anderson.ucla.edu/sites/default/files/document/2022-09/Laws%20Beliefs.pdf
Very interesting paper, thanks for posting it.
I think there's a connection between this and prior discussions on "belief" vs. "belief in belief."
That is, there exists some number of people who take positions on political issues because they believe they believe them, or they want to be the kind of person who believes them (maybe call this "aspirational belief.") There's no immediate cost to holding these kinds of positions as long as they're in opposition to the status quo or strongly entrenched as the status quo.
For example, if I'm a devout Catholic, I should be strongly opposed to abortion in almost all cases. The strongest way to oppose something in a democratic society is to try to make it illegal. As long as abortion remains a protected right and I don't actually personally need one, I can safely believe that I believe it should be illegal. But when the *Dobbs* ruling comes down and I'm confronted with the real possibility that I or someone I care about might be affected by a total abortion ban, maybe I start to question whether the law is the right tool to express my moral conviction.
On that theory, the victories that are likely to result in backlash are the ones where some poll respondents are expressing something other than how they want the future to look. Someone who says they support overturning *Roe* may just be saying "abortion is bad;" someone who says they oppose free trade or immigration may just be saying "the modern global economy has left my community behind;" someone who says same-sex marriage should be illegal may just be saying "I'm a Christian."
The majority of respondents in either case may actually believe that the policy they're supporting is good. But some fraction of them just believe they believe that because that's what people with their values/emotions/identity are supposed to believe.
I think the reason you can only pull up conservative examples on the national scale is that the liberal issues with this dynamic tend to be local. It's easy to imagine ways it could play out on a national scale in a hypothetical universe where the far left had more power at the federal level: polled support for slavery reparations would drop even lower than it already is if there were a real chance that white people were going to be differentially-taxed to fund large cash payments for the descendants of slaves. But in real life, most of the left monkey's paws are local concerns like housing/homelessness, school policy...the stuff that dominates local elections in blue cities.
I think the most interesting aspect of the Gallup poll is that the 2022 poll began on May 2nd, the same day the Supreme Court draft memo was released. It could be a coincidence. Gallup starts this poll in early May every year. The case was argued in early December 2021 and the decision made in late June 2021. The opinion had to be written before it could be leaked. So there may have only been a couple months of time in which it could be leaked, so April-May might have been a natural time to leak it.
Even if we grant the leaked memo would have had a similar effect if released a week before the poll, that still leaves about a 10% likelihood of it coinciding with the start of the poll. And it's obviously even less likely that it happens to be released on the exact day the poll starts by chance. Even if the leaker didn't know the exact start day for sure, Gallup is very consistent in starting in the first few days of May, so they'd have stood a good shot of releasing it on the actual first day of polling by chance.
This makes me entertain the possibility that the leaker deliberately timed the leak to coincide with the Gallup poll so that they'd pick up the salience of the issue in their polling. If that on balance led more people with earnest pro-choice views to take the survey, that could explain the shift in expressed support without actually reflecting a shift in real opinions.
Having worked in a call center for a year, my experience is that people are much more likely to answer the phone if they perceive participating in the call as being valuable to them. It would not surprise me that pro-choice people who just discovered Roe v. Wade was about to be overturned for real viewed the ability to express their views in a survey as being of unusually high value at that time, and chose to take those calls more often than they normally do.
My best hypothesis to explain why this happens after some political victories and not others is that expressing support for a popular political view is most useful when fighting against an unpopular position or person that has nevertheless achieved political victory. "You may have won formal power, but most people don't like you and we're going to make sure you know it and we know it." Under this hypothesis, people would tend to respond to surveys more when they've just suffered a loss despite holding a politically popular position.
According to Gallup, 80-90% of people support some level of abortion access and 70% support gay marriage. Support for government guaranteeing access to healthcare is 50-60%. Victories in favor of gay marriage and government access to healthcare were politically popular, so under my hypothesis, people don't feel that participating in a survey would be an especially useful. The majority who support gay marriage and government healthcare feel that their institutions are reflecting their belief, and those who are against feel that wielding public opinion is unlikely to be a useful way to fight back.
Trump lost the popular vote, and international trade was a majority favorable position before 2016. So this again fits my hypothesis in which the victory of an overall politically unpopular figure leads to a surge in willingness to take the time to make expressions of support for the popular position. This surge in expressiveness then gets picked up by polls.
