The Very Conservative States of the United States: Canadian Outlook?
Richard Florida, the urban-affairs guru, has run the latest Gallup numbers on party affiliation, co-relating them with factors of income, religious observance, educational attainment, and has come up with some startling (to me) observations.
Yes, America is a more conservative culture than Canada or Europe, always has been. But, Florida, asserts, it is becoming more so. One could go about proving this, as Florida does. But for me it's sufficient to note the populist support of FDR during the Depression contrasted to the polarizing effect of Obama and his agenda, also during a time of severe economic crisis. (One doesn't want to exaggerate this, as dismal the mid-term election results for the Dems incline one to do. Obama is polling about 15 points ahead of Ronald Reagan at the two-year mark in his presidency.)
Two Democratic presidents, each coping with the one of the two worst economic crisises in modern U.S. history. One enjoyed popular support - indeed, was able to build an enduring coalition of blue-collar workers, African Americans, women, and first- and second-generation immigrants that set the national political agenda from 1933 to 1968, lasting a third of a century. Even Ike, father of the Interstate hightway mega-project, was in his way a New Dealer.
Facing with obvious crises - a global economic meltdown of U.S. origin (the unprecedented American housing boom-bust of the 2000s), urgently needed reform in education and healthcare systems that have fallen behind those of other advanced nations, jeopardizing America's future prosperity and global clout, and a global disdain for America which works against America's interests in everything from combatting terrorism to boosting U.S. exports to compensate for a flagging domestic economy, all these things Obama tackled in what most would regard as a common-sense manner and hardly a radical one. Yet Obama has been so thoroughly tagged as a radical socialist that there's no denying - and this is how progressives disappointed in Obama have to bear in mind - that he will never rid himself of that reputation.
Why that sharp divergence? FDR's reforms were radical - collective bargaining, power centralized in Washington at the expense of the states, the creation of today's welfare state, starting with Social Security, and harsh regulations imposed on Wall Street. (Harsh by comparison with lax or non-existent supervision before, not by today's standards.) By contrast, the current symbol of Obama's "sell-out" to the comfortable class is appointing to the head of one of his economic policy commissions the CEO of General Electric, revealed to have paid no taxes last year on its $5 billion in profits. One thing the two had in common: they each saved capitalism from itself - that capitalism needs periodically to be rescued says all that needs saying about the supposed unalloyed virtues of that system - and each earned the odium of the wealthiest citizens, and of Big Business especially, and of the MSM of their days (not front-line journalists, in FDR's case, but just about every newspaper owner/publisher, for having done so. The GE boss in question, Jeffrey Immelt, along with the head of 3M Co., are among the many Fortune 500 CEOs who've taken Obama to task for his socialistic "meddling." (Yet Obama inexplicably chose Immelt as an advisor, an appointment that Russ Feingold, in recent retirement from the Senate, is now trying to reverse.) A certain class of wealthy Americans, again particularly in business - since business was found to have so profoundly failed in the 1930s - to this day insists FDR worsened rather than moderated the worst impacts of the Great Depression, a task akin to searching for unicorns. But one can't deny that sentiment, any more than gravity.
Canada is a very different country than the U.S., something Canadians haven't come to appreciate until relatively recent years. It is more secure in its identity, not subjecting its students to daily pledges of allegiance, raised eyebrows or worse in questioning a U.S. military intervention (rallying around the flag is a Canadian virtue, certainly, when we're agreed the cause is just, although even then there will be vocal objections widely seen to be legitimate and worthy of a hearing).
Fundamentally, though, the difference between these two countries sharing the northern portion of North America are these. Americans cling to a quite false belief in the power of individualism, with the right to be left alone that accompanies that libertarian spirit, though every significant advance in the American Experience, from the Revolution to the Internet, has been sponsored by the state. Canadians, with no such illusions about the necessity of collective action, chose for their guiding national principal not the defiantly self-interested "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," but "peace, order and good government." In essence, to be American, according to that country's founding spirit, is to have the right to do as one pleases. To be Canadian is to consider the implications for others of the things one does. And so civility is our guiding principle.
