It’s large, according to a study by Stephen Hawkins, Daniel Yudkin, Miriam Juan-Torres, and Tim Dixon, helpfully summarized by Yascha Mounk, who writes,
According to the report, 25 percent of Americans are traditional or devoted conservatives, and their views are far outside the American mainstream. Some 8 percent of Americans are progressive activists, and their views are even less typical. By contrast, the two-thirds of Americans who don’t belong to either extreme constitute an “exhausted majority.” Their members “share a sense of fatigue with our polarized national conversation, a willingness to be flexible in their political viewpoints, and a lack of voice in the national conversation.”
If Lilliana Mason and Ezra Klein are correct in forecasting a future alignment between a Social Justice party and those who are opposed, the Social Justice party has little chance. Which means they are not correct.
The paper offers this ideological picture:
– Progressive Activists: younger, highly engaged, secular, cosmopolitan, angry.
– Traditional Liberals: older, retired, open to compromise, rational, cautious.
– Passive Liberals: unhappy, insecure, distrustful, disillusioned.
– Politically Disengaged: young, low income, distrustful, detached, patriotic,
conspiratorial.
– Moderates: engaged, civic-minded, middle-of-the-road, pessimistic, Protestant.
– Traditional Conservatives: religious, middle class, patriotic, moralistic.
– Devoted Conservatives: white, retired, highly engaged, uncompromising,
patriotic.
I am skeptical of this breakdown. Where do African-Americans or Hispanics fit? Libertarians and others who with some beliefs that align left and other beliefs that align right?
Still, this report is catnip for me, with all sorts of interesting nuggets. Another excerpt:
The old left/right spectrum, based on the role of government and markets, is being supplanted by a new polarization between ‘open’ cosmopolitan values and ‘closed’ nationalist values. Insurgent populists, usually advancing a strident ‘closed’ agenda, are disrupting many political establishments. Yet we also find in each country that somewhere between 40-60 percent of people do not identify unambiguously with either the open or closed ends of the spectrum, and many are disturbed by the increasing sense of division in their country.