Is America really a 'center-right' nation?
OPINION - One of the most persistent truisms in politics is that America is a center-right nation...
Obama’s inaugural address attempted to connect the high minded principles of America’s founding in the 18th century, to the gaping holes that had to be fix in the 20th: for women at Seneca Falls, for African-Americans at Selma and for gay Americans at Stonewall.
The speech was a strong defense of progressive values, to be sure, but those values have been entrenched for so long, it’s hard to argue that they’re anything other than mainstream.
When Obama said that “We the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it…” and that “we believe that America’s prosperity must rest upon the broad shoulders of a rising middle class,” that wasn’t some far-out Marxist vision, it was what the vast majority of Americans, who polls show care most about “strengthening the economy” and “improving jobs”, happen to believe.
When he said “we know that America thrives when every person can find independence and pride in their work; when the wages of honest labor liberate families from the brink of hardship. …” it was the restatement of a concept of work that has been standard since the early 20th century, when the country decided that a minimum wage, a weekend off, a safe workplace, and child labor laws, were fundamental American values.
Obama’s statement that “we the people still believe every citizen deserves a decent measure of security and dignity,” he was defending safety net programs like Social Security and Medicare, which even tea partiers would dare any politician to try and part them from.
And when he said that “we are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American, she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own,” he was simply taking the “self-evident” truths in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…” and applying them to those left out of the “self-evidence” by the slave-owning men who wrote the country’s founding document.
Meanwhile, when it comes to fundamental questions like the economy, the safety net, women’s rights and civil rights, Obama was addressing a nation whose center of gravity has shifted away from the right.
Obama’s election itself, and his re-election, shows that.
And whether it’s the increased social acceptance of gay marriage, majority support for immigration reform, or what polls show is now supermajority support for keeping abortion legal, driven in part by increasing support from African-Americans and Hispanics, two groups commonly thought of as more socially conservative than the national average, it’s fair to say Obama is leading, and being driven by, a tide that’s drifting toward progressivism.
Even on the subject of national security, a decade of war post-9/11, the latest Pew Research survey finds that preventing terrorism ranks fourth on Americans’ list of priorities, roughly tying with strengthening Social Security and improving education. So when the president spoke of ending America’s state of “perpetual war” — he likely spoke for the majority.
In the wake of the Aurora and Newtown massacres, Americans are increasingly joining post-1981 Reagan in supporting some form of gun control.
If there’s one area where the country seems to be moving rightward, it’s on race, where anti-black sentiments are actually growing, according to a Pew Poll — ironic given that the country just re-elected its first black president. Still, generational divides in racial attitudes suggest that the remaining pockets of resistance to the idea that all men and women really are created equal, will only become more isolated over time.
To be sure, the U.S. is a country with deep veins of conservatism running through it, especially in certain regions, like the south, and rural parts of many states. But overall, it’s hard to describe the country as “center-right” when the gravitational pull on so many issues is in the other direction.
Fellow Joy Reid on Twitter at @thereidreport.
