The Limits of Ideological Self-Identification

William Galston has an excellent post about the shifting ideological self-identification of the electorate:

This shift is part of a broader trend: Over the past two decades, moderates have trended down as share of the total electorate while conservatives have gone up. In 1992, moderates were 43 percent of the total; in 2006, 38 percent; today, only 35 percent. For conservatives, the comparable numbers are 36 percent, 37 percent, and 42 percent, respectively. So the 2010 electorate does not represent a disproportional mobilization of conservatives: If the 2010 electorate had perfectly reflected the voting-age population, it would actually have been a bit more conservative and less moderate than was the population that showed up at the polls. Unless the long-term decline of moderates and rise of conservatives is reversed during the next two years, the ideological balance of the electorate in 2012 could look a lot like it did this year.

But of course that leaves us with the question of what implications this carries. To my mind, like most analysis of ideological self-identification it indicates that ideological self-identification is a pretty murky subject. Ask yourself on what subject has the public become more conservative?

Consider gay rights. To shift to the right relative to the 1992 status quo, we would need for every state in which gay marriage is legal to repeal that. We would also need to eliminate civil union laws. And rather than repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell and allowing gay and lesbian servicemembers to serve openly, we'd need to revert to a policy of explicitly authorized inquisitions and purges. Does anyone think that would be popular?

Or health care. To shift to the right relative to the 1992 status quo, we would need (of course) to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Fine. But do you hear Republicans talking about repealing the 2009 SCHIP expansion? I don't. How about the creation in 2003 of a Medicare prescription drug benefit? How about the 1997 creation of SCHIP? Or the Kennedy-Kassebaum Act? Or the Family and Medical Leave Act? I don't hear anyone talking about any of that. Nor do I hear anyone talking about undoing Bush-era increases in federal K-12 spending.

What's happened on these subjects is that the stance one needs to take in order to be a conservative in good standing has become less extreme. In the 1960s, the conventional wisdom was that to be a conservative in good standing you had to regard the Civil Rights Act as an intolerable regulation of private enterprise. Today, only Rand Paul thinks that and he's too embarrassed to admit it squarely.

There are probably issues on which the public has actually become more conservative. There's clearly much more support for the idea that torture is a legitimate tool of governance than there used to be. More interest in immigration restriction, perhaps. Maybe less interest in defense cuts? Obviously I don't think it would have occurred to anyone in 1992 that the government should prohibit the construction of a mosque in lower Manhattan.