Re: how the media is involved --
After the abortion ruling there has been an obvious uptick in stories about ridiculous injustices due to abortion being illegal, probably in part because they're topical, in part because they get a lot of clicks, and in part because there are more actually relevant things happening as a result of the ruling (directly or indirectly -- like some people now can't easily get abortions, but also maybe some anti-abortion people are galvanized to be annoying about it after the ruling). So the average member of the public might be more generally aware of how bad abortion restriction is to people than they were before the ruling, and hence their opinion might swing in favor of abortion.
I mention this to say that it's important to keep in mind that this cause & effect is not simply "the media tends liberal -> more abortion horror stories -> more anti-abortion sentiment". The causal diagram also has a node for "abortion restriction is actually inhumane" (or if you don't like that phrasing, "abortion restriction causes major and easily preventable problems for people"), and this is also a cause of "more abortion horror stories". (It's also a cause of "the media tends liberal" but that's probably less important). This is an argument against the simplistic stance (expressed in another thread) that "well the media tends liberal so that's probably the main explanation for backlashes against conservative victories". Part of the backlash is _caused_ by the bad thing that liberals not-coincidentally tend not to like (abortion restriction being actually really bad for people).
Anyway this is also the reason that liberalism is on the right side of history: the stances weren't randomly assigned to conservative vs liberal camps; they've assigned based on whether they're, like, good stances, and the good stances are usually going to be on the right side of history. Or, in my biased opinion: the liberals took all the good stances on social issues so no wonder they come out ahead in the long term. (It's not at all clear to me that economic stances weren't basically randomly assigned though.)
>Maybe because liberals control more of the media than conservatives; when conservatives win something, the media does a good job making everyone panic that conservative ideas are taking over, and convinces them to do a thermostatic reaction. But when liberals win something, most people either don’t hear about it or don’t hear anyone telling them to worry, so they don’t.
I like how Scott buries the actual answer in a few subclauses of one paragraph.
I find it hard to believe that Americans are more pro trade than ever before. Maybe my perceptions are just wrong, or maybe people have a different idea about what it means to be pro trade, so you can’t compare the top line number.
Also far fewer Americans have heartfelt strong positions on trade policy than on, say, abortion or gun rights. Simple yes/no polling doesn't reflect those differences in depth of feeling.
I don't know that it's clear that they aren't willing to pay $2 more for widgets, as opposed to being too lazy to look for a "Made in America" label. How would you tell the difference?
It is not irrational for someone to say "I want to do X but not closely related X', and I don't want to be bothered by this, so let's just ban/regulate/overtax X' and eliminate it from the market". It's selfish, in that it denies options to other people. but it's a rational sort of selfishness that for various values of X is common across the political spectrum.
Here's a facebook video via the daily mail of dogs barking at each other until a gate is opened.
https://www.facebook.com/DailyMail/videos/dogs-bark-ferociously-at-each-other-only-when-gate-is-closed/895314087944546/
Is it possible we're running into some signaling that might be explained by game theory? That is, opposing abortion might be +1 more virtuous until enough people oppose it, abortion is banned, and then it switches to -3 abortion is actually illegal. People then readjust to try to relegalize abortion, but once it's legal/accepted opposing it becomes more virtuous again. If this model is correct then similar effects might be seen for liberal policies like more extreme energy policies.
It's not exactly the same, but Germans are now more pro nuclear power. https://www.energymonitor.ai/policy/weekly-data-shift-in-germanys-perception-of-nuclear-energy/
I think being extremely pro "green energy" or "anti-racist" probably benefits from the same signaling game theory. Maybe there are some examples of this sort of thing happening locally and getting pushback.
> Or maybe it’s because liberalism is “on the right side of history”, ie the direction things naturally tend
As a slightly weaker/less-universal explanation, is it possible that there is some non-partisan conception of "quality" of policy, that is orthogonal to the partisan dimension, and which most people are capable of honestly assessing (sometimes in advance, but much more easily after the fact)? By which I mean, for a given partisan position, a "good" policy would actually give precisely the disired effects when the plan makes contact with reality, and the "bad" policy has unintended consequences and does harm, perhaps doesn't even improve the thing it was targeted at.
For example, Trump's tarrifs did substantial harm to US businesses, and those knock-on effects had to be countered with direct subsidies. A better policy for that position might have been to go out with some subsidies at the same time; even Republicans recognized that it was just a bad implementation.
