The empty quarter up there thus represents a lot of old big-government New Dealers (Catholic and Southern), but they’re dying out. The historical dimension might explain a lot.

Alas, European Christian Democrats also seem to be diverging into the Left/Liberal vs Right/Conservative mould. Interestingly, the end result differs by country: Germany’s CDU and above all CSU went right, whereas the Dutch CDA went (in US terms) liberal.

The movements that do support the Left/Conservative mix tend to be strongly rooted in Evangelical, and specifically Reformed, traditions: the Dutch ChristianUnion, and Britain’s tiny Christian People’s Alliance.

I’m one of ‘The Forgotten’ too.

Long before I was a lawyer, I was neck deep in politics, spent a brief stint as a Congressional staffer, and have stayed attached to the ugly off stage underbelly of the political world. A number of my friends are lobbyists, and I know drill although it isn’t what I make my living doing these days.

Honestly, I could care less about formal ideological categories let alone twisting them. “Big government conservatism” is a Pew Foundation term. Simple categories are merely an analytical tool and are only a little useful.

The not entirely honorable, sausage making, art of the possible, tactical side of politics is mostly about emphasizing fine nuances of what someone believes about one little thing until you can find a way to make a deal about that one little thing. You dig deep enough to make an idea post-ideological. Splitters gets things done. Lumpers generate logjams.

My point is simply (1) to emphasize how much diversity there is within the conservative coalition on economic issues once you really scratch the surface (liberals, FWIW, are no different) and (2) to suggest that there are no empty quarters in American national politics (there are gaps, however, in state and local politics although they vary from place to place).

There is not just one way of being socially conservative and economically liberal, there are a dozen. Economic liberalism and conservativism tend in general to be less coherent categories than social liberalism and conservatism. Enough of the economic world is sufficiently outside the realm of experience of people with political views that their opinions about that aren’t terribly well defined. Many of the ways of being socially conservative and economically liberal are non-obvious until you encounter them.

In my world, political ideology is less about Platonic categories that you try to fit round pegs into and more like Sibley’s Field Guide to Birds hidentifying a species matters more than identifying a family or order. If I rant, it is to proclaim how much diversity is out there as a taxonomist, not to complaint that politicians aren’t purists (something that doesn’t personally bug me very much).

Are those boring observations? Perhaps. But, it beats reading half the dreck that political scientists put in their academic journals.

Populism and corporatism are both out there and sometimes in the same person on different issues. Personally, I don’t trust either to be anything except predictable. I’ve personally spent more hours than I’d care to recall trying to explain to liberals why corporate personhood helps the little guy most of the time and why most of the Teddy Roosevelt era progressive planks did more harm than good.

I agree with you that we don’t in the United States have an organized political party, or even really a self-identified political movement that is centered in the sweet spot where “Christian Democrats” are in Europe, even though the GOP is becoming very overtly Christian in a lot of places. The GOP political elite doesn’t have the instinct for moderation that Christian Democratic politicians do.

Some of this may be a product of a first past the post electoral system that favors having only two political parties in any one geographic location at a time — U.S. conservatives can’t tactically afford to exclude the American equivalent of people who would belong to European neofascist/nationalist parties the way that European Christian Democrats can. Some of this may be a product of the lack of an established church – a far smaller share of U.S. Christians are moderate, ritual rather than ideology oriented members of churches that are established churches somewhere in Europe and lack the folkways that go with that world. Many God and Country conservatives also espouse a strong formal commitment to the separation of church and state as they understand the concept.

The closest cousins ideologically to Christian Democrats on the American scene, in my view, are probably the political wings of the Chamber of Commerce, and members of service clubs like Rotary and Lions in small cities. But, that kind of classification is infinitely subtle and highly subjective. Your mileage may vary.

you’re a lawyer, so i have to assume that you purposely misunderstood the categories to engage in this rant. i hope you feel better, because it was totally boring (you can find it 1 million time elsewhere). obviously the ‘big gov. social conservatism’ is different from the corporatism you are talking about here. on the contrary, the populists tend to have a reflex against corporatism and a neo-hamiltonian ‘american system.’ what i term ‘the forgotten’ can probably be analogized to some extent as similar to ‘christian democracy’ in europe, which has its elements of corporatism, but is (from what i recall) rooted in the petite bourgeois.

I think you’re misinterpreting what being “economically left” versus “right” means. Rhetorically speaking, it’s about free markets of course. But this is just rhetoric, as you rightly noticed. One of the reasons I am not a libertarian is that it’s obvious free markets are not a self-correcting mechanism. If a market is set as too “free” then the tendency is for the winners to collude, eliminate risk for themselves and their children, and ultimately turn it into a highly unfree market.

The difference between being economically left or right I think is better described as this: Is it more important that the economy reward the already successful, or limit the downsides of failure? Under such a rubric, many types of “big government conservativism” are properly seen as right wing (or at least apolitical), as although there is a redistribution, if anything it is up the income ladder (from ordinary taxpayers to defense contractors, for example) rather than downward.

An obvious loophole is left for the person holding those views still to be hypocritical. So someone on the right may think rewarding success is more important than easing failure – until they fail themselves. Hence why many on the right can oppose government handouts in principle and still get them themselves. I suppose the flipside is if someone on the left supports higher taxation on the wealthy, but gripes about taxes personally (or seeks to evade them). But in my own experience, people on the economic left are more likely to suck it up. I’m not saying that we can’t be hypocritical in other ways, but on taxes, the left mostly isn’t.

Is it “quite disturbing” because you can not relate to the sentiment or disturbing because there is something extremely bad that will happen because of it?

I would wager a guess that belief in the exceptionalism of one’s own country or people is not uncommon throughout the world. Nationalism and religiousity would seem to naturally distill themselves into a belief such as “God has granted *my country* a special place in human history”.
I think it is quite likely that the U.S., as the reigning superpower during the most rapid technological/cultural advances seen thus far, will hold a prominent place in human history for the forseeable future; and if I were superstitious, it would be logical for me to believe that “God granted” it.

K Street is awash with big government conservatives arguing for special interest tax breaks and more government spending. So is the “conservative” component of the federal judiciary. So are the folks in Utah that organized for and secured huge increases in elementary school funding in an overall highly conservative Republican state.

These are the same people who gave us near monopoly non-profit health care in North Dakota long before liberals were talking about single payer. These are the managers of the defense contractors and road building empires of the world. These are our soldiers and government union member law enforcement officers. These are Reagan Republican union members. These are the modern day merchantalists urging active manipulation of currency markets and tough stances with China on its currency floats. These are Eisenhower Republicans. These are the gay hating geezers for whom Medicare and Social Security are third rails.

Many politicians who claim to be economic conservatives are really merely anti-Soviet Style communists who want relief for business constituents who complain to them specifically, not ideological lassiez-faire economists.

Part of the coalition building problem that this survey reveals and that has been long known by other names is that politically, white working class populations in the South are very different politically from white working class people elsewhere.

I do have to say, 70% of the white working class thinking “God has granted America a special place in human history” is quite disturbing however. Even when I was a young teen, before I ceased to be religious, I found the idea that God would somehow care more about America than other countries ridiculous. This is the one “does not compute” moment for me – particularly because on the whole working-class whites aren’t all that much more religious than middle-class whites.