Conservative Passion

For the record, I didn’t dispute your assertion, but I did question whether it was true. To see what it was based on for example.

And based on your response, I think the problem for your assertion (and for any ‘bet’, as well) lies in trying to define/measure ‘passion’ in this context. Question-begging seems inescapable.

Not clear what your proposed word-frequency metric really measures, for example. If indeed the phrase ‘get tough’ arises more in conservative writing on war than on taxes, would that nec. be a reflection of more ‘passion’? Or could it just reflect the differing intrinsic nature of the topics?

I suspect what you’re noticing is really just a proxy for the fact that, if someone is generally ‘pro-war’ and ‘anti-immigration’, the sentiment is almost naturally going to come out sounding ‘passionate’, regardless of the person’s relative depth of feelings on other topics. Remember that your claim was a relative one. How is one to gauge the relative depth of ‘passion’ on different subjects? I would go not by which words are used but by things like consistency (I don’t think ‘pro-war’ well describes late-1990s conservatives), longevity, and how widespread the view is. That’s why – if we must indeed identify a ‘passionately’ held conservative view – taxes, on which almost all conservatives have consistently agreed for a very long time, was what immediately came to mind.

Immigration is still there, but I think that “WAR” has been replaced by “Financial house in order” for many conservatives. Note Dave Ramsey (“all debt is of the devil, governmental or personal”) at the top of the podcast list of popularity and also the tea party wave into congress.

“The conservatives that I know can’t stop talking about these topics. They bring them up spontaneously, frequently, and invariably to express outrage about American weakness. Can my sample really be that biased?”

1. The likelihood that the people any one person happens to know are an unbiased estimator of overall public opinion, or of public opinion of a group of which they are not a member (in this case, conservatives) is pretty freakin’ low. We should always be suspicious of our own experience as an estimator of anything but our own experience.

2. That said–and G-d do I hate giving you this, since it undermines everything I just said–but see this (scientific? Can’t tell) survey of key issues to conservatives in the 2008 election. Immigration and war are right up there.

I think Caplan is probably correct and mostly in-line with current scholarship on people’s views (and voting) on issues & the way issues are framed by politicians, political elite, and the media ( see this recent paper reviewing the scholarship on this ) .

@patrick r. sullivan: That’s a banal & outdated example that has nothing to do with Caplan’s post.
It’s the same as saying that I think the most passionate people on war have been the registered-Republican Party and NRA member-types, like Timothy McVeigh (cite) There are nuts on both sides of the issue–it doesn’t help us evaluate Caplan’s premise about conservatives current issue-orientation.

Here’s an example of what I’m thinking about. Pew Aug 2010 survey

I think that’ll take you directly to the issues table. If not, it’s in the section “Issue Priorities and the Vote for Congress”.

Whether conservatives are more outraged about abortion or immigration depends on what part of the country you live in. In the bible belt they are (at least the people in Kansas and Oklahoma I know are) more fixated on abortion, maybe less so now that George Tiller is dead. But immigration is reaching the equilibrium point in anger.

“But again, how much angry attention has this topic really gotten in major conservative outlets during the last ten years? A minority of conservatives is clearly extremely angry about abortion, but a majority of conservatives seem extremely angry about Mexicans and terrorists.”

At the risk of getting facetious, maybe the reason could be explained by charts tracking terrorist activity and illegal immigration numbers from the past 10 years.

The first has a relevant data point around 3rd quarter 2001.

The second probably needs some reference to recent amnesty proposals… ones eerily similar to the Regan era betrayals on the same topic.

Surely it is too much to ask your sampled group to be “most passionate” about every topic, all the time, with no shift in focus corresponding to world events?

It seems to me that many people who used to self-identify as conservative now call themselves libertarian, even if they don’t agree with some libertarian positions. Others called themselves independents, particularly during the runup to the recent election, when the popular press was swooning over the “independent” vote.

The reason for this is that the “conservative” label was hijacked, first by the “national greatness” crowd at the Weekly Standard, and then by other big-government conservatives. When you start and/or drag out unnecessary wars, create a massive new entitlement, bail out the richest and least deserving, tap phones, lure people into attempting to commit crimes, elevate a nuisance into a “War on Terrorism” and thereby move towards a police state, that kind of gives conservatism a bad name.

The result is that only the people who actually approve of the Bush policies still call themselves conservative. And since Bush’s appeal was mostly driven by the fear of outsiders, it’s not surprising that his remaining supporters are anti-immigrant and pro-war.

I call Heisenberg.

People are only going to passionately discuss things they disagree about. When a well known libertarian like BC talks to conservatives, that means the lively debate topics are war and immigration.

I think Bryan’s dead wrong here and I have a bet proposal at the end if he is interested.

“Passion” is hard to measure. But as editor of The Heritage Foundation’s blog, The Foundry, I see what posts get the most traffic and the most comments.
We blog about almost every conceivable public policy topic at The Foundry, and immigration and “war” are not traffic or comment generators.

Any foreign policy topic, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, are almost always at the bottom of our traffic rankings. Immigration is about in the middle. Spending, debt, health care, and the U.S. Constitution are by far the most popular topics.

Here is the bet: Identify the three highest rated conservative talk show hosts (I think its Limbaugh, Hannity, and Beck). Pick three random shows from each of them from this year. Then tally up the minutes they devoted to different policy areas.

I’d bet immigration and war are not the top two items on that list.

The issues where the general public polls wildly in favor/against a policy, and the government does the exact opposite, generate the most passion. Conservatives think the government is running a pro-illegal alien immigration policy. With Obama in office, some of the them think he’s intentionally trying to bankrupt America.