In order to find out how willing liberal Americans are to jettison the country’s cultural identity, I decided, on May 7th, to ask what I thought were outlandish questions—almost to the point of inflicting a Sokal Squared-style hoax on survey respondents. The answers I received amazed me. I then repeated the exercise on June 15th, after the George Floyd killing and subsequent protests to see whether things had gotten even crazier. It turns out they have.Topline findings: 70% of his supermajority-white liberals want a new Constitution (79% of 'very liberal's). 44% want Mount Rushmore "respectfully" destroyed (58% of 'very'). Several of the outlandish proposals have majority support, and even more among 'very's.
After the preface, “To what extent do you think that the following should be done to address structural barriers to race and gender equality in America,” I presented 16 statements that an amalgamated sample of 870 American respondents could agree or disagree with. The sample is not representative of the American population—I used the Amazon Mechanical Turk and Prolific Academic survey platforms that thousands of academics use. Respondents on these platforms lean young, liberal, and white. But as this is precisely the group I wished to study, this is not a major limitation. Indeed, I have removed conservatives and centrists to focus only on liberals. Liberals are defined as those who rate themselves as a one “very liberal” or two “liberal” on a five-point scale from “very liberal” to “very conservative.” The liberal sample, consisting of 414 people, was 86 percent white and 53 percent male. Forty percent of liberals identified as “very liberal” and the other 60 percent as just “liberal.”
The smallest level of support came in for a truly extraordinary proposal: 15/17% would like America to abandon English and adopt another language as its national standard -- and not a living language, but a constructed artificial one "forged from the immigrant and Native linguistic diversity of this country’s past." That's more than one in eight who are willing to jettison our entire literary cultural heritage in favor of a language in which no works of literature have ever been written, because that language does not exist.
Topline findings: 70% of his supermajority-white liberals want a new Constitution (79% of 'very liberal's).
ReplyDeleteThis illustrates why I'm opposed to a Constitutional convention. We got very lucky with the one we have. What we might benefit from are a couple of Amendment proposals and debates.
Eric Hines
That's more than one in eight who are willing to jettison our entire literary cultural heritage in favor of a language in which no works of literature have ever been written, because that language does not exist.
ReplyDeleteEven Mao's brainwashing via simplistic chinese, didn't go that far.
THe new generations always exceed the previous!
Eric: What we might benefit from are a couple of Amendment proposals and debates.
ReplyDeleteI agree, though I'm not quite as fearful of the convention idea. It depends on whether the output of the process is a bunch of individual articles to be ratified independently, or some sort of omnibus "something for everybody" mess. But that's true even if the proposal comes out of Congress.
J,
ReplyDeleteConsider our original Constitutional Convention. Its official, legal charter as endorsed by the Congress of the Confederation was to tweak the Articles of Confederation.
It quickly ran amok and vastly exceeded its charge. And we got lucky.
There's no reason to believe that a Constitutional Convention convened today, through whatever venue, won't similarly run amok. It's unlikely though, that the new proposed Constitution won't be significantly worse than the one we have. See, for instance, how the Texas Constitution seeks to micromanage so much of the State's internal business. And there's not an election season that goes by without the opportunity taken to vote on yet another amendment.
Consider, too, how likely that Constitution would be to be obeyed were it ratified. We already have a press that insists our current Constitution isn't binding on anything, and a plethora of judges and Justices who insist Article V is irrelevant; the Constitution is--must be--malleable from the bench.
Eric Hines