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[misko27]

Think it may be a third option.  Basically every Republican president or presidential candidate has been called a nazi in some capacity for a couple decades, so normal conservatives started tuning it out.  Then social media started getting big, a lot of the early voices there were in cities due to those being major areas where high speed internet got installed.  Cities that have been pretty solidly democrat for a few decades.  This fucked with the in-person view of the overton window and as the standard range of conservatives started to trickle online as higher speeds spread out, they were seen as much further right than they actually would place if you did a national census of opinions.  This gets a massive block labelled incorrectly online.

I would like to use this space to urge people to spoiler extremely long comments so we can skip to the bottom more quickly.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I notice you talk a lot about people feeling rejected by traditional political definitions.

That's true, but I think we're trying to spot a shift in recent years where there isn't one. In fact things have not changed much since the coming of the modern party system, with Nixon, the Southern Strategy, and watergate. To wit, Nixon promised Americans both to "not get involved with foreign wars" but also to project strength; he promised an inherent contradiction of Strength abroad with "Peace", a powerful mixture for those burned in Vietnam. His southern strategy brought home those who opposed the civil rights act and the ending of Jim Crow without having to take meaningful actions to deal with it. His radical disruption of the global system built after WW2 through taking the US off the reserve system and plunging an international economic system built on that fact as a foundation into chaos appealed to many, even if they didn't quite follow the details. And as a result, he won with a result that no one before or since could replicate: 520 to 17 electoral votes, carrying 49 states, and winning 60.7% of the popular votes (his opponent didn't even break 40%: he was down to 37.5%). What else is interesting about this election? Turnout fell a whole 5.7% points from 60.9% to 55.2%; it has only on two occasions since even broken past this lower number, and only by a slim margin; turnout has never recovered from where it stood before.

You know what else is interesting? A majority of Americans supported Nixon being removed from office. A majority of republicans did not and never did. In the elections following, Americans punished Congress like never before or since: the rate of successful incumbents was down to 55%, which is literally not a thing that happens except in this particular instance; Democrats gained 49 seats in the House. But not because people suddenly loved democrats; it's because republicans turned on their congressmen.

Now who should come by Reagan in 1980? And he promises strength, peace, he promises optimism and "Morning in America", and he promises economic change, and he wins first decisively, and then in a (significantly less than Nixon) landslide. The senate of 1980 is coincidentally the same that was elected in 1974, and republicans gain 12 seats. Now why should they gain 12 seats, if the people who voted in 1974 were democrat-leaning enough to give them such a boost? The only real justification for that is that Republicans in 1974 didn't vote or punished their legislators, than voted for new ones. But Reagan, despite everything and being lionized even to this day as an icon of conservative thinking, did not win nearly as much as Nixon did. Because he's not Nixon. Then Reagan's VP HW Bush runs. He promises "A kinder, gentler" Reagan. He wins at first, with Reagan endorsing him; but after four years of being not-reagan (and certainly not Nixon), he loses. Quite handily for someone who was part of such a massive win. Why?

I'll tell you why. You know when Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998, it started in October and ended in December. It was a congressional election year, with elections being held in Novermber, in between those three month period of impeachment. That year Democrats won +5 seats; it's borderline unheard of for the party who has the presidency to win house seats during midterms, but he did. How? Why?

You know one of the most interesting things about W. Bush? Bush came into office after an election that was essentially a coinfip. Then he won in 2004 with the popular vote (the first republican since 1988 to do so! And there have been none after either!), and he won with 98% support from Republicans. But by the end of his second term his popularity had shifted to the low-20s. Bear in mind: Trump's support has never gone below 35%. Bush? He ended with 15%. 15% This, the first republican to win the popular vote since his father, bottomed out harder than we could even conceive of today. Why?

Why did Obama's popularity go up at the end of 2014 (after the midterms)? The Obama years were eight years of ranting at Obama from the right and indeed from the more progressive left about everything from drone strikes to his tan suit. But he ended with a positive approval rating, and it actually improved steadily from 2014-2016, when the only major policy changes at that time were the strikes against ISIS. Why?

