• Home
  • About the book
  • About the author

MADE IN AMERICA

Notes on American life from American history.

Feeds:
Posts
Comments
« Pastime – Opening Day 2014
Thinking Inequality »

Which Radical Ideas Come True?

April 1, 2014 by Claude Fischer

It’s 1974. Richard Nixon resigns the presidency; Barbara Streisand is singing, “The Way We Were” all over the radio (that music-playing thing before the internet); and you could buy a hand calculator that could only add, subtract, multiply, and divide for, in today’s currency, $100. Someone asks you: Here are three pretty radical ideas – which do you think is likely to happen first, if ever?:

  • Americans will so fully accept homosexuals that they will be allowed to marry one another just like heterosexuals do.
  • A black man will be elected president of the United States.
  • Everyone will have government-subsidized health insurance – just like the elderly have Medicare and poor have Medicaid, both of which started just several years before; just like citizens in most western countries had.

I bet most Americans in 1974 – and probably most social scientists – would have picked the third.

Medical Exam

Library of Congress

The first radical idea is just about come true. There is a headlong rush toward normalizing gay marriage going on almost everywhere. A recent poll found that most Republicans under 45 support “same–sex marriage rights” and another found that more Republicans under 30 consider it a “good” rather than a “bad” thing – in spite of the fact that just a few years ago the Republican party deployed opposition to gay marriage as a powerful winning strategy. A few weeks ago, conservative Catholic columnist Russ Douthat recently discussed the “terms of surrender” for his side of the gay marriage debate.

We’ve now had a black president for five years and even though he pays a price in voter support because of his race, Americans are less ticked off at him because he is black than because of his effort to extend government health insurance, that third radical idea.

As the Obamacare deadline has (sort of) come and gone, what appeared to be the least radical idea of 1974, that we would have universal national health insurance, is still a long way off (if it ever happens). How come?

Public Opinion

On gays: In the early 1970s, fewer than in one in eight Americans endorsed the idea that homosexual relations were “not wrong at all.” They were outnumbered over 5:1 by the 70 percent who said such relations were “always wrong.” By the start of the 2010s, the proportions saying not wrong and always wrong were about equal. Among those under 45, the not-wrongs outnumbered the always-wrongs by almost ten percentage points.[1] In 1988, the first year that the General Social Survey (GSS) asked Americans about the then-novel notion that “homosexual couples should have the right to marry one another,” a mere 12 percent of American adults supported the idea; now about 45 percent do (54 percent of the young). Support is rising rapidly.

On a black president: In 1958, the Gallup Poll dared to ask Americans for first time, “If your party nominated a generally well-qualified man for president, would you vote for him… if he happened to be a Negro?”; 53% said No. By 1974, only about one in five Americans said No when asked an almost identical question. In the spring before Barack Obama’s 2008 election, a mere one in twenty respondents would admit that they would vote against a black man because he is black.[2]

On health care: Back around 1975, 53 percent of Americans told the GSS that they agreed more with the statement, “it is the responsibility of the government in Washington to see to it that people have help in paying for doctors and hospital bills” than they agreed with the statement that “people should take care of these things themselves.” That percentage favoring government responsibility has fluctuated up and down by no more than nine points ever since, reaching a high in 1990. Most recently, in 2008-2012, it was, as it was in 1975, at 53 percent.[3]

(By the way, here is a fascinating factoid: In 1975, 54 percent of GSS respondents aged 65 or older said that the government should help Americans pay their medical bills. In 2006-08, before the Obamacare controversy, about 40 percent said that. And In 2012, only about 34 percent of the elderly – compared to 59 percent of those under 65 – said that the government should help with medical bills. All of these older Americans, of course, actually have most of their medical care paid for by those under 65 through the federal government. Go figure.)

How Come?

Two radical notions in the early 1970s, having a black president and permitting homosexual marriage, have pretty much come to pass – in terms of public opinion and public policy. But the idea that the government should be partly responsible for all Americans’ health care, not just care for the elderly and poor, has not.

To be sure, there have been steps toward more comprehensive government support. Medicaid has expanded, CHIP covers some children. Add in Medicare and the Veterans Administration and you find that a large proportion of Americans are, in reality, getting government health insurance. But Americans’ resistance to making it universal remains strong. One reason Obamacare is such an unwieldy kludge of a health care program is that establishing a simple European- or Canadian-style system here is still politically far out of reach.

