Conservatives Finish 2009 as No. 1 Ideological Group

Uptick owing largely to more independents calling themselves conservative

by Lydia Saad

PRINCETON, NJ -- The increased conservatism that Gallup first identified among Americans last June persisted throughout the year, so that the final year-end political ideology figures confirm Gallup's initial reporting: conservatives (40%) outnumbered both moderates (36%) and liberals (21%) across the nation in 2009.

More broadly, the percentage of Americans calling themselves either conservative or liberal has increased over the last decade, while the percentage of moderates has declined.

Since 1992, there have been only two other years -- 2003 and 2004 -- in which the average percentage of conservatives nationwide outnumbered moderates, and in both cases, it was by two percentage points (in contrast to the current four points).

"The proportion of independents calling themselves "moderate" held relatively steady in the mid-40s over the last decade, while the proportion of Republican and Democratic moderates dwindled."

The rather abrupt three-point increase between 2008 and 2009 in the percentage of Americans calling themselves conservative is largely owing to an increase -- from 30% to 35% -- in the percentage of political independents adopting the label. Over the same period, there was only a slight increase in professed conservatism among Republicans (from 70% to 71%) and no change among Democrats (at 21%).

The 2009 findings come from an aggregate of 21 separate Gallup and USA Today/Gallup surveys, including nearly 22,000 interviews. The 1992 to 2008 trends also represent thousands of interviews compiled for each year. Thus, the margins of sampling error around the individual estimates are less than one percentage point.

Trends of the Past Decade

Just looking at the decade that ended in 2009, Gallup's annual political ideology trends document a slight dip in the percentage of Americans calling themselves moderate (from 40% in 2000 to 36% in 2009), while, at the same time, the ranks of both liberals and conservatives expanded slightly.

Gallup measures political ideology by asking Americans to indicate whether their political views are very conservative, conservative, moderate, liberal, or very liberal. The detailed responses show a slight increase between 2000 and 2009 in the percentage of Americans calling themselves "very conservative" (from 6% to 9%) and less change in the percentage calling themselves "very liberal" (from 4% to 5%). Most conservatives continue to call themselves "conservative" rather than "very conservative," and the same pattern is seen for liberals.

Republicans Become More Solidly "Conservative"

In addition to the very recent increase in conservatism among independents, a growing percentage of Republicans identified themselves as such starting in 2003. Across the same period, the percentage of Democrats calling themselves conservative dipped slightly, somewhat offsetting the increase among Republicans.

Partisans Shy Away From "Moderate" Label

The proportion of independents calling themselves "moderate" held relatively steady in the mid-40s over the last decade, while the proportion of Republican and Democratic moderates dwindled. Between 2000 and 2009, the percentage of moderates fell five percentage points among Democrats (from 44% to 39%) and seven points among Republicans (from 31% to 24%).

Democrats Grow Increasingly "Liberal"

Similar to the increased conservatism among Republicans, there was a gradual increase in the last decade in "liberal" identification among Democrats, from 29% in 2002 to 38% in 2007, and it has since remained at about that level.

The effect of this shift among Democrats is most apparent when one reviews the trend in their ideological profile over the past decade. Whereas moderates constituted the largest bloc of Democrats in 2000, today they are about tied with liberals as twin leaders, and the proportion of conservatives has declined.

By contrast, the expanded number of conservatives making up the Republican Party has merely strengthened the conservatives' already strong hold on that party.

And despite the recent uptick in conservatism among independents, the largest segment continues to be moderate (although by a smaller margin than previously).

Bottom Line

Political independents showed increased attachment to the "conservative" label in 2009, boosting the overall ranks of that group so that it now clearly outnumbers moderates in Gallup's annual averages for the first time since 2004. Longer term, the proportions of Americans calling themselves conservative as well as liberal expanded slightly this past decade, largely because of increased partisan attachment to each label. At the same time, the percentage of "moderates" has dwindled, underscoring the heightened polarization of American politics as the nation heads into a new decade.