Your argument is on the right track. But it's imagining a shift where there isn't one. Republicans in the last 50 years do well when they tap into the numbers who like the Nixon Archetype, and they fail when they don't or the Democrats do it instead. It's not a "silent majority" as nixon described it; it's definitely a minority, but in a world where turnout is lower they win pretty consistently. They want someone promising both strength but also don't like to actually be in protracted wars which invite criticism, yet at the same time they want deniable "Peace with honor" and don't care if we actually "win" in the longrun. They like bold economic decisions and certainly don't mind overturning international systems. They particularly like Presidents who tell the media and/or congress to fuck off. And above all they want a president who will make them feel good about the country. Trump checked every box there was.

But this year, which is on track (when the votes are certified) to be the first election to exceed 1968's Nixon election since, they didn't win. It was actually not even very close; we've had vastly narrower elections in the popular vote, and Biden's electoral vote lead will exceed's trumps in 2016. The haze of election day clouded the minds of many, but let me remphasize: this is not close. And why should that be? I think in the end the turnout will be the obvious and key part of this. The Nixon base is large enough to decide elections when turnout is around 50-55% and not when it's 60%; let alone the 64% we're on track to reach.

Vis-a-vis conservativism in the forum, meh. To be honest the number of people who actually follow politics, for good or ill, is always low; who follow it to any level of detail even slimmer, and this means that this population tends to be more likely to be not very representative of a larger population. That's just how that is; true of elections, true of parties, true of organizations, and true of this forum. The price of not being involved is that the people who do will wield disproportionate influence over the conversation. That's not a condemnation of people who aren't into politics; most people aren't. But it is how it is.

You learn a lot about democracy by being a pollworker at every election for 4-5 years straight, at elections so small the candidate himself is out there in the rain 100ft from the polling place, umbrella in hand and asking people to vote for him. And one of those things is that the people who decide every *other* election, which determines everything from who rights the partyline to what sort of situation the presidential candidates exist in to what policies are or aren't an option, are a hilariously slim minority of even those who actually show up to presidential elections. Which means the opinions of the wider majority just aren't counted. Is how it is.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

Think it may be a third option.  Basically every Republican president or presidential candidate has been called a nazi in some capacity for a couple decades, so normal conservatives started tuning it out.  Then social media started getting big, a lot of the early voices there were in cities due to those being major areas where high speed internet got installed.  Cities that have been pretty solidly democrat for a few decades.  This fucked with the in-person view of the overton window and as the standard range of conservatives started to trickle online as higher speeds spread out, they were seen as much further right than they actually would place if you did a national census of opinions.  This gets a massive block labelled incorrectly online.

I would like to use this space to urge people to spoiler extremely long comments so we can skip to the bottom more quickly.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I notice you talk a lot about people feeling rejected by traditional political definitions.

That's true, but I think we're trying to spot a shift in recent years where there isn't one. In fact things have not changed much since the coming of the modern party system, with Nixon, the Southern Strategy, and watergate. To wit, Nixon promised Americans both to "not get involved with foreign wars" but also to project strength; he promised an inherent contradiction of Strength abroad with "Peace", a powerful mixture for those burned in Vietnam. His southern strategy brought home those who opposed the civil rights act and the ending of Jim Crow without having to take meaningful actions to deal with it. His radical disruption of the global system built after WW2 through taking the US off the reserve system and plunging an international economic system built on that fact as a foundation into chaos appealed to many, even if they didn't quite follow the details. And as a result, he won with a result that no one before or since could replicate: 520 to 17 electoral votes, carrying 49 states, and winning 60.7% of the popular votes (his opponent didn't even break 40%: he was down to 37.5%). What else is interesting about this election? Turnout fell a whole 5.7% points from 60.9% to 55.2%; it has only on two occasions since even broken past this lower number, and only by a slim margin; turnout has never recovered from where it stood before.

