US POLITICS SPRING 2011: Let's just call off this country.

"Hard-Pressed Democrats"?

is that a typology or a sandwich

"A group of independently-minded Post-Moderns, who have voted overwhelmingly Democratic in the past two elections, are the youngest of all the typology groups. This mostly secular group agrees with Solid Liberals on social issues, immigration and the environment, but is not engaged with the traditional liberal rallying cries of the New Deal or Great Society. Instead, this group tends to be more supportive of Wall Street and business interests, and skeptical of broad-based social justice programs aimed at helping African-Americans and the poor."

This is the kinda thing I've been saying for a while on this board: that this is a big future of so-called liberalism in the USA. What were the moral foundations of the welfare state à la the New Deal / Great Society, and have they been undermined by post-1960s "liberal" ideology? I think yes.

How this group coheres with the Hard-Pressed Dems, the poor ones in other words, is interesting. But if someone says "the country is shifting rightward", I say it's because the Post-Moderns aren't really interested in helping the poor. I'm not sure what it means to be a Dem anymore, & I think this is one big reason why.

ugh @ post-moderns, scum of the earth

xp otm!!!!

young Dems created by Bubba Clinton's Personal Responsibility Act

(ie, eat it, poor)

srsly otm. and i say this as someone who could have been called a post-modern liberal about ten years ago

basically just less doctrinaire libertarians

My local Top 40 station in the early nineties boasted a "college music" show called "The Post-Modern Music Show." So this is what happens when XTC and Smithereens fans grow up and create policy.

the thing that gets lost in the personal responsibility shuffle is that it is entirely EXPECTED that someone who is taking responsibility for themselves will need help every now and then, or possibly even more frequently than that; life is capricious and cruel, no one really knows what's going to happen to them and one of the strong points of a society should be how it helps those in dire circumstances

like, I am poster child for "yr consequences, enjoy them" rhetoric but it is largely directed towards spoiled people of privilege who have never actually had to face the consequences of their poor choices, not those who have had their choices restricted by circumstance

basically just less doctrinaire libertarians

― estkella (k3vin k.), Thursday, May 5, 2011 10:13 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah this is what i was gonna say

"post-moderns" just sound like "moderates" of the last 20 years who are ok with gay marriage

and more likely to be into ethnic food and prii

A new Republican-oriented group of Libertarians believe in the same economically conservative principles as the Staunch Conservatives, but its members differ when it comes to social issues, where they are very secular.

it looks like they arbitrarily decided what 'groups' they wanted (votes dem, responds that they don't care about welfare = post-modern ) and then showed the results from the groups "this group votes dem, and doesn't care about welfare!"

I'm on the phone w/ fuckin att and only half-reading this so maybe I'm missing the part where they create the groups based on the data instead of before the data...

I dunno, I thought if you didn't care about New Deal / Great Society accomplishments, then you were a Republican, not a moderate. Like to me that is what it is to be conservative. This is why I think the current coalition of religious folks / libertarians in the GOP, and poor folk / educated folk / "post-moderns" in the Dems is so bizarre.

yeah otm, there is definitely a quite a bit of overlap and the lines were probably drawn based on self-identification xp

seems like they shift the boundaries every 5 years based on how people's answers change?

as in, get the data --> come up with roughly-equal populations sets of ppl with similar answers --> come up with names of those sets

xp to iatee

http://people-press.org/2011/05/04/about-the-political-typology/

The typology groups are created using a statistical procedure called “cluster analysis” which accounts for respondents’ scores on all nine scales as well as party identification to sort them into relatively homogeneous groups. The tables on the following pages show each of the scales, its component questions, and the average placement of each of the eight typology groups (excluding bystanders) on each scale.

Cluster analysis is not an exact process. Different cluster solutions are possible using the same data depending on model specifications and even the order in which respondents are assessed. Several different cluster solutions were evaluated for their effectiveness in producing cohesive groups that were sufficiently distinct from one another, large enough in size to be analytically practical, and substantively meaningful. While each solution differed somewhat from the others, all of them shared certain key features. The final solution selected to produce the political typology was judged to be strongest from a statistical point of view, most persuasive from a substantive point of view, and was representative of the general patterns seen across the various cluster solutions.

yeah but as long as we don't get to see this part 'come up with roughly-equal populations sets of ppl with similar answers' we really don't get anything useful from these numbers

yes it's silly that 'libertarians' suddenly appear in american life in 2011, i think the point is that in 2011 that's a valid way of describing a large-ish bloc of americans, compared to other groups

i'm not sold on the changes they've made since 2005 or earlier yet, and i'd like to see their %s for each (haven't read it all yet)

xp yup there you have it i guess

cluster solutions

I dunno, I thought if you didn't care about New Deal / Great Society accomplishments, then you were a Republican, not a moderate. Like to me that is what it is to be conservative. This is why I think the current coalition of religious folks / libertarians in the GOP, and poor folk / educated folk / "post-moderns" in the Dems is so bizarre.