That is not an argument for the superiority of one culture over others. The French put culture on a high pedestal indeed; to be British is almost a negative virtue today, it means not to be infected with the impurities of the Continent across the Channel. Japan still has a residual sense of cultural superiority over the Chinese and Koreans. We must accept people as we find them, which in our case asking non-Canadians to show forebearance about our national sweet tooth, inexplicable (to me) tolerance and even embrace of poutine, and revelry in the fisticuffs that reliably interrupt each contest in our national sport. (The superb European players emphasize skating skills, we idolize thugs with sharp elbows.)
In Canada, our patriotism is tempered by humility, given our diminutive population and knowledge of how others, from the Florentine bankers to the geeks of Silicon valley, have invented so many of the essentials of our own daily lives. We do not believe the government is an enemy, but rather since before Confederation have demanded, with the emergence of any problem or challenge, that the government do something about it. (Hence "good government.) And so we need no persuading about the imperative of collective action. Thus words like "liberal," "welfare" and even "socialism" have little if any shock value here.
Canada's modern welfare state, including its social protections, state-funded research and granting instiutions, its educational infrastructure, and its cultural institutions from the CBC to regional orchestras, have been the handiwork of political parties of all stripes through the generations. The Conservative Party of Canada, or Tories, are a bit to the left of America's Democratic Party. It was the Tories who launched the first, largely state-financed Canadian mega-project, the Canadian Pacific Railway, and later the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the first "baby bonuses" to help low-income parents, and in my province built modern-era universities, the province's network of community colleges, the Science North and the Ontario Science Centre and other recreational and cultural amenities, along with backstopping the financing of our great teaching hospitals, which are community, not privately, owned.
The issue of a rising conservative tide in America arises because America's conservatism, unique among the major advanced nations, is central to public policymaking in what for some decades will will remain the world's dominant economic, scientific and military power. America still leads, whether or not we choose to accept that fact. As recently as the current Libyan mission, France and Britian were mightily exercised about the urgent need for action. Yet they did nothing, though Libya is just across the Mediterranean from the French republic. No, it had to wait for America, and specifically Obama, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice at the U.N. and Samantha Powers, the U.S. president's top advisor on genocide, to act. And only then did the others follow. This was the case with Bosnia and Kosovo, also, even though they too are in Europe's backyard, not in America's North American sphere of direct influence.
Friends over the years, and occasionally readers of this blog, have wondered about my fascination with the U.S., dating from visits to friends there in youth, and I'can't apologize for it. I do study with equal fascination unfolding events and trends in countries that likely will rival the U.S. in many ways by mid-century, and take the pulse of my own homeland every day.
Hence my mild alarm at reading the results of Florida's latest project. It's not just that U.S. has unavoidable influence in the world as no other, and is Canada's only neighbor, it's that I do and always have liked the American Experience.
Florida finds that 37 U.S. states are "conservative" or "above-average conservative," which leaves only 13 with more liberal tendencies. Even in those 13, Americans self-identifying as conservative outnumber liberals. By contrast, a consistent two-thirds of Canadians vote against the dominant conservative political party, whatever name by which it happens to go in a given decade.
More troublesome - and this is not, or should not be, a partisan or ideological issue - American conservatives are more religious, less well-educated, less embracing of diversity (immgrants and sexual orientation were among Florida's markers here), less affluent, and less likely to be engaged in the professional, creative and other wealth-producing vocations that "below-average conservatives." (It's striking that Florida doesn't talk of American liberals, only those whose conservatism is less pronounced than others.)
One could easily slip into the morally repugnant conclusion that American conservatives, answering to that unassailable empiracal description, are second-class, or a lower tier of Americanism. Again, we take people as we find them, aware that the most disagreeable aspects of a given people are present in our own ranks, too. (Just read the online comments on any Canadian newsapaper site for harsh, even ugly, words about pilfering my wallet to ameliorate someone else's distresss.)
You can get into big trouble, as an American, describing this American archtype. This was Candidate Obama's fate in responding to a question at a 2008 California fundraiser about the plight of poor people in Appalachia, whom the future president accurately described as clinging to their Bibles and guns, and described as "bitter."
