The tea party's social conservatism

In a previous post, I tried to convey that self-described tea party members are essentially uber conservative (in the contemporary American political context) rather than being decidedly libertarian in their emphasis. I didn't articulate the point too well, because, well, verbal articulation isn't my forte. So let's turn to the Arizona exit poll results for some clarification.

The following table shows how Rick Santorum (the least libertarian and most socially conservative of the Republican contenders) and Ron Paul (clearly the GOP's most libertarian candidate) fared among voters who support, are neutral towards, and oppose the tea party:

Tea Party	Santorum	Paul
Support	31%	6%
Neutral	19%	10%
Oppose	6%	19%

For simplicity, Gingrich's and Romney's results are not shown (they're more consistent than Santorum and Paul are, with tea partiers showing a relatively gentle preference for Gingrich and against Romney). Tea party supporters were five times more likely to support Santorum than they were to support Paul, while those opposed to the tea party backed Paul over Santorum by a three-to-one margin.

If the tea party was primarily driven by libertarian concerns, I'd expect relative support among members to flow as follows, from most to least: Paul, Romney, Gingrich, Santorum. In fact, here it flows in exactly the opposite direction, with the most socially conservative candidate getting the greatest amount of tea party support relative to support from the rest of the Republican electorate while the least socially conservative candidate is received more coldly by tea partiers than he is by non-tea party Republican primary voters.

Parenthetically, Michigan's tea party exit poll numbers are more of a muddle, though opposition among tea partiers to Ron Paul is still pronounced, while tea partiers were modestly more relatively supportive of all three of the other candidates. To make sure Arizona's results weren't a fluke, I looked at the biggest and putatively most nationally representative state thus far, Florida. The tea party results shake out in much the same way as they do in Arizona.

On impaling civilians, owning slaves, and eating meat

One of my favorite rhetorical devices to use on those who cast moral aspersions on the actions of historical figures involves a thought experiment about the consumption of meat, or more precisely, eating animals slaughtered for the sole purpose of becoming our dinner. It doesn't seem inconceivable to me that in the future, the thought of engaging in such behavior comes to be seen as being as morally abhorrent as slavery seems to us today. Should they, and nearly everyone else they know, be at risk of being written off by posterity as perpetrators of turpitude for something that wasn't even controversial in the early 21st century society in which they lived?

That such a shift sounds somewhere between far-fetched and inconceivable to a contemporary audience, of course, is exactly the point, just as the abolition of slavery would've sounded to 2nd century Romans and their contemporaries or the idea of amnesty for the resisting residents of Jerusalem following the first crusade's successful siege of the city would've sounded to the crusaders and their contemporaries, including the saracens they put to the sword.

One reason I employ the animal eating device is because it's usually a leftist sympathetic to vegetarianism who is passing haughty judgment on people in the past, and I can't help but experience a little thrill from making people squirm. But it's plausibly grounded, too, I think, and I don't just mean because of the popularity of documentaries like Food, Inc. In vitro meat, presaged by Winston Churchill eighty years ago, could portend a future in which synthetic meats are grown by using a protein to cause muscle cells to grow into chunks of meat to such an extent that a single animal (or maybe a sacrificial Noah's ark's worth, for the sake of variety) could conceivably feed the world many times over.

See any glaring problems with this conversational approach? It's been pretty effective for me, but in real life most of the people I talk to are less knowledgeable and intelligent than I am, while in the virtual world, most people are more knowledgeable and intelligent than I am, so TAE is a great personal resource for soliciting feedback on this kind of thing!

For whom Jeffrey tolls

In last weekend's featured editorial page interview, the WSJ's James Taranto wrote about longtime Republican political operative Jeffrey Bell. It makes for interesting reading from a perspective that many WSJ readers probably don't have much firsthand experience with. There are a couple sloppy assertions made, however, that are worth addressing. First, by Taranto:

The rise of the tea-party movement heartened many libertarian conservatives, who saw it as leading the Republican Party away from social conservatism.