How come American views and policies changed so much with respect to the hot issues of sex and race, but not health care?

One explanation is that gay marriage and a black president don’t cost affluent Americans any money in taxes; universal health care probably would.

Or perhaps, such a health system just runs up against Americans’ deeply-held resistance to more expensive government or stronger government. Or it runs up against Americans’ deeply-help insistence on individual self-reliance. Americans repeatedly compromise their philosophical stances against government and for self-reliance (say, by accepting disaster relief and mortgage subsidies), but each compromise is an uphill struggle.

Or, perhaps, acknowledging the rights of gays to marriage and the rights of blacks to election fits Americans’ libertarian streak.

Or perhaps universal health care has not arrived because the wealthy and the powerful – those who now get the best health care in world that money can buy – see no need to mess with the current system. (This may also explain the oddity about the elderly’s views: “I’ve got mine.”)

Or, perhaps the lack of political traction on this issue reflects the ability of vested interests, in this case the health industry, to “inform” the public and lobby the Congress against the simplifications and streamlining of health care.

Here a bit of yet older history is informative: In fall 1945, President Harry Truman proposed a government-based national health insurance plan. Shortly afterward, the Gallup Poll asked Americans, “Do you approve or disapprove of Truman’s plan for (compulsory) health insurance in this country?” Support was strong: 59 percent yes versus 25 percent no. In 1950, Gallup asked almost the identical question, “Do you approve or disapprove of this plan (the Truman Administration’s Compulsory Health Insurance Plan)?” Americans’ views had flipped: now 24 percent approved and 61 percent disapproved. What happened? Part of the explanation may be Truman’s stubbornness about compromising on his plan or his general loss of popularity in the intervening years. Also, Americans generally shifted to the right after the 1948 election. But most of that shift was probably the result of a full-bore campaign led by the doctors’ and the insurance companies’ associations to paint the Truman plan as socialist or even communist. By 1960, most Americans ended up with private, employer-based health insurance rather than coverage through a universal system.[4]

Whatever the explanation, it is striking that of these three radical ideas circa 1974 the one that would have seemed to be the least radical is the one that has not come to pass.

………………………

NOTES

[1] General Social Survey, item “homosex”averaging 1973-74-76 and 2008-10-12.
[2] GSS, “racpres,” “fepres”; also here, and Gallup data from iPoll.
[3] GSS, “helpsick.”
[4] Gallup Polls via iPoll. Shift to right: data courtesy of Eric Schickler. On the Truman plan, see also here, here, and here.

(Cross-posted by the Berkeley Blog on April 1, 2014, and by the Boston Review BR Blog and LA Progressive on April 3, 2014.)

Share this:

  • Share
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • LinkedIn

Like this:

Like Loading...

Related

Posted in Uncategorized |

  • Made in America: Now available in Paperback, on Kindle, and via Google eBook

  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 448 other subscribers
  • Comment Back to:

    madeinamericathebook @ gmail.com
  • * 2010 winner, PROSE Award for U.S. History, American Association of Publishers.
    * "A shrewd, generous, convincing interpretation of American life" -- Publishers Weekly
    * "Masterful and rewarding . . . exactly the sort of grand and controversial narrative, exactly the bold test of old assumptions, that is needed to keep the study of American history alive and honest" -- Molly Worthen, New Republic Online
    * "... brave and ambitious new book ...." "Made in America sheds abundant light on the American past and helps us to understand how we arrived at our own historical moment, and who we are today." -- David M. Kennedy, Boston Review
    * "... this book ... already belongs to the prestigious line of works which decipher the singular character of America. It is in itself a mine of definitive information for all those who are interested in American society and its fate in modernity" [trans. from the French] -- Nicolas Duvoux, Sociologie

  • Pages

    • About the book
      • Corrections & Updates
    • About the author
  • Previous Posts