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Stuff Some White People Don't Like | The American Prospect

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by Paul Waldman

Back when Barack Obama began his extraordinary quest for the presidency, lots of conservatives -- particularly those prone to wake screaming in the night from visions of Madam President Hillary Clinton -- just couldn't say enough nice things about him. What attracted them most was not his intellect or political skill: It was the way he handled race. Right-wing stalwart William Bennett may have best summed up the feeling when he gushed that Obama "never brings race into it. He never plays the race card. Talk about the black community -- he has taught the black community you don't have to act like Jesse Jackson; you don't have to act like Al Sharpton."

The post-racial honeymoon couldn't last, of course. During the campaign, conservative forces worked overtime to define Obama by his race, from the attacks on his wife as an "angry black woman" (Fox News once referred to her as Barack's "baby mama") to the way they gleefully seized on Jeremiah Wright in an attempt to turn Obama into Black Panther Huey Newton. "It is clear that Senator Obama has disowned his white half. He's decided he's got to go all in on the black side," said Rush Limbaugh, making sure his listeners were not deceived into thinking Obama was anything but a black militant. .

A year and a half later, you might think Obama is some kind of racial King Midas, turning everything he touches into a race-inflected debate. But he's not the one for whom race is so important. There are some people who just can't help seeing this president through race-colored glasses.

Let's be absolutely clear -- many people who dislike the president or his agenda are perfectly comfortable with his race. After all, just under 60 million Americans voted for John McCain, and they did so for many reasons. But it's becoming clear that the presence of a black man in the Oval Office, combined with the increasingly diverse makeup of the American public -- most particularly the growing number of Latinos -- is causing some to not only see terrible threats in things they cared very little about a year ago. It's also causing them to cast aside any pretense of commitment to the basic legitimacy of the American system as it exists today.

The current fight over health-care reform is the arena in which this trend is becoming evident, but the details of that issue are not really motivating the most intense opponents. When you show up at a town hall debate and yell that reform represents "socialized medicine," you just don't know much about socialism (or health care, for that matter). But when you come to that town hall and shout "I want my America back!" through tears, you aren't talking about health care at all.

It is plain that a great many people simply do not believe Barack Obama legitimately occupies the office of president of the United States. Some -- the "birthers" -- think he was really born in Kenya, and benefited from an elaborate conspiracy to falsify documents demonstrating otherwise -- in other words, not American at all. Some have reacted to policies they oppose by reviving a neo-Confederate claim that states don't have to abide by laws passed by the federal government if they don't like them. These are the "tenthers," who believe that the tenth amendment makes virtually everything the federal government does unconstitutional, from Medicare to building interstate highways to regulating airlines. So long as the wrong man's in the White House, that is.

It goes on. When George W. Bush was president, wearing a T-shirt simply saying "Protect our civil liberties" could get you thrown out of a rally and threatened with arrest; today, conservatives come to see the president toting firearms. Talk-show hosts warn darkly that government actions they don't like aren't merely bad policy -- they're totalitarianism. Extremists begin stockpiling weapons in preparation for an imagined government crackdown. When the president plans to tell kids to work hard and stay in school, people on the right complain to school officials and keep their children home, lest the impressionable young ones have to listen to Obama's "socialist indoctrination." And members of Congress decide that shouting out insults during presidential addresses is now within the bounds of decorum.

What all of this has in common is a rejection of the mores of American democracy. There were some things that people on the left and right used to agree on. You might not like it if Congress passes the president's agenda, but the law is the law. You might not like the president himself, but you're not going to make a big stink about it when he does things like pardon turkeys on Thanksgiving or tell kids to study hard and stay in school. You might not want to vote for what the president is arguing for, but if you're a member of Congress you don't heckle him like you're a drunken frat boy in a comedy club.

For all the passion and, at times, anger in our politics, those things used to be true. But not anymore.

It isn't just a random protester here or an obscure blogger there who are showing this rejectionism. The branches of the conservative crazy tree reach much farther into the establishment than anything comparable on the left. There are leftists who think weird things, but they are treated with scorn by Democrats. In contrast, there are members of the United States Congress who believe that President Obama may have forged his birth certificate. Probable 2012 presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty, the governor of Minnesota -- heretofore known as a modern, moderate Republican -- recently started talking about "asserting our tenth amendment rights" to nullify federal laws. Pawlenty was lining up behind a series of Republican politicians, including Texas governor Rick Perry, South Carolina senator Jim DeMint, and Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota. And does anyone think it's an accident that the now-famous Congressman Joe Wilson is a former aide to segregationist Strom Thurmond and a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans who supported keeping the Confederate flag flying over the South Carolina statehouse? And is anyone surprised that what really had Wilson so mad was the prospect that somewhere, an undocumented immigrant might get health coverage? One of Wilson's constituents who recently lost her own coverage explained her misgivings about health reform by saying, "We're without insurance, and I do think some folks should get government health care. But they have to be American."

