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All or nothing. Moderate means being moderate on everything . being non-moderate on immigration means being far-right even if left-wing on other stuff
I was going to agree with you that one hard right opinion makes you describable as far right but there’s a 14% of the American population that’s quite anti gay that’s never coded right.
And moderate itself changes. Obama was moderate on homosexuality in 2008 and hard right in 2022.
You're substantially overestimating both the prevalence and salience of homophobia amongst African Americans. They're more likely to oppose gay marriage than white liberals but less likely than white conservatives. And, more importantly, it's just not an issue for them - a randomly selected black man may not have particularly liberal views on homosexuality, but it doesn't motivate his political actions.
And that's the core distinction - Bernie is far left despite being kind of squishy on immigration and racial justice because the economic positions he centers are far left. Trump may be "moderate" on a lot of issues, but he's far right because he ran and governed on a platform of nativism and inchoate populist rage.
Citation needed?
The closest thing I can find to relevant numbers would put them neck-and-neck, with support for same-sex marriage among US blacks at 51% and among Republicans at 47% (which might put white Republicans slightly higher), but that was five years ago and everyone's support is still rising rapidly. I guess this claim also depends on your criteria for "conservative"; e.g. "white evangelical" support was at 35%, below "black protestant", not just African-Americans as a whole.
Add in a little help from the Latino vote and it was enough to get California Prop 8 passed.
Of course, that was 15 years ago, and also rendered moot by later court decisions. Is it a strong issue for anybody anymore? I can't find any data for this one, but I almost never see anything like the sense of indignation from anti-gay believers that I've seen commonly among e.g. pro-life people, the other major group for whom "overturn Supreme Court precedent" became the only political option left. Even the conservatives who mock libertarian ideas about "victimless crimes" are almost unanimously talking about drug decriminalization etc. I do have to say almost never, because there's always someone (ISTR a screed or two by John C. Wright, and there were Jerry Falwell's ridiculous comments after Hurricane Katrina), but average homophobic internet commenters seem to go for "slippery slope towards some other actual harm" arguments at most, when talking about gay marriage qua gay marriage their hearts don't seem to be in it. This might be a contingent level of tolerance, since average homophobic people seem to be aware that they're being overwhelming trounced in the court of US public opinion, but at least while they're both being creamed the social conservatives seem to be unwilling to disown any libertarian conservatives over this issue.
The PEW survey you cited is a start. Here's another, more recent one: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/11/15/about-six-in-ten-americans-say-legalization-of-same-sex-marriage-is-good-for-society/
GOP: 55/43 against/for
Conservative GOP: 66/32 against/for
Black: 39/57 against/for
So a 14 point gap for African Americans vs the GOP as a whole and a 25 point gap compared to conservative Republicans, both of the latter being net negative. Conversely, there's a 23 point gap between them and Democrats. So yes, African Americans are more conservative on homosexuality than Democrats as a whole but less than Republicans.
I'm not going to try and read minds to determine whether or not people really mean what they say, but a) conservative politicians generally continue to oppose legalization of gay marriage b) black politicians generally do not c) at least some conservative politicians continue to actively and vocally oppose gay rights and present the toleration of homosexuality as a social threat.
This is motivated by a minority of religious conservatives, but I'd argue that points in favor of anti-gay sentiment as litmus for far right political alignment - more 'normal' conservatives might not think much of homosexuality and are happy to go along with their more proactive copartisans, but it doesn't motivate their politics and they're generally not enthused about burning political capital for it. Contrast that with where the Overton Window was on the matter 15 years ago - the 'moderate' position was civil unions and the broader question of cultural acceptance wasn't really on the table.
It's a shame I can only upvote this once; thank you.
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It depends on what is meant by socially conservative. In my experience, I see normalized antipathy towards homosexuality, open hostility towards trans, and very redpill sort of views towards gender.
OTOH, the churches seem more blatant about being scams, in the Heinleinian "snake oil shamans" sense.
I think this doesn’t give a great description of either what general working class Americans believe or what IRL hardline social conservatives believe.
IME most working class blacks have very similar social views to working class Anglo whites of the same age and background, for obvious reasons. In general for the working class this would be an attitude that plenty of women are crazy sociopathic gold diggers(although not all women are like that), that homosexuality is pretty messed up and marks out a male practitioner of it as somehow contaminated, but that doesn’t justify preventing them from marrying each other(or whatever else consenting adults want to do) even if they’re by default morally suspect, that trans have a mental illness and are mostly crazy perverts, churches in general exist to live off of 10% of social security checks except for the ones you’re personally well disposed to and on average it would be better to trust a random Christian of any denomination than a random person of no religion, and you should still believe in Jesus and going to church is a good thing unless you’re joining a cult, even if it’s not a very important good thing, that having lots of casual sex is bad, but you shouldn’t pry to much if it’s a man and anyways a man is supposed to be sexually active unless he’s really religious, domestic violence is wrong but it’s sometimes the woman’s fault she gets beat, and that abortion is wrong but sometimes understandable because occasionally rape causes pregnancy or there’s a baby with a severe disability(in which case the momma should consider getting sterilized in case it’s her bad genes) or a woman gets abandoned by her partner.
This isn’t a very politically correct set of beliefs, but it’s also not one which lines up very well with IRL(that is, not on twitter) social conservative hardliners either. Remember that around a fifth of Americans think homosexuality should be illegal, abortion should be hard banned no exceptions(usually with the view that the morning after pill is abortion), women shouldn’t work outside the home, porn should be banned, etc. This group doesn’t see eye to eye with the moderately conservative working class view I just laid out above. Actually they’ll have some pretty big disagreements. But they do, by and large, occupy the same space of ‘left of the media.
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