A new poll on foreign policy comes up with some interesting new categories to label American voters — from “Fortress America” (17 percent) and “Reluctant Super Power” (16 percent) on the right to ”International Environmentalist” (12 percent) and “New Isolationist” (14 percent) on the left.
About a third of voters are in the middle, dubbed “Average Americans.”
Republican pollster Bill McInturff said the biggest surprise were the new isolationists.
“Isolationism for me has always been a kind of Robert Taft (idea), that strain of the Republican party,” McInturff told a briefing of U.N. correspondents in New York.
“The new isolationists are liberal, moderate-to-liberal, younger (Sen. John) Kerry voters who don’t want America doing much of anything around the world. That is so counter-intuitive to what I would have thought before I started the research,” he said.
“The reason we call them new isolationists is it wasn’t just Iraq. They’re also really ticked off about trade agreements, and there’s other stuff across this data that makes them very, very surprising.”
“They really want a retreat about America’s role around the world, and it’s just not something we expected to find or see.”
The poll, conducted jointly with Democratic pollster Geoff Garin and commissioned by the U.N. Foundation, sampled 800 likely voters. Read the full Reuters story here.
The poll ranks voters’ top foreign policy issues, apart from Iraq, as follows:
Terrorism (38 percent)
America’s dependence on foreign oil (33 percent)
Improving America’s relationships with other countries (27 percent)
Tell us which one is most important to you.
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It seems a serious mistake to call these respondents “isolationists”. Progressives are anti-imperialist and often anti-capitalist; they oppose policies and practices of these “isms” when perpetrated by their own country as well as by any other (e.g. plundering the worlds’ wealth for profit regardless of social and human costs, waging wars of aggression, e.g. Vietnam, Iraq II, etc.). But many of them would want to see the United States actively engaged internationally in a variety of positive ways, e.g. leading the way in combatting global warming and other forms of environmental degradation, leading in fighting against diseases such as aids, malaria, virulent influenza, etc., promoting the United Nations’ efforts against world hunger, poverty, oppression of women, nuclear and other weapons proliferation, etc., supporting quality education of all children, reducing levels of violence, etc. All this is obviously at odds with traditional “Taftian” isolationism, which is rooted in nationalism, not a progressive, humanitarian internationalism. Once these crucial distinctions are made, the poll results should not be at all surprising.
Geoffrey Hellman
- Posted by Geoffrey HellmanProfessor and Chair
Department of Philosophy
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN 55455