Every once in a while, someone will doubt my progressive creds. Well, doubters, the Center for American Progress just punched my liberal card. Check out their progressive quiz. It takes about five minutes and they have a nice graph comparing your results with other demographics. (Thanks, Julie G.)
30 thoughts on “The Progressive Quiz”
Comments are closed.
Apt. 11d 
But Laura….. what was your score? Progressive, or just merely liberal?
LikeLike
I’m very progressive. I got a 297. What did you get?
LikeLike
338 for me. Some of the questions were dumb (eg, the “life starts at conception” which you have to either give a 0 or 10 to). I was almost all 10s and 0s, and some of them were clearly on the anti-progressive end of the scale (e.g. on free trade, where I was entirely anti-progressive, and changes in the structure of the family, where I presume my answer was also wholly anti-progressive), so I was surprised by the outcome.
LikeLike
I was 333, which surprised me because, like harry, I answered some of the business questions in ways that I thought were pretty unprogressive. It’s funny because I found myself thinking once in a while–well, I know what the party line is, but I feel differently. Which is good–just being conscious of it was weird.
LikeLike
339, putting me solidly to the left of ‘Liberal Democrats’.
That’s about right: any other OECD country I’d be a moderate social democrat, here in the US I’m a raving lefty loon. Oh well.
LikeLike
290 for me. I suspect I mostly voted like Harry, but a bit more wishy-washy on some. I agree as well that some questions were dumb, but less than one usually finds on such polls.
LikeLike
Either the test is worthless or I’m getting warbly in my old age. I got a 206. (Or maybe I’m still that irked about the Bank of America stuff.)
Also, they said my score was both ‘progressive’ and only three points from average, which doesn’t make much sense for any of the usual, current uses of the word progressive.
LikeLike
Now that you know I’m only three points from average, I assume you’ll trust me to figure out a politically acceptable solution to the health care problem. Since our northern neighbor’s system appears to work, I think we should copy them. Therefore, I propose a single-payer system where the Canadian government is the payer.
LikeLike
I scored 330, and like others, was a little surprised, because I didn’t think some of my business-related answers were progressive at all.
I had quite a few 8s and 2s, though, so maybe the wishy-washy-ness affected the tally?
LikeLike
Damn, I was proud of my 307 until I saw all of these 330s. (To be honest, there were a couple of questions in there where I didn’t know what the progressive answers were.)
LikeLike
Yeah, some of my business answers weren’t that progressive either. Obama’s bailout of Wall Street screwed up the left/right divide on this issue.
I was pretty stingy with my 10s and 0s. I can always think of exceptions.
LikeLike
272. As usual, the test has no idea how to deal with someone who believes in universal health care for all and that changes in family life over the past couple of generations have been bad for human happiness, and especially no idea what to do with those of us who see those two answers as essentially connected. So we get split down the middle.
LikeLike
327. But I always want to qualify my answers, or to provide footnotes, which these quizzes sadly never seem to allow.
LikeLike
Survey locked up at question 21 but already have some iconoclasm going. Like disagreeing with the hair-shirt greenery as the only route to sustainability.
LikeLike
Obama’s bailout of Wall Street screwed up the left/right divide on this issue.
Maybe if you were already to the left, but I’m still more irked about the Bush part of the bailout. The whole “Let the market work” idea seems more than a bit hollow when I have to take my losses and a trader with ten times my income doesn’t. That definitely shifted me to the left on economic issues. If it wasn’t for the Democrats persistence in putting people who don’t pay their taxes in charge of collecting taxes and writing tax laws, I’d have probably shifted more to the left instead of moving to ‘I want a new elite’. (I’ve spent more time this year fighting about my 2007 taxes than I did completing them last year. My strong suspicion is that the IRS just sent out a ‘correction’ for an amount they thought I would pay to avoid a fight and that if I went to tax court, I’d owe nothing.)
LikeLike
150. I don’t know why a person can’t believe, as I do, that embryonic lives should be protected more than they are now (and more than, say, the lives of veal calves) without abortion being treated as murder. In other words, embryos and fetuses have some human rights, but not as many as babies. I answered a 4 to that question.
LikeLike
On the business-y questions. I think they screw things up (though obviously not enough for me, laura/geeky, Jody etc to be drummed out of the brownies). I am, in fact, much more left wing than almost anyone I know about economic issues — I’m for very radical redistribution, and would support a much more socialised economy than we have (I’d be a very far left social democrat in Europe). BUT, I also believe i) that doing both those things would harm growth (and I’m fine with that) and ii) that if we are NOT going to do those things (which we are not) government regulation and, especially, payroll taxes, can be very costly without yielding significant benefits to the least advantaged (it all depends on the precise details of the regulations, of course, but I trust a legislature that has no social democrats in it to do the regulation badly). So, whereas my first best is very left, my second best is often very sympathetic to right-wing objections to government meddling in markets. (Also, being only a mildly reconstructed Marxist (well, you know what I mean) I have very strong free trade instincts, so on that question come of as anti-progressive. All that, and I think the fragmentation of the family has been harmful both to the social fabric and to the least advantaged most of all. So, you can imagine my surprise….
LikeLike
174.