Such a sociological assessment uttered in London about the downtrodden of Yorkshire or Liverpool would pass without much if any comment. In America, Obama had just revealed himself as an "elitist" for speaking truth as plain to see as the underfunded schools, libraries, firehalls and medical clinics of rural West Virginia. A country that cannot be honest with itself hasn't much of a future. We do strive in my country to be honest about our shortcomings, which are manifest, and I believe this accounts for our above-average performance on a wide range of social "metrics." We know we have to do better. We know that certain conditions in our country are an embarrassment, an international disgrace, or at the least an impediment to making our current prosperity sustainable. We know, in short, that our worst enemy is complacency, and so we are muted in our celebration of what's so right about my country.
For the U.S. bank bailouts of 2008-09 (begun by free-market believer George W. Bush), in the absence of which the entire world including Canada would have plunged into a 1930s depression with unemployment of 25% to 30%, compared with the current 8.8%; for the state rescues of GM and Chrysler, the underpinning of America's industrial infrastructure; and for Obamacare, a rather unambitous effort at catching up with long-entrenched genuine universal healthcare elsewhere in the OECD nations, to all be greeted in the U.S. with a firestorm of protest and vilification of the agents of betterment is profoundly indicative of an unpromising future for the great Republic.
For those who complain of a liberal tendency to high-handed presumptuousness, who nurse an image of progressives dictating to knuckle-draggers how they should live, the attempted transition to a better order of things under Obama was as good as it gets. No stock liberal from Cental Casting, the current U.S. president is overtly respectful of blue-collar work and the lifestyle of the people who do it; of Americans with reservations about abortion and homosexuality (he shares those reservations); of Americans for whom religion is a defining fact of their lives (Obama himself is devout, unlike say, Lincoln or Reagan); and of people who don't like being to be told what to do - that is, most of us.
Obamacare was the work of five Congressional committees, not the spawn of a secretive conclave of unelected experts as the previous effort 17 years earlier had been. Obama, having just won the third-largest majority vote of a successful Democratic presidential candidate in history, on a campaign that emphasized universal healthcare, had as resounding a mandate for Obamacare as any chief executive has had for any initiative. He and a Democratic Congress then structured Obamacare so that it would roll out gradually over several years. Its most vote-appealing provisions don't take effect until 2014, not in time to help secure Obama's re-election. And Obama insisted on it being that way. Why? In order to reduce as much as possible any shock to a medical-industrial complex accounting for 17% of the U.S. economy. Possibly not the best politics, but assuredly sound policy.
So, again, that's as good as it gets for progressives. Favorable conditions and a president and his party implementing change that was neither radical nor imposed suddenly. Yet still Obama's mildly progressive agenda is held deeply suspect by tens of millions of Americans. That's a powerful disincentive for the progresive successors of Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and the unsung heroes supporting the progressive agenda in Congress (many of them defeated in the midterms, along with Pelosi's demotion) to attempt the still urgently needed reforms - in education, energy security, the environment- that will come in the U.S. If they don't come, the country will take on a greater acquaintanceship with Rome's last days, signs of which already are apparent to Americans of a pessimistic outlook.
The impediment to that next American Century, and the one after that, with Florida only giving further proof to this, is that rising tide of conservatism, of too many Americans afraid of the future, unwilling to embrace the new, the bold, the better. America has of course done that very thing more often than anyone could count. Yet oddly on issues that go to the core of where most Americans live - their standard of living and quality of life - there is this traditional, stubborn resistance to change that appears so entrenched it cannot be overcome, even by someone with the respectful, thoughtful bearing of a Barack Obama.
I'll end this overlong note with Florida, far better than I at cutting to the chase:
Florida is a New Jersey native who first achieved national acclaim during a long stint teaching at Carnegie Mellon, where he was a first-hand witness to the remarkable transformation of Pittsburgh from a blue-collar to a knowledge-based economy. For its burgeoning arts scene, upstart high-tech industries, and endowment of cultural amenities initially financed by long-gone steel barons, Pittsburgh is now ranked, by the three worldwide agencies that assess quality of life, as the most liveable city in America. Florida for the past few years has been running the Martin Prosperity Institute associated with the business school at the University of Toronto.
David Olive
The Star...
Yes, America is a more conservative culture than Canada or Europe, always has been. But, Florida, asserts, it is becoming more so. One could go about proving this, as Florida does. But for me it's sufficient to note the populist support of FDR during the Depression contrasted to the polarizing effect of Obama and his agenda, also during a time of severe economic crisis. (One doesn't want to exaggerate this, as dismal the mid-term election results for the Dems incline one to do. Obama is polling about 15 points ahead of Ronald Reagan at the two-year mark in his presidency.)