Pro-life Republicans want less access to abortion, but my understanding of the polling is that most don't want a total ban, which is what Dobbs produced in some states. So enacting that policy resulted in much more serious consequences than most Republicans were actually in favor of (even if Republicans in a given Red state might have got broadly what they hoped for inside that state).
A problem with this analysis would be Scott's point that the "support for international trade" increased _before_ the tarrifs were implemented. I think this suggests that there is no monocausal explanation for this; we have to include press coverage as a major driver of sentiment in addition to ex post analysis of side-effects.
But even then, quality and content still matters; I think there's only so much that the press can convince people to support. Without any specific proposal to reduce trade, one might say "sure trade is OK I suppose, but I do have some concerns about {globalization and sweatshop labor | NAFTA taking our jobs | colonialism | wars in the middle east | insert ambi-partisan objection here}". On the other hand, with a specific proposal for less trade (say the Trumpist protectionist agenda), now we have a concrete position to argue against, and so if one doesn't support that specific agenda, one might move from "undecided on trade" to "enemy of my enemy is my friend, I support trade against this form of anti-trade".
So, three related possibilities: bad quality of policy evaluated ex post, press coverage of policy ex post, and a process for coalescing opposition in response to a specific policy.
1) Defund the Police and BLM generally basically collapsed in popularity after the November 2020 election.
In fact I would say this is Round X in this typical dance on how the public views crime since the 60s.
2) COVID NPIs basically collapsed after the Omicron wave (I would argue the second Youngkin won in November 2021, but some time elapsed to save face). If public health tried to try shit again, I think it would get slapped down.
3) Although the Republican Party in general couldn't take advantage of the above, certain Republicans could (Ron DeSantis, etc).
> Defund the Police and BLM generally basically collapsed in popularity after the November 2020 election.
Actually, they collapsed in the summer of 2020, which is why the election was so close. Capitalizing on the BLM backlash was practically Trump's entire campaign strategy.
Yea. Indeed they were politically dead on arrival. I live in a deeply-blue part of a deeply-blue state -- precincts which no Republican has come close to winning in decades -- and around here "Defund the Police" was an eye-roll punchline by Labor Day of 2020.
There were gigantic riots all over the country, which were attended by democrat politicians in the middle of a pandemic they said justified stay at home orders.
BLM flags were put up all around the world. English soccer players were taking a knee.
Nearly every single company made their workers go through mandatory CRT struggle sessions reminiscent of the cultural revolution.
Biden got more votes than any president in history by a wide margin.
No, it was in full swing at that point.
BLM collapsed as people started to understand what it meant. The struggle sessions and the crime spike removed any ambiguity. And with trump gone one had to face it head on rather then channel it through one’s opinion on trump.
Even if you don't want to listen to anything else, you can just *look at the graph* posted by fellow right winger trebuchet elsewhere in these comments and that would make it obvious enough that the backlash started in the summer.
This seems more situational than pattern-based. What if we looked at progressive ideas like "low-income housing projects," "cut back your use of energy," and "defunding the police"? Sure, these are not policy victories, but they're still policy ideas that had some level of implementation at different points in time.
In other words, are you doing some selection bias based on framing it exclusively as policy victories vs. political salience of the core ideas?
Another obvious (to me) hypothesis is that democrats are disadvantaged in Congress and in the courts, so they can only get wins on issues where they have popular support, whereas conservatives can get wins on issues with less support thus producing greater backlash.
Yea I had that thought as well. E.g. Republicans in a 50-50 or 51-49 Senate represent far fewer voters than their Dem counterparts do; but national opinion polls on an issue are usually simply national in their samples.
I think the most relevant analogy to Obamacare would be the TCJA. Was there a major backlash to TCJA (I'm not aware of one, but I haven't looked). If not, that would be a strike against "liberal propaganda controls everything" and evidence in favor of "laws that do popular things don't cause a backlash".
It's also worth noting that Obamacare got a lot more popular in 2017 once Republicans seriously started trying to kill it.
The media bias theory makes the most sense. Most mainstream media sources are skewed left. This includes 3 of 4 broadcast networks, 2 of 3 cable news networks, the NYT, NPR and so on:
https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart
I’ve also noticed that the major news aggregators that supply the news to our browsers and phones (Google, Apple) favor these sources. That means the “default” news most people see will overwhelmingly skew left — unless you intentionally curate your news to include sources from the right. The one exception is Fox, but I think most people are acutely aware of Fox’s bias, so it’s different than some other sources that are perceived to be neutral and are not.
