Netroots lefties

So it’s not that they don’t have a coherent ideology, it’s that they’re not very conscious about their ideology, or I would argue, their political identity.

Not surprising, given that most left of center bloggers set up shop out of frustration with traditional left-of-center groupings, that it would take them a while to solidify their political identity.

A lot of the paper seems to me to be about a pattern that’s been observed elsewhere (say, in readerships of political books as reported through Amazon).

But on this specific disparity, between self-reported political identification and issue-oriented political conviction. Don’t you think that the gap between hot-button preferences and self-description is something interesting in and of itself? Rather than treating this as a kind of revealed-preferences gotcha!, it might be that:

1) The presumption that people arrive at their views on hot-button issues via a coherent ideology which they either conceal or do not recognize that they hold might be wrong; it may be that positions on hot-button issues are clustered for some other reason–say, for example, “culture”, broadly speaking. (e.g., that your feelings on single issues are determined by some sense of habitus in a way that your articulation of a general political philosophy is not)

2) That the hot-button issues are associated with each other as a matter of history, e.g., that they gained an association because of a past ideological case but as the ideology has decomposed (which is reflected in self-descriptions of ideological affiliation), the issues have remained bundled. Sort of like how anticlericism and leftism were intensely bundled together in French politics for a long time even after arguably the specific ideological premise of that bundling had ebbed to some degree.

3) That you’re measuring two different levels of political belief which are often contradictory, but that knowing which level will actually occasion political action at any given moment is difficult to predict–that “overall identification” and “issue identification” are like “quantum physics” and “solid-state physics”, operating at really different levels of the political. After all, you’re looking at “homophiliac” political blogs–overall blogs looking to draw readerships who identify with the general views of the authors. I wonder if this wouldn’t look radically different if the blogs you were looking at were explicitly single-issue driven, and if netroots readers would appear or speak differently when you find them operating in that context.

4) Or, I guess, I’d just say that any time you find a gap in self-representation and behavior, it’s more interesting to ask, “So why do people identify in the way that they do, if it’s not a good description of actual behavior” rather than saying, “The self-description is false, the behavior is true”. One possibility that relates to the debate you guys are reviewing in the paper is that people hold out the possibility of being deliberative as an ideal, but when it gets to specific issues, recognize that the ideal does not exist in actual practice at the moment. It’s a bit game-theoretic: they’d like to be tit-for-tat altruistic in political deliberations, hence the self-description as “centrist” or “open-minded” or “somewhat liberal”. But when it comes to an issue where an actual decision or action is at stake, they recognize that their opponents are not going to play the game with the same principles, and so close down an openness to deliberative politics.

I’m a bit surprised that you are lending such credibility to these “hot button” issues. I think they are essentially manufactured issues, and that’s why you don’t see strong identification with them. I don’t mean to propose some kind of right-wing conspiracy. It’s just that as a consequence of the perverse incentives present in journalism (tell a story that sells, rather than telling the story that matters), issues that draw a strong emotional reaction from opposing and vocal minorities are the ones that get the most attention in the press, and thus emerge as “the issues people care about.” So we have the pro-choice/pro-life polarity, the pro-gay marriage/anti-gay marriage polarity, and so on.

In fact, I think peoples’ choices are much more practical than that, and that’s why you don’t see strong identification on these issues. We’re against the war in Iraq because it’s expensive, even if we’re not against it because it’s immoral. Sure, many of conservative voters would vote for an anti-choice candidate, because they don’t disagree that abortion is immoral, but that’s not *why* they’re voting for the conservative candidate, and it didn’t stop some of them from voting for Obama in this election – if they voted against him, it was because he is too liberal, not because he is pro-choice.

I think it’s this disconnect between what people are reported to take seriously, and what people actually take seriously, that accounts for the statistical anomaly you’re seeing.

“that netroots types didn’t have a coherent ideology”

The netroots is a group of political activists within the Democratic party. Activists are in most cases more radical than the general population. So, unless it was a self-consciously moderate group a la the DLC, it would be very surprising if they didn’t show up far to the left on an absolute left-right scale. In some sense, then, the netroots did have a coherent ideology.

