Empire Notes

To me, there’s only one good thing that can come out of the shattering defeat we all suffered on November 2. That is a recognition that so badly have the left, the antiwar movement, progressives of any stripe failed that we must change the way we do things in its entirety. And so I continue beyond the comfort zone.

One change: the left must come to terms with American public opinion, and, in particular, with polls. Too often people confuse the descriptive with the normative; if a poll says, for example, that a majority of Americans favor continuing the occupation of Iraq (as all recent polls do), activists want to contest the results. The most common way is to contest the methodology: “How can a poll of 1000 people represent the views of 300 million?” Curiously, when polls go the other way, activists often take them as absolute signs that the people are with them.

Much poll skepticism is unwarranted. The claim that polls accurately represent public opinion is based on two things. First, an assumption that the population is being randomly sampled. Second, simple mathematical analysis. If , say you have polled 1000 people, randomly selected, 19 times out of 20, you will get within 3% of the numbers you would get if you had asked the whole country. In fact, polls do have systematic errors, like the fact that they don’t usually reach people without phones, and those can throw off results by a few percent; but there’s really no chance that polls, as currently conducted, significantly misrepresent the answers of the entire country to the particular set of questions asked.

This is not the same as the views of the entire country, since obviously a great deal depends on how questions are phrased, which questions are asked and which aren’t. This is why you should always read the original questions when looking at poll results.

Given all of those caveats, it’s still true that understanding and interpreting poll results is more useful to an activist than denying them. Let me share with you results of the Communications Omnibus Survey, funded by the Media and Society Research Group at Cornell. It first came to my attention because of an AP story reporting that in this poll, 44% of respondents favored some form of restriction of civil liberties for Muslims.

The poll actually contains some even more amazing results. Only 63% of respondents felt that people should be allowed to criticize government policies in times of war or crisis, and only 60% felt that people should be allowed to protest. 33% believed the media should not cover protests and 31% that it shouldn’t report criticisms. These numbers fly in the face of any comfortable suppositions about Americans and their respect for individual freedom or for informed policy debate in a democracy. Not much over half of people even believe they should be legally allowed, let alone engaged in.

Other striking statistics: Although 70% favored, somewhat or strongly, the so-called “war on terrorism,” only 42% believe its primary purpose is protecting the United States from attack. 22%, more than one in five people, believe the primary purpose is controlling Middle East oil. Most interesting, of that 22%, 43% still favored the war on terrorism – with a margin of error of close to 8%.

Since those 22% are likely to be of the more oppositional sort of people, it’s entirely plausible that even if the whole American public knew that control of Middle East oil and U.S. imperial hegemony is the primary reason, half or more might still support the “war on terrorism.”

That’s the kind of thing you need to know when you’re doing activism with an eye toward mass mobilization and major policy victories, like, say, ending the occupation. There’s no need to pander to that kind of opinion, but you should be aware of its existence and it should inform your strategies.

We need more information like this; in fact, one of our most crying needs on the left is to fund and design our own polls and focus groups. Liberal organizations like MoveOn do this, but it’s in the service of the Democratic Party; we need to do it in service of a genuine left agenda.