Seems like in the abortion rights and Trump free trade cases, new constraints were put on the populace; or, alternatively, freedoms were taken away. In the former, a right that previously was taken for granted was put into question; in the latter, trade faced new restrictions that, in principle, limited businesses’ options relative to the status quo and drove up costs for everyone.
In the Obamacare and gay marriage cases, constraints were taken away / freedoms were added. The lives of people with insurance and heterosexual unions weren’t really different after those events, nor did the potential for significant change really increase.
Generally, people don’t like when freedoms (or anything really) are taken away. Also, they don’t really care when new freedoms they won’t exercise are gained. I don’t think you need to invoke left/right dynamics to make sense of this, though I’m sure they might affect the intensity of the reactions.
Also, with respect to the small number of examples, maybe you could look at sentiments after different COVID restrictions, prohibition, women’s suffrage, civil rights, and/or Brexit if we’re including non-American events.
There doesn't have to be the same reason for two similar reactions. The Trump backlash could be rooted in how individually shitty he is, while the post-Dobbs reaction could be about something else.
If you do want to find a common factor here's a possibility: events making some people focus on an issue more deeply than they have previously. Pollsters have terminology for this which I do not remember right now, but the basic idea is that a lot of the time a certain fraction of public opinion about issue X is not based on a lot of deep thought or strong feeling for/against X. But then something happens (e.g. the SCOTUS suddenly and sharply changes the policy reality of X) to make some people give X some real thought for the first time.
And the Trump factor could be synergistic with that. E.g. people having no strong opinions about immigration policy being startled and turned off by Trump's open racism towards immigrants (I have one of these in my own household), which makes them more likely to respond a certain way when asked by a pollster.
What about Defund the Police. How did that go.
I agree with other commentators that it's basically about whether the "win" has immediate trouble associated with it that was ignored when pushing the belief, because the belief was really about something else (e.g. abortion is often about traditional family values and don't be promiscuous, defund the police was really about inadequate training and empathy in some high profile cases). It was kind of a posture. In fact I'd say voting for Trump itself was kind of like that for some people. Things are so bad I'm gonna vote for TRUMP! Oh wow, he won, what happens now.
You could speculate about how long-term goals play into this. For example, short-term pain might be more apparent than long-term gain, short-term pain might cause more backlashes (not that there is any long-term gain, but that it would suddenly take a backseat, for example if liberals just shut off all the oil overnight).
I'm going to hypothesise three different sources of backlash.
1) The Trump: This one is all personality. A big figure becomes associated with a policy and people who don't like that person turn against the policy.
2) The Insulation Effect, AKA, The Abortion: This backlash requires people who don't like a policy, but feel safe to advocate it. Imagine if you will a Republican woman making a trade with a bible thumping preacher "I'll vote for your abortion policies if you vote for my tax cuts". Because the supreme court will strike down any anti abortion law this trade costs her little. But as soon as Rowe vs Wade is struck down she has to seriously consider whether those tax cuts are worth control over her reproductive system. So all the people who were pro-abortion as a political trade, as tribal signalling, basically anything except genuinely believing abortion is evil. They all have to reconsider.
3) The Enemy Victory, AKA, The Brexit: This one is straight forward. The backlash comes from people who were always against a policy moving from passive support to active vocal support once their policy is under threat. If you like being a member of the EU in 2000 you probably don't think about your membership much. Tomorrow the sun shall rise and you shall be an EU citizen. In 2016 campaigning could make the difference between membership or leaving, so you campaign hard.
P.S. I think there's some of 1 in the backlash to Rowe vs Wade. I'm sure clips of politicians talking about said 10 year old triggered people's disgust in the same way that Trump can.
If a government takes *turns* whacking both sides of an issue which divides us, that's not justice. Government should only intercede when we've had enough dialogue and evidence to reach a super-majority on ethically-charged issues. It's safer to be conservative about the *application* of government in the ethical sphere.
Implicit in the question is an assumption that voter opinion on specific issues can be modelled statistically *without taking into account what the issues are*. One can go a surprisingly long way, and yet there really is more to politics than simply rolling dice. Decisions have impact, and whether they make life better or worse is not entirely subjective.
After a decision is made, if life becomes noticeably worse, one may expect some backlash. Whether or not this will happen isn't something you can predict *purely* by looking at which tribe made the decision or what political colour it is. You have to also consider the actual effect.