This sense, however, doesn’t capture what most people were aiming for when they observed that the netroots weren’t particularly ideological. Instead, they meant that the netroots didn’t insist on certain positions for a whole set of traditional intra-left disputes. The only issue where orthodoxy was essential was opposition to the Iraq war. Beyond that, squabbling about Afghanistan, free trade, etc, was fine as long as it didn’t get in the way of electing lefty candidates. These issues all had lefties on both sides, so disagreements probably aren’t going to show show up strongly on a left-right scalar spectrum, but they still represent significant ideological incoherence.

Tim’s four alternative explanations for the apparent disparities really exhaust the topic, so I’ll just add my two cents in support of #1 and #2. It is my experience that on both the left and the right, a lot of the specific policy positions taken by many people in response to the “hot button” issues, however defined, are not derived from their considered (and for all any of us know, accurate) self-articulation of their own beliefs, but rather are outliers, inherited from their historical experience and cultural habitus, and grafted (sometimes successfully, sometimes not so much) onto that self-articulation for purposes of coherence and consistency. Not that coherence and consistency are or necessarily should be trump values for everyone, but more often than not I see people trying to put it all together, with–for me at least–humorous results. One of my great delights when I teach political ideologies is explaining to anti-war liberals why so many idiosyncratic conservatives are on their side and actaully seem to have better arguments to boot, or explaining to pro-life conservatives why one of their strongest intellectual resources–Catholic natural law teachings–point towards a near-socialist economy.

I have a problem with notions of ideological coherence that apparently reduce it to statistical clumping. Surely you can’t define a people’s political outlook accurately by merely counting how they vote on a few issues without asking why they vote that way. The Communist Manifesto calls for income tax and universal education. I’m also in favor of these things. So should I be addressed as comrade?

I’m inclined to distinguish lefties and liberals in the following minimalist way. The lefties are hostile to capitalism and would like it to be replaced by some radically different system while the liberals are defenders of capitalism who want to see it reformed. Now it may be that I underestimate the proportion of netroot folks who are leftist in my sense. Maybe the Kossites really are waving the red (or black) flag. I haven’t seen any evidence for that thesis, however.

In the last sentence above strike I think. The footnote says it is.

The problem is that this study doesn’t even engage the left-wing positions. So you take a bunch of really stupid right-wing issues like abortion and the iraq war, throw in global warming and gay marriage. On each of those issues you have the wack-job-right beliefs and sensible positions. In order to guage left-wing affiliation, you need some actual left-wing ideas, like say communism or population control. But simply being against the idiotic policies of the Bush administration doesn’t make you left-leaning.

I’ll begin by admitting I haven’t been able to absorb the whole paper yet due to a cold — I skimmed, but I’m certain I missed things.

As others have noted there’s the question of what counts as left vs. right, and my feeling is there are a lot of people who are solid liberals on Daily Kos etc but relatively few people truly on the left.

I think there’s also an interesting question of who we are as individuals vs. who we are as bloggers, and the relationship between embracing pragmatism in our writing and what we’d actually like to see in the world. Which may be a cop-out or a sell-out or some such, but I think it’s real.

“But I have also seen people (including Kos if I remember correctly) argue for the other too – that not only are the netroots pragmatically partisan (they care more about winning seats than ideological benchmarks) but that they are an alliance of people from quite different ideological perspectives,”

But that was spin. Fairly benign spin, but still spin.

Kos and others wanted to push back against how they were portrayed in DC, so they emphasized how they were different from (sterotypes of) various other lefties. There weren’t any much data, and ideological and centrist are somewhat vague concepts, so I wouldn’t say they were dishonest, but they were spinning.

And it worked to some extent. For example, Bai (who’s fairly dimwitted and easily spun) changed his tune.

Isn’t this just yet another version of ‘The Worlds Smallest Political Quiz’? Particularly when something like:

we look at a scale measuring blogreaders’ attitudes to a number of hot-button political issues such as abortion

is considered a valid question to determine the degree of liberalism/conservatism?

I’m with Yarrow at 2 and Matthew at 17: from what you’ve given, these are terrible questions to use in your measurements. I’d also say from my own observations (of various statistical data, not anecdotal) that the typical ‘moderate’ American is far to the left by these measures. Of course you’re going to see some skew!

