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The Republican party at prayer
Mar. 21st, 2012 11:53 pm
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 13. High today: 23.
More on the Santorum-and-women mystery, from a Gallup release today: "While more Republican women back Romney than Santorum, female support for Santorum is holding up despite widespread media discussion of his conservative positions on contraception and other women's issues." This is in reference to their poll finding that more Republican and Republic-leaning women than men support Santorum, 30% to 27%. Republican(-leaning) women also like Romney more than Republican(-leaning) men do. Women like Gingrich less than men do (15% to 11%), which might suggest that being a jerk to women is more of a "women's issue" among Republican women than contraception and abortion are. But women like Paul much less than men do--14% to 6%. (Paul is also the candidate whose numbers are most affected by place-of-worship attendance and by age. If you never or seldom attend a PoW, you're twice as likely to support Paul as if you attend weekly (14% to 7%). If you're between 18 and 34 years old, you're nine times as likely to support Paul as if you're 55 or older (27% to 3%). And, of course, Paul is much more popular among Republican-leaning independents than among Republicans proper (17% to 8%). I wonder if Paul has an outright majority of support among 18-year-old Republican-leaning males who never go to church. (Yeah, probably not, but....))
So let's look at the contraception thing. I had figured that it wouldn't be as easy to find polls on support for contraception as it is to find polls on support for abortion rights, but actually (as anyone who follows American politics closely would know) it's easy to find polls these days on one thing having to do with contraception, i.e., the real issue about contraception that Santorum could actually do something about, namely, the new legal requirement that private insurance plans cover contraception. According to this here poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation, women do in fact support that more than men do overall, but only 66% to 60%. When you break it down further along party lines, though, you find that support for that law is the same among Republican men and women: 42% each. (Among Democrats: women 85%, men 80%. Among independents: women 67%, men 60%.) Here's another interesting thing from the same poll (more detailed PDF here): 27% of Republican women, 19% of independent women, and 21% of Democratic women said that abortion is "extremely important" to their vote for president. (Here's something from another Kaiser poll (PDF): 58% of Americans say that the health reform law passed in 2010 is still in effect; 14% say it has been overturned by the Supreme Court; 28% don't know or refused to answer. A majority of those with an opinion said that the Supreme Court should find it unconstitutional, but more respondents said Congress should keep and/or expand the law than said Congress should repeal it and/or replace it with a Republican alternative.)
Thinking about the Santorum-and-women mystery, I thought, well, look, if you support abortion rights, whether you're a man or a woman, you're likely not a Republican in the first place (or else there's a good chance you're a Paul Republican, which I guess is not unlike being a David Orchard Conservative--if your guy wasn't running, you wouldn't be in the party). But then I thought of the huge swathes of monolithic Conservative country in rural Ontario and right across Alberta, and I thought of my grandfather, who voted for the Conservatives in 1988 despite thinking that free trade would destroy the country--policy positions don't necessarily drive party preference. (Frequently, party preference drives policy positions: you like what your team likes.) Location and heritage are drivers of party preference, often by way of policy positions, but not always. Some places in Canada, politics for the most part doesn't take place between parties but within them, or rather within one of them. Presumably there are many places where it's the same in the US. If you're a young woman growing up in Cowtown, Texas, it might be obvious that only crazy degenerate socialists from the big city vote for Democrats, but you might also happen to come to the ineluctable conclusion that killing a human embryo is not murder. This actually seems like an important thing to happen for political parties, to moderate them and keep them at least somewhat open to the other side's positions. I suspect it's largely because party preference is being driven less and less by location and heritage, as both Americans and Canadians become more urban and more sophisticated-rationalist-modern, that the main parties are becoming less moderate and more antagonistic in relation to each other. I suspect it is increasingly the case that if you don't like your party's position on issues that are important to you, you switch parties. (This comes much more naturally in Canada, where the vast majority of people have no official affiliation with any party. The typical American voter has a party; the typical Canadian voter votes for a party.) But then again, as voters become more inclined to switch, parties have to moderate themselves to appeal to the increasing pool of "swing voters"....
This all brings me around to an article--"Presbyterianism's Democratic Captivity", by Joseph D. Small, in First Things--I was reading the other day in the Trinity College library (which, miraculously, seems to be stubbornly clinging to its hard-copy journal subscriptions). It's about how the positions of the American Presbyterian Church are decided upon by majority vote of representative assemblies, and the divisiveness of doing things this way: if your side loses a vote on an important issue (which, lately, means something having to do with sexual orientation), there's a good chance you end up leaving and joining another church or setting up your own. Small's view seems to be that the church should only take positions that can be agreed upon unanimously, or near-unanimously. This strikes me as basically incoherent as a solution to the schism problem: if half of the members of your church in fact support--or demand--the ordination of gay ministers and half don't--or would rather die--then you've got an irresoluble problem no matter what you do. What's interesting to me about this is the fact that people do make demands like that of their churches--what's interesting is not the problem of democratic procedures but the fact of democratic attitudes, which have led to the mainline protestant churches being barely distinguishable from each other (though this is not a new thing--weird as talk of a Lutheran-Anglican merger in Canada feels, the United Church of Canada was founded in 1925), including, as Small points out, in that they've all undergone or are undergoing the same schisms. I used to find it weird and distasteful that people "shop around" for a denomination or religion that suits them because that struck me as basically contrary to the revelatory essence of religion. It strikes me now that the real problem for the churches isn't the people who leave them to find ones that suit them better, but the people who want to make their own churches into ones that suit them better.