Unfortunately, whose life a decision makes better and whose worse is much more difficult to quantify than how many people style themselves red vs blue, and so people keep pumping their intuition engines with the latter as a poor proxy for the former, beliving the output uncritically then being surprised when it fails to match reality.
Prediction: The upcoming (and all but certain IMHO) demise of affirmative action/racial preferences in higher education will be broadly mildly-popular despite being narrowly extremely-unpopular.
My guess would be that policy changes that are perceived to increase the typical voter's ability to do as they please are unlikely to provoke significant backlash, but new restrictions on perceived freedom will tend to create backlash.
People just don't like it very much when they're told a freedom they've come to expect is being taken away. Even someone who is nominally opposed to abortion on a moral level may balk once they realize the government is *actually* going to force them to carry a fetus to term.
But when a new freedom is introduced, for instance gay marriage, it doesn't really hit the same way. Even if you're opposed, your life isn't actually changed. Your theoretical opposition is still mostly theoretical, and will tend to erode over time as people do the thing you don't like and the world carries on just fine.
I'll expand to say I don't think this is because voters are ideologically libertarian or anything - that's why I emphasize "perceived ability to do as they please." A regulation on a shady business practice that people don't like is less likely to provoke backlash because most people won't parse that as affecting their own day-to-day freedom.
This is why, for instance, trans rights debates become so heated. Proponents see themselves as advocating for the freedom of people to identify as they please. Opponents feel like they are being told they have to learn a bunch of new language rules or be canceled. Both sides feel like any slide in the opposite direction is a blow to their and their loved ones ability to do as they please on a day-to-day basis.
Part of it is that Democrats tend to be more, well, democratic: they are more likely to pick fights and policies which already have widespread public support (it wasn't so long ago that Obama publicly disavowed gay marriage, for example). This is in part due to the voting system (Democrats are the urban party and Republicans the rural one, and the voting system gives rural voters outsized power, so Democrats need way more popular for equal electoral performance than Republicans do), and in part due to Republicans really having gone off the deep end recently (I think Hanania's recent take at https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-the-media-is-honest-and-good is the correct one on this: their extremely low standards for truthfulness in allied media are causing their core voter base to increasingly lose their grip on reality).
Another thing is that on some topics, one side is just right (or at the very least, significantly more convincing to the average person after careful consideration and examination of arguments). So while the topic is low-salience, people tend to think whatever their preferred media thinks; but once it becomes a major point of discussion, most people can't / won't avoid engaging with arguments from both sides, and truth might override ideology. This happened with abortion, IMO: until it was regulated by courts, the average person did not have much reason to care; once it ended up on ballots and became a point of intense national debate, people reexamined their views, and pro-life views are just harder to defend.
Trump is a bit of an exception, I think, because he tried to take the Republican party in a new direction, so for a while his proposals went against both the liberal press narrative and the conservative think-tank narrative. (And it surely didn't help that he was incredibly unpopular at the time + did not look very competent at being a president.) So that was a combination of the issues suddenly becoming more salient + his ideas not really having an intellectual "heartland".
Scott, If I read your source on the abortion graph right the 2022 datapoint is from May and Dobbs was decided in June. So this may not be the effect you are looking for.
The Dobbs decision was leaked in early May; while it was in late May / early June theoretically possible that SCOTUS could change its mind, most public discourse started in May based on the assumption that Roe and Casey were going down.
That's a fair point. I guess I didn't see it that way. I wasn't at all sure that I believed the 'leak'. It was so obviously done as an attempt to push the court Tha I didn't view the issue as settled at all, though I suppose in what direction it was intended to push the court and whether or not it succeeded are questions for after the leaders identity is established.
I seem to remember most people being very uncertain of which way the court would jump until it was all settled.
So, this is sort of a modified version of the effect Scott was writing about-a predecisipn backlash, in fact a backlash specifically intended to prevent the decision it was in (p)reaction to. Whatever the leakers intention was the intent of the backlashers was to prevent the decision which actually happened. So maybe the backlash in general is the same as this specific case-the whole backlash sort of whipped up by a contrived incident, more propaganda driven than organic grassroots?
For me the clue is in the names “conservative” and “progressive”. People vote for conservatives to maintain a status quo/tradition and for progressives to make change. I can understand why there would be backlash if conservatives made changes, and why there is so little surprise when the same is made by progressives.