While the impetus for the tea party's formation and the primary public focus it places is on reducing the size and scope of the federal government, the presumption that those self-identified as belonging to the tea party movement are more distinctly libertarian than the broader base of Republican voters doesn't seem to be clearly substantiated by the actual data. Taken from a Pew Research survey on tea party voters, the following table compares the percentages of self-identified tea party members from the rest of the Republican electorate on red meat economic and social issues:

Issue	Tea party	Other GOP
Prefer smaller government	88%	80%
Government almost always wasteful	87%	79%
Corporations make too much profit	30%	37%
Favor same-sex marriage	26%	24%
Abortion should be illegal in most/all cases	59%	56%
Better border security should be a priority in dealing with illegal immigration	51%	45%
Protecting gun rights is more important than controlling gun ownership	78%	72%

With the exception of same-sex marriage, for which tea partiers are marginally more supportive than the rest of Republican voters are, tea party types are generally more conservative versions of the GOP electorate. Pew didn't query respondents on their foreign policy views, but I suspect tea partiers also tend to be more hawkish on Iran and more firmly supportive of Israel than other Republican voters are.

As summarized by Pew in the aforementioned report:

Tea Party supporters tend to have conservative opinions not just about economic matters, but also about social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage. In addition, they are much more likely than registered voters as a whole to say that their religion is the most important factor in determining their opinions on these social issues. And they draw disproportionate support from the ranks of white evangelical Protestants.

Secondly, from Bell:

Mr. Bell, for his part, sees in social conservatism opportunities for the GOP to expand its appeal among minority communities. "Latino voters tend to be more socially conservative," Mr. Bell says, noting that in 2008 they backed California's Proposition 8, which overturned a state Supreme Court ruling establishing same-sex marriage, by 53% to 47%. Non-Hispanic whites narrowly opposed the measure.

Nothing stated here is explicitly incorrect, but there are problems by way of omission. Blacks voted for Proposition 8 by a 70%-30% margin, so by Bell's logic, blacks should be riper targets for Republican conversions than Hispanics are. But most (though not all) conservative pundits, including Bell and Taranto, know better than that.

Further, to point to Hispanics voting a whopping 4 points to the right of a leftist white electorate (whites opposed Prop 8 51%-49%) like California's as evincing a major opportunity for the Republican party is just silly.

Bell also expresses sympathy for the WSJ's view that immigration restrictionism hurts the Republican party... by turning Hispanics away from it, of course--no one appears to care or have anything to say about how it will affect the much more consequential white vote. In neighboring Arizona, however, where white voters are considerably further to the right than California's whites are (only 40% of white Arizonans voted for Obama, while 52% of white Californians did), Hispanics voted in favor of Proposition 202, which increased penalties on those employing illegal immigrants, by 56%-44%, a level of support just 4 points to the left of white Arizonans. While restrictionism won't win over a naturally hostile voting bloc, the evidence shows again and again that it doesn't do much, if anything, to repel them, either.

Flat Florida, acrophilic Alaska

At Taki's Magazine, the Derb writes the following:

Stupid? The Republican Party’s EEG trace is flatter than Kansas.

Technically, Kansas isn't actually flat. As a person travels upstream over four hundred miles from the state's eastern end to its western one, he rises more than half a mile higher as he approaches the great continental divide. There are actually 20 states that exhibit less change in elevation from their lowest points to their highest ones than Kansas does.

To be as annoyingly precise as possible, Florida is the most flat, barely able to raise itself out of the Atlantic or the gulf from the panhandle to Miami. At least it offers plenty of opportunities for alliteration.

Of course, Derb's intention is to conjure up images of western Kansas, devoid of the woods and hilliness of the state's eastern end, which, to the south, resembles the Ozarks more than it does the Kansas-Colorado border. That the state's highest natural point, "Mount Sunflower", is located less than a mile from Colorado and is indistinguishable from the surrounding terrain, attests to this. The gentle but steady incline across the state measures around 0.1 degree. The Derb's point is well taken, I promise!