You know what else is interesting? A majority of Americans supported Nixon being removed from office. A majority of republicans did not and never did. In the elections following, Americans punished Congress like never before or since: the rate of successful incumbents was down to 55%, which is literally not a thing that happens except in this particular instance; Democrats gained 49 seats in the House. But not because people suddenly loved democrats; it's because republicans turned on their congressmen.

Now who should come by Reagan in 1980? And he promises strength, peace, he promises optimism and "Morning in America", and he promises economic change, and he wins first decisively, and then in a (significantly less than Nixon) landslide. The senate of 1980 is coincidentally the same that was elected in 1974, and republicans gain 12 seats. Now why should they gain 12 seats, if the people who voted in 1974 were democrat-leaning enough to give them such a boost? The only real justification for that is that Republicans in 1974 didn't vote or punished their legislators, than voted for new ones. But Reagan, despite everything and being lionized even to this day as an icon of conservative thinking, did not win nearly as much as Nixon did. Because he's not Nixon. Then Reagan's VP HW Bush runs. He promises "A kinder, gentler" Reagan. He wins at first, with Reagan endorsing him; but after four years of being not-reagan (and certainly not Nixon), he loses. Quite handily for someone who was part of such a massive win. Why?

I'll tell you why. You know when Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998, it started in October and ended in December. It was a congressional election year, with elections being held in Novermber, in between those three month period of impeachment. That year Democrats won +5 seats; it's borderline unheard of for the party who has the presidency to win house seats during midterms, but he did. How? Why?

You know one of the most interesting things about W. Bush? Bush came into office after an election that was essentially a coinfip. Then he won in 2004 with the popular vote (the first republican since 1988 to do so! And there have been none after either!), and he won with 98% support from Republicans. But by the end of his second term his popularity had shifted to the low-20s. Bear in mind: Trump's support has never gone below 35%. Bush? He ended with 15%. 15% This, the first republican to win the popular vote since his father, bottomed out harder than we could even conceive of today. Why?

Why did Obama's popularity go up at the end of 2014 (after the midterms)? The Obama years were eight years of ranting at Obama from the right and indeed from the more progressive left about everything from drone strikes to his tan suit. But he ended with a positive approval rating, and it actually improved steadily from 2014-2016, when the only major policy changes at that time were the strikes against ISIS. Why?

Your argument is on the right track. But it's imagining a shift where there isn't one. Republicans in the last 50 years do well when they tap into the numbers who like the Nixon Archetype, and they fail when they don't or the Democrats do it instead. It's not a "silent majority" as nixon described it; it's definitely a minority, but in a world where turnout is lower they win pretty consistently. They want someone promising both strength but also don't like to actually be in protracted wars which invite criticism, yet at the same time they want deniable "Peace with honor" and don't care if we actually "win" in the longrun. They like bold economic decisions and certainly don't mind overturning international systems. They particularly like Presidents who tell the media and/or congress to fuck off. And above all they want a president who will make them feel good about the country. Trump checked every box there was.

But this year, which is on track (when the votes are certified) to be the first election to exceed 1968's Nixon election since, they didn't win. It was actually not even very close; we've had vastly narrower elections in the popular vote, and Biden's electoral vote lead will exceed's trumps in 2016. The haze of election day clouded the minds of many, but let me remphasize: this is not close. And why should that be? I think in the end the turnout will be the obvious and key part of this. The Nixon base is large enough to decide elections when turnout is around 50-55% and not when it's 60%; let alone the 64% we're on track to reach.

You've slightly misunderstood.  I'm not saying that the overall political spectrum of the nation shifted all too much, I'm instead saying that the overton window got completely fucked and caused a perception shift that has messed with the elected democrats a bit.

This economist article has details, but the particular chart I want to bring your attention to is annoyingly hidden under 'pay to subscribe to see more of the article'.  You can spot it for a second before that comes up, but you can't really get a good look at the thing.  I spammed different search terms and found this here that does show the chart.  It has relative conservatism has shifted by a couple percent (bounding a bit more right when Obama was in charge), but something went a bit weird with the dem side of the equation that starts out roughly in time with social media becoming bigger.