For the people who appreciate the vigorous pandering of conservative politicians, who believe that Obama has no right to the office he occupies, who are now wielding "Don't Tread On Me" banners as though they were oppressed by a foreign occupier, it's all beginning to make sense. Glenn Beck, who has become the key media figure of the anti-Obama movement, tells them Obama harbors "a deep-seated hatred for white people." They've lost "their" America, the one where a certain distribution of privilege and power was unquestioned. In 2009, being in the political minority isn't just a drag -- it's cause to discard your commitment to the system as we've known it.

During the post-election wrangling of 2000, numerous commentators said that the fact that there weren't tanks in the streets was a tribute to American democracy. In the end, we'd settle the argument through our established institutions, and everyone would respect the results. (Imagine for a moment if Obama had won the way George W. Bush won -- with fewer votes than his opponent, and only through the employment of a combination of ruthless hardball tactics and the intercession of a friendly Supreme Court majority.) That was supposed to be what made us so admirable. It seems like so long ago.

There is nothing we can do to escape tribalism; it is written on every page of human history. As our own society grows more complex and diverse, we become members of multiple overlapping tribes that we use to differentiate ourselves from others. We define "us" and "them" by our age, the place we live, our religious beliefs, our favorite sports, the kind of music we favor, and our taste in various consumer goods, to name but a few.

But there are some things we're all supposed to share, including a willingness to submit to the results of democracy even when we don't like those results. For a growing number of Americans, the presence of a certain kind of person in the White House calls that willingness into question.

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US Commission on Civil Rights Must Be Replaced, Rights Leaders Say