But that was very much a push-poll. Is regulation good? Well, some are good, some are pointless, and some are actively harmful.
LikeLike
293.
And we’re dong this so that everyone can stereotype what we say as Laura’s comentariat, right? I don’t think this is a “push-poll” and think it looks like the other political/religious/thought surveys that I see (like the Pew surveys of religion, but, I’m not an expert on that kind of thing).
I think folks who are finding that they need to explain their constellation of views as not easily pocketing into one thing are not as unusual as they think they are. I think most thinking people find these surveys tough, and they think that the linear number that you get out of them not a good reflection of their beliefs. But, they still serve some predictive value. For example, it looks like people subdivided on another category (like Baptists, or those who get most of their information from TV news) are different, than, say Presbyterians, for example.
And, in the end, what matters is how you weight the different views you hold. For example, I am adamantly pro-choice and pretty opposed to trade-restrictions. But, I’ll vote for the pro-choice, anti-trade candidate over the person who would legally restrict abortion and trade.
MH has surprised me, by being so close to the average. And, I’m impressed that both people who have 174s & 339 find Laura readable and interesting.
I can’t give myself credit for reading out of my zone though, since I’m apparently 4 points from Laura. Do I win a prize for that?
LikeLike
Oh, and I really want to see what the shape of the distribution is on this survey scale. Is the information buried somewhere?
LikeLike
…the person who would legally restrict abortion and trade.
That’s my kind of politician, or at least someone in that general quadrant.
LikeLike
182.
LikeLike
Living in Pittsburgh has really weakened my support of free trade. You see the negative effects concentrated. One day, you are earning well above median wages, then boom, gone. Thirty years later, it’s 2009 and your house is worth less than it was in 1979. Your children are either living in North Carolina or are so far removed from the mainstream of economic life that they wear mullets.
LikeLike
“Living in Pittsburgh has really weakened my support of free trade. You see the negative effects concentrated. One day, you are earning well above median wages, then boom, gone. Thirty years later, it’s 2009 and your house is worth less than it was in 1979. Your children are either living in North Carolina or are so far removed from the mainstream of economic life that they wear mullets.”
On the other hand, with technical advancements and mechanization, it’s quite likely that whatever happened, there would be fewer and fewer human beings needed in the steel mills. (Of course free trade puts more pressure on companies to adopt new technology.) I’m from a logging town, and my dad tells me that even since I was a kid, there have been huge steps forward in mechanization. They no longer need nearly so many loggers–in fact, the whole process can be done without anyone ever touching a tree. The downside is fewer jobs and a hit to the local economy. The upside is that fewer people risk being crippled, maimed, or killed. As we’ve discussed earlier, the same is true of agriculture–with an improvement in technology, fewer and fewer workers are needed to run the machinery.
LikeLike
Well, I’ve certainly seen the reduced need for manpower in agriculture close-up. My one cousin farms as much ground as four or five guys would have in the 50s. And with higher yields per acre. However, as near as I can tell, the people who don’t farm have been better able to adapt. They have shifted to something that pays more than farming and stopped getting mullets before 1990.
LikeLike
I should cite my paper: Indicators of economic and social marginalization: Male hair-styles and percentage of days wearing Steelers apparel. 2006. Journal of Half-Assed Policy. 43(1), 55-89.
LikeLike
Speaking of mullets, you remind me that I forgot to blog a college student I saw at the cafeteria who was overdoing the 80s nostalgia thing. He had a mullet, a beard, and a faux-hawk. Mullets are coming back!
LikeLike
MH- what of those in even less well-off parts of the world who have benefited greatly from more trade opportunities? Do they count? I don’t think you have to be a strong cosmopolitan to think they do. (That’s one thing I strongly dislike about some of the rhetoric that, say, Russel sometimes supports- it acts as if those in other countries who benefit from trade were worth nothing.) The trouble is also not with trade, but with how largely necessary transitions were dealt with. Those jobs wouldn’t have stayed with different trade policies for the most part, anyway, as global markets would have shifted, and benefits would be lost in the US. rear-guard fighting has made the transition even worse, I think.
LikeLike
Matt,
I remember watching Born into Brothels a few years back (that’s the documentary about children of prostitutes growing up in an Indian red light district) and I remember thinking, “Get these people a NIKE factory, stat!”
As far as how transitions are handled, I’m sure MH has a few thoughts on how the city of Pittsburgh could have made better choices. I loved living there (as a non-home owning, low-income, childless 20-something), but I think it would look different to me now. I know I’ve heard it said that the City of Pittsburgh suffers from cargo cult thinking with regard to cultural amenities–build it and they will come. You see a lot of that with cities and things like stadiums. Somehow building a stadium (at the cost of tens of millions of dollars) will stimulate the local economy because people will travel to games, stay in hotels, eat at restaurants, etc. Meanwhile, across the country, everybody’s busy building a stadium.
LikeLike
Matt, I said less supportive, not opposed. I’m not about to defend any of Pittsburgh’s political, union, or business leadership, past or present. The only good thing I can say about our local leadership is that it doesn’t seem to be as corrupt as Philly’s. I attribute the lower level of corruption to sloth, not honesty.
LikeLike