Mix with all the giants being in a major city causing them to be messed with as well due to the mentioned cities getting clued in big time first (and as I forgot to mention, the youth that are predominantly liberal getting onboard first as well) in turn messing with some power-tripping moderators thinking the prior overton was right, with all grabbing from that same pool thereby causing the inaccurate overton window to be forced to try to stick and causing no end of headaches as AI is tried to be put in said position...

I'm figuring its a 1/3rd chasing the false overton to try to remain 'left' on it, 1/3rd in battleground areas that don't need to chase it as they are safely 'left' on the more accurate local, and then about 1/3rd in with districts in between those extremes acting a bit as a bridge to keep there from being a split into two.

[Lord Shonus]

Zantezuken's got a solid argument, but there's another big factor involved. Identity politics have heavily favored the Democrats for a long time, because the party has been much friendlier to just about every identity out there. This means that there's a huge block of people that have a "well, I agree with the Republicans on a lot of things but the Democrats treat me like a human. So I'll vote Democrat" attitude. A huge percentage of pundits, policy makers, and candidates don't see that - they just see "80% of <group> votes for us exclusively, we can count on their support" and assume that this vote is because <group> is almost entirely behind the entire platform. So they push the platform super hard instead of digging in and looking at "do we need to adjust this"?

Then you have a 2016 situation where huge portions of <group> don't turn out enough, or even worse turn out for the Republican candidate because they feel like they are being ignored (a lot of blue collar types who were solid Democrats for decades voted for Trump, as did a lot of Cubans in this most recent election). It also feeds strongly into the exact narrative Zantezuken is talking about - once you've decided that no <minority group> will support a position and proclaim this to the nation, people who see large numbers of <minority group> actively endorsing and pushing that position will no longer treat you seriously.

[McTraveller]

I think it's because people are not really "left" or "right," but a complex mishmash of things, and have to shoehorn their beliefs into one of two parties that never really matches what they want, hoping that the party they vote for does at least one thing they like.

The media (traditional and social) feeds off the polarization, eschews nuance, and most sides use language that paints those that hold any different view as deficient in some manner.

It's also very very much the case that in all elections you can have a very uniform set of beliefs on average, but the people that get elected put in place policies that are not "uniform".  Consider something only marginally controversial like immigration reform. If you have a general population where half the people think it's fine to have open borders and about half think it's terrible, the policy is probably not going to be "ok we'll let half the people through" - the policy is either "open borders" or "strict borders."  I mean that's worded poorly, but you get the idea.

The policies themselves are not, and many policies cannot by nature, be "average."  Take ACA and the coverage mandate: there was no opt-out here; you either paid one way or you paid another.  This is the kind of thing that polarizes people.  Not giving people options, taking away choice, that is a real fear.  On the other side, you tend to get people fearing (often with good reason) that if people are given a choice, then they will abuse their power to choose.  Instead of having systems that allow people to choose but then have repercussions for abuse of that freedom, we tend to get systems that just take away choice.

I want choice plus responsibility.  I want safety nets, but I want it sustainable (simply "taking from the rich" is not sustainable. Let's fix the way we grant ownership so that everyone, not just the lucky few, gets to benefit from increased productivity).  I want affordable health care and affordable education, but I don't want it by forcing everyone to pay for it through mandatory insurance or taxes; I want affordability to increase through lower barriers to entry and increased supply.  I want a greener environment, not through penalizing people who can't afford newer tech by high taxes, but by making new tech more affordable (and not just TCO; a poor person won't get the benefit, say, of reduced TCO for an EV because the only way to get an EV will likely be to lease/loan it for unfavorable terms because they are "poor").  I don't want everything to be "as a service"; I want first-sale doctrine so people can own things instead of being beholden to the rent-seekers.

