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

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.

A neoliberal believed in a Tough Foreign Policy -- a Michael Crowley or Peter Beinart type.

http://dlc.org/

as president, and leading democrat, he legitimized "postmodernism" as an acceptable form of liberalism

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

i'm saying, my belief is these kinds of shifts happen among the people first and are capitalized upon later. had clinton not found a way to get people like this to vote for him, they would have still been there, believing what they believe, happy enough to vote some other way.

i've never understood exactly who the 'reagan democrats' are supposed to be, reagan's victory in '84 was so huge, a whole bunch of different kinds of people are swept up in that bucket.

Reagan Dems (in Congress they were known as Boll Weevil Democrats because they mostly came from southern or rural districts) were Dems who rode on his coattails in 1980 by renouncing a lot of liberalism's post-sixties "excesses."

Lots of them, for example, voted for his '81 tax cuts and budget. "Reagan Dems" are now just swing voters.

i'm saying, my belief is these kinds of shifts happen among the people first and are capitalized upon later This is a subset of the whole Carlyle vs Tolstoy debate and I'm inclined to think it's more of a feedback loop than that overwhelmingly one-sided.

Reagan's victory was huge by electoral votes; 40% of the public still sighed heavily and voted for Mondale, like me. So that narrows Reagan Dems down to a manageable scale.

Reagan Democrat is an American political term used by political analysts to denote traditionally Democratic voters, especially white working-class Northerners, who defected from their party to support Republican President Ronald Reagan in both the 1980 and 1984 elections. It is also used to refer to the smaller but still substantial number of Democrats who voted for George H. W. Bush in the 1988 election. The term can also be used to describe moderate Democrats who are more conservative than liberal on certain issues like national security and immigration. The term Reagan Democrat also refers to the vast sway that Reagan held over the House of Representatives during his presidency, even though the house had a Democratic majority during both of his terms.[1]. The term also hearkens back to Richard Nixon's Silent Majority; a concept that Ronald Reagan himself used during his political campaigns in the 1970's.

how did the working-class northerners turn into gabbneb