About That Prevailing Wisdom

William Galston’s latest Wall Street Journal column relies on that “prevailing wisdom” I spoke of in an earlier post:

Let’s start with a definition. Suppose that for each issue there’s a continuum from one extreme to the other, defined by a scale from 1 to 5. There would be a meaningful center on an issue if more people placed their views at 3 on the scale than at either end.

By this standard, people with “centrist” views constitute at least a plurality—meaning the largest faction when there is not a majority—on many questions at the heart of today’s political contestation, starting with political identity.

Asked to place themselves on a right-to-left spectrum, 43% of respondents opted for the center, compared with 34% for the right and 23% for the left. Overall, there’s a basis for saying that the U.S. is a centrist country that leans modestly to the right.

This fact coexists with a significantly polarized party system. Sixty-five percent of Republicans identify with the right, 27% with the center, and only 8% with the left. By contrast, 42% of Democrats identify with the left, and the same share with the center. One major party has a dominant ideology while the other is divided down the middle, a straightforward explanation for the shape of the current contest for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Note that, unlike Nationscape he’s using an affiliational yardstick rather than the one they’re using. That’s circular—he’s assuming what he claims is true. Whether it in fact is true is important.

But he uses it to reach exactly the same point we reached the other day:

On some issues, however, rather than a dominant center, we find a national consensus across partisan and ideological lines. Fifty-eight percent of Republicans, 80% of Democrats and 67% of independents believe that government should “do more” to provide health care and a secure retirement for elderly Americans, a political reality that Donald Trump understands but Paul Ryan did not. The odds are that when these programs face their long-predicted financial crunch, politicians will have to focus on funding rather than cutting benefits. Similarly, the First Amendment stands out as a core tenet of America’s secular faith. More than 60% of Republicans, Democrats and independents believe that the right to free speech is nearly absolute, except when a speaker advocates violence.

I think there’s also a difference between what rank-and-file Democrats and Republican believe and what elected officials of each party believe.