In this diary, I bust some myths that have been circulating around here:
1. “The Democrats have moved to the right since Reagan. Now, they are more conservative than Reagan/Nixon/Goldwater/etc”
People have been complaining about the Democratic Party’s lack of “ideological purity” since long before Reagan. Jimmy Carter campaigned and governed as a moderate, and was primaried from the left by Ted Kennedy in 1980. In 1960, liberals opposed John F. Kennedy, and hoped to nominate Adlai Stevenson or Hubert Humphrey instead. Even FDR faced opposition from the left: in 1936, Huey Long argued that the New Deal didn’t go far enough and railed against his failure to “break up the size of the big fortunes.”
So how can we tell if the Democratic party of the “good old days” was really more liberal than it is today? DW-NOMINATE data is widely accepted as the best objective measure of ideology by political scientists. It allows one to compare the ideology of Senators and Congressmen serving at different times via the voting records of long-serving members. It assigns to each member of Congress a lifetime score between -1 and 1, reflecting how liberal or conservative they are compared to other members (that this axis corresponds to our subjective notion of ideology does not follow from any a priori assumptions in the model — rather, it finds the “most informative” one-dimensional representation of Congress, and that turns out to correlate very well with what we perceive as liberal or conservative). Under the assumption that Senators remained ideologically consistent throughout their careers (on average), this data supports the hypothesis that Democrats became more liberal, not more conservative, since 1980: voteview.com… .
This isn’t definitive proof, because individual Congressmef and Senators could have moved to the right throughout their careers, which would bias the cross-time comparison. To do a quick back-of-the-envelope plausibility check of this assumption, we can examine a different data set which generates DW-NOMINATE scores for each individual two year session of Congress. The numbers aren’t directly comparable between Congresses without an objective baseline*, but we can compare the percentile rankings across time.
(*An earlier version of this diary proposed Senator Kennedy’s scores as one, as he was consistently liberal throughout his career. I prefer this new approach.)
Consider the seven Democratic Senators that were in office from 1978 to 2008: Max Baucus, Joe Biden, Robert Byrd, Dan Inouye, Ted Kennedy, Pat Leahy, and Carl Levin. For each, we calculate two scores representing how liberal they were between 1978-1984 and 2002-2008, relative to the other Democrats in the Senate. To be precise, each score is the average percentile of their individual session DW-NOMINATE scores among Democratic Senators over the three sessions. The lower a score, the more liberal a Senator is relative to the others in the data set. The years were chosen to test the hypothesis that Democrats became more conservative after 1980, and to cover years in which both Democrats and Republicans controlled the Senate.
|
1978-1984 Percentile |
2002-2008 Percentile |
Baucus |
.46 |
.86 |
Biden |
.29 |
.57 |
byrd |
.47 |
.27 |
Inouye |
.53 |
.58 |
Kennedy |
.06 |
.18 |
Leahy |
.30 |
.16 |
Levin |
.17 |
.29 |
(I’d like to add error bars to this figure, but the data and my time is limited)
Relative to the other Democrats in the Senate, Baucus, Biden, Inouye, Kennedy, and Levin saw their scores increase, while Leahy and Byrd saw their scores decrease. What does this mean for our plausibility check? We can’t just say 6>2, but we can compare our subjective evaluation of the Senators’ ideologies over time with them. My take is that Senators Levin, Kennedy, and Baucus had consistent ideologies throughout their careers, whereas Byrd became more liberal over time. I don’t have a firm sense of the others (and I was a bit surprised by Biden’s numbers). Under the reasonable assumption that Kennedy and Levin were about as liberal (in absolute terms) in 1980 as they were in 2008, and that Baucus remained as conservative, we can conclude that the Democrats in the Senate became more liberal over time. That is, a Democratic caucus with a higher proportion of Senators more liberal than Kennedy or Levin, and a lower percentage of Senators more conservative than Baucus is a more liberal Democratic caucus.
I should note that this is not a complete or definitive analysis. If I had more time to work on this, I’d certainly add some measure of statistical uncertainty in the percentile estimates. A long term project would be to attempt to take the subjectivity out of the last argument — that is, the judgement that Levin, Kennedy, and Baucus were consistent over time.