[Reelya]

My point as above really was, some of those things McTraveller just mentioned actually are part of rational conservative viewpoints, but those aren't the things that people get upset that people disagree with. The stuff people want to freely push and not get any push-back tend to be FOX News type talking points based on misinformation. Nothing actually to do with a coherent conservative viewpoint on a topic.

Or LordBaal, I get why he hates Maduro, but if that is couched as "and Hillary is the same as Maduro!" or someone attacks the Swedish Model by saying that it will inevitably turn into Venezuela, well, these are no longer rational arguments about the issues and are veering into irrational polemics. Everywhere else is basically not Venezuela - Venezuela is an outlier that gets a lot of attention for the specific reason that nowhere else on Earth works the way Venezuela does. Even very similar countries that are like Venezuela and had leftist leaders didn't turn out like Venezuela, so it's irrational to say for example that voting Hillary or Bernie would turn USA Venezuelan, and has basically zero to do with taking an actual conservative viewpoint on any issue.

EDIT: Personally, people probably know that I myself have said some stuff here that's considered right of center over the years, but the difference is that I'm saying those things based on looking at the issues or reading research and coming to conclusions about it, and look for third-party information if that's challenged. I'm sure it would be a lot different if I went to a right-wing site and copy-pasted their talking points. So I think there's a cognitive dissonance based on that, too. On 'conservative' media sources you'll get pre-prepared 'conservative' opinion points, and people will believe those in good faith, and when they're repeated outside the conservative ecosystem / echo-chamber and get push back, they get upset that "conservative opinions are not welcome".

No, the problem is in fact that those FOX type talking points are put together in a vacuum for the faithful to spread to the faithful. They're just not designed to withstand scrutiny when talking to people who are basically skeptics from any perspective that's outside the FOX bubble, not just "leftist" scrutiny. QAnons and their "Qproofs" which are entirely circular logic and basically built on outright lying are just the Ultimate Form of the type of stuff FOX etc put out. People here tend to be skeptics, not communists. For example, if you came on here as a super Biden supporter you'd be shredded instantly, the same as a hardcore Trump supporter. And I don't think that's because, for example, everyone here is more left-wing than Biden.

FOX News talking points really were not designed to stand up as coherent debating positions. So when people spread them outside that echo-chamber and people start dissecting what was written, they get upset that the 'leftists' won't let them have their opinion.

[Dostoevsky]

[partisanship / ideological shifts, etc.]

(I'd be interested to see the methodology behind the Economist graphic, if you have access to it.)

I think this misses a few key aspects, particularly through the definitions of partisan divide and which aspects of ideology are changing.

Unfortunately I don't think there's a newer version of this since 2016 - a version including the last 4 years would be quite interesting - but Pew Research took a look at trends on partisan gaps on a series of 10 items going back to 1992. (the image below goes to '94, but the data itself goes back to '92.)

Spoiler: Trends (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: The actual positions for each of the questions (click to show/hide)

Where is the divide getting wider? Treatment of poor people; feelings regarding the government, immigrants, and African Americans; environmental laws; and the importance of military strength. Some topics - homesexuality, government spending, feelings on corporations - haven't changed as much. Notice that e.g. back in '94, liberals were as likely to think of immigrants as "a burden on our country" as conservatives.

Or, put another way, not every policy difference is wide, but the policies that are recently becoming the widest are also some of the most present in the public discourse. See, e.g., this more limited Pew research piece on racial and gender views comparing 2016 to 2020.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Considering all this, it'd be good to know in what ways the most recent batches of congressional Dems are getting more liberal. It could simply be a matter of a wider range of perspectives present, seeing as there's been a rather large bump of members who aren't white males over the past few terms.

Other factors in here are the generational divide (see e.g. this Pew piece) and geographical self-sorting (this one is a more hotly-debated topic, though).

Self-identifying members of each of the two main parties do self-sort more than ever before, arguably largely thanks to an increased ability to do so in a broader / more free media landscape (i.e. the internet) - I'd argue that's not solely a leftist issue. Just as the past few decades have seen the rise of Huffington Post and other liberal outlets, so too has it seen the rise of Fox, OAN, Newsmax (at times the most popular news website in the US!), and others.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

[partisanship / ideological shifts, etc.]

