I thought Karl Smith missed badly with this *: "[T]he term liberal is heavily associated with the social-sexual mores of the American upper class. Most Americans reject those."
As I wrote in the comments (and also emailed to him, but never heard back):
"Certainly some very large number of Americans have accepted all manner of changes to social-sexual rules, including divorce, cohabitation, children out of wedlock (the upper class may lag much of the nation on that one), and gay rights. Even gay marriage has become less of a wedge issue. So…what exactly are these issues rejected by 'most Americans?'"
Here's some polling data -- from the state in which both Smith and I live -- that supports my contention about gay marriage.
And this morning's WSJ opinion piece on America's diverging social classes by Charles Murray (with which I also have some real problems **) offers data to support my point about at least some social-sexual mores being more conservative among the upper classes.
*I also thought Smith and Brooks both underweighted the impact on the word "liberal" of a relentless, generation-long political and media campaign to make it into a synonym for "stupid, weak, and profligate," but that's a subject for another post.
**Among my problems with Murray's piece: His willingness to mythologize a common culture that even he is forced to acknowledge always excluded a big chunk of the population; the way he ignores the role of income disparities in driving the cultural differences he identifies (a lot of people might vacation in Costa Rica if they could afford it, duh); underplaying the role of technology in exploding the common culture; missing the fact that for much of America, the recession began long before 2008; failing to include any possible positive outcomes from the programs he blames for so many social problems; author's history of junk science.
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