The rank ordering of US states by the change in elevation from each state's lowest point to its highest:

State	Change (ft)
1. Alaska	20320
2. California	14785
3. Washington	14417
4. Hawaii	13803
5. Nevada	12665
6. Arizona	12565
7. Idaho	11955
8. Utah	11338
9. Oregon	11249
10. Colorado	11123
11. Montana	11003
12. Wyoming	10709
13. New Mexico	10323
14. Texas	8751
15. North Carolina	6684
16. Tennessee	6466
17. New Hampshire	6288
18. South Dakota	6276
19. Virginia	5729
20. New York	5343
21. Maine	5270
22. Georgia	4784
23. Oklahoma	4686
24. West Virginia	4623
25. Nebraska	4587
26. Vermont	4300
27. Kentucky	3887
28. South Carolina	3560
29. Massachusetts	3489
30. Kansas	3361
31. Maryland	3360
32. Pennsylvania	3213
33. North Dakota	2757
34. Arkansas	2698
35. Alabama	2413
36. Connecticut	2379
37. New Jersey	1802
38. Minnesota	1700
39. Missouri	1542
40. Michigan	1408
41. Wisconsin	1372
42. Iowa	1191
43. Ohio	1094
44. Illinois	955
45. Indiana	937
46. Rhode Island	811
47. Mississippi	807
48. Louisiana	543
49. Delaware	447
50. Florida	345

As tangential to this post as this post was to the Derb's article, does this guy's photo epitomize everything that is wrong with the modern white male or what?

Let Melissa have them

As I was perusing WVS responses to questions about who constitutes an undesirable neighbor, the aversion to Gypsies among those in the five countries where the specific question was asked jumped out at me. Nearly 7 in 8 Italians said they wouldn't want to live near them. Nearly half of those in Spain and Slovenia feel the same way. Majorities of Moldovans and Romanians want nothing to do with the 'Romani', either.

Indeed, disdain for Gypsy neighbors is higher than it is for gays, immigrants, people of a different race, of a different religion, or who speak a different language, criminals, unmarried cohabitating couples, militant minorities, and political extremists. Only heavy drinkers and drug addicts are more shunned than Gypsies are (and in Italy, even these dregs are preferred over the Roma).

Being the parochial American that I am, the closest I ever come to the little filchers are the periodic stories from across the pond I read in curious amusement about governments, with popular consent, taking action against them. Gypsies are almost surreal to me. They're make-believe, like elves, gremlins, and eskimos. But apparently to know them is to hate them, or at least not want to have anything to do with them.

WVS variables used: V43MD

Happiness and loneliness by age

In a post on the British government's push to keep people working into their seventies, Parapundit's Randall Parker excerpted remarks from a senior aide:

He told delegates at the Stockholm summit that more than half of those older than 75 in Britain described themselves as lonely “all or most of the time”.

“Work matters, particularly for older people, not just for money, but absolutely for social contact,” he said.

I wondered if there was much in the way of detectable differences in feelings of self-reported loneliness and happiness strictly by age. Obviously, a host of factors other than age influence how lonely and how happy people feel, but I was more curious as to whether or not there are differences as is, not after trying to control for everything like income and marital status. Simply, at what age(s) do levels of loneliness tend to be lowest and happiness greatest in the US?

The following table shows the percentage of respondents, by age range, who reported at their time of participation in the GSS that they had not felt lonely at all over the course of the previous week:

Age	Not lonely
18-24	48.6%
25-29	53.0%
30-34	51.6%
35-39	50.0%
40-44	55.0%
45-49	73.5%
50-54	56.7%
55-59	66.5%
60-64	72.0%
65-69	63.7%
70-79	61.0%
80-89	51.7%

Plotting loneliness and age exhibits a bit U-shape--it tends to be a little worse when people are younger and still finding their ways in the world, and when they're elderly, especially once they get into their late seventies and eighties and people around them really begin dying off. From the mid-forties to the mid-sixties looks to be our least lonely years, when people are established in the social institutions important to them.