Why don’t you actually present each question along with the reasoning that goes along with it explaining why it is a measure of left/right? As Matthew says, being opposed to right-wing idi0cy is not a proxy for liberalism. Indeed, that’s one of those pernicious memes that needs to be actively sought out, staked through the heart, and burned. After which the ashes are scattered to the four winds and a priest of a very strong denomination is brought in to read the exorcism rites.

Henry:”I think that there is an underlying logic to at least some of these objections which is that people feel that it isn’t leftwing to hold the ‘left’ position on these issues, because that position is obviously the sane and moderate position to hold.”
I sense a link here with Timothy’s “But when it comes to an issue where an actual decision or action is at stake, they recognize that their opponents are not going to play the game with the same principles, and so close down an openness to deliberative politics.”
Someone else can carry the ball from here.

I have read posts on objectively far right forums in which the author touts the fact that forum readers come from “all sides of the political spectrum, all walks of life”. Exaggerating your own centrism is a rhetorical feature of political debate in the blogosphere and elsewhere. I’m not sure I see anything surprising in this study.

PS. I like ALL kinds of music. Country AND Western.

About the only interesting information I can discern from those plots is that lefties are far more likely to read righty blogs than vice versa. I really don’t see how you can make any inferences about “centrists” based on them. Maybe there’s more pertinent data in the full study, but if so, why not present it? The middle of that plot doesn’t represent centrism in any real sense, but rather people who go against “orthodoxy” on a handful of issues – Broderite centrism, if you like. That’s not centrism. It’s being left wing on some issues (say, social ones) and right wing on others (say, foreign policy or economics). Ron Paul is not a centrist, but he’d look like one in that study. This is why most useful plots of political ideology have two or more axes.

Rich, what would be some examples of those marker issues of ‘the old left’? And would they be categorized as cultural, political, economic, or something else?

The things my right-wing relations think of as examples of ‘liberalism’ are what I think of as examples of bad historical color; bra-burning feminists in an Oliver Stone biopic, say. I suspect that more than a few of them believe that large bronze peace symbols worn on a leather thong are still de rigeur when liberals meet at their secret liberal headquarters in San Francisco. Now, that may just be a regional thing; Lynyrd Skynyrd still gets daily airplay in Missouri’s Boothill. But otoh, and perhaps not so coincidentally, Limbaugh hails from Cape Girardeau.

I describe myself as left of centre politically, but when asked whether I am liberal or moderate I choose the latter. My college-going son, otoh, calls himself liberal, yet when we both answered a simple questionaire (Washington Post’s “Compass”) we were at exactly the same point i.e. “liberal”. A more detailed questionaire (“Which presidential candidate’s views are closest to yours?”) did separate us – he was closer to Obama whereas I was offered Bill Richardson, even though I never even thought of supporting him.

This comment thread has been a very strange experience, watching a series of people misinterpret the claims being made here and Henry responding to each in turn.

But if you just look at what Henry is starting out with, the whole argument/study/conclusion makes a lot more sense. If we’re trying to answer the question of whether a netroots/MoveOn alliance makes sense, the thing that matters most is the consistency with which netroots bloggers and readers line up on the hot button political issues that MoveOn, etc are pushing.

On the other hand, describing the results as demonstrating that the netroots are strongly and coherently to the left is a claim that is only true in the very limited sense that Harry means it. Normally, I am inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to a researcher to define his terms in whatever way makes the most sense to him especially if he is clear about what he is doing. But there are good reasons for limiting the degree to which this is allowed, and I wonder if the strong reaction here indicates that political scientists spend some time thinking about this issue. After all, I don’t see any reason for them to reinforce the (silly!) idea that the center of US politics is ‘moderate’ in any meaningful sense and I think that’s what might end up happening in the minds of non academic observers.

Henry, I don’t think we’re communicating very well here. You claim that, for example, people on the left think global warming is real, and that one’s opinion on the validity of global warming as a theory can be used to reliably order people on a left/right scale.

