[Bartels, a Princeton political scientist, is author of the new book, Unequal Democracy.]

They certainly sound egalitarian. For example, as I noted the other day, more than 85% of Americans say they agree that "Our society should do whatever is necessary to make sure that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed." That sentiment, if taken seriously, implies a quite radical policy agenda with respect to education, health care, and other forms of social support. It also seems very hard to square with tax-free inheritances for the children of multi-millionaires.

Perhaps survey respondents answering very general questions of this sort are simply paying lip service to egalitarian values. However, it is easy enough to find much less abstract expressions of egalitarian sympathies. For example, Americans asked to rate various social groups on a 100-point "feeling thermometer" report warmer feelings toward working class people than toward middle class people, warmer feelings toward poor people than toward rich people, and warmer feelings toward labor unions than toward big business. If these feelings were translated into policies, those policies would be quite egalitarian. But the connection between sympathies and policies is remarkably loose. In some cases - perhaps most strikingly, with respect to the minimum wage - public opinion is strongly and consistently egalitarian, but consistently ignored by policy-makers. (Thus, the real value of the federal minimum wage has eroded by more than 40% over the past 40 years.) More commonly, however, the public's own policy views fail to reflect their egalitarian-sounding impulses.

One problem is that most ordinary citizens pay only modest attention to politics and public affairs; as a result, they are often too uninformed to translate their broad political values into specific policy preferences. The 2001 Bush tax cut is a dramatic case in point. In opinion surveys conducted in 2002 and 2004, about 40% of the public said they hadn't thought about whether they favored or opposed this multi-trillion dollar policy innovation. Among those who did express a view one way or the other, opinions were most strongly shaped by what I refer to as "unenlightened self-interest." People who thought their own taxes were too high were very likely to support the tax cut, regardless of what they thought about the tax burdens of rich people, who were overwhelmingly the main beneficiaries from the tax cut. How much people wanted to spend on a wide variety of government programs, their views about the efficiency or wastefulness of government, and other plausibly relevant considerations had no effects, or seemingly illogical effects, on support for the tax cut. Democrats and strong egalitarians were most likely to oppose the tax cut, but only if they were unusually well-informed. Indeed, much of the sizable plurality of public opinion in support of the tax cut came from uninformed egalitarians, liberals, and Democrats

Another problem is that people's perceptions of problems and policies are often warped by their partisan and ideological commitments. For example, even most conservatives recognize that income differences between rich people and poor people have increased over the past 20 years; but conservatives who are generally well-informed about politics and public affairs are actually less likely than those who are less informed about politics and public affairs to admit that fact. In this instance, paying greater attention to politics mostly seems to be helping people learn how congenial political elites would like the world to be, not how the world actually is. (Lest anyone be tempted to suppose that this sort of motivated misperception is peculiar to conservatives, I'll note that a majority of strong Democrats in 1988 thought that inflation had worsened under Ronald Reagan; in fact, the inflation rate had fallen from 13.5% to 4.1%.)

Political elites often take for granted complex interconnections among facts, values, and policy implications. However, for ordinary citizens these connections are often fuzzy, warped, or entirely absent. Thus, while public opinion provides some fertile ground for an egalitarian policy agenda, the hard work of translating egalitarian values and sympathies into effective policy demands mostly remains to be done.

Jason Blake Keuter - 5/17/2008

More "false-consciousness" dressed up in rhetorical garb. Egalitarians believe in justice and fairness. Is it fair that rich people pay only 5% in income tax while the poor pay 50%? Of course not. But wait! The rich actually pay an infinitely greater percentage of their income in taxes and the poor generally pay nothing! To make things more EQUAL as the Bush tax cuts did is somehow not egalitarian.

The author invokes the usual, "polling shows the American people would be socialist wealth-redistributors if they knew all the facts and thus all present policy can be regarded as a subversion of 'substantive' democracy" mantra. The reason most Americans don't give a rip about tax cuts for the rich is because most of them don't benefit that much from high taxes on the rich. Did Middle Class tax cuts go up as a result of the tax cuts? No. Where's the injustice?

The real problem with the tax cuts is the threat they pose to the government. Cuts in taxes unaccompanied by cuts in spending lead to deficits which will force the issue of tax increases or spending cuts. Everyone hates tax increases, so those who have something to lose from tax cuts (the government - including most professors) try to rally those who don't have anything to lose from them (most middle class people who can always vote to cut government - e.g. professors' salaries - instead of raise their own taxes) to think that they're evil. In other words, the government tries to instill in the voter the false consciousness that cutting tax rates is unfair and unequal and elitis. Why? So they can continue to consume those taxes. They find it inordinately frustrating that the average American doesn't share their urgency on this point and are too ignorant to see that the average American has no good reason to share that urgency and if they did, they'd simply be adopting the perspective of the tax consumer that they are not and not the tax payer that they are.