(I'd be interested to see the methodology behind the Economist graphic, if you have access to it.)

I can't see the particulars as it is buried behind the article and I don't have the money to dump on a subscription to that at this time.

I will note that that graph is not the same data used with Pew.  From what I'm aware, Pew is researching the general population, while at the top of the Economist data's chart, it's noted it specifically focuses just on candidates to the house of representatives that won their primaries.  Could easily be a disconnect there, especially with the mentioned fucked overton window having more potential to influence those campaigns.

[Dostoevsky]

Difference between populace and electeds is relevant, yes, though depending on how Economist calculated their figures the explanation could just be e.g. reparations or other topics related to some of the more recent divisions.

Edit: The more I think about it, the more I feel I need to know the methodology behind the chart. I'm thinking of e.g. the stories in the press a few months back about Sen. Harris being 'the most liberal Senator' - they referred to GovTrack, a pretty nonpartisan site compiling data on congressional activity. The thing is, their score is largely based on "whether they sponsor and cosponsor overlapping sets of bills and resolutions with other Members of Congress." Thanks in part to the relatively low pace of legislative activity in the Senate, it can be fairly easy to game that system through activity that a) your average layperson would not know of understand, and b) that would be entirely unrelated to voting patterns, the places where policies can actually become law. One could have cosponsorship patterns at odds with their public policy platform easily enough (heck, it happens often enough).

[Reelya]

This economist article has details, but the particular chart I want to bring your attention to is annoyingly hidden under 'pay to subscribe to see more of the article'.  You can spot it for a second before that comes up, but you can't really get a good look at the thing.

On Firefox at least, spamming the Esc key prevents those pop-ups from occurring, but that one clearly has a timer in the script and if the pop-up isn't up, it tries again. So I was able to read the whole article but had to hit Esc frequently to avoid the pop-up appearing. Well here's the direct link to the chart if anyone wants it

https://www.economist.com/img/b/600/954/90/sites/default/files/images/2018/09/articles/body/20180922_USC938_0.png

As per the article, most of the further-left candidates who won Democratic primaries were in solid Red constituencies, so not in places where they had a shot at winning. What they're probably seeing there is that if there's no chance of actually winning then pragmatism isn't as important as sending a message about values, whereas pragmatic candidates wouldn't stand in the first place in that situation. It could be that this is a thing where it's not mirror-image on the right. For example, if Republicans are selecting a values-candidate for an election in a deep blue electorate, then they're not actually more likely to pick a hard-right candidate, but a 'conscience conservative', i.e. they're also more likely to pick someone further to the left in that situation than who would be running in a competitive election.

[McTraveller]

Re:

Items in the Ideological Consistency Scale

I find the survey flawed in that it builds presuppositions into the way the questions are worded; the "Conservative position" and "Liberal position" are not the full range of possible views.

For instance, "Government is almost always wasteful and inefficient" is not the opposite of "Government often does a better job than people give it credit for".  They are related but not responses to the same question.  You can be almost always wasteful and inefficient and do better than people give credit.

"Government regulation of business usually does more harm than good" versus "Government regulation of business is necessary to protect the public interest" are also not opposites.  This one is trickier than the first, though, because neither "harm" nor "public interest" are defined.

The most controversial on that list is probably "Homosexuality should be discouraged by society" versus "Homosexuality should be accepted by society". The full opposite would be "Homosexuality should be encouraged by society."  Incidentally this is why this issue gets so heated - while some people (like myself) think it should be accepted, I don't think it should be "encouraged" - but mostly because I don't think it's something you encourage someone to do - it's just who they are. Like I mean you encourage someone to stay in school, you don't encourage someone to take on a particular sexual identity.  This is subtle - you encourage people to be who they are, not to adopt a particular lifestyle.  (And yes, I know I have my own biases to deal with there).