More on the Santorum-and-women mystery, from a Gallup release today: "While more Republican women back Romney than Santorum, female support for Santorum is holding up despite widespread media discussion of his conservative positions on contraception and other women's issues." This is in reference to their poll finding that more Republican and Republic-leaning women than men support Santorum, 30% to 27%. Republican(-leaning) women also like Romney more than Republican(-leaning) men do. Women like Gingrich less than men do (15% to 11%), which might suggest that being a jerk to women is more of a "women's issue" among Republican women than contraception and abortion are. But women like Paul much less than men do--14% to 6%. (Paul is also the candidate whose numbers are most affected by place-of-worship attendance and by age. If you never or seldom attend a PoW, you're twice as likely to support Paul as if you attend weekly (14% to 7%). If you're between 18 and 34 years old, you're nine times as likely to support Paul as if you're 55 or older (27% to 3%). And, of course, Paul is much more popular among Republican-leaning independents than among Republicans proper (17% to 8%). I wonder if Paul has an outright majority of support among 18-year-old Republican-leaning males who never go to church. (Yeah, probably not, but....))
So let's look at the contraception thing. I had figured that it wouldn't be as easy to find polls on support for contraception as it is to find polls on support for abortion rights, but actually (as anyone who follows American politics closely would know) it's easy to find polls these days on one thing having to do with contraception, i.e., the real issue about contraception that Santorum could actually do something about, namely, the new legal requirement that private insurance plans cover contraception. According to this here poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation, women do in fact support that more than men do overall, but only 66% to 60%. When you break it down further along party lines, though, you find that support for that law is the same among Republican men and women: 42% each. (Among Democrats: women 85%, men 80%. Among independents: women 67%, men 60%.) Here's another interesting thing from the same poll (more detailed PDF here): 27% of Republican women, 19% of independent women, and 21% of Democratic women said that abortion is "extremely important" to their vote for president. (Here's something from another Kaiser poll (PDF): 58% of Americans say that the health reform law passed in 2010 is still in effect; 14% say it has been overturned by the Supreme Court; 28% don't know or refused to answer. A majority of those with an opinion said that the Supreme Court should find it unconstitutional, but more respondents said Congress should keep and/or expand the law than said Congress should repeal it and/or replace it with a Republican alternative.)
Thinking about the Santorum-and-women mystery, I thought, well, look, if you support abortion rights, whether you're a man or a woman, you're likely not a Republican in the first place (or else there's a good chance you're a Paul Republican, which I guess is not unlike being a David Orchard Conservative--if your guy wasn't running, you wouldn't be in the party). But then I thought of the huge swathes of monolithic Conservative country in rural Ontario and right across Alberta, and I thought of my grandfather, who voted for the Conservatives in 1988 despite thinking that free trade would destroy the country--policy positions don't necessarily drive party preference. (Frequently, party preference drives policy positions: you like what your team likes.) Location and heritage are drivers of party preference, often by way of policy positions, but not always. Some places in Canada, politics for the most part doesn't take place between parties but within them, or rather within one of them. Presumably there are many places where it's the same in the US. If you're a young woman growing up in Cowtown, Texas, it might be obvious that only crazy degenerate socialists from the big city vote for Democrats, but you might also happen to come to the ineluctable conclusion that killing a human embryo is not murder. This actually seems like an important thing to happen for political parties, to moderate them and keep them at least somewhat open to the other side's positions. I suspect it's largely because party preference is being driven less and less by location and heritage, as both Americans and Canadians become more urban and more sophisticated-rationalist-modern, that the main parties are becoming less moderate and more antagonistic in relation to each other. I suspect it is increasingly the case that if you don't like your party's position on issues that are important to you, you switch parties. (This comes much more naturally in Canada, where the vast majority of people have no official affiliation with any party. The typical American voter has a party; the typical Canadian voter votes for a party.) But then again, as voters become more inclined to switch, parties have to moderate themselves to appeal to the increasing pool of "swing voters"....
This all brings me around to an article--"Presbyterianism's Democratic Captivity", by Joseph D. Small, in First Things--I was reading the other day in the Trinity College library (which, miraculously, seems to be stubbornly clinging to its hard-copy journal subscriptions). It's about how the positions of the American Presbyterian Church are decided upon by majority vote of representative assemblies, and the divisiveness of doing things this way: if your side loses a vote on an important issue (which, lately, means something having to do with sexual orientation), there's a good chance you end up leaving and joining another church or setting up your own. Small's view seems to be that the church should only take positions that can be agreed upon unanimously, or near-unanimously. This strikes me as basically incoherent as a solution to the schism problem: if half of the members of your church in fact support--or demand--the ordination of gay ministers and half don't--or would rather die--then you've got an irresoluble problem no matter what you do. What's interesting to me about this is the fact that people do make demands like that of their churches--what's interesting is not the problem of democratic procedures but the fact of democratic attitudes, which have led to the mainline protestant churches being barely distinguishable from each other (though this is not a new thing--weird as talk of a Lutheran-Anglican merger in Canada feels, the United Church of Canada was founded in 1925), including, as Small points out, in that they've all undergone or are undergoing the same schisms. I used to find it weird and distasteful that people "shop around" for a denomination or religion that suits them because that struck me as basically contrary to the revelatory essence of religion. It strikes me now that the real problem for the churches isn't the people who leave them to find ones that suit them better, but the people who want to make their own churches into ones that suit them better.