Two Democratic presidents, each coping with the one of the two worst economic crisises in modern U.S. history. One enjoyed popular support - indeed, was able to build an enduring coalition of blue-collar workers, African Americans, women, and first- and second-generation immigrants that set the national political agenda from 1933 to 1968, lasting a third of a century. Even Ike, father of the Interstate hightway mega-project, was in his way a New Dealer.
Facing with obvious crises - a global economic meltdown of U.S. origin (the unprecedented American housing boom-bust of the 2000s), urgently needed reform in education and healthcare systems that have fallen behind those of other advanced nations, jeopardizing America's future prosperity and global clout, and a global disdain for America which works against America's interests in everything from combatting terrorism to boosting U.S. exports to compensate for a flagging domestic economy, all these things Obama tackled in what most would regard as a common-sense manner and hardly a radical one. Yet Obama has been so thoroughly tagged as a radical socialist that there's no denying - and this is how progressives disappointed in Obama have to bear in mind - that he will never rid himself of that reputation.
Why that sharp divergence? FDR's reforms were radical - collective bargaining, power centralized in Washington at the expense of the states, the creation of today's welfare state, starting with Social Security, and harsh regulations imposed on Wall Street. (Harsh by comparison with lax or non-existent supervision before, not by today's standards.) By contrast, the current symbol of Obama's "sell-out" to the comfortable class is appointing to the head of one of his economic policy commissions the CEO of General Electric, revealed to have paid no taxes last year on its $5 billion in profits. One thing the two had in common: they each saved capitalism from itself - that capitalism needs periodically to be rescued says all that needs saying about the supposed unalloyed virtues of that system - and each earned the odium of the wealthiest citizens, and of Big Business especially, and of the MSM of their days (not front-line journalists, in FDR's case, but just about every newspaper owner/publisher, for having done so. The GE boss in question, Jeffrey Immelt, along with the head of 3M Co., are among the many Fortune 500 CEOs who've taken Obama to task for his socialistic "meddling." (Yet Obama inexplicably chose Immelt as an advisor, an appointment that Russ Feingold, in recent retirement from the Senate, is now trying to reverse.) A certain class of wealthy Americans, again particularly in business - since business was found to have so profoundly failed in the 1930s - to this day insists FDR worsened rather than moderated the worst impacts of the Great Depression, a task akin to searching for unicorns. But one can't deny that sentiment, any more than gravity.
Canada is a very different country than the U.S., something Canadians haven't come to appreciate until relatively recent years. It is more secure in its identity, not subjecting its students to daily pledges of allegiance, raised eyebrows or worse in questioning a U.S. military intervention (rallying around the flag is a Canadian virtue, certainly, when we're agreed the cause is just, although even then there will be vocal objections widely seen to be legitimate and worthy of a hearing).
Fundamentally, though, the difference between these two countries sharing the northern portion of North America are these. Americans cling to a quite false belief in the power of individualism, with the right to be left alone that accompanies that libertarian spirit, though every significant advance in the American Experience, from the Revolution to the Internet, has been sponsored by the state. Canadians, with no such illusions about the necessity of collective action, chose for their guiding national principal not the defiantly self-interested "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," but "peace, order and good government." In essence, to be American, according to that country's founding spirit, is to have the right to do as one pleases. To be Canadian is to consider the implications for others of the things one does. And so civility is our guiding principle.
That is not an argument for the superiority of one culture over others. The French put culture on a high pedestal indeed; to be British is almost a negative virtue today, it means not to be infected with the impurities of the Continent across the Channel. Japan still has a residual sense of cultural superiority over the Chinese and Koreans. We must accept people as we find them, which in our case asking non-Canadians to show forebearance about our national sweet tooth, inexplicable (to me) tolerance and even embrace of poutine, and revelry in the fisticuffs that reliably interrupt each contest in our national sport. (The superb European players emphasize skating skills, we idolize thugs with sharp elbows.)
