Center to the Right?

Ezra Klein on the question of whether the US is a center-right nation.

We know that self-described conservatives outnumber self-described liberals, and appear to have done so for as long as we've been polling the question. But we also know that self-described Democrats outnumber self-described Republicans -- even when conservative pollsters are asking the question -- and that's been true for decades, too. So we're a conservative country ... that leans towards the Democrats? Huh.

We know, for instance, that Americans are less bothered by inequality than Europeans. But we also know that, when given a choice (pdf), Americans say they'd like their level of wealth inequality to look less like America's and more like Sweden's.

America's center-rightness is supposedly proven by the fact that we don't have a government-run health-care system. But we love our Medicare. We prefer it, in fact, to our private insurance. And we're less satisfied with our system than Europeans are with theirs. So we're a country that opposes government-run health care -- except when we have it, and then we far prefer it to the private market, and we're more likely than people in other countries to demand that our health-care system gets rebuilt.

I want to be clear what I'm arguing here: It's not that Americans don't have measurably different opinions than Europeans. It's that our opinions and the outcomes of our political system are not closely correlated. Rather, I think that the exceptionalism of the American political system comes from its structure, which is conservative with a small-c.

Because it's harder for the government to do things, the government does fewer things. At least seven presidents have run for office with some sort of universal health-care plan. In another system, one of them would've succeeded, and we would have had national health care by the mid-20th century, and one of the central policy differences between America and Europe wouldn't exist. As it happens, our system makes legislative change difficult, and so they all failed. But in the cases when they succeeded -- Social Security and Medicare -- their successes are wildly popular, and efforts to roll the programs back have been catastrophic failures. The American political system isn't so much biased against the left or the right as against change in general, and though there are occasional moments when events and majorities align to allow a political party to achieve a lot of the items on its agenda, they're quite rare, and almost never durable.