Beyond Liberal and Conservative: Reassessing the Political Spectrum

I. The Roots of Contemporary Ideologies

Almost everyone finds public opinion and ideology in the United States confusing in some way. All too often analysts explain this confusion by concluding that the public itself is confused. It is the central argument of this book that much of this confusion and misunderstanding stems from a simple fact: The liberal-conservative dichotomy (or even a liberal-moderate-conservative continuum) is inadequate to describe and understand the opinions and behavior of the American public.

The public's use of these labels often does appear to be confusing. People claim for themselves one ideological label, but then either express opinions that seem to contradict that label or vote in ways that appear incompatible with that ideological view. When asked by pollsters to define themselves, many call themselves moderate or middle of the road rather than use either label. In many surveys as many as a third of the people have refused to label themselves at all. We are offered two major parties defined as representing liberal and conservative views, and yet many voters complain that American elections present no real choices. Low voter turnout, split-ticket voting, disenchantment with the major political parties, and continuing alienation from politics and its leaders suggest serious problems between the public and its political system.

The class division on which ideological division historically has been based (the liberalism of the New Deal coalition versus Republican conservatism) no longer has the same meaning it once had and does not adequately explain the political behavior of the citizens. A person's economic standing is no longer a simple predictor of his ideology or voting behavior. As our economy changes from an industrial system to a service economy, the usual description of the occupational basis of ideological divisions between liberals and conservatives (blue collar versus white collar) no longer seems very useful. The accompanying increases in levels of educational attainment, mass media exposure to politics, and general affluence suggest that the class-based politics of liberal versus conservative, the politics as usual of the past, is not a very good description of what the public is thinking or doing ideologically.

Furthermore political candidates often do not fit neatly into either a liberal or conservative mold, and the term moderate does not provide a very clear way to describe them either. Candidates themselves often reject these labels, although rarely do they offer us more informative summaries of their overall point of view. The Democratic party has been ravaged by ideological disputes and seems not quite comfortable with itself whether it nominates traditionalliberal candidates or less ideologically defined leaders. The latter can bring victory at the polls, but no sense of mission to the party. Republicans in recent years have avoided the bitter ideological battles that plagued them for much of the postwar period, but the party still includes major segments discontented with the purely conservative definition of the party in the 1980s. In the last decade voters have avoided presidential elections in ever-increasing numbers. Third parties face serious disadvantages in our system, but an independent candidate in 1980 drew 6 percent of the vote even though he offered little in the way of ideological clarity. New third parties, such as the Libertarian and Citizens parties, have emerged and acquired ballot access more quickly and easily than was possible in the past.

Political journalists, columnists, advisors, and consultants often note these trends, usually suggesting that a new coalition is about to appear or lamenting the lack of party leadership or the leadership's inability to communicate ideological viewpoints effectively. Professional political scientists note these trends as well, but tenq to give them much less attention than they do to details of the current political behavior of the electorate. They chart the behavior of the public without doing much to explain these larger changes. They focus on questions of ideological consistency (holding a collection of opinions clearly definable as liberal or conservative) and the rise in issue voting (voting for a candidate because his or her position on major issues is similar to the voter's own).

Despite all this evidence and discussion of trends, awareness of the limitations of the terms liberal and conservative to describe the public's ideological points of view has not yet produced a systematic alternative or extension of our standard way of defining public belief systems. In this book we offer an alternative.

Existing analyses of ideology in the United States are not so much wrong as they are too narrow. As long as we operate within a framework in which liberal and conservative are the only identifiable or legitimate ideologies, we cannot make much sense of the public's ideological views or their behavior. We propose here a simple but crucial extension of the conceptions of ideology and provide both theoretical and empirical justifications for its use.

One recurring question in the analysis of public opinion and voting concerns the extent to which Americans are or are not ideological. In other words do Americans believe in a set of basic attitudes about politics (such as government should do as much as possible) that gives them a consistent and interrelated set of opinions about political events and issues? The implication is that if this were true, American politics could be understood in terms of the continuing conflict between major ideologies. The usual assumption has been that two possible ideologies form the underlying basis for most conflicts, as well as for our dichotomized political party system. In the 1950s many observers declared the end of ideology, as the level of American affluence rose and many economic issues seemed to be less crucial than they had in the New Deal era. In the 1960s, though, ideological commitment was resurrected to help explain the intensified political conflict of that decade. Then the internal battles of the Democrats in the early 1970s and of the Republicans in the mid-1970s were also explained in ideological terms. More recently political analysts have been concerned with a variety of new ideological phenomena, such as the New Right, the decay of liberalism, and the rise of neoconservatism, neoliberalism, and libertarianism.

