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But I don't honestly know how that compares with your 6%, since your number implies individuals and mine concerns family income. And there is no telling how that question was answered at the exit polls where voter information is gathered. But obviously you have some reason for stating the 6%, and I'll accept that at face value.
But 6% of the US population is 18.6 million people. Let's assume (safely) that they are all of voting age. There were 125 million votes cast in 2012, so suddenly that 18.9 million people become a significant portion (15%, in fact) of the voting public.
Use 117 million households as the figure, and you get 23.2 million household making above $100,000.
Whichever way it is, they leaned hard toward Romney, which is not surprising. My view is that financially successful people are the real drivers of the economy, and they clearly tend to be conservative. In this past election their numbers were overwhelmed by the young voters and what I call (without apology) the low information voters, because of their extremely narrow motive for voting as they do.
Relative to which nations at what times? At birth the US was instantly the most radical nation on the planet, with four to five times the percentage of the population who qualified to vote than had England.
Since then the US has remained progressive, albeit slow and steady rather than revolutionary bursts. Other nations have evolved to feature some institutions which are more liberal than their counterparts in the US, but relative to the way that most of the rest of the world has been governed, the US has been to the left.
Kind of funny how anyone can claim that the U.S. has become more conservative in light of the end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the increasing acceptance of gay marriage rights, the increasing in the inclusion of women in every more aspects of American society and the election of a African American to the presidency of the United States. The thread would have been better entitled the "When have conservatives been more conservative" because the rest of the country just isn't on the same road.
More conservative? Hardly. The right has reached the end of it's tenure. Just because it's making such loud noises in it's last dying gasps doesn't make it a majority.
More conservative? Hardly. The right has reached the end of it's tenure. Just because it's making such loud noises in it's last dying gasps doesn't make it a majority.
I have no idea what that is supposed to mean. You are proposing that the two party system will go away and we are left with one party? "The right" has not reached the end of it's tenure, it's just adapting by moving more to the center. They also have to deal with changing racial demographics. The population that are registered as Republican are about equal to those registered as Democrat.
Both parties adapt, and the new "right" is where the center was 40 years ago. But it appears to be reaching an equilibrium, such as in Europe which has, by necessity, become more fiscally conservative in the last few years. It's also ironic (maybe an indication that whoever is in power, things stay the same, and the disagreement of right and left is just a huge meaningless political game) that Bush and Obama now have the exact same complaints - bad economy growth, unpopular military action, government privacy issues.
Extremests on both sides just seem louder because you have social media and other alternative media outlets. And look at this sites P&C forum - some very strange people there. But it is not representative.
My view is that America as an aggregate is more conservative today than it was in the mid-20th century. How can this be, given the vastly greater rights and acknowledgment of contributions made by women and minorities, and the acceptance of gay rights?
I offer two points: religion and capital. America is more overtly religious today than it was 2 generations ago, when it was gauche for mainstream politicians to includes references to god in their speeches. Today religion is a litmus test for political office, a regular part of public discourse. This is a fairly new development. The second point is about the role of capital vs. labor. Today it is entirely mainstream to extol the investor-class and to use terms such as "job creators". 60 years ago, talk of unions and worker rights, if transported into the present, would be regarded as downright socialist.
Modern America is more inclusive and more tolerant of people who don't look like the mainstream, and that's of course all to the good. But in the crucial matters of religion and money, our society is more conservative to day that in the post-WW2 period.
In the past 30 years, when has it leaned more to the right, either in social or fiscal issues?
I can think of a few conservative victories and uprisings:
- Most recently, the Tea Party movement around 2010, as a reaction to Obama
- The period from 9/11 to roughly after the Bush re-election. 2004 seems like a particularly conservative year, in terms of TV and things (e.g. "Nipplegate" and the aftermath)
- The mid-1980's - Reagan won in 49 of the 50 states
Conservatives remain the majority in the U.S., with moderates coming in second. Liberals are the minority.
Conservative comes with a wide connotation of political movements. Neoconservatism, social conservatism, paleoconservatism, and libertarianism (from an international context: right libertarianism, left-libertarianism does not formally exist in the United States). Obviously, libertarianism has sparked the most interest in recent years while the first three mentioned are steadily losing interest. It's hard to say if society is truly leaning conservative, Democrats still have a grip on power. More like a period of heightened political tension.
The USA today is certainly more conservative than most of the nations that have similarly robust economies.
Which raises an arguable point. All modern industrial democracies have constitutions that are very much like that of the USA, and frequently modeled after it. So, is there language within the US constitution, which mandates that the social and economic climate ought to be further to the right, than the manner in which other nations have interpreted their constitutions? Particularly with respect to the mandate to "promote the general Welfare" in the Preamble.
In other words, exactly where in the US Constitution would one find the language that requires that the US Constitution be interpreted more conservatively than other constitutions are, or would prohibit a more liberal interpretation?
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