by Hazel Trice Edney NNPA Editor-in-Chief Originally posted 8/10/2009 WASHINGTON (NNPA) – The 52-year-old U. S. Commission on Civil Rights, historically a leading force for overturning racist policies and enacting civil rights laws against Jim Crow segregation, has become obsolete and must be replaced, say civil rights leaders who are moving to make it happen. Largely because of right wing political domination and appointees stacked by the former Bush Administration, rights leaders say the eight-member Commission has done little for civil rights progress lately and over the past several years has done more to turn back the clock. “There should be a new commission. You need a commission because you need a commission to do what it did when it was doing what it was supposed to do, which is look at all these new problems – the old ones and the new ones,” says constitutional law expert Mary Frances Berry, a former member of the commission, who served 11 years as its chair. “Discrimination complaints on the basis of race have increased exponentially at the [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission]. And most of them are found to be valid. This has just happened over the past few years.” Berry, who resigned from the Commission in late 2004, continues, “People are still having problems on their jobs, we’ve still got police - community issues and everything. People are getting shot, every kind of issue you can think of. “The fact that Obama is president doesn’t mean that the issues just went away,” she said in the interview with the NNPA News Service. “It doesn’t matter who the president is. You need an independent watch dog that will investigate and look at civil and human rights issues and try to build consensus and make recommendations, and work to try to get something done.” In her new book, “And Justice for All”, an extensively researched history of the Commission and America’s “continuing struggle for freedom”, Berry says the current commission must be replaced with a U. S. Commission on Civil and Human Rights in order to renew its power against injustice. “The addition of human rights could make clear a concern with the nexus between race, sex, disability, age, national origin, sexual orientation, religious discrimination, poverty and civil liberties concerns,” Berry writes at the conclusion of the 400-page book. “A civil and human rights commission could also monitor U. S. compliance with the international human rights covenants to which we are a party and encourage adoption of those we have not approved.” The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is supposed to be an independent, bi-partisan body that was established by Congress in 1957 under the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It is primarily a fact-finding body that looks into allegations of discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, age, disability or national origin. Berry recalls how the Commission worked with civil rights greats Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, and others to document facts that led to civil rights laws. “The impact of the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights is sort of an overall missing piece of how we got over,” she describes. While civil rights battles raged in the streets, lunch counters and jail cells, the Commission - which still has an advisory committee in each state - would visit communities; using subpoena power to compel both Blacks and Whites to give often shocking testimony about their personal experiences of injustices as well as those that had witnessed. “The commission from that time until the Reagan Administration was a force for trying to make change. They would make recommendations. They worked with everybody,” Berry recalls. Then the Reagan politics began. In 1983, two years after he took office, Reagan fired Berry, Blandina C. Ramirez and Murray Saltzman from the commission after they publicly disagreed with him on his administration’s civil rights policies. “They decided to fire commissioners and appoint those who would be mouth pieces,” Berry said. Rather than accept Reagan’s action, Berry and Ramirez sued and won back their seats after the Federal District Court in Washington, D.C. ruled that the commissioners served as watchdogs. Berry chuckles as she recalls the judge’s comment, “’You can’t fire a watchdog for biting.’” In her 24 years on the Commission, Berry became known for her fights with presidents, including challenges to Jimmy Carter, Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. She resigned from the Commission in late 2004 amidst intense disputes with President Bush and his appointees on the Commission. In the book she states, “President George W. Bush essentially ‘fired’ me.” Now – though she mentions him by name only three times in the book - she’s challenging both President Barack Obama and Congress from the outside. She clearly views his administration as an opportunity to strengthen the Commission and return it to its original mission and purpose. The movement is growing. Laura Murphy, a senior consultant for the Campaign for a New Domestic Human Rights Agenda, a coalition of more than 50 civil rights groups that’s pushing for a new Commission among other causes, says they’re making headway. “The United States has been cited for its failure to end racial profiling, for its failure to end the high rate of incarceration of juveniles. These are the very issues that a reformed and strengthened U. S. Commission on Civil and Human Rights could give attention to,” she says. Murphy, former director of the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office, says the group is in conversation with members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. She says the Obama Administration has also been receptive. “I think we will see hearings before the end of the year,” she said. Currently the Commission has eight members, including six Republicans and two Democrats. A move by Bush in 2004 created the conservative majority. Bush solidified the conservative Commission after two Republicans who had been Republicans when appointed - Russell Redenbaugh (who has since resigned) and Abigail Thernstrom - reregistered as independents. Bush then installed a fifth and sixth Republican. Democratic President Obama will not get an appointment until 2010. And even then he’ll only get one. Meanwhile, divisive issues such as police profiling and misconduct; affirmative action and same-sex marriage are not being dealt with in fact-finding hearings by the Commission, Berry points out. Instead, in recent years, the Commission has been busy opposing civil rights progress, including its opposition to the renewal of the Voting Rights Act, hate crimes laws, and arguing against diversity as a benefit in public education. Other civil rights leaders agree a new Commission is the answer. A recent report issued by The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, led by its President Wade Henderson, says the current Commission is nearly irreparably flawed. “Today, the commission is so debilitated as to be considered moribund. With a new administration, there is the opportunity to take a fresh look at this venerable institution and make the necessary changes to restore it to its former status as the ‘conscience of the nation,’” states the report. The report pushes for an ''entirely new entity that returns to the commission’s original mandate and expands on it to preserve and protect the civil and human rights of all American citizens.” Titled, “Restoring the Conscience of a Nation”, the Report includes the following recommendations which essentially mirror those advocated by Berry: •Creation of a new commission, consisting of seven members. The members would serve four year staggered terms. Each commissioner will be appointed by the president, and be subject to Senate confirmation. •Authorization of the commission to hold hearings across the country to better understand the landscape of equal opportunity involving various regions and protected groups. Based on these hearings, and other information, the commission would have the responsibility to make policy recommendations to the president and Congress. The commission would retain the authority to subpoena witnesses to participate in such hearings. •The name of the commission would be the United States Commission on Civil and Human Rights in order to “reflect the human rights dimension of its work” and “make more explicit its authority to examine U.S. compliance with these international treaties as part of its existing mandate to examine compliance with legal obligations that affect civil rights.”