Scholars, however, have generally reached one of two major conclusions regarding the ideological nature of the American public. One conclusion is that the public really is not very ideological at all, in that Americans are led by satisfaction, ignorance, apathy, or acquiescence to see political issues as fragmented or disconnected. The other conclusion is that most people can be categorized as ideological in the sense that they have an overall point of view about politics, but only fairly small numbers of people are truly liberal or conservative. The dominant ideology in the postwar era, according to this view, can be defined as moderate, or middle of the road, on most issues, which makes the public appear to be nonideological.

Both of these conclusions are based on analysis that begins by assuming that American political attitudes can be understood only in terms of a liberal-conservative continuum. If Americans are ideological at all, the logic usually goes, they must be either liberal or conservative. If we find that they are not much of either of those, then the only ideological viewpoint that will describe them is something between those two extremes; in other words they are moderate.

It is the central thesis of this book that the single liberal-conservative dichotomy-and the resulting two-way analysis of American politics-is inadequate for understanding belief systems or ideologies in the United States. Rather we think that mass belief systems are better understood if they are analyzed in terms of two separate dimensions-thereby making possible a four-way description of American politics. One dimension is attitude toward government intervention in the economy, and the other is attitude toward the maintenance or expansion of personal freedoms.

Different positions on government involvement in the economy have generally been assumed to be the defining division between liberals and conservatives in contemporary America. However, the extent and nature of government regulation of personal behavior has also been an enduring conflict in American politics. We think that this conflict is both analytically and empirically distinct from conflict over the economic dimension. Other political scientists have recognized these two sets of issues and have surveyed public opinion on both dimensions; in doing so, though, they have still allowed for only two resulting ideological positions, liberal and conservative.

Our analysis uses these two issue dimensions-government economic intervention and expansion of personal freedoms-to define four rather than two ideological categories. We label these liberal, libertarian, populist, and conservative. Specifically the two dimensions combine as shown in figure 1. Liberals support government economic intervention and expansion of personal freedoms; conservatives oppose both. Libertarians support expanded individual freedom but oppose government economic intervention; populists oppose expansion of individual freedom but support government intervention in the economy. These four categories can be justified both theoretically and empirically. This book presents empirical evidence regarding these political attitudes of Americans. In this chapter we develop the theoretical and historical meaning of our four categories and show how they derive from the traditional political thought of the past few centuries.

Figure 1

ISSUE DIMENSIONS AND IDEOLOGICAL CATEGORIES

The Nature and Meaning of Ideology

There is much confusion about the meaning and content of such ideological terms as liberalism and conservatism. There is even controversy over the meaning of the term ideology itself. Even a quick glance at the literature reveals dozens of different specifications of what constitutes an ideology. For our purposes, though, it is useful to think of ideology at two different levels, at the philosophicallevel and at the level of mass belief systems. At the phil-osophicallevel an ideology may be said to be a set of interrelated ideas that purport both to explain how the political and social world works and to prescribe how that world should operate. At this level an ideology includes three elements: (1) a more or less complex, systematic set of normative statements setting forth political and social values; (2) descriptive and analytical statements intended to elaborate on those political values and provide a guide for explaining and evaluating political events; and (3) prescriptions describing desired political, economic, or social conditions. Thus, when viewed at the philosophical level, an ideology involves the elaboration of a world view and of desired processes of political change to reach desired values or goals (Dolbeare and Dolbeare 1971). The purpose of an ideology may be to provide a guide to action, to persuade others, to give legitimacy to a set of social structures, to engender passive acceptance of a set of social-political arrangements, or some mix of these purposes. Ideology thus understood is generally, although by no means exclusively, the province of philosophers and intellectuals. The masses of ordinary citizens seldom articulate an ideology, if ideology is defined solely in these terms.

