In a recent New York Times hit piece on California Republican gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder, you will read those words on three occasions.
One wonders if there’s any center-right position that isn’t considered “far right” by political journalists. In a recent New York Times hit piece on California Republican gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder, you will read those words on three occasions.
An example:
Mr. Elder’s political positions speak loudly and clearly to the state’s small but vocal strain of far-right conservatism. He supports school vouchers and prioritizes jobs over environmental and climate considerations. He opposes abortion. He is vaccinated against the coronavirus because of a rare blood condition but opposes vaccine and mask “mandates.”
I’m unsure why the word mandate deserves quotation marks here. Does reporter Shawn Hubler believe that Elder isn’t really opposed to mandates, but all vaccinations? Or does she simply reject the idea that state edicts compelling Californians to get a jab should be referred to as a mandate. Difficult to know.
In any event, perhaps a yet-to-be-discovered transcript will out Elder as an anti-vaxxer. Right now, however, I can’t find a single instance of the candidate offering any conspiratorial or even antagonistic opinions about COVID vaccines. The closest we come is a Huffington Post story that accuses the talk show host of promoting an anti-vax ideas. The evidence? A single quack caller and Elder himself believing it “ought to be a person’s choice whether to get vaccinated for COVID-19.”
Whatever the case, it is hardly a “far right” to oppose “mandates.” Most polls show around 40-something percent of voters concur with Elder — which is a larger percentage than those supporting the Democrats’ position on government-funded abortions. Poll after poll, in fact, has a majority of Americans supporting restrictions on abortion after 20 weeks. California’s beleaguered governor Gavin Newsom doesn’t believe in a single constraint to ending a pregnancy — not even in the ninth month. Yet, no reporter at the Times, nor anywhere else in the establishment media, would refer to him as “far left.”
Hubler may also find the notion of school choice extreme, but support for the idea, including tax vouchers following kids, has been gaining popularity for years — spiking on the heels of COVID lockdowns. Numerous polls now have universal-choice policies at over 50 percent. Whatever you make of those polls, school choice can hardly be described as fringe right-wing hobbyhorse. Black and Hispanic parents, neither of them big right-wing constituencies, are robust supporters of educational choice.
According to Gallup, the percentage of Americans who now prioritize the environment over the economy has been dropping. Forty-two percent of Americans tell the pollster they believe “economic growth should be given priority, even if the environment suffers to some extent.” Polls are often about theoretical positions. In reality, somewhere over 90 percent of Americans prioritize their economic well-being over climate hysteria. Even President Joe Biden recently implored OPEC to increase oil production to prioritize jobs over environmental considerations. Even if he hadn’t, Elder’s position is well within the mainstream.
The same goes for Elder’s opposition to a minimum wage — mentioned numerous times in the Times article. No doubt, the policy is popular these days. Only a few years ago, however, most economists would have told you that it was harmful for workers. Was Paul Krugman on the “far right” when he wrote that any “Econ 101 student” could tell you that “higher wage reduces the quantity of labor demanded, and hence leads to unemployment”? Even today, economists are split on the issue. Many believe moderate increases to the wage floor would have a small effect. Many also believe that doubling it would kill millions of jobs. The CBO says that 1.4 million Americans would lose work if we doubled the national minimum wage to $15. Today, polls show somewhere around 34–35 percent of Americans usually oppose the idea. That is a minority, but it is not, either ideologically or politically “far right.”
Now, I don’t pretend to be scholar on Larry Elderism. Nor am I arguing that someone with Elder’s positions would normally have a chance in deep-blue California. Nor do I contend that the polls I cite above tell us the full story on any of these complex issues. But for decades that phrase, and others like “ultra-conservative,” have been misleadingly deployed by journalists to describe conventional center-right positions that they happen to find objectionable. Certainly nothing detailed in the Times piece indicates that Elder is on the “far right.”