    • How Red v. Blue Became Me v. You: Polarization, Part I
    • The Covid Experience Reveals How Weird America Is
    • Americans Continue to Associate. For What Cause?
    • Slavery, Capitalism, and Reparations
    • Opening Day, 2022: Still Unresolved
    • No Peace, No Justice
    • The Right’s Reaction to Americans’ Leftward Shift: A Supreme Example
    • The Culture Has Moved Left… So the Right has Mobilized
    • Overcoming Distance and Embracing Place: Personal Ties in the Age of Persistent and Pervasive Communication
    • The Death Surge Before Covid-19: Who, What, and Why.
    • Women Rising: Life Stories from the Last Century
    • Whither Big Tech, or When Novelties Become (Regulated) Necessities
    • Opening Day, 2021: Baseball’s Crises
    • First Takes on the Election #2: What About the Polls?
    • The Political Census
    • First Takes on the Election: #1, What Happened?
    • Now for Something Different: Is Sex Wilting?
    • Explaining Trump: The Next-to-Last Time (I Hope)
    • Covid-19: Exceptionalism with a Vengeance
    • Is Left Cancel Culture Cancelling Left Culture?
    • BLM Protests: Surprisingly Successful… So Far. Why?
    • White Liberals’ Political Correctness Could Help Trump Get Re-Elected
    • Asteroidal Change or Glacial Change? Peering Over the Covid-19 Horizon
    • Opening Day Under Covid-19: Do Fans Matter?
    • COVID-19: Balancing Short-Term Solutions and Long-Term Effects. Are There Lessons from 1918?
    • Bernie: The Left is Still Waiting for the Proletariat Vote
    • AG Barr says attacks on religion are loosening the hounds of hell. Are they?
    • One Year Down, One to Go: Still Explaining Trump
    • Lead, Brains, and Behavior: Sociology Meets Biology
    • The Year’s Racial Flare-Ups: Signs of the Future or Signs of a Last Gasp?
    • [Bracket] Political Commentary [End Bracket]
    • Parental Love, Opportunity Markets, and Inequality
    • Brain Twisting, or How We Evolved
    • Opening Day, 2019: Data-Crunching, Inequality, and Baseball
    • Fixing Inequality: More Opportunity is Not the Answer
    • A Christian America? The Talk and the Walk
    • Shareholder Value: Law, Inequality, and the Doubting Justice
    • After the Election: More Polarization or Less?
    • Searching for the Authentic Self (… and Finding Trump)
    • The Politics-Religion Vortex Spins
    • Loneliness Epidemic: An End to the Story?
    • Get by with a Little Help from…
    • Feel-Good or Do-Good Politics
    • Do Americans Tolerate Zero Tolerance?
    • How Can Size of Community Still Matter?
    • Sending a Message by Pollster
    • Loneliness Scare Again… and Again… and…
    • Where Have You Gone, “Alienation”?
    • Opening Day, 2018: Politics, Race, and Baseball
    • Local Cultures
    • Chain Migration
    • Explaining Trump Some More
    • “Okie from Muskogee” a Half-Century On
    • Reversing American Voluntarism
    • National Character? A Reply to Stearns
    • Do We (Still) Value Family?
    • Is Marriage Over? For Whom?
    • Bannon, Brown, and the Identity Debate
    • The Great “American” (or is it New York?) Songbook
    • Is Health Care a Right?
    • Church Social
    • Inequality is about Security and Opportunity
    • Democracy in America, France, and “Hamilton”
    • Opening Day, 2017: Inequality on the Field, in the Stands
    • Voting for the Five Percent
    • More (on) Polarization
    • Americans and the Unassimilables
    • Explaining Trump
    • ***** Hiatus *****
    • The Great Settling Down
    • Election Reflection
    • Is the U.S. No Longer Religiously Exceptional?
    • Technology and Housework: Other Tasks for Mother?
    • Can Sociability Blunt Political Polarization?
    • The End of Good Work?
    • RFD, Media, and Democracy
    • Long Tails, Big Cities, Critical Masses
    • A Woman President?
    • Magazines: 19th Century Internet
    • Friends and “FB Friends”
    • Reversal of Fortune: American Cities
    • Does Education Work?
    • A Tony by Any Other Name…
    • Bernie, Hillary, and Historical Memory
    • Driving Cattle, Driving Exceptionalism
    • Build Bigger Wall? Get More Undocumented.
    • Opening Day 2016
    • Great Again
    • A Celebrity Strong Man
    • Survey Says . . .
    • Veterans and Suicides?
    • Odd Man In
    • The Pace, the Pace