In Canada, our patriotism is tempered by humility, given our diminutive population and knowledge of how others, from the Florentine bankers to the geeks of Silicon valley, have invented so many of the essentials of our own daily lives. We do not believe the government is an enemy, but rather since before Confederation have demanded, with the emergence of any problem or challenge, that the government do something about it. (Hence "good government.) And so we need no persuading about the imperative of collective action. Thus words like "liberal," "welfare" and even "socialism" have little if any shock value here.
Canada's modern welfare state, including its social protections, state-funded research and granting instiutions, its educational infrastructure, and its cultural institutions from the CBC to regional orchestras, have been the handiwork of political parties of all stripes through the generations. The Conservative Party of Canada, or Tories, are a bit to the left of America's Democratic Party. It was the Tories who launched the first, largely state-financed Canadian mega-project, the Canadian Pacific Railway, and later the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the first "baby bonuses" to help low-income parents, and in my province built modern-era universities, the province's network of community colleges, the Science North and the Ontario Science Centre and other recreational and cultural amenities, along with backstopping the financing of our great teaching hospitals, which are community, not privately, owned.
The issue of a rising conservative tide in America arises because America's conservatism, unique among the major advanced nations, is central to public policymaking in what for some decades will will remain the world's dominant economic, scientific and military power. America still leads, whether or not we choose to accept that fact. As recently as the current Libyan mission, France and Britian were mightily exercised about the urgent need for action. Yet they did nothing, though Libya is just across the Mediterranean from the French republic. No, it had to wait for America, and specifically Obama, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice at the U.N. and Samantha Powers, the U.S. president's top advisor on genocide, to act. And only then did the others follow. This was the case with Bosnia and Kosovo, also, even though they too are in Europe's backyard, not in America's North American sphere of direct influence.
Friends over the years, and occasionally readers of this blog, have wondered about my fascination with the U.S., dating from visits to friends there in youth, and I'can't apologize for it. I do study with equal fascination unfolding events and trends in countries that likely will rival the U.S. in many ways by mid-century, and take the pulse of my own homeland every day.
Hence my mild alarm at reading the results of Florida's latest project. It's not just that U.S. has unavoidable influence in the world as no other, and is Canada's only neighbor, it's that I do and always have liked the American Experience.
Florida finds that 37 U.S. states are "conservative" or "above-average conservative," which leaves only 13 with more liberal tendencies. Even in those 13, Americans self-identifying as conservative outnumber liberals. By contrast, a consistent two-thirds of Canadians vote against the dominant conservative political party, whatever name by which it happens to go in a given decade.
More troublesome - and this is not, or should not be, a partisan or ideological issue - American conservatives are more religious, less well-educated, less embracing of diversity (immgrants and sexual orientation were among Florida's markers here), less affluent, and less likely to be engaged in the professional, creative and other wealth-producing vocations that "below-average conservatives." (It's striking that Florida doesn't talk of American liberals, only those whose conservatism is less pronounced than others.)
One could easily slip into the morally repugnant conclusion that American conservatives, answering to that unassailable empiracal description, are second-class, or a lower tier of Americanism. Again, we take people as we find them, aware that the most disagreeable aspects of a given people are present in our own ranks, too. (Just read the online comments on any Canadian newsapaper site for harsh, even ugly, words about pilfering my wallet to ameliorate someone else's distresss.)
You can get into big trouble, as an American, describing this American archtype. This was Candidate Obama's fate in responding to a question at a 2008 California fundraiser about the plight of poor people in Appalachia, whom the future president accurately described as clinging to their Bibles and guns, and described as "bitter."
Such a sociological assessment uttered in London about the downtrodden of Yorkshire or Liverpool would pass without much if any comment. In America, Obama had just revealed himself as an "elitist" for speaking truth as plain to see as the underfunded schools, libraries, firehalls and medical clinics of rural West Virginia. A country that cannot be honest with itself hasn't much of a future. We do strive in my country to be honest about our shortcomings, which are manifest, and I believe this accounts for our above-average performance on a wide range of social "metrics." We know we have to do better. We know that certain conditions in our country are an embarrassment, an international disgrace, or at the least an impediment to making our current prosperity sustainable. We know, in short, that our worst enemy is complacency, and so we are muted in our celebration of what's so right about my country.
