I know it’s hard to lose election after election, but do you guys really think the country is politically “conservative” just because we’re not all out there stealing and murdering to our hearts’ content? What about actual policies? How do you reconcile this “center-right” majority with public support for “liberal” programs like Medicare and Social Security? Even Republican pollsters admit that the public wouldn’t mind greater government involvement in controlling healthcare costs.

Sincerely,

Joe V., Eagle Scout  

Hello again. This week the editors at Salon have asked me to address how it can be, as Joe V. said in his question and as many of you asked in your letters and comments on last week’s column, that conservatives continue to believe America is a center-right country.

I have to confess it was a little surprising that this idea made so many of you so angry — but I won’t be surprised to see that anger repeated in my response to this week’s column. Conservatives do not believe this is a right-wing country; only that it is governed by center-right values, not center-left or liberal ones — at least not “liberal” in the Barack Obama/Nancy Pelosi sense of the word.

More than a few of you were outraged by the idea that values like family and work should be considered center-right values when you yourselves believe in them and you consider yourselves liberal.

But consider “family.” Is it conservatives or liberals who are engaged in an effort to expand or even rewrite the definition of what constitutes a family?

When it comes to work, who was it who opposed the Clinton-era “Welfare to Work” law as being unfair and punitive by requiring able-bodied men and women on welfare to get a job? It wasn’t conservatives. And, as we can see from recent as well as historical polling data, these are positions supported by a majority of the country.

In June, a survey from the Gallup Organization showed that 40 percent of Americans interviewed described themselves as “conservative.” Another 35 percent said they were “moderate” while 21 percent said they were “liberal.”

Conservatives, despite the results of the last two national elections, outnumber liberals by 2-to-1. If you add the moderates into one of the two camps by the same 2-to-1 ratio, the conservative position is easily the majority.

This is not new, although the split is slightly more pronounced. Gallup analysts said the new figures are little changed from data collected over the past decade but “the nation appears to be slightly more polarized than it was in the early 1990s.”

“Compared with the 1992-1994 period, the percentage of moderates has declined from 42 percent to 35 percent, while the percentages of conservatives and liberals are up slightly — from 38 percent to 40 percent for conservatives and a larger 17 percent to 21 percent movement for liberals,” Gallup said.

Let’s look at this idea a little deeper by examining a few issues.

According to a survey by the polling firm known as the polling company/WomanTrend, more than two-thirds of the electorate would prefer to see judges nominated to the federal bench who exhibit a conservative philosophy than a liberal one.

“Two-in-three actual voters in 2008 would prefer that the president nominate judges and justices who believe that their roles as judges ‘is solely to evaluate whether a law or lower court ruling is in line with the constitution’ rather than those who believe that ‘their roles as judges is not simply to review the law as it is written and not take into account their own viewpoints and experiences,’” the firm found.

They also discovered that 87 percent of American adults believe it is appropriate for government to make sure U.S. healthcare providers are not forced to participate in “procedures and practices to which they have moral objections.” To review the bidding, that is the Bush administration position, one that Obama pulled back in his first days in office to curry favor with pro-abortion rights groups.

In April the Pew Research Center found that 57 percent of American adults believe that “when something is run by government, it is usually inefficient and wasteful,” and that 55 percent of Americans believe that “the federal government controls too much of our daily lives.”

According to a June 2009 ABC News/Washington Post poll, 54 percent of American adults would prefer a smaller government with fewer services (the conservative position) than the 41 percent who preferred one that is larger with more services (the liberal position). To go further, surveys show substantial support for such “conservative ideas” as English as the official language of government, ending government preferences based on race, and reasonable limits on abortion.

This includes the 93 percent who, in one recent poll, rejected the idea that abortions should be permitted “at any time during a woman’s pregnancy and for any reason.” In fact Gallup now shows that, for the first time, 51 percent of Americans — do I need to say this constitutes a majority? — said they were “pro-life” rather than “pro-choice.”

These are all dominant issues in America’s political life, issues that command national attention with some intensity. Admittedly, polls are snapshots of opinions in time. It’s certainly possible to find equally reputable pollsters who can produce data that shows something else, but what about when people vote, “the only poll that counts,” as someone once said.

Looking at it this way, where issues are on the ballot rather than candidates — when actual positions on policy are not obscured by political personalities and partisan preference — there is still plenty of evidence the center-right position usually prevails.

When government spending and revenues are out of balance the liberal position is almost always to increase revenues by raising taxes. In California, which Barack Obama carried in 2008 with 61 percent of the vote, a recent statewide ballot measure to raise taxes to balance the budget was defeated with 64 percent of the vote.

More than that, it failed to win a majority of the vote in a single county in what is the nation’s most populous state. This is the same state where voters have twice approved ballot measures to prevent recognition of an expanded definition of marriage as something more than being between a man and a woman.

America is neither a liberal nor a conservative country, but conservatives believe it skews to the right. From a political standpoint, conservatism as a political force is much where it was after 1964, 1976 and 1992, when the Johnson, Carter and Clinton presidential victories had most pundits believing the country had lurched off its traditional ideological axis. But those elections were followed by the conservative victories of 1966, 1978, 1980, 1994 and 2000 as the country’s traditional alignment reasserted itself.

I hope that helps. 

If I may paraphrase the question, Rachel wants me to explain why conservatives who talk about the importance of traditional values often fail to live up to those values in their personal lives and why other conservatives are often willing to turn a blind eye to those indiscretions.

First of all, I’m not sure it is the case that most conservatives are willing to overlook personal indiscretions like infidelity when considering whom to vote for. Whether or not Newt Gingrich runs for president in 2012 — and it is not at all clear that he is running — he has to be prepared to explain to a certain portion of the GOP primary electorate why the fact that he is a twice-divorced, thrice-married man does not automatically eliminate him from consideration as a serious candidate. There are a number of people out there who, I am almost certain, would not vote for him under any circumstances because of it.

The United States remains a center-right country composed of people who believe in center-right values, like family, hard work and honesty. But also in forgiveness — which is why the public apology from those in positions of authority who have crossed lines that seemingly could not be crossed often survive — but only when those failings are a matter of personal behavior rather than public trust.

Rachel is right in that the examples she cites create the opportunity for liberals to scream “Gotcha” at the top of their lungs. Not that this advances the debate any — but I bet it makes you feel good. I have to admit you have a point, though I am not at all certain I would categorize the senators she mentions as she does. Ensign and Vitter, in particular, are thought of as much more traditional Republicans than social conservatives. I don’t think they should have to resign because they were unfaithful to their spouses; and it’s up to the voters in their respective states whether or not they should be reelected. But if walking the talk is the standard we should set for our elected officials, let me ask a few questions of you in that same regard.

Should Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., resign his seat in the House of Representatives? After all, McDermott was one of those who opposed the Bush administration’s program to listen in on the international phone conversations of suspected terrorists. But this is the same McDermott who, when presented with an illegally recorded conversation of Republican House members discussing the Gingrich ethics investigation, turned that tape over to the media. I think it is fair to say that, in this case, McDermott failed to walk the talk.

Should Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., have to resign his seat in the U.S. Senate because he accepted the Reagan and Bush tax cuts that he railed against? Or should Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., have to resign his seat because his acceptance of a shotgun as a gift during the 2004 presidential campaign violated several of the gun control measures he himself had co-sponsored? Or should Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., resign his seat because he, despite having voted for civil rights legislation, was once a member of the Ku Klux Klan?

The “Gotcha” formula can be easily applied to almost any issue you can name. I think it is true that the vast majority of those conservatives serving in elective office can be considered people who “walk the talk.” But in an age where the politics of personal destruction remains an electoral tactic utilized to extremes by both liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, the ones who slip up are going to be the ones who get all the attention. And not undeservedly so.

I hope that helps.

I know this is going to provoke a heated response from a lot of people who read this column, so let me begin by saying that I, and every conservative I know, condemn the murders of Tiller, Pittsburgh police officers Paul Sciullo II, Eric Kelly and Stephen Mayhle, and Holocaust Museum guard Stephen Johns.

There is no reason, no excuse, nothing that can be said or written that would justify these senseless acts.

As to whether there is a connection between these acts and Obama’s election, I can only say that conservatives certainly do not believe there is.

I know there are statistics floating around the Internet purporting to show that violence and threats against abortionists have increased since Obama’s election. As one writer put it, Obama’s election was followed by the murder of an abortionist just as Clinton’s election was — while there were none during the just-concluded Bush administration. But I think this is much more coincidence than proof of cause and effect.

It may be true that Obama’s election has emboldened some of those called white supremacists — like Richard Poplawski, who stands accused of shooting and killing the three Pittsburgh police officers, and James von Brunn, who was arrested and charged with shooting Stephen Jones. These are, self-evidently, dangerous people.

It can be argued — and I suspect it will be by those of you who read this column and post comments — that their movement is potentially dangerous, just as any movement that teaches the superiority of a single ethnic, racial or religious group over all others may be, whether it is the Ku Klux Klan or the New Black Panther Party. But taking the potentiality of that danger as an excuse for the state to act to repress these organizations and individuals comes into direct conflict with the First Amendment’s guarantee that people are allowed to think what they like and that like-minded people are free to assemble and to share their ideas with others.

This is one reason for the conservative outrage over the shoddy report on so-called right-wing extremism released by the Department of Homeland Security in the early days of the Obama administration.

That report attempted, using loose language, to connect religious and racial hate groups to “those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely,” singling out antiabortion activists — without clarification — gun owners, immigration opponents and returning veterans.

It was an exercise in profiling, which we all know to be wrong. And which is probably why the report was withdrawn so DHS could rewrite it, as Secretary Janet Napolitano told the House Homeland Security Committee in May when she admitted, “The wheels came off the wagon because the vetting process was not followed” and that “an employee sent it out without authorization.”

If, however, anyone is actively engaged in a conspiracy to violate the laws of this country and to do violence against its citizens, the conservative response is to arrest the conspirators, charge them, give them a fair trial in front of a jury of their peers and, if they’re convicted, to jail them for a very long time. And in this sense, conservatives think there is a very real difference with those on the left who, they would argue, have turned people who have committed perceived acts of violence against the state into pseudo-folk heroes.

William Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, who were members of the terrorist Weather Underground in the 1960s, are now held up as positive role models. Their bomb-setting past is dismissed as something on the order of youthful indiscretions, unworthy of discussion.

Mumia Abu-Jamal, the Black Panther who was sentenced to death after having been found guilty of the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, is another example. Although his death sentence was set aside due to irregularities in the sentencing process, his conviction has not been overturned — yet he has become a global celebrity who has been made “an honorary citizen” of cities around the world including Paris, Montreal and Palermo and whose radio commentaries were broadcast over the Pacifica radio network.

And then there is Leonard Peltier, the American Indian activist who was sentenced to two consecutive life terms following the 1975 cold-blooded murder of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. In 2004 the tiny left-wing California-based Peace and Freedom Party selected him as its presidential candidate. He got 27,607 votes.

These people and their causes have been embraced by the left, even by some mainstream liberals. I know some of you will point to G. Gordon Liddy as an example of a former felon whom conservatives have embraced, but a) his crimes were nonviolent, and b) he served his time in prison. And there weren’t any “Free Eric Rudolph” T-shirts in evidence at the last large conservative gathering I attended.

I hope that helps.

Thanks for your answer,

Peggy

Hello again. It’s good to be back with you.

The strong language — and, one can assume, the level of anger that language represents — used in the replies to last week’s column about Ronald Reagan was, to put it mildly, surprising. I would have thought the passage of time might have taken the edge off a bit. I guess not.

This week Peggy wants to know why conservatives are “REALLY” opposed to the confirmation of 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court. This assumes, of course, that the stated concerns many have voiced are somehow disingenuous, that they are not reflective of what they are really thinking, and that there is a hidden agenda at work.

There isn’t. Judge Sotomayor has demonstrated that she is a liberal, activist judge and, as such, conservatives are reflexively opposed to her appointment — just as liberals automatically come out against the nomination of a strict constructionist anytime a vacancy occurs on the Supreme Court.

There are voices on the right who have strongly criticized Sotomayor before all the evidence is in. But to their credit, the Republicans in the U.S. Senate — and their “votes” are really the only ones that count — have been remarkably measured in their response.

After she was nominated, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said, “Senate Republicans will treat Judge Sotomayor fairly. But we will thoroughly examine her record to ensure she understands that the role of a jurist in our democracy is to apply the law even-handedly, despite their own feelings or personal or political preferences.” To this point, I think it is fair to say that Republican senators have kept their word.

It is true, however, that a number of conservative groups have come out strongly in opposition to her confirmation. Part of that is, as I said earlier, reflexive. But, and I think it fair to say that the examination of her record is still in the early stages, there are real issues of concern regarding her temperament and her attitude toward her job.

There is, for example, her now widely discussed statement in a 2002 Berkeley La Raza Law Review that “a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion that a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

Conservatives reading that come away with a real concern that her attitudes about equal justice may depend, or at least be shaped by, the race and gender of the parties involved in the cases before her. As conservative commentator Leslie Sanchez said recently on CNN, “The Constitution doesn’t guarantee equal for some or equal justice for the disadvantaged; it guarantees equal justice for all.”

So it is more than fair to ask what her understanding is of the job of a Supreme Court justice. Is it to interpret the Constitution in a way that is constrained by what it actually says and by precedent? Or is it to evaluate each case alone, on its own merits but in a interpretive way, one that is shaped by her personal feelings, her background and her politics more than by the language of the nation’s highest laws and a desire to achieve outcomes that are “fair” rather than constitutional? One would hope they would always be both, but fairness is a subjective standard. Constitutionality is not, or at least shouldn’t be.

There are plenty of individual cases and opinions that cause conservatives to question how she will rule as a high court justice and, therefore, to oppose her nomination.

There is Ricci v. DeStefano, a racial discrimination case in which she joined a 2nd Circuit opinion supporting the decision by the city of New Haven, Conn., to throw out the results of promotion exam for firefighters because the only applicants who qualified for promotion were white or Hispanic. The current Supreme Court is considering Ricci v. DeStefano.

And there is the case of Maloney v. Cuomo, in which she was part of a three-judge panel that ruled the Second Amendment affects only federal law, not state or local law. This is an issue that is almost certain to come before the high court in the next year or so, coming on the heels of D.C. v. Heller, in which the court held the right to bear arms is an individual right. The court’s decision threw the whole idea of restrictive-gun bans, from the standpoint of constitutionality, into question.

It is the concern about cases such as these, how she ruled and why, that are driving the conservative opposition to her nomination. Conservatives are not in opposition because she is Hispanic. Remember: The Republicans in the Senate and conservatives across the country went to war, in the political sense, after Senate Democrats used the filibuster for the first time to keep President George W. Bush’s 2001 nomination of Miguel Estrada — who received a unanimous “well-qualified” rating from the American Bar Association — to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from coming to the floor for a vote.

When you look at the record, it was President Obama and the White House that made Sotomayor’s nomination about her race and sex. It was the White House that couched her nomination in terms of her life story and trumpeted the fact that she was the first Hispanic nominee over her legal and judicial qualifications. As the Democrats paid little price in the Hispanic community for blocking Estrada, it is highly unlikely that Republicans will lose support in the Hispanic community for voting against Sotomayor.

In the end, it is highly likely that Sotomayor will be confirmed and, as she is easily as liberal as the justice whom she will replace, David Souter, there are some who confess a degree of puzzlement over the desire to fight her nomination when it won’t change the balance on the court. But her opponents argue that it is important to set down markers, in order to be better prepared for the moment Obama nominates a judge who would be a game changer.

I hope that helps.

Well, despite the best efforts of some of those in the op-ed industry who masquerade as genuine conservatives — wait a second, has David Frum been submitting questions again? — the answer, hopefully, is never.

Reagan was more than a transitional figure, sandwiched in between the Greatest Generation and Generation X; he was a transformational one. He changed the nation, and the world, for the better. So it is no wonder that most conservatives — and quite a few liberals, judging by the way the current president is so often proclaimed to be Reagan-like — continue to look to him for inspiration.

Part of that is because Reagan was, to borrow a phrase from Lady Margaret Thatcher, “a conviction politician.” He operated out of a set of deeply held beliefs that governed his view of the world, of morality and the presidency. Unlike Nixon or Clinton, Reagan’s concerns about public opinion were addressed in the way he dealt with issues and crises, not whether he dealt with them at all.

Ronald Reagan came into office in 1980 promising to do three things: 1) Restore America’s national pride; 2) Revive an economy crippled by stagflation; and 3) Win the Cold War. He did all three even though, thanks to Tip O’Neill and friends, he had one hand held behind his back. At the same time he cruised to re-election in 1984 with the largest Electoral College majority in history, winning 49 states while losing only the District of Columbia and, by 7,000 votes, his Democratic opponent’s home state of Minnesota. That is a feat that may never be matched.

No presidency is perfect. Reagan, after all, agreed to a significant tax increase in 1982′s Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, which promised (I think it was) one dollar in new taxes for every three dollars in spending restraint. And he got suckered. He came up with the taxes but Congress never provided the spending restraint. “Congress never cut spending by even one penny,” he lamented long after he’d left the White House. (The inability of Congress to control its urge to spend is a pattern that continues even today.)

And there were some other problems during Reagan’s tenure, which I am sure we will hear about from the readers of Salon when the comments start to come in. But his was a more than successful presidency — and those of you who might be quick to point out the issues arising from his Central American policy would do well to remember that it was the Clintonites who came along later to explain that “rule of law” was a) a matter of interpretation and b) beside the point, at least where illicit sex was concerned.

Most importantly, it was Reagan’s achievement of building or at least maintaining a successful political coalition composed of social conservatives, libertarian-leaning voters concerned about the economy and the size of government, moderate, “birthright” Republicans, working class Democrats and voters worried about foreign policy issues that make him the enduring standard against which the party and conservatives measure their success today. The ongoing debate between many national Republican leaders and pretenders over what the party should now stand for, following back-to-back routs in 2006 and 2008 — is really a discussion of how best to replicate the Reagan model of campaigning and governance.

The bottom line is that Reagan showed conservatives how to lead — and in the face of tremendous media and political opposition mind you — and, more importantly, how to win. So I guess Republicans will stop talking about Reagan at about the same time Democrats stop talking about FDR, Truman and JFK. Those three are really the only Democrats in an entire century worth mentioning if you ask me. But you didn’t — that’s a question for another day.

I hope that helps.