The same table for happiness, but on a 3-point scale, inverted so that a higher value indicates greater happiness:

Age	Happiness
18-24	2.14
25-29	2.21
30-34	2.23
35-39	2.22
40-44	2.21
45-49	2.22
50-54	2.23
55-59	2.22
60-64	2.26
65-69	2.30
70-79	2.28
80-89	2.22

One standard deviation is 0.63 points, so the average difference from the least happy age to the most happy is one-quarter of one standard deviation. Not much here, but hey, I ran the numbers so why not share them?

GSS variables used: AGE, LONELY(0)(1-7), HAPPY

Super Bowl and conference championship point differentials over time

Following this year's superb* Super Bowl, Steve Sailer wondered if the big game keeps getting better. He writes:

My impression is that Super Bowls are seldom the stinkers they used to be so regularly.

To try and quantify this, I looked at point differentials for every Super Bowl and averaged them by decade in an attempt to get some sense of how accurate that impression is:

Decade	PtDif
'60s	17.3
'70s	11.6
'80s	21.9
'90s	14.2
'00s	9.8

I was introduced to football as a second-grader living in Coppell, a Dallas suburb, the year the Cowboys put an exclamation mark on the NFC East's domination of the Bills. The eighties, though, is the decade when some of the most lopsided games in the league's history occurred. Just take a look at Super Bowls 18-24. Only the Montana-Esiason matchup was 'worth' watching.

Yet as Steve points out, there are ineptly played games where the final score nonetheless ends up being close, as the seventh Super Bowl illustrated. Defensive ineptness isn't something spectators tend to get too upset over, as long as it isn't limited exclusively to one side. For a general audience, the higher scoring, the better. The average combined total score in Super Bowls by decade:

Decade	AvgPts
'60s	36.3
'70s	37.0
'80s	49.7
'90s	53.4
'00s	46.1

Super Bowl 46 comes in on the low-end of scoring by the standards of the last few decades, adding to the perception that it was a boring game. This seemingly permanent shift towards higher scoring that has been firmly in place for the last few decades is probably the biggest reason games today feel better than they did when Steve was a kid. Something around 34-31 is probably ideal in terms of maximizing viewer satisfaction.

Steve also recalls observing when he was younger that:

Conference championship games were often thrilling, but Super Bowls were typically a waste of time.

Using the same simple point differential method employed previously, the following table additionally includes the average point differential for conference championship games by decade from the time of the NFL-AFL merger to the present:

Decade	SB Dif	Conf Dif
'70s	11.6	14.5
'80s	21.9	14.0
'90s	14.2	13.2
'00s	9.8	11.7

My historical impression is that conference championship games have been a lot better since I started following the league than they were when before then, but maybe that's skewed by the fact that shutouts didn't used to be the rarity that they are today. As late as the mid-eighties, the NFC championship game featured three consecutive shutouts in a row, as the Bears (who proceeded the following year to shutout LA), Rams, and Redskins were each held to zero. It's only happened once since in either conference since then, when the Giants drubbed the Vikings during the '00-'01 post-season.

* A commonly held perception of the game is that while it was unarguably competitive, it was boring. The Super Bowl draws twice the number of viewers that each conference championship does, and they're of course more watched than any of the other contests throughout the season are. So it's probably not much of a stretch to say that the majority of Super Bowl viewers aren't really fans of the league. For many of them, it's the only NFL game they'll watch all year.

I understand that perspective (though it's not one I share). From it, huge gains, momentous errors, and lots of lead changes are exciting highlights (along with the commercials, which have become a great selling point in getting people who have no interest in the sport to watch the game at parties) in an otherwise bland four hours of faceless men running into each other. The only especially memorable play was Mario Manningham's terrific catch (off a beautifully placed Manning pass) along the sideline just minutes after he'd given up a reception by losing track of the sideline. There was only one turnover, and it might as well have been a punt. Both offenses were efficient and both defenses played well, with the difference being a series of dropped balls by Patriots' receivers and Brady's bizarre intentional grounding that resulted in a safety on the first play from scrimmage for New England's offense.