    • A Street Divided
    • A History of Health and Health Inequalities
    • Why Diversity
    • Family Wages
    • What Happened When They Came?
    • The Grandma (and pa) Effect
    • Turkle, Times, Technology, Trauma–Yet Again
    • Just Deserts
    • Cell Phone Etiquette
    • Changing Hearts, Changing Matters, 2011-2015
    • American Self-Creation
    • The Immigrant-Crime Connection
    • Black by Choice?
    • The Marriage Contract
    • Attaining Adulthood
    • Left Out: Working-Class Kids
    • Life is a Stage, or Several
    • Family Farms vs. Americanism
    • Censor This, Political Correctness
    • Opening Day 2015
    • Science vs. Religion… or Science and Religion?
    • Building the Natural Market
    • Dressing Down
    • Untangling the Race Gap
    • Finding Public Relief
    • Surveying Change
    • Snap Decisions and Race
    • Holy-Day Exceptionalism
    • Where Does the “Don’t Shoot” Movement Go?
    • Reporting from America’s “Slums”
    • Racism as Mental Illness?
    • Which University?
    • The “Shared” Economy
    • Of Places Past
    • Long Story of the “Long Tail”
    • The Blameless Only
    • When Epidemic Hysteria Made Sense
    • Latest News on “No Religion”
    • Vocabulary Retrogression
    • American Way-Differentism: More a Club than a Family
    • Do Ideas Matter?
    • Alternative to Empathy
    • Women Dining
    • Too Much Social Science?
    • Ferguson and Social Media
    • Blame Who or What
    • “Libertarianism is Strange” Revisited
    • All Tech Is Social
    • How Ideas Make Themselves Matter
    • Women in Politics 1780-2014
    • Government Works
    • Telling Stories vs. Telling Data
    • Persistence of Race, 2014
    • Selfishness or Self-Awareness?
    • Virtuous Debt
    • Work Hours and the Pay Gap
    • Life in Public, Then and Now
    • Mourning 9/11 Victorian Style
    • A “Friends” Gripe
    • Bible Readings
    • Old Days, Fast Times
    • De-Democratizing?
    • Eco-Puritanism
    • Bring Me Your….
    • Thinking Inequality
    • Which Radical Ideas Come True?
    • Pastime – Opening Day 2014
    • Where Did “Hispanics” Come From?
    • Kitty Genovese: The Emblematic Story
    • Public Health
    • Exceptionalism Ending?
    • Risk-Sharing
    • Folktales of the Policy Elites
    • Male (Job) Insecurity
    • Libertarianism is Very Strange
    • Art and the Machined World
    • The Public Housing Experiment
    • The S-Curve of Cultural Change
    • Artful History
    • Inventing the Social Network
    • American Dream, Twisting
    • Deservingness
    • Place Matters More
    • Squirrely History
    • Atheist Evangelism: “Nothing New Under the Sun”
    • The Giving Season… and Era
    • Cell Phone Science
    • Boo! Americans and the Occult
    • You Call That a Shutdown?
    • More Inequality Updates
    • Political Responses to the Crash
    • Child Labors
    • Word Counts and What Counts
    • Loss of Economic Exceptionalism
    • Learning Sympathy
    • Respecting the Science
    • Economic Equality, 1774 and Beyond
    • Declaring You’re a “None”
    • Extremely Local
    • Robert Bellah
    • Inequality Hits Home
    • The Supreme Court Ducks Immutability
    • Postcard from Paris
    • America’s Religious Market
    • American-Made Ethnic-Americans
    • New Media and Old Manifestations
    • Novel Data: Promise and Perils
    • Immigrants and Historical Amnesia
    • Inequality Update
    • Psychologically Damaged
    • Race in the Eye of the Beholder
    • Getting Smarter
    • Suicide Boom?
    • Tweedledee-Tweedledum Nostalgia
    • Sexual License, Sexual Limits
    • Markets, Prices, and Justice
    • Immigration and Political Clout
    • Is the Gender Revolution Over?
    • Writerly Baseball – Opening Day 2013
    • Back Home
    • Catholic Schism
    • How Material Are We?
    • Unholy Alliance: Laissez Faire and the Church
    • The ’60s Turn 50
    • The Left’s Religion Problem
    • Paying Attention to the Kids
    • We’re # Last!
    • Risk Taking
    • The Elderly and Their Children
    • Guns
    • A Modern “Antebellum Puzzle”?
    • Makes One Anxious
    • Psychological Labeling … and Enabling?
    • The Giving Nation? Philanthropy’s Problems
    • Religion, Politics, and the Sunday Mail
    • The Happiness Boom
