[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Policy.]
By John Hood
Real Clear Policy
RALEIGH, NC — Traditional small-government conservatism is yesterday’s news. Its few remaining adherents — nostalgic politicians, media hounds, ivory-tower intellectuals — just stumble around ineffectually, like extras from the umpteenth season of The Walking Dead, while nationalist-populists with fresh ideas and different priorities are building a young and ascendant American Right.
Or so we’ve been told, primarily by the nationalist-populists themselves. I’ve always had my doubts about this “Zombie Reaganism” narrative. It didn’t comport with my own experience, lived largely outside of the Beltway, the City, and the Twitterverse. Most conservative politicians, activists, and thinkers I know still want to make government smaller, rather than merely shifting the target of its coercive power from our “friends” to our “enemies.” And, yes, they revere Reagan, even if they don’t remember the Reagan era.
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I was right to be skeptical, according to the latest political typology from the Pew Research Center. It managed to capture quite a few Reaganite zombies in the wild and subject them to survey testing. The results show them to be very much alive.
There are, to be sure, plenty of differences across the four reddish voting groups in Pew’s typology: Faith and Flag Conservatives (23% of Republican or Republican-leaning voters), the Populist Right (23%), Committed Conservatives (15%), and the Ambivalent Right (18%). Although the vast majority voted for Donald Trump, for example, the first two groups are more enthusiastic about his style and signature issues than the latter two groups. There are important disagreements about foreign policy, immigration, trade, and other matters.
Still, I was struck more by the commonalities than the differences. When asked about government regulation, for example, 85% of Faith and Flag Conservatives said it “usually does more harm than good,” as did 73% of the Populist Right, 70% of Committed Conservatives, and 63% of the Ambivalent Right. Asked whether they’d rather have a smaller government providing fewer services or a larger government providing more services, all four groups overwhelmingly choose the first option.
American conservatives of every stripe tend to disdain welfare programs. Three-quarters or more of each group agreed that “government aid to the poor does more harm than good, by making people too dependent on government assistance.” Two-thirds or more agreed that “government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals.” Almost all oppose giving presidents more power. Almost all think the federal budget deficit is a big problem. Most oppose raising the minimum wage and think it should not be the responsibility of the federal government to “make sure all Americans have health care coverage.” Most also oppose “phasing out the production of new gasoline cars and trucks by the year 2035,” which may sound unexceptional until I tell you that 47% of all respondents and majorities of all Democratic groups favor this cockamamie idea.
Regardless of which typology group Pew placed them in, most American conservatives think there’s been “a lot” of progress over the past 50 years towards “ensuring equal rights for all Americans regardless of their racial or ethnic backgrounds.” They’re right. And most show little sympathy for the Black Lives Matter movement, which may have begun with high ideals but all too often devolved into left-wing grievance politics, disorder, and rioting.
Again, by offering these observations on what American conservatives have in common, I’m not denying the obvious disagreements and tensions. Some of the Pew Research Center findings disappointed or even dismayed me. I have strong views about many of the issues about which GOP-leaning voters are closely divided. As a libertarian-minded conservative, I’m going to keep trying to convince more of them to see things my way, just as I expect nationalist-populists to keep trying to do the same.
Nor do I accept these or any other poll results as dispositive. Most Americans are, to their credit, only moderately interested in politics. Their views can’t be precisely divined by surveys about policy issues to which they have often given little prior thought. Their answers depend on part on the wording or even the order of the questions posed. In short, they aren’t weirdos.
That doesn’t make projects like the Pew Research Center’s typology useless, however. They are best thought of not as public-policy checklists or predictive electoral models but as messaging devices. What words, phrases, and general concepts draw the greatest response, positive or negative, from respondents with varying degrees of political information and engagement? For those interested in building and sustaining a broad governing majority on the Center-Right, the Pew results are heartening. There’s a lot we can work with here. Best get to it.
John Hood is president of the John William Pope Foundation. His latest book is a novel, Mountain Folk (Defiance Press, 2021).
[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Policy.]
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