I’m sorry, but that makes absolutely no sense. Now, this question might be a good question of relative rightness, but it simply isn’t symmetrical wrt to leftness(the same thing with your ‘hot-button’ issues like abortion: wanting to ban it may be considered a symptom of rightness, but it’s inverse simply does not apply.) So you may think you can use questions to impose some sort of relative ordering. But really, you can’t. Here’s a little gem I picked up first at the science blog list and further explicated at Obsidian Wings: That chimpanzee who severely mauled it’s owner? It seems that in the post-mortem, the Primate Safety Act was finally passed. Which I had known, as I said, from reading the science blog list. What I didn’t know was that, according to Hilzoy, Democrats voted for it 247 – 2, Republicans against it 76-93. Huh? The Captive Primate Safety act was voted along partisan lines? In what universe would something like this be considered a partisan issue decided by ideology? And you’re telling me that you could use responses to the question of whether or not the act was passed to grade people along a left/right continuum?

Combining the two questions together, I could have a hypothetical statement to the effect that various left-leaning blog readers claim that they’re ideologically diverse, but as the questions on global warming and primate safety clearly show, they’re much more homogeneous than they would have others believe. I think we would both agree that you have to vet the questions a little more carefully than that.

Now look again at what other people are saying: ‘I describe myself as left of centre politically, but when asked whether I am liberal or moderate I choose the latter. My college-going son, otoh, calls himself liberal, yet when we both answered a simple questionaire (Washington Post’s “Compass”) we were at exactly the same point i.e. “liberal”.‘ Doesn’t that indicate to you that maybe your test lacks a certain amount of precision? Perhaps in the laudable pursuit of accuracy?

Finally, when you say this:

As mpowell implies, I should have been more careful in saying up front what I meant by ‘left.’ Part of the problem here is one of translating from the more specialized vocabulary of political science (where most people are comfortable with scales of this kind, know what they do and do not tell you etc) into the vernacular of everyday conversation.

It seems that you aren’t really addressing the question of homogeneity as your sample population is using the term at all. Clearly they aren’t using your specialized definition.

Henry: “But it rests on an implicit normative argument, about what is crazy right wing nonsense and what is a reasonable position to take, that I have no business taking as a political scientist.”

The problem with your “I am a political scientist” frame is that there is no such thing as an objective position on politics.

You’ve essentially accepted the beltway consensus about our political spectrum, when part of what’s shaping these things is just how skewed the beltway consensus is. Movement conservatives have invited just about every useful right-wing idiot into the coalition and insisted that we take them seriously by jaming their opinions down our throats on right-wing financed media, so a place at the table is available for nearly every wingnut position on the right that can garner a significant percent of the populace in favor of it. You have to get to the David Dukes before you can’t assume your issues will be discussed in the NYT or in congress.

But on the left, pretty much anything to the left of the median democratic position is considered off the table, crazy, unacceptable and unworthy of debate outside of the netroots. This, even when some of these positions actually have the support of a majority of voters, not merely more support than many right wing positions that won’t come off he GOP platform until you pry it from their cold, dead hands.

It’s no surprise that according to a set of mainstream debated talking points, democrats are more ideologically coherent than republicans. There simply aren’t any sane people who would ever adopt many of the movement conservative positions, while every last one of the standard “left” positions is at least reasonable.

There is no real problem with your paper as political science research, and I think you are mistaking the nature of people’s criticism. There is a *real* problem with your paper as a public document that makes little attempt to dispel the obvious misinterpretation that readers of left-reading blogs are farther left than readers of right wing blogs are right. No matter how many times you try to say otherwise, the labeling you have chosen for your graphs is basically saying *that*.

This is also, in my opinion responsible for the difference in labeling versus response to your study. I’m pretty sure most of the people who identified as centrist or center-left did so because they regard the position you classify as “left” to be centrist positions, and reject the beltway bipartisanship fetish which holds that even though most of your current republican politicians are voting like john birchers or brownshirts, you have to average the democratic and republican positions to find the “center”.

That’s the very media consensus that has allowed the crazies and kleptocrats to take over the republican party and mostly get away with it. You are getting so much pushback on this because a defining feature of the netroots is a motivated centrism that is *against* the very consensus of what we are supposed to be debating that you are taking for granted (and so, implicitly supporting) in your analysis.