    • What Americans Have Been Thinking
    • The Verdict on Class and Voting
    • Panderocracy
    • 9/11 Reaction and Resilience
    • A Cost of Inequality: Growth
    • Obama’s Racial Penalty
    • Choose Your Choice
    • To the Poorhouse
    • The Polarizing Political Paradox Redux
    • The 47% Charge in U.S. History
    • The Survey Crisis
    • Competitive Intelligence
    • Execution Songs
    • Spiritual and/or Religious
    • “Who Built That?”: Chance and History
    • Meeting, Mating, and the Web
    • Live Long and Prosper — and Plan
    • Voting Violence
    • Sex and the American Car
    • The Assets Gap
    • Differences Under the Differences
    • Why Americans Don’t Vacation
    • Virtuous Voting
    • Clothes Make the Common Man
    • Driving Blind
    • Geography of Inequality
    • Slavery’s Heavy Hand
    • Gay Vows
    • Explaining Poverty (Again)
    • Out- and Insourcing
    • Still Under God
    • The Loneliness Scare is Back
    • Sunday Pleasures, Private Faith
    • Between Dole and Market
    • Opening Day 2012 – Worldwide
    • Tolerating Americans
    • What’s the Common in the Common Good?
    • End Times and Presidents
    • The Abortion Puzzle
    • The Army of Black Liberation
    • The South Has Risen
    • Can’t Believe It
    • Marrying — Up, Down, Sideways
    • Occupy 2012: Another 1968?
    • Over-Impacted
    • How Bad is “European”?
    • Unique, Sovereign, American
    • The Working Class’s Party
    • Reconstructing Memory
    • Make-Your-Own Religion
    • Consume This
    • Self-Absorbed: Emerson & Thoreau
    • What Works? Votes.
    • Stumbling in the Dark
    • More on Occupy
    • Occupy! Now What?
    • Lost Children
    • Cheerful Yanks?
    • Tolerating Ambiguity
    • New News, Old News
    • Unequal Denial
    • Timing is (Not?) Everything
    • Breastfeeding History
    • What’s a Life Worth?
    • Homesick Blues
    • Summer Break
    • Spinsters No More
    • Missing Tramps
    • City Crime; Country Crime
    • Living Togetherness
    • Naturally Clean
    • Women Graduating
    • Home Owning Dreams
    • Technology and Fundamentals
    • Protected Class
    • Faith Endures
    • American Exceptionalism
    • Buying a Head Start
    • A. Lincoln, Socialist?
    • Opening Day 2011
    • Shaken but Secure
    • Jobs Go and Come
    • Heavy Hand
    • The Big Change
    • American Ties (III)
    • Money and Character
    • Going Out–or Home?
    • Degree Inequality
    • American Ties (II)
    • Ugly or Needy
    • 18th-Century Twitterfeed
    • American Ties (I)
    • Grammar Rules
    • Christmas Struggle
    • Ancestor Worship
    • Was Slavery, Is Slavery
    • Hanukkah or Vanish?
    • Pilgrims, Puritans, Americans?
    • Return on Investment
    • Solidarity, Soldiers, and Baseball
    • Win Stay, Lose Change
    • Why Vote?
    • We’re All Geniuses
    • Caring More or Less
    • Life Begins
    • Equal Visions
    • No Dinner Invitations?
    • Depressing Comparisons
    • Labor’s Laboring Efforts
    • Multiculturalism Lite and Right
    • Who Has Your Back
    • A Natural Romance
    • Alone or Lonely?
    • Sentimental Journey
    • LeBron & the 10th
    • We’re #1 !
    • A Fragmenting America? – Pt. 2
    • A Fragmenting America? – Pt. 1
    • Fighting for the 4th
    • Gentrified Memories
    • Juneteenth: Race? Slavery?
    • Boomer Blues
    • No Longer the Tall American
    • A Crime Puzzle
    • Memorial-izing Day
    • Angry Old White Men
    • Sisters Take the Streets
    • Brooks, Policy, and History
    • Tongue-Tied to America
    • Happiness Happy
    • Inventing Friendship
    • American Individualism – Really?
    • Tax Day: The Government-Enterprise System
    • Opening Day 2010
    • Did “Consumerism” Blow Up the Economy?
    • A Christian America? What History Shows
    • The Myth that Never Moves
    • Good Health, Long Life, and Big Government
    • Announcing the “Made in America” Site

Blog at WordPress.com.

WPThemes.


  • Follow Following
    • MADE IN AMERICA
    • Join 448 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • MADE IN AMERICA
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Copy shortlink
    • Report this content
    • View post in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...
 

    %d bloggers like this: