The In-Crowd isn't so In anymore

About a month ago, a conservative friend told me that most Americans didn't favor the health care reform bill. At the time, he was right. But things have changed, as Nate Silver points out:

Public Policy Polling has found a rather dramatic increase in support for health care legislation among liberals. 89 percent of self-described liberals now support the bill -- just 3 percent are opposed -- a shift which appears to account for most of the somewhat improved numbers that the bill is experiencing overall...

So my friend was technically right that most Americans didn't favor the health bill a month ago; he (or, more likely, his news sources) simply omitted the important fact that liberals were among the ones who were dissatisfied.

The GOP has used three main arguments against the bill:

A) The bill represents socialism, fascism, the downfall of America, and an affront against God.

B) The Democrats' use of parliamentary rules to get around the filibuster is un-democratic.

C) The Democrats are doomed if they pass the bill, because the backlash will be huge.

Argument (A) plays well to the angrier and wackier elements of the Republican base, but not to anyone else. Argument (B) is obvious bullshit.

Which leaves argument (C). It now looks like this is also wrong, since moderates favor the bill. But it's interesting to note how much of Republican persuasion relies on the assumption of a Republican/conservative majority. This has been their standard line for a while now; remember right after Obama was elected and all the conservatives could say was "this is still a center-right nation"? And of course, the GOP has long taken it as given that "liberal" is a slur and "conservative" is a badge of honor (sadly, many liberals have bought this line, calling themselves "progressives" to avoid the "liberal" label).

In other words, rather than persuading the nation that their ideas are good ideas, the GOP focuses on persuading the nation that their ideas are already popular. Go with the flow, the GOP says. Everybody's doin' it. The GOP clearly thinks of themselves as the "In-Crowd," the popular cool kids, and the Democrats as the scruffy, ugly "Out-Crowd".

The thing is, that is increasingly untrue. The reasons include immigration (which decreases the relative weight of the Southern white evangelical bloc), a shift to knowledge-based service industries, and the massive failure of conservative policies during the 00s. Liberalism has not yet supplanted conservatism as the country's dominant ideology, but conservatives can no longer credibly claim the support of a majority of Americans. Which means that the argument of "everyone agrees with us, so you Democrats better go along with whatever we want" is going to fall flat more and more.

The popular kids ain't so popular anymore. Ain't democracy a biotch.

On a related note, read Brad DeLong.