Andrew Ferguson seems to think not:

This is an old argument, and it never goes away for long. It’s usually revived when articulate people with strong political convictions suddenly see the public, which moments before had been agreeing with them, veering off in a seditious direction. Only a little more than 18 months ago, American voters elected a well-schooled sophisticate to the presidency and thereby demonstrated a long overdue spiritual maturity. Now, having turned on him, they are demonstrating their bad character. Today’s Tea Partiers are up-to-date versions of the Angry White Males who fomented the Republican takeover of the House 16 years ago. One fed-up pundit back then described his feelings about these ingrates with unusual heat: “They are, in short, Big Babies.” Nyah, nyah, nyah. From the wisdom and sophistication they had shown only two years before in electing Bill Clinton and strong Democratic majorities in Congress, they had regressed to the crib, like Benjamin Button.

[…]

Last week the Center for American Progress (CAP), a liberal think tank, issued a poll-riddled paper titled “Better, not Smaller: What Americans want from their Federal Government.” To their credit, the CAP demographers refused to call American voters hypocrites for disagreeing with them. Instead, they refused to believe that American voters disagree with them.

CAP, of course, promotes more federal involvement in priority areas such as energy, poverty, and education. And hey look: “Clear majorities of Americans of all ages,” says its report, “want and expect more federal involvement in priority areas such as energy, poverty, and education.” Fewer than 25 percent of respondents told the pollsters they wanted less involvement in those areas.

At the same time, however, the demographers admitted that from some perspectives—theirs, most notably—a lot of the numbers look terrible. Only 33 percent had some or a lot of confidence in the federal government’s ability to solve problems. A slightly higher number, 39 percent, agree that “the government should do more to solve problems”; 57 percent say “government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals.”

A paradoxical people, these Americans: eager to have an incompetent government that they don’t trust do more of the things that they don’t want it to do. CAP’s pollsters square this circle by announcing that what Americans really want is a “federal government that is better not smaller,” which, as it happens, is what the Big Government liberals at CAP say they want, too. (Big Government conservatives also want this: their ideal is a government that is “energetic but limited,” like the Incredible Hulk isometrically flexing his muscles under a straitjacket.)

There are easier ways to resolve the paradox. Maybe the problem is in the pollsters and not the respondents, in the questions rather than the answers. Simple, one-step questions are a dull blade with which to probe attitudes about a hypothetical future.

Ask “Would you like a Ferris wheel in your backyard?” and a shockingly high percentage of Americans might say yes. Complicate the question, however—“Would you like a Ferris wheel in your backyard if it tripled your electric bill and bumped off the family dog?”—and the number would drop. Either/or questions aren’t much better. In its poll, CAP asked: “Please tell me whether you’d like to see more federal government involvement in [the following] areas, less involvement, about the same amount, or no federal government involvement.” Clear majorities (51 percent in the case of health care) answer “more, more, more.” CAP takes the result as an indication that Americans have a European-like craving for centralized power.

Yet a more complicated question would likely yield different results. “Would you like more government involvement in health care if it meant that .??.??. your insurance premiums rose or your employer might choose to drop your insurance .??.??. ?” The issue becomes less abstract when costs as well as benefits are introduced with any specificity. The Times poll that Lindsey and Applebaum cited merely asked respondents whether Social Security and Medicare were “worth the costs,” without saying what the costs are or might be. Indeed, even in CAP’s poll it appears that in some cases, the closer Big Government gets, the less Americans like it. Ten years ago 73 percent wanted more federal involvement in health care. Now that they’re about to get it—good and hard—the percentage has dropped to 51 percent.

You could even make the case that the biggest threat to Big Government is Big Government. Karlyn Bowman, poll maven at the American Enterprise Institute (a small-government think tank run by Arthur Brooks), points to a survey from 1958, in which respondents were first asked how often they could trust the federal government “to do what was right.” Seventy-three percent said “always” or “most of the time.” A Yankelovich poll found similar attitudes in 1964.

Twenty years later the percentage was down to 44 percent. Seymour Martin Lipset, in his book American Exceptionalism, reported that in 1964 only one out of three Americans thought his government served special interests rather than the public interest. Thirty years later the number was 80 percent, roughly where it is today in the CAP poll.

What happened between 1964 and 1994? Lots of things: war, scandal, booms and busts, Jimmy Carter. Also, in 1965, Lyndon Johnson and an eager Congress launched the raft of programs known as the Great Society, which forever expanded the region of national life in which the federal government felt free to muck around. No one has been able to shrink the sphere since, though voters seem to like politicians—Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, even George W. Bush—who promise to try, and for this reason, I suppose, liberal commentators have told us we’ve been living through an age of conservative dominance.

Now, in post-LBJ America, when a pollster asks adults whether they’d prefer a larger government with more services or a smaller government with fewer services, Americans have in almost every instance chosen the latter. The more tasks the government takes on the more likely it is to fail, and for citizens to see it as a failure. As the government changed, so did the public’s attitude toward it.

Much of what liberal / progressive pollsters rely on is the unconsidered, knee-jerk appearance of political engagement by those who believe they’re supposed to be politically engaged — with the result being that people polled give the answers they think they are supposed to give, taking their cues from everything from the overall tenor of the questions to the subtle attitudes of the pollster. That a majority of those polled would claim a desire to see an improvement in education or health care, etc., is surely unremarkable, therefore. And when posited to them — even obliquely — that spending and government oversight is the only way to assure such improvements, people will naturally claim to favor such fixes to what must, by virtue of the question’s even being asked in the first place, be horribly broken.

Educational indoctrination in “progressive” ideas of government most certainly have affected the thinking of large swathes of Americans. But even those so indoctrinated remain self-interested, which is why progressivism — while it is propounded by many — is in the voting booth the ultimate client / benefactor political relationship. And even many putative progressives understand that there is only so much of other people’s money to go around.