For the U.S. bank bailouts of 2008-09 (begun by free-market believer George W. Bush), in the absence of which the entire world including Canada would have plunged into a 1930s depression with unemployment of 25% to 30%, compared with the current 8.8%; for the state rescues of GM and Chrysler, the underpinning of America's industrial infrastructure; and for Obamacare, a rather unambitous effort at catching up with long-entrenched genuine universal healthcare elsewhere in the OECD nations, to all be greeted in the U.S. with a firestorm of protest and vilification of the agents of betterment is profoundly indicative of an unpromising future for the great Republic.
For those who complain of a liberal tendency to high-handed presumptuousness, who nurse an image of progressives dictating to knuckle-draggers how they should live, the attempted transition to a better order of things under Obama was as good as it gets. No stock liberal from Cental Casting, the current U.S. president is overtly respectful of blue-collar work and the lifestyle of the people who do it; of Americans with reservations about abortion and homosexuality (he shares those reservations); of Americans for whom religion is a defining fact of their lives (Obama himself is devout, unlike say, Lincoln or Reagan); and of people who don't like being to be told what to do - that is, most of us.
Obamacare was the work of five Congressional committees, not the spawn of a secretive conclave of unelected experts as the previous effort 17 years earlier had been. Obama, having just won the third-largest majority vote of a successful Democratic presidential candidate in history, on a campaign that emphasized universal healthcare, had as resounding a mandate for Obamacare as any chief executive has had for any initiative. He and a Democratic Congress then structured Obamacare so that it would roll out gradually over several years. Its most vote-appealing provisions don't take effect until 2014, not in time to help secure Obama's re-election. And Obama insisted on it being that way. Why? In order to reduce as much as possible any shock to a medical-industrial complex accounting for 17% of the U.S. economy. Possibly not the best politics, but assuredly sound policy.
So, again, that's as good as it gets for progressives. Favorable conditions and a president and his party implementing change that was neither radical nor imposed suddenly. Yet still Obama's mildly progressive agenda is held deeply suspect by tens of millions of Americans. That's a powerful disincentive for the progresive successors of Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and the unsung heroes supporting the progressive agenda in Congress (many of them defeated in the midterms, along with Pelosi's demotion) to attempt the still urgently needed reforms - in education, energy security, the environment- that will come in the U.S. If they don't come, the country will take on a greater acquaintanceship with Rome's last days, signs of which already are apparent to Americans of a pessimistic outlook.
The impediment to that next American Century, and the one after that, with Florida only giving further proof to this, is that rising tide of conservatism, of too many Americans afraid of the future, unwilling to embrace the new, the bold, the better. America has of course done that very thing more often than anyone could count. Yet oddly on issues that go to the core of where most Americans live - their standard of living and quality of life - there is this traditional, stubborn resistance to change that appears so entrenched it cannot be overcome, even by someone with the respectful, thoughtful bearing of a Barack Obama.
I'll end this overlong note with Florida, far better than I at cutting to the chase:
Conservatism, at least at the state level, appears to be growing stronger. Ironically, this trend is most pronounced in America's least well-off, least educated, most blue-collar, most economically hard-hit states. Conservatism, more and more, is the ideology of the economically left behind.
The current economic crisis only appears to have deepened conservatism's hold on America's states. ... Liberalism, which is stronger in richer, better-educated, more diverse and, especially more prosperous places, is shrinking across the board and has fallen hehind conservatism even in its biggest strongholds.
The long-term danger is economic rather than political. This ideological state of affairs advantages the policy preferences of poorer, less innovative states over wealthier, more innovative, and productive ones. American politics is increasingly disconnected from its economic engine. And this deepening political divide has become perhaps the biggest bottleneck on the road to long-run prosperity.
The current economic crisis only appears to have deepened conservatism's hold on America's states. ... Liberalism, which is stronger in richer, better-educated, more diverse and, especially more prosperous places, is shrinking across the board and has fallen hehind conservatism even in its biggest strongholds.
The long-term danger is economic rather than political. This ideological state of affairs advantages the policy preferences of poorer, less innovative states over wealthier, more innovative, and productive ones. American politics is increasingly disconnected from its economic engine. And this deepening political divide has become perhaps the biggest bottleneck on the road to long-run prosperity.
David Olive
The Star...
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