As with so many discussions on this site, what we have here is another example of the way that disciplinarity trumps simple reason. Those of us who aren’t Masons and don’t feel the need to give the secret handshake at every available opportunity look at the distribution of opinion on the web using a traditional set of categories that reflects historical experience instead of some dubious statistical woo.

It’s nutty to call most of the folks one encounters on netroot sites leftists because doing do leaves us with no term for the real leftists that do in fact exist. There are people who dream of revolutionary change and aren’t shy about promoting the radical transformation of the economic, political, and social systems of the U.S. This attitude contrast sharply with the specific positions and rhetoric of most contributors to Kos or Eschaton. Defending traditional civil rights and constitutional government are liberal rather than leftist activities.

If you could put methodologies on trial for war crimes, I don’t see how survey sampling could evade the noose.

What is becoming increasingly clear to me is that a lot (most?) of this is being driven by angst about being described as on the left…. Speaking in terms of the everyday meaning of the language, Kos type people are clearly on the left. Liberals are on the left. This doesn’t mean that they’re social democrats, let alone sekrit Communists. But they are to the left of the average American. This is a feature, not a bug. Repeat after me. There is nothing wrong with being on the left. It’s the good place to be.

I think this is a vocabulary problem; not one I can really straighten out, but I can at least gesture at it. I use the word left and leftist pretty much like you appear to, as a direction on a scale: as a Democratic voter, I’m on the left; Hillary Clinton is to the left of Olympia Snow; and so on. The fact that Hillary Clinton is pretty centrist doesn’t make describing her as ‘on the left’ rather than ‘on the right’ incoherent. But there’s a not uncommon usage of ‘left’ and ‘leftist’ as identifying a particular position on that scale, very far from the center; people who are left of center but not that far from the center are liberals, and describing them as leftist is simply wrong, kind of the way that calling a conservative a libertarian would be wrong. (I’m not describing this usage perfectly, because it’s not the way I naturally use the terms. But I’ve run into it.)

I think what you’re seeing as angst is an attempt to correct your usage: blogreaders aren’t leftists, mostly, they’re merely liberals. If they were real leftists, they’d be much more active or ideological or something than they are in practice.

I don’t have a problem with the characterization of “Left”, but I do question that of “coherence”, which to me suggests a strong logical link, not just a correlation. I think we’ve discussed before in this forum that being pro-choice and anti-Iraq war were strongly correlated positions, though there is no logical necessity that this be so (one could construct links, but one could also make counter-arguments). I would say, then, that someone who embraces the set of Left or Right positions as a whole rather than combining them is ideologically consistent, but not necessarily coherent. In fact, I think neither of these sets currently are very coherent, for partly different reasons. However, if they are not coherent, there is that much more reason to explain the consistency.

If I care strongly about drastic economic inequality, Sandra about abortion, Kalia about civil liberties, and Dmitri about the political abuse of science strongly enough to become politically engaged, at least to the point of venting on blogs, we can all be more effective if we form a coalition. We will do this most effectively if we agree about each other’s issues. This agreement will be most effective if it is “sincere”; that is, if we actually and probably subconscious adopt one another’s views, rather than simply pretending to do so. We have all been through the evolutionary arms race between deceivers and deceived after all. Even talking to one another creates pressure for conformity, as dissension will usually have some social or psychological cost. For example, I recently agreed with the Republicans that the final version of the Stimulus bill should have had 48 hours of review before signing; I believe Obama campaigned on that, it was why Feingold voted against the Patriot Act, etc. The only counterargument I could see was that Obama had to meet his arbitrary and self-imposed President’s Day deadline, which seemed to me very weak. But taking this position meant I had to argue alongside people I regarded as trolls and idiots against people I respected: never a pleasant thing. It would have been easier to be “coherent” if less coherent in terms of my actual beliefs.

PS, by “here” in the last paragraph above, I mean in the blogosphere, not necessarily on this particular blog, thought that may apply too.

I think you are arguing something like the following. On most of these issues, there is a non-crazy position and a crazy position. People answering these questions, and ending up on the left on our scale, are really all just taking the non-crazy position, while the batshit right wingers over there are taking the crazy one. Therefore, all we can say is that the people who appear to be on the far left pole are non-crazy, not that they are genuinely left wing or ideologically coherent.

