BREAKING! New Deal Programs Extremely Popular
By Murc argues that conservative messaging has too been effective:
Well, the Republicans manage to get around 45% of the vote, minimum, while explicitly campaigning on destroying things that thirty years ago would have been considered political suicide to advocate.
I mean, remember the Ryan budget? That was part of Romney’s campaign platform, in fact pretty much the core of it, and it explicitly called for the dismantling of Medicare, a wildly successful and efficacious program. It got, what, 47% of the country voting for it? That says to me that this policy that benefits large numbers of people has gotten sufficiently less popular that trying to destroy it is no longer beyond the pale, and that seems like a win for long-term messaging discipline to me.
Hell, look at when Bush took a run at Social Security about eight years ago. That wasn’t popular enough to pass, but it sure as hell was more popular than it would’ve been in the eighties, judging by the nonexistent political price paid for it by those who were willing to sign on.
The problems with this argument are rather obvious, even if we leave aside the fact that “getting thumped in the subsequent two elections” seems like a political price to me. Bush’s Social Security plan was highly unpopular, and got less popular as he spent more time using the immense power of the BULLY PULPIT to sell it. Paul Ryan’s proposed destruction of Medicare is somewhat less popular than cancer of the rectum. Not only the public as a whole but a large majority of Tea Party members strongly support New Deal programs. Decades of conservative messaging (including an extensive campaign by a recently re-elected president) have not had any success in undermining the popularity of New Deal programs. Indeed, the Ryan plan wasn’t political suicide in some measure because it’ s so grotesquely unpopular people literally refused to believe that Romney was actually proposing it.
None of this is surprising, because if you look closely the whole argument it’s a non-sequitur. Positive electoral results can prove the popularity of individual messages only if elections are referenda on discrete issues, which they obviously aren’t.
And again, this is the problem with the tendency to vastly overrate the power of “messaging”: it obscures concrete issues of power. All things being equal, it’s better to have public opinion on your side. But just as public opinion gains are no guarantee of policy wins, individual unpopular policies are no guarantee of policy or electoral defeat. And if your plan for political success is based on using clever rhetoric to sell people things they don’t want, you’re misguided twice over.