― Euler, Thursday, May 5, 2011 11:28 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i havent dug into the data yet but the questions seem to be about whether or not the government should do "more"; not whether or not the government "is doing too much"/"has done enough"

In the eighties, disillusioned Dems (e.g. Gary Hart, Clinton) came up with the New Republic-endorsed label "neoliberal." Remember?

(there were 13 pages of information/analysis about this, odds were that if you skipped to the "about the typologies" link there would be info on how they were created)

(also it sounds like they might have used my company's technology to do this, or one of our competitors, lol)

"post-moderns" = mike bloomberg?
"disaffecteds" = mike huckabee?

cluster fuck solutions

"bystanders" are 49% "dem-leaning" or democrats and only 29% "rep-leaning" or "republican"

would be nice if they voted!

haven't read the methodology yet but yeah, data clustering is a pretty standard bit of sociology today so this seems like well-worn methodology to me

Libertarians are on the chart since 1994, but only slide into the center in this most recent survey.

This is the kinda thing I've been saying for a while on this board: that this is a big future of so-called liberalism in the USA. What were the moral foundations of the welfare state à la the New Deal / Great Society, and have they been undermined by post-1960s "liberal" ideology? I think yes.

great, a whole generation full of Gabbnebs. do i start to weep for America now?!?

survey questions are here btw, not gonna be able to get to them until maybe tonight though

Gabbneb was a prophet that I think you oughta listen to.

the so-called "postmortems," that is.

the socially-liberal pro-Wall Street Dems.

(there were 13 pages of information/analysis about this, odds were that if you skipped to the "about the typologies" link there would be info on how they were created)

(also it sounds like they might have used my company's technology to do this, or one of our competitors, lol)

again I was on the phone. I used to work for a polling company very much like this and am reallllly skeptical of this “cluster analysis” bullshit. again 'is not an exact process' = let's play around w/ numbers until we have a narrative. I don't think there's really any value to these groups.

I mean the only data w/ a decent margin of error is the total sample group

http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lkq1snEVSF1qdx4lmo1_500.jpg

well that's one of the problems with the way that clustering algorithms work; depending on which ones you use and how you feed them the data, they produce different results

the methodology they used, where they generated several different analyses and picked the one most representative of the trends displayed makes sense to me but I work for a company that does this type of thing so duh

how post-modern of you, iatee!

do not like maths unless range factors and Defense Inndependent Pitching is involved

as descriptors of clear populations it's got it's weaknesses, sure, since there aren't any such things, life is messy, etc. but as an illustration of the widely divergent opinions and interests within each broad 'party' i always like these things. some 'republicans' love government, hate wall street, some 'democrats' vice versa.

more to the point, politicians and the political system are always playing catch-up; they are a very thin layer of waves on top of a huge ocean of shifting ideas and people. to get metaphorical.

I think this is all fine and worthy and everything but my own perception of where I am politically is very situationist. In France, I'm a liberal which is somewhere in the center of their spectrum. In San Francisco, I'm moderate to even somewhat conservative. In some places in the US, I'm apparently 'hard left'. I spend less time trying to figure out my place in the spectrum than trying to figure out my responses to various issues (or non-issues as the case so very often is).

lol it was horrible. anyway 'is not an exact process' is all we need to know. this is mark penn style politics and not super useful. xp

ie the idea that bill clinton 'caused' the 'postmoderns' to exist is just stupid. politicians chase, they don't lead.

xp "mark penn style" wow low blow!

the idea that bill clinton 'caused' the 'postmoderns' to exist is just stupid

Not entirely true. He veered to his right after losing his second election and the next time he ran he was there for ten years.

obviously clinton didn't "cause" them to exist, nor does he completely represent "them" whoever they are. however he codified some of their beliefs, and in a way made them mainstream w/in the party

huh

that was poorly worded, lol - i meant as president, and leading democrat, he legitimized "postmodernism" as an acceptable form of liberalism

ie the idea that bill clinton 'caused' the 'postmoderns' to exist is just stupid

I was being somewhat sarcastic. Reagan Democrats fathered the New Gabbnebs, then Clinton's welfare bill was the Appomattox of mainstream liberalism.

that is, what kevink said

Reagan Dems and the neolibs I mentioned are not the same.