No, this is not what I am saying. Go back to where I described a lot of people who formerly approved of the invasion of Iraq. They’re moderates – and always have been. Well then, why the reversal of positions? In a word, pragmatic considerations. Prior to the war, they were told that invasion would be cheap and easy (we’ll be greeted as liberators!), and that if this wasn’t done, the Evildoer would nuke Pocatello, or Laramie, or Cedar Rapids, or maybe Branson. Besides which, said Evildoer was responsible for 9/11. Of course, post- invasion, it comes out that there were no WMD’s, that far from being a cakewalk, occupation is money and manpower intensive, and according to our trusted news outlets, Saddam wasn’t responsible for 9/11 after all. Not a big surprise that the average voter changed their opinions about the invasion. Also not a surprise – the big difference between the netroots and the average citizen was that the DFH new all this beforehand; the unwashed masses only being clued in afterwards.

Do you see how this will affect the results of your survey? And how this applies to vast range of issues? Joe Median will vote according to the information he has available, his political proclivities notwithstanding. Indeed, what distinguishes the far right in this respect is that additional information does not matter. Global Warming is made-up science. Saddam really was a ‘gathering threat’, etc. Despite impartial information to the contrary. So, your homogenization of opinion on certain issues might very reflect nothing more than being possessed of a certain minimal amount of information.

I don’t claim that this is only one consideration that has been neglected, btw, or even the most important. I am saying that I don’t see anywhere in your paper where you’ve accounted for these sorts of issues.

But if you want to look at this in relative terms, which is what our data tells us about, then the ‘crazy’ (inverted commas deliberate – I am still wearing my pol-sci hat here) is widely distributed. The median American voter is a mix of ‘crazy and ‘non-crazy’ positions.

Wearing my stat hat, I think that there is some confusion here – there is a difference between the ‘median’ opinion, and the opinion of the random median voter. In fact, the median opinion on a variety of issues is pretty well known, and is moderate to liberal. This does not conflict your claim that the median voter is a mix of different ostensibly left/right opinions; it merely means that, say, one person could be firmly anti-gun control and also believe that global warming is a real phenomenon. To put it another way, statistically, the ‘average person’ is a myth. Nor does the distribution of opinion necessarily reflect a grab-bag of ideological opinion; it could quite easily instead be the result of a mix of information, some highly partisan, some not.

So the point here is that the median left-blog reader is quite different from the median American citizen – he or she is not close to the central set of positions on these (and I would strongly predict, other) issues. And that is a pretty important difference. You may argue that the ‘leftwing’ position on this is the moderate position, properly considered. And that is a perfectly legitimate claim. But it rests on an implicit normative argument, about what is crazy right wing nonsense and what is a reasonable position to take, that I have no business taking as a political scientist. When I am writing as a blogger, it is a different matter of course, and I do allow myself strong opinions as demonstrated by ample empirical evidence.

.

Again. Please. Read what I actually write; I said quite plainly up above that the ‘moderate’ or middle position was defined by majority opinion over time on various issues. I made no attempt at a normative argument at all.

To put it a different way – there is a lot of variation both among American voters and American politicians on limited scales such as this one, and on more detailed instruments too. Political scientists want to capture this variation, using statistical instruments, and argue that it provides us with some insight at least into where people’s positions rank in relative left-to-right terms (or in two dimensional issue spaces, but that is another world of hurt). This has clear limitations, as discussed above. But it does provide us with useful knowledge. This knowledge may not map well onto your sense of what is sensible, plausible moderation, and what is not, but that is not what these instruments are suppose to do. They don’t try to capture what is ‘sensible’ or what is ‘reasonable’ (given that nearly everyone believes themselves to be sensible and reasonable no matter how far out they are, this would be a heroic claim). Instead, they try to capture the underlying logic of observed substantial variation in the positions American citizens, activists and voters take on various political issues.

Hey, I’m all for doing good science myself. And no, what you attribute to me up above? That is not what I am thinking or what I had said before. Really, you’ve got to actually read what I write. Let me say this again – your tools appear to be defective. They don’t measure what you think they are measuring. They have both range and bias issues.