2. “Hillary Clinton is a right-winger” and “She would have been considered a moderate Republican in (insert date here)”
Hillary Clinton is liberal. She has been consistently liberal dating back to at least 1972 when she went undercover to investigate segregation academies. In the Senate, she had a more liberal voting record than 70% of her fellow Democrats:
Clinton was one of the most liberal members during her time in the Senate. According to an analysis of roll call votes by Voteview, Clinton’s record was more liberal than 70 percent of Democrats in her final term in the Senate. She was more liberal than 85 percent of all members. Her 2008 rival in the Democratic presidential primary, Barack Obama, was nearby with a record more liberal than 82 percent of all members — he was not more liberal than Clinton.
Clinton also has a history of very liberal public statements. Clinton rates as a “hard core liberal” per the OnTheIssues.org. She is as liberal as Elizabeth Warren and barely more moderate than Bernie Sanders. And while Obama is also a “hard core liberal,” Clinton again was rated as more liberal than Obama.
Sometimes I wonder whether people are confusing Clinton with her husband. Bill Clinton’s statements have been far more moderate. He has also had a more moderate donor base, according to Adam Bonica’sfundraising scores. —
fivethirtyeight.com/...
That the voteview data is the same as the DW-NOMINATE data mentioned in the previous section. It indicates that not only is Hillary Clinton to the left of the average Democrat today, but that she is also liberal compared to the Democrats of previous years. In an earlier diary, I used it to show that Hillary Clinton would arguably be the most liberal president since at least 1960 (with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter — there is no good objective way to compare their ideologies).
3. “Hillary Clinton is a Neoliberal”
This essentially comes down to the definition of a ‘neoliberal.’ There are many proposed definitions, but it is often used as a pejorative. Let’s examine a few definitions of the term, and see if Secretary Clinton meets them:
Neoliberalism, ideology and policy model that emphasizes the value of free market competition. Although there is considerable debate as to the defining features of neoliberal thought and practice, it is most commonly associated with laissez-faire economics. In particular, neoliberalism is often characterized in terms of its belief in sustained economic growth as the means to achieve human progress, its confidence in free markets as the most-efficient allocation of resources, its emphasis on minimal state intervention in economic and social affairs, and its commitment to the freedom of tradeand capital. — www.britannica.com/...
This seems like a good definition to me. By this, Hillary Clinton is no neoliberal — she opposes laissez-faire economics, and she supports more than “minimal state intervention in economic and social affairs.”
The main points of neo-liberalism include:
-
THE RULE OF THE MARKET.
-
CUTTING PUBLIC EXPENDITURE FOR SOCIAL SERVICES
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DEREGULATION.
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PRIVATIZATION.
-
ELIMINATING THE CONCEPT OF "THE PUBLIC GOOD" or "COMMUNITY" -www.corpwatch.org/...
This is another reasonable definition, one for which Clinton is clearly not a neoliberal. Clinton opposes cutting public expenditures for social services, deregulation, and privatization. She has been a strong champion of the concepts of “public good” and “community” throughout her career.
A liberal who de-emphasizes traditional liberal doctrines in order to seek progress by more pragmatic methods -www.merriam-webster.com/...
OK, Hillary Clinton meets this definition, but I don’t think it accurately reflects what people around here call neoliberalism. I think pragmatism is a virtue in a president, not a vice.
Sunday, May 1, 2016 · 9:05:39 PM +00:00 · Ninox
I thought I should clarify some assumptions I am making in the first argument:
1. DW-NOMINATE scores are an objective measure of ideology (which is a widespread assumption in political science).
2. Ted Kennedy and/or Carl Levin’s ideology remained somewhat consistent over time.
3. If the center moved to the right over time and assumption 2 is made, then Ted Kennedy and/or Carl Levin would vote “yea” or “nay” with the majority a smaller percentage of the time.
I think these are reasonable assumptions, but they are still assumptions. One could decide to throw the analysis out the window because of this, but then we would be left with subjective arguments about what “right” and “left” mean at different points in time, with no substantive evidence to back them up. I challenge anyone else to present a better objective measure of ideological change over time that shows a different conclusion.
Also, here is a good, relatively accessible introduction to this data set: www.swarthmore.edu/...
Tuesday, May 3, 2016 · 12:18:25 AM +00:00
·
Ninox
In response to the comments, I provided a stronger argument in section 1. I show that the percentage of Democrats more liberal than long-serving liberals Levin and Kennedy increased between 1980 and 2008, and the percentage of Democrats more conservative than Baucus decreased. This argument still rests on the assumption that Levin, Kennedy, and Baucus were ideologically consistent over time, but no objective argument can be made about subject without an assumption of that sort.