That ordinary citizens are not philosophers does not necessarily mean their political beliefs are totally devoid of ideology. An analogy to religion may help clarify this point. One does not expect the Christian layperson, for example, to deal with his religious world in the same kind of theoretical language as does the theologian. This does not mean that the layperson is not religious or that he holds no sectarian principles. In his classic work, Political Ideology, Robert Lane recognizes this difference by distinguishing between the 'forensic' ideologies of the conscious ideologist and the 'latent' ideologies of the common man (Lane 1962, p.16).

The ordinary citizen may be largely unaware of or inarticulate about the philosophical underpinnings of his political beliefs, but nonetheless he may have a set of political beliefs and issue positions that are interrelated in a consistent fashion. We do not mean to take this line of reasoning to the other extreme to argue that any set of political attitudes held by an individual is an ideology. While mass beliefs need not be as complex, subtle, and complete as forensic ideologies to be considered ideological, they must have certain characteristics. First, the beliefs must be shared. Although it is possible that a purely individual, idiosyncratic set of beliefs may be ideological, this is neither very interesting nor very important. We are interested in sets of beliefs that are shared by significant numbers of people-and thus have some potential for being relevant to political action or political events. Second, these beliefs must be related to each other in some coherent fashion. Of course this is the crux of the problem. What constitutes a set of beliefs that are coherent or consistent? The answer to this question is often taken as self-evident. The method we use for initially establishing categories of mass belief systems, and for evaluating the coherence of a set of political beliefs, is to draw from the established traditions of Western political thought and philosophy. We are not simply interested in attitudes, but in shared sets of consistent attitudes that, at least in a latent sense, relate to established traditions of political thought.

We do not argue that Americans are political philosophers or that the American public is highly ideological. Philosophical levels of ideology may be seen as highly refined and extended versions of what many ordinary citizens believe. Mass belief systems, on the other hand, can be understood as highly simplified (and sometimes more pragmatic) versions of complex philosophical views of politics. Analysis that begins by looking at two dimensions rather than one, and thereby uses four rather than two ideological categories, shows that a surprisingly large percentage of Americans have opinions on political issues that cohere in a consistent fashion and that can be seen as related to established traditions of Western political thought. The four categories we use here, therefore, are supported both by empirical evidence and by their relationship to traditions of political thought.

The American Experience

It is important to emphasize that this is an analysis of mass belief systems in the United States, and that the study of ideology in the United States involves some unique difficulties. Most of our ideological labels and ideas originate in European thought and history, even though the American and European political experiences are quite different. The two most obvious differences are the absence of a feudal tradition and the presence of the great frontier in the United States. Because we lack a feudal tradition, a European conservatism based on tradition and class privilege did not develop here. Furthermore the great frontier with its seemingly unlimited resources of land and wealth made the classical liberal concept of the independent and self-sufficient individual seem more realistic in the United States than was possible in relatively more developed Europe.

In this setting what is called classical liberalism took root to such an extent that all major ideologies in the United States share liberal assumptions to some degree. As we shall soon discuss, only the libertarians retain these assumptions in their classical form. For the other ideologies classical liberal assumptions are the starting point though they are often modified and reinterpreted. Thus from a global perspective the most striking thing about American thought is the degree of consensus rather than conflict. This consensus is one of the reasons why Americans often think of themselves as nonideological. In the context of consensus, basic assumptions are rarely seriously challenged, so that these assumptions seem natural, not ideological. These assumptions have become so automatic, so given, that they are often taken as self-evident truths rather than as political assumptions. Given the importance of these assumptions, it is useful to examine the basic tenets of classical liberalism as background for our four ideological types. At this point in the discussion, we will use the term liberalism in its classic or historical sense. (Modem liberalism, associated with such symbols as the Democratic party or Franklin D. Roosevelt, while based on classical liberalism, is a significant modification of the classical position.)

Some elements of liberalism may be found in the entire Western tradition, but we can conveniently date the immediate origin of liberalism from 16th-century England and the thought of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and John Locke (1632-1704). Although Hobbes is very important to the development of basic liberal assumptions, the authoritarian conclusions of his major work, Leviathan (1651), place him somewhat outside the later development of liberal thought. On the other hand the foundations of liberalism are more democratically stated (although not without ambiguity) in John Locke's major work, Two Treatises of Government (1689). It is not without justification that Locke is called the father of the U.S.