How did you happen to select these particular questions anyway?

Now that gender’s been officially introduced to the thread, might I suggest the vocabulary may be causing some of the the problem, if not most of it, by forcing the fit of far too much that doesn’t, can’t, and won’t ever.
Male/female gender distribution appears to be linear, as it has only two points. For a lot of people there’s hardly any distribution toward the middle of that linear graph. Men are men, women are women. Anyone who doesn’t actively take up the role of their biologically-assigned gender is a freak. This attitude is fading into obscurity, somewhat.
Experience, and science, says that real gender distribution clustered at the ends of the poalrity, and in fact isn’t linear at all.
Trying to make it so does two things:
It confirms a polarity that doesn’t really exist for those whose insecurities are assuaged by it. As in I’ve got an exterior package therefore I’m a man, I’ve got boobs and an interior package therefore I’m a woman.
But it leaves those who don’t fit comfortably in either distinct category feeling undefined, incomplete, or left out etc.
Real gender distribution is diamond-shaped, not linear.
Some people who don’t fit the polarity stereotypes have pronounced mixed gender characteristics, lots female lots of male, but some have none. There’s as much difference between those two groups in the center as between those with pronounced male and pronounced female characteristics at the ends.
The categories exist before self-identification or experience can refute them, which can get problematic and marginalizing for the extremes in the middle of the line, who are not in the middle of anything really.
Shoehorning people into inadequate gender categories isn’t that different from shoehorning people into inadequate political categories.
And it just may be more accurate to think of the spread in both instances as 3-dimensional not 2-, with a lot more points of polarity, but I don’t have the vocabulary or imagination to describe what that might look like.

ScentOfViolets – there is something fundamental I am not getting about your underlying claim, so I will abstain from further argument. The questions were a part of a collaborative survey instrument that others came up with – as noted above, they were chosen to make them roughly comparable with Congressional vote data.

I’ll try to think of a better example. Meanwhile – to repeat my other statement – how do you get that ‘moderate’ voters aren’t really liberal or left-of-center? I call myself a moderate for the good and sufficient reason that my opinions on a number of subjects match the opinions of the general public. So it seems that my definition agrees yours when it comes to relative placements along a left/right axis.

Like most people, I don’t favor criminalizing abortion – a moderate position.

Like most people, I am against school vouchers – a moderate position.

Like most people, I am against the current occupation of Iraq – a moderate position.

Like most people, I believe that global warming is a real phenomenon – a moderate position. [1]

And so on and so forth. And yet, you claim that public opinion is nowhere near that ‘liberal’. What is the source of this discrepency? Is this a matter of asking the right questions in the right way? Because a lot of this seems pretty straightforward, for example the CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll that asked this question:

“With respect to the abortion issue, would you consider yourself to be pro-choice or pro-life?”

Am I making a suspect statement when I claim that not wanting to criminalize abortion is a moderate position when the figures to the above question came back: pro-choice 53%, pro-life 44%? This is why I am rather disgusted with attempts frame the above positions as ‘liberal’ rather than ‘moderate’, btw. It has a lot less to do with partisanship, and a lot more to do with accuracy. It smacks of a rather nasty technique being used to thwart the will of the people. It is, in short, undemocratic.

[1] Let’s look at that last, since it illustrates what I was trying to say earlier:

Executive Summary

Overall, a large majority of the American public is personally convinced that global warming is happening (71%). Surprisingly, however, only 48 percent believe that there is consensus among the scientific community, while 40 percent of Americans still believe there is a lot of disagreement among scientists over whether global warming is occurring.

Sigh. Henry, I think you’ve jumped the shark. You originally said this:

But – and this is key – this ‘left’ and ‘right’ don’t measure absolutes – they are relative terms. It plausibly makes sense to say that someone who is pro-choice anti-Iraq war and was against Bush’s tax cuts is more ‘leftwing’ than someone who is pro choice and anti-war, but favored the tax cuts, and that this person is more leftwing than someone who is anti-choice, pro-war, and liked the cuts. So you can make useful relative judgments. But you can’t and shouldn’t simply map these relative judgments onto absolute notions of whether someone is ‘far left’ or ‘far right. Furthermore, these relative notions of ‘left,’ ‘right’ and ‘center’ have no systematic relationship whatsoever with sensible moderation of the kind that ScentOfViolets is interested in.

