E.g. most lawyers support using race as a factor in college admissions and hiring decisions. Most Democrats (as well as most Black and Hispanic people) oppose using race as even a "minor factor" in admissions decisions (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/25/most-americ...), and oppose using race as a factor in hiring decisions, even if that results in less diversity (https://www.vox.com/2019/5/9/18538216/diversity-workplace-pe...).
Likewise, most lawyers are liberal on criminal justice issues. Meanwhile, a 2014 Sentencing Project study found that two-thirds of Black people (90% of whom vote Democrat) think the criminal justice system "is not harsh enough." https://news.wttw.com/2019/04/11/how-black-leaders-unintenti...
Most lawyer's support Roe v. Wade's rule that states cannot prohibit abortions before fetal viability (around the end of the second trimester). But 65% of people think abortion should "usually be illegal in the second trimester" (i.e. after 13 weeks): https://apnews.com/article/only-on-ap-us-supreme-court-abort...
Most lawyers are aggressively secular, and lean toward a mode of excluding religion from schools similar to France. Meanwhile, most Americans say that religion has too little presence in schools: https://news.gallup.com/poll/18136/public-favors-voluntary-p.... Specifically, 73% of Republicans and 51% of Democrats think there is too little religion in schools.
Insofar as judges (and Supreme Court Justices) come from the pool of lawyers, it's important to observe that lawyers as a group are well to the left of not only Republicans, but many or most Democrats on these issues.
For example, lawyers should be aggressively secular. The separation of church and state is one of the most important pillars of a fair democracy, and should be steadfastly defended by our legal professionals regardless of the current ebbs and flows of culture and religion.
Personally, I think that the Reagan Era ushered in a wave of cultural conservatism that is far out of step with a healthy democracy, and lead to a toxic abundance of corporatism, deregulation, and rugged individualism, and that the "woke wave" that conservatives complain about is in many ways really just a cultural pendulum swing back to a healthy center.
Democrats are to the right of most lawyers, sure - but the Democratic party would be considered right wing in most other western democracies. America is so right-leaning that being a centrist in a global sense makes you more to the left than our left wing party.
So I don't think this data shows that our legal system is being corrupted by a sudden surge of radical leftists. I think it shows that American culture is going off the deep end and that our lawyers are trying to keep us tethered to the realities of democracy. These people get decades of education about the concrete function of legal institutions, and undoubtedly know much more about what is actually effective than your average American that just spews their untested opinion at a polster.
I'm a believer in procedural democracy. Within limits--with those limits themselves having public endorsement--democracy means that people should have the kind of society the people want. I don't think the only kind of democracy is secular, liberal democracy: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/05/de....
> Democrats are to the right of most lawyers, sure - but the Democratic party would be considered right wing in most other western democracies. America is so right-leaning that being a centrist in a global sense makes you more to the left than our left wing party.
On economic issues yes, but not on social and cultural issues. France is to the right of America on each of the issues I listed above except public religion. For example, France's abortion law (which generally bars abortions after 14 weeks) would not survive under Roe (which requires abortion to be generally available up to viability, which is 22-24 weeks). On color blindness versus race consciousness, centrist Macron is far to the right of American progressives: https://wset.com/news/nation-world/france-denounces-american.... Macron, in fact, has specifically attacked "woke" progressive ideology.
The only exception is religion--France is aggressively secular. But France is the exception on that front. For example, the UK still technically requires all schools to have daily prayers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_prayer#United_Kingdom. That law would be unconstitutional in the U.S. Likewise, public funding for religious schooling, which is common in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, etc., would be unconstitutional in the U.S. In another example, in Bavaria it is mandatory to display a cross on public buildings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kreuzpflicht. By contrast, in the U.S. there was a big kerfuffle recently about whether it was permissible to have a cross sculpture on public property.
> I think that the Reagan Era ushered in a wave of cultural conservatism that is far out of step with a healthy democracy
I think you have to separate two things. First, how culturally conservative are the people? Second, how responsive is the legal system to those views?
America has always been extremely religious, like all the other New World countries. The percentage of Americans who pray daily is comparable to Iran. And as a practical matter, the religiosity of Americans is continually replenished by immigration. Folks who come here from Latin America, Asia, etc., may vote Democrat, but often they're quite culturally conservative.
Reagan didn't make America culturally conservative--he made the legal system more responsive to people's cultural conservatism. During a period in the mid-20th century, lawyers--who represent an elite slice of society--had departed quite significantly from the moral center of the country, and Reagan turned that back.
The interesting thing when you compare to Europe is that the legal system in those countries is much more responsive to the public on issues of morality than the U.S. legal system. Social change happens in those countries through popular legislation, not court rulings. For example, the European Court of Human Rights unanimously found that the express "right to marriage" contained in the European Convention on Human Rights did not extend to same-sex marriage. They did that the year after the U.S. Supreme Court reached the exact opposite conclusion about the U.S. Constitution's implied marriage right. (Countries less religious than the U.S., such as Italy, Greece, and Switzerland, still don't have same-sex marriage as of 2022.) Likewise, European courts have consistently deferred to legislatures on issues such as abortion laws.
The U.S. may often seem very conservative because the U.S. is much more like Poland than Denmark. But the legal system is actually aggressively liberal in overruling public opinion compared to the counterparts in Europe. Frankly, they remind me a little of Bangladesh, my home country. There, the country's elites have consistently tried to overrule the deeply-Islamic public in making secularism a central legal principle.
>> The only exception is religion--France is aggressively secular. But France is the exception on that front. For example, the UK still technically requires all schools to have daily prayers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_prayer#United_Kingdom. That law would be unconstitutional in the U.S. Likewise, public funding for religious schooling, which is common in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, etc., would be unconstitutional in the U.S. In another example, in Bavaria it is mandatory to display a cross on public buildings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kreuzpflicht. By contrast, in the U.S. there was a big kerfuffle recently about whether it was permissible to have a cross sculpture on public property.
THANK YOU. It's so refreshing to actually see someone not treat leftism-rightism as a monolithic thing measured via free healthcare.
As far as I'm concerned, leftism and rightism are best understood as inchoate moral intuitions that are given form in things like culture, philosophy and various creeds, and those creeds frequently contradict each other. The world wished for by a postliberal paleocon and a libertarian transhumanist couldn't be more different, yet both are ostensibly on the right. Woke intersectionalists and TERFs literally run different patches of the same ideology, both solidly on the left, and are for all practical purposes at war, and the list goes on and on.
Treating them as monoliths is not always useful.
> For example, France's abortion law (which generally bars abortions after 14 weeks) would not survive under Roe (which requires abortion to be generally available up to viability, which is 22-24 weeks).
Similar thing in the Nordic country where I live: People are very pro-choice in terms of having abortion be available and an okay choice to make, but understand that abortion is a grave matter and the law reflects it, something that'd likely look really weird to Americans.
Interesting semantic game. I had to stop and think for a second, but, yes, that is probably literally true (albeit just barely).
Of white Trump voters, probably a little under half are women.
Some of-color people (that semantic boundary is itself flexible) also voted for Trump, probably enough to make up for whatever man/woman difference there was among the white voters, plus enough to get over the 50% threshold.
So yes, literally, "the majority of Donald Trump's voters in 2016 and 2020 were women and people of color" is probably true.
Interesting trick.
"Women and people of color constitute the majority of Trump supporters"
or
"The majority of Trump supporters is comprised of women and people of color"
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-w...