A Jacksonian Urge

Paul Waldman appears surprised that more Americans view the Democratic Party as extreme than they do the Republican Party:

As a progressive, I tend to think the Republican Party is much more ideologically extreme than the Democratic Party. There are many reasons, some of which may be more legitimate than others. But it turns out that my opinion isn’t representative. According to this research from the Pew Research Center, the typical Democrat thinks the GOP is kind of conservative, while the typical Republican thinks the Democratic Party is really, really liberal.

An obvious retort to this is that Americans are keen observers of the political scene but as I’ll explain below I think the reality more complicated than that. James Joyner observes:

I don’t doubt that there’s some reinforcing mechanism from conservative media outlets, although my guess is that it’s minor. First, as Waldman himself notes, the tendency dates back to at least 1985, well before the polarization of media. Second, the chief reason for the rise of Limbaugh and Fox News was the sense that the national media was biased to the left.

The more obvious explanation is that the center is further to the right than Waldman thinks. Indeed, Pew has another couple of graphics — similar to those we’ve seen dozens of times elsewhere over the years — that reinforces this point…

Party politics is a like a fan dancer’s fan—it both reveals and conceals. While the partisan divide is real it’s neither the only nor the most important way of looking at American politics. Most Americans’ political views can be classified as Jacksonian, Wilsonian, Hamiltonian, or Jeffersonian (pessimistic populist realists, optimistic idealists, optimistic pragmatists, and pessimistic idealists, respectively). These views aren’t coherent ideologies or political platforms but tropisms with historic, social, religious, and cultural roots. For a lengthy description of the Jacksonian tradition see Walter Russell Mead’s essay. For a brief summary of all four of these views see here.

Both major political parties have lots of Jacksonians. I would estimate that more than 50% of all Americans tend towards Jacksoniamism with Wilsonians and Hamiltonians comprising about 15% each, Jeffersonians 10% or fewer, and other viewpoints without substantial historic American support comprising the rest. This is not so much science as instinct but my guess is that nearly 50% of the Democratic Party has Jacksonian inclinations. Although the intelligentsia and the party’s leadership is mostly Wilsonian or even progressive transnationalist, the real base of the party is comprised of union members and blacks, frequently Jacksonians or with Jacksonian inclinations. That’s the source of the divide between the party leadership and its base.

Jacksonians aren’t opposed to taking handouts from the government or government debt although they tend to be wary of government aid to others—cf. the typical American overestimation of and opposition to the level of our foreign aid. It’s also how you can reconcile the broad support for farm subsidies or Social Security. Generally speaking, Jacksonians view taxes as falling on somebody else and see taking a handout from government as merely prudent. Jacksonians aren’t opposed to the use of military force, a view that bewilders and horrifies our European cousins.

As the Democratic Party, under the leadership of its intelligentsia whose views are rather different from those of its heavily Jacksonian base, takes positions that differ from those espoused by that base, I think we’ll see an increasing view that the Democratic Party is “very, very liberal” even as it maintains the 40% self-identification as Democrats that has been the case for many, many years.