The one I find the most amusing is this one: "Most corporations make a fair and reasonable amount of profit" versus "Business corporations make too much profit."  I don't even know what that means - what is "too much profit"?  If you make a widget that everyone on the planet loves, why is it OK to make $x per widget, but not $2x? I think what the question is hinting at is "do businesses abuse the system to get more profit than they would otherwise," but it's not worded that way at all.

I also find subtlety in "Poor people today have it easy..." versus "Poor people have hard lives because government benefits don't go far enough".   This makes it sound like the only issue is the money and it doesn't have anything to do with systematic issues that are still in place even if you give handouts, etc.  Interestingly the question about racism hits more on the systemic issues: I think "the poor" are more likely to be poor due to systemic issues just like the racial minorities, not because they aren't given enough (monetary) benefits. But that's not even on the spectrum.

[Dostoevsky]

There are always going to be limitations in question phrasing, of course, especially since it's based around a general liberal-conservative two pole assessment. If one wants to capture the full range of response, there's a decent chance it'll just be noise for many possible questions, especially if one is trying to capture general population trends. This study has limitations, to be sure, but I think it is a decent way to try and capture certain trends over time.

(That said, I would be happy to see/compare to other similar studies. I also think some of these questions are framed oddly, but so it goes.)

As to the homosexuality one, I'm a little surprised by your response. These aren't meant to be framed as opposite, just particular frames first chosen in the early 90s - a period of time where, for example, congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act on a broad bipartisan margin. I'm also not really sure what you mean by "encouraged" here - I assume you don't mean indoctrination or something. Brainwashing kids is a hypothetical opposite of discouraging it, but that's not really a relevant political perspective worth polling in a by-nature polar question framework.

"Too much profit" can mean many things, but I suspect folks are going to think of profit v. investments, paying wages, etc. It's not too much gross, but too much after-expense profit.

[McTraveller]

I think that there is a difference between accepting something and promoting it.  I think this gets lots of "conservatives" up in arms, especially about sexuality.

I'm also aware that there are inherent dangers with just saying something is "accepted" without giving it some protections - that's largely how we still have all the race issues in the US: we "accepted" racial freedom, but only at face value.

I also realize that there are people who do honestly think that people should be prevented (forcibly) from doing something they think of as "wrong". This is both on the conservative and liberal side - some conservatives say you shouldn't be allowed to express a particular sexuality. Some liberals say you shouldn't be allowed to use fossil fuels.  I think it's wrong to use force in either of these cases, regardless of what you think about the morality of them.

Anyway I'm kind of rambling...

[Reelya]

The most controversial on that list is probably "Homosexuality should be discouraged by society" versus "Homosexuality should be accepted by society". The full opposite would be "Homosexuality should be encouraged by society." 

Actually, that's still slightly off, as the remaining cognitive dissonance shows.

The opposite of "discourage" is not "encourage" it's "not discourage", and it's clearly wrong to say that "not discourage" and "encourage" are synonyms. "not discourage" and "accept" are actually closer in meaning. For example, to discourage payment with bitcoin, to not discourage payment with bitcoin, to accept payment with bitcoin, and to encourage payment with bitcoin all have different meanings, but the two middle ones denote neutrality on the issue.

Pew actually did the right thing here, since saying "conservatives discourage homosexuality, while liberals encourage homosexuality" would actually read like something designed to mislead.

Also, there's nothing written into the rules that the conservative position and liberal position on a topic even must be diametrically opposed. The viewpoints can well and truly be orthogonal.

[MrRoboto75]

No, the big gay is now required, by law.

[Reelya]

I think it's even clearer if you use the dichotomy about abortions. The conservative opinion is that nobody should have an abortion, so the liberal opinion must therefore be that everyone should have an abortion. (EDIT: I wish this was a fake example but I'm pretty sure that there are commentators out there going on about how the libs love it when people have abortions).

It kind of makes me think of Bizzaro world in the Superman comics, where everything is opposite.

Or, In Soviet Russia, abortion has you.