The pendulum swings again

Is the United States Moving to the Left?

Posted by John Cassidy, New Yorker

Over the weekend, at a Christmas party in Brooklyn, I ran into an old acquaintance, a veteran editor and publisher of serious, left-leaning books. For much of the time I’ve known him, he’s been busy bemoaning the state of American politics—the entire works of the Bush Administration and the G.O.P., obviously, but also the prevarications and retreats of Obama’s first term: the capitulation to Wall Street, the drone attacks, the failure to close Gitmo, and so on. On this occasion, I fully expected to hear another litany of complaints, but it didn’t happen. In fact, my old cobber was in a good mood. “The country’s moving to the left,” he announced with a smile.

Could it be true? Does Barack Obama’s reëlection, and the Democrats’ retention of a handy majority in the Senate, signify that the age of Reagan and Bush is truly over, and that a more liberal age is replacing it? With at least some Congressional Republicans seemingly willing to accept higher tax rates on the rich; with the Supreme Court set to hear arguments on gay marriage, which could conceivably lead to the legalization of same-sex unions across the country; and with the U.S. presence in Iraq and Afghanistan fast drawing down—it is at least possible to imagine such a thing.

Perhaps. A new poll from Politico/George Washington University, which was released on Monday, showed that sixty per cent of Americans back higher taxes on those earning more than $250,000 a year, and sixty-four per cent of Americans support raising taxes on large corporations. Support for higher taxes on the rich extends across the political spectrum. Fully fifty-nine per cent of independents favor such a policy. Even among self-identified Republicans, there is almost forty per cent backing. “Democrats really have a winning issue here, and we should drive it hard,” Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who helped conduct the poll, told Politico. “We’re in an era now where there’s a lot of cynicism about trickle-down economics.”

That appears to be true. When the pollsters asked the respondents whether they believed that raising taxes on high earners would damage the economy, almost sixty per cent of them said no. The detailed findings of the poll show that this rejection of the trickle-down argument was common to almost all the major geographic and demographic groups: men and women; the young, the middle aged, and the old; Midwesterners and Southerners; Catholics and Protestants; whites and Hispanics; high-school dropouts and college graduates. About the only groups that agreed with the G.O.P. argument were self-identified Republicans, conservatives, white conservative Christians, and members of the upper class. And even here, the support was hardly overwhelming. Thirty-seven per cent of Republicans and forty-five per cent of conservatives said that imposing steeper taxes on the highest earners wouldn’t hurt the economy.

(More here.)