And I have told you – what? – three or four or five times now that when I say ‘moderate’, I mean what the majority of the population thinks on a given issue. Not what you keep attributing to me. Like this:

I call myself a moderate for the good and sufficient reason that my opinions on a number of subjects match the opinions of the general public. So it seems that my definition agrees yours when it comes to relative placements along a left/right axis.

or this:

Let me elaborate on what I mean by ‘moderate’ – it’s the median or majority opinion of the electorate over time on a variety of actions and issues.

And yet, you say:

And I think that a lot of the confusion springs from a confusion between two different uses of the term moderate. You would like moderate to mean something like ‘sensible, prepared to accept valid evidence and change their views accordingly.’ And that is a common language use of the term which is perfectly fine. But it shouldn’t be confused with another common language use of the term – people who are moderate in the sense that they are close to the median.

When I encounter this level of refusal to read what is clearly stated multiple times, I’ve got to wonder just how wedded the individual is to an idea. And I just had an entire post about what I’ve bolded, with cites.

Now, until you can actually admit that you were wrong, that I’m using this word in exactly the same way you are, I really don’t see why I should continue this conversation. I’m not going to spend any more energy responding to someone who doesn’t bother to read what I write, who prefers to manufacture my position for me rather than answer substantively.

Henry, I quoted myself, giving an explicit definition. More than once. You ignored it. More than once. End of story. Y0u got no leg to stand on here. Nor does what you quote back up your claim that I’m using more than one definition; I certainly don’t see how ‘Thinking that global warming is a real phenomena does not make one a liberal.‘ is using another definition when in fact, the majority of the populace do indeed think global warming is a real phenomena. (I’ll also not that – gasp – having a ‘reasonable’ opinion and having the opinion of the majority agree with don’t necessarily conflict. Strange, I know, but true.) So you can’t claim that you were confused by definitions that were at cross-purposes.

And with that, since you obviously have no intention of admitting you made a gross mistake, more than once, which everyone can see for themselves, I think we’re quite, quite through here. You do realize of course that the way you have conducted yourself here will influence people’s opinions of what you post in the future. Especially given the fact that you’ve admonished others to read what you write rather than attribute to you the positions they wish to challenge. There’s a word for that, starts with an ‘H’ . . .

“Sorry – no. And if you really think that this is what this is about, you’re on crack. Read the fucking discussion. Try to find one place, just one place where I even hint that the center of this distribution is the right and appropriate place to be, and that there is something wrong with being on the left side of this distribution.”

That isn’t what I meant.

I don’t know what your exact political positions are, but everything I’ve read from you here and in the past suggests that you are crammed over on the left side of your graph like almost everyone else who’s worth reading for information (as opposed to enemy tracking).

The point is that your graph and the decisions you made to create it, has a rhetorical effect, whether you intended it or not. And whether or not those questions were the right choice for the problem you were trying to address as a researcher.

That rhetorical effect is to implicitly accept the beltway frame about where the edges of debate are.

Can you not see that at first glance, this picture is not saying “readers of left blogs mostly follow a coherent set of positions” but instead “readers of left blogs are almost all at the far left of the spectrum, while readers of right blogs stretch evenly from moderate to right wing”? Clearly your full text does not support that interpretation, but because of the labels you’ve chosen, it’s what the picture says to anyone who doesn’t read the whole thing.

It looks just like something some right-wing hack would link to as “evidence” that left bloggers are a bunch of radical DFHs. That would intellectually dishonest, of course, but it wouldn’t matter. It would be effective, because the picture’s false apparent claim takes 2 seconds to comprehend, while comprehending the real claim requires reading the paper and a modicum of social science familiarity.

And having read more, and knowing what you are really saying, I still can’t look at your graph without having to consciously ignore the obvious visual interpretation.

I don’t think you are David Brooks, I just think you didn’t consider what the public result of this graph would be, and you seem to be arguing here as if that public result is irrelevant.

I’m pretty sure that’s why you are taking so much flack in this thread.