The media is certainly a big part of the equation, but aside from that: people have an aversion to losing their rights. They may not be very happy about their political enemies gaining rights, but they'll panic and get angry if you try to take something from them, particularly if they used to take it for granted.
On the other hand, if an issue doesn't concern them particularly and they don't have strong convictions about it (no religious beliefs, no partisan solidarity), they may have an interest in picking the victor's side (particularly if they're surrounded by people who have strong convictions about it).
Less backlash to laws that introduce freedoms than that take them away? This would not seem shocking to me.
(Obamacare is something of a mix, though, so it might not apply.)
Roe was popular and fits what most people want. IMO the reason for the change.
If the mechanism that causes a backlash is seeing the results of a decision, then you are not going to get a backlash every time, because people are not going to hate what they see.every time. Similarly, if the mechanism is a public debate, that might change minds, but not alway.
The huge tea party victory in the 2010 midterms seems like a pretty big backlash against the Obama presidency. For that matter, Trump himself seems a lot like a backlash against Obama. Those are pretty big conservative backlashes against liberal victories. Are you counting them?
There is a tendency towards the belief that there are only two positions you can publicly take: fully support or fully oppose. In reality most people have nuanced positions and faced with a sudden loss of rights might flip from oppose to support. If this is true then looking for cases where liberals want to take away rights should provide a mirror case.
I think that at least part of the answer requires an *honest* understanding of why the "losing" side is against whatever the issue is. Such honesty is, of course, not exactly common...
In the case of gay rights, I think the explanation is pretty simple. The issue of gayness (being honest now, as opposed to the usual story) I think was primarily viewed by its opponents as set of anti-bourgeois values and morals. And why wouldn't it have been so? In the late 60s/early 70s gayness presented as an all-party all-the-time lifestyle built on endless drugs, zero personal responsibility, and destruction of the family:
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/michael-bronski-gay-family/
The infamous 1972 Gay Men’s Liberation demands looked to most people like a demand for legalized pedophilia and does the usual political yutting thing of throwing in multiple demands that have zero to do with gayness but an awful lot to do with making themselves unpopular with most of America.
https://thecambridgeroom.wordpress.com/2018/01/16/bostons-gfls-10-point-demands-to-the-democratic-convention-1972/
Read the above document. THAT is what most people thought they were protecting America from in the 1970s, and who can blame them...
What happened in, I guess the 90s, is that a smart enough group of gay people managed to wrest control of the agenda away from these lunatics and worked hard to ensure that the ONLY issue on the table was gayness. Not gayness and how the military sucks. No gayness and how the family should be abolished. Not gayness and drug legalization. NO OTHER CRAP except gayness and laws related to that. And it turns out that, big fscking surprise, Americans did not have a problem with gayness per se, once it was stripped of the lunacy.
To the extent that other agendas like "racism" or "sexism" win without backlash, it would be by following the same agenda. But it appears that both of these are in too deep in terms of having defined a totalizing world view that is anti-bourgeois and anti most of what Americans support (including such basics as decency, honesty, truth, and rationality).
In a sense I think you have the story backwards. Both race and sex got most of what was reasonable in the late 60s and early 70s, but were not content to take the win and build on that; they created a backlash by refusing to take yes for an answer.
Gay rights stand out as being a rare case in history where common sense prevailed, where the winning group was content to accept its winnings, shut up, and stop fighting. If gay marriage had immediately been followed by other items on that 1972 agenda ("Americans remain as homophobic as ever, until they are willing to destroy that most homophobic and repressive institution of all, the family!!!") yes, there would have been, and would continue to be, massive backlash.
Probably been said before, but have you considered that trump caused a lingering "rage against conservatives" effect? does the trend to not backlash against liberal victories but to do backlash against conservative ones exist before trump as well?
The media also found and amplified said story…any victims of liberal policies are not sought out and suppressed when they come forward (detransitioners, COVID vaccine injured people being 2 examples)
The abortion, medical care, gay marriage issues impact people's lives directly. If the Right supported real policy that would have a positive, realizable benefit on people's lives, you would not see this effect. Since the Right stands for the rights and privilege of a privileged or successful minority, any real policy they propose is not going to have this sort of property.
Trade is an abstract thing, so people have no direct feel for it. Free trade is good for rich people, who control media. Hence media will work to change opinion to oppose what they oppose like Trump's tariffs. To test this idea, look at opinion on how much tax rich people pay and how that is affected (or not affected) by conservative-supported tax cuts.