"No, America Is Not Turning Libertarian"

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No, America Is Not Turning Libertarian

By Jonathan ChaitFollow at New York Magazine

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/08/america-is-not-turning-libertarian.html

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The premise undergirding the story is that libertarians hold a unique generational claim to America’s political future. Draper quotes the Reason Foundation’s pollster, who tells him that voters under 30 “agree with Democrats on social issues, and on economic issues lean more to the right.” The premise that young voters lean distinctly libertarian returns through the story repeatedly.

Reason has invested a great deal of money and time in promoting its claim to represent America’s youth, including regular polls that purport to bolster this claim. It’s important to understand that, since small changes in the framing of a poll can produce dramatically different responses, it is possible to produce polling that seems to show agreement with any position the sponsor of the poll desires. Advocacy organizations routinely sponsor polls that show the public supportive of their own position. Reason is the only magazine I know of that uses this tactic.

But polling produced by non-advocacy organizations does not yield this conclusion. It certainly shows that voters under 30, who vote strongly Democratic, have strongly liberal views on most foreign-policy and social issues, as libertarians do. The crucial difference lies in economics, where libertarians veer sharply right and young voters veer sharply left. This can be seen in specific instances, like health care, where young voters are far more likely than older ones to support an expanded government role. Like most Americans, they strongly support the maintenance of specific programs, such as Social Security. Unlike most Americans, they actually favor bigger government in the abstract:





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