THERE’S A SIMPLE EXPLANATION for virtually all the political trends of 2000, including the declining appeal of tax cuts, the rising support for government programs, the popularity of the Democratic agenda, the less conservative than usual cast of the Republican presidential front-runners and the more liberal cast of the Democrats, indeed, the success of John McCain and the failure of conservative candidates Steve Forbes, Gary Bauer, and Alan Keyes. The explanation? The country has moved to the left. No, it hasn’t lurched drastically. But the political mood has grown perceptibly more liberal over the past year or two.
Conservatives should not dismiss the shift as merely a transitory function of a strong economy. True, there is a prosperity effect that has, for one thing, dampened enthusiasm for slashing taxes. But the mood swing is not entirely the result of good times. The bellwether issue that tracked the rise of conservatism from the 1960s to the 1990s was the death penalty. Support in Gallup polls surged from 42 percent in 1966 to 80 percent in 1994. Last year, those favoring capital punishment dipped to 71 percent, not a huge drop but meaningful nonetheless.
The most striking change is the public’s attitude toward government. There is less worry that government is too large and tries to do too many things. In 1996, 61 percent of Americans surveyed by CBS News preferred “smaller government with fewer services,” and only 30 percent favored “larger government with many services.” Last fall, CBS asked again and found a dramatic change. This time, 46 percent wanted smaller government, and 43 percent preferred more government. Meanwhile, opposition to government regulation has diminished, and fewer Americans agree with the notion that government is always inefficient and wasteful.
The first politician to respond to the mini-revival in support for government was President Clinton, and he did so cautiously in 1996 with a slew of micro-programs at the federal level. This year, he proposed 73 small, new programs in the State of the Union address and 83 in his final budget. This tack — little big government — has proved politically popular. So much so that the two Democratic presidential candidates, Al Gore and Bill Bradley, have been emboldened to move beyond it, to Clinton’s left. They’ve proposed sweeping and more costly programs in health care, child support, and income subsidies. Yet polls show voters regard them as solidly in the political mainstream.
George W. Bush and John McCain tailored their campaigns to a political environment that’s less anti-government. The package of domestic policies Bush calls “compassionate conservatism” consists largely of tasks for government. He talks about limiting government, not slashing it. McCain’s campaign is mostly about himself and not his policy ideas, but he’s made one proposal that’s surprising for a Republican. Rather than go for a large tax cut, as Bush has, McCain says two-thirds of the non-Social Security surplus should be used to pay down the national debt and shore up Medicare and Social Security. Polls say the public prefers McCain’s approach.
Americans also seem quite happy with the candidates they’ve been offered. In 1992, only 40 percent said they were satisfied. Four years later, 57 percent did. Now, 70 percent say they’ve found a candidate who’d make a good president. And a sizable majority doesn’t want much to change in Washington either, at least in a conservative direction. Sixty percent in a Gallup poll in January said Clinton’s policies should continue or be replaced by more liberal policies. Only 33 percent called for more conservative policies.
Most of these trends — contentment, desire for slightly more government, satisfaction with presidential candidates — are at least partly and perhaps entirely the products of prosperity. Certainly the national mood is sky-high. Since 1974, Yankelovich Partners has been asking: “How well do you think things are going in the country these days?” This year, those answering “very well” or “fairly well” reached an all-time high of 80 percent. The highest in the Reagan years was 74 percent. People feel so good even their opinion of former presidents has soared. “Everybody is getting a bump except Nixon,” says polling expert Karlyn Bowman of the American Enterprise Institute.
Yet prosperity hardly seems a sufficient explanation for the lost allure of tax cuts, the staple of successful Republican campaigns since the 1970s. After all, aren’t federal taxes as a percentage of GDP the highest ever, higher even than during World War II? The answer to that question is yes, but it may be the wrong question. Nearly half of American house-holds now own stock, and their tendency is to judge their tax burden against their net worth, not against their income. In the past, workers didn’t see the money building up in pension accounts. Now, with 401(k) plans and IRAs, they do, and they also decide how it should be invested. And for the time being, anyway, they watch as their household wealth mounts.
Bruce Bartlett, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, explains what he calls “tax passivity” as the quite understandable result of taxes rising more slowly than net worth. “By contrast, because of progressivity, taxes rise faster than incomes,” he writes in Policy Review. “That is why taxes as a share of GDP plus the rise in net worth have fallen, while taxes as a share of GDP have risen. . . . As long as net worth keeps rising at a healthy clip, people will probably remain relatively unconcerned about rising taxes.” Besides, Bartlett says, paying down the debt is instinctively seen by many Americans as a tax cut, since taxes won’t have to be hiked later to cover that same debt.
But it’s not McCain’s debt payment plan that best manifests the clever positioning of his campaign. It’s his emphasis on character and biography rather than issues and ideology that makes his candidacy apt for the times. Prosperity, it turns out, is the enemy of ideology. Bush discovered this after being shellacked in the New Hampshire primary. For two days, he stressed that he’s the conservative GOP candidate, McCain the liberal. This line of attack flopped, and Bush quickly abandoned it. “Ideology takes center stage when you’ve got a real crisis,” says pollster Frank Luntz. “When problems are less extreme, people tend to look at smaller solutions.” And at other things in a candidate, like personal traits.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
