Following on a David Brooks column saying despite what "should be a golden age of liberalism...There are now two conservatives in this country for every liberal." And an earlier Daily Kos post I wanted to look closer at the history.
What's important to note is there was never a time politically that the term "liberal" has been more identified with than the term "conservative." Even in 1936 people preferred to align with a "conservative" rather than "liberal" party. As the Anchorage Daily News points out in 1974:
Even in 1936, a high point in Democratic strength, the division of opinion showed a slight preference for a conservative party over a liberal party.
Now it's important to note 1936 was no ordinary year, it was the year Franklin Roosevelt won one of the biggest landslides in US history over Alf Landon and yet more people preferred to label themselves "conservative."
Here's the electoral map to get a sense of the 1936 Democratic/"Liberal" victory:
A rather good study by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill looked at this entire history all the way from 1936 to today. It took about a thousand different surveys on liberal and conservative identification totaling a whopping 2 million people and lays out a good history of how the identifications evolved.
As the study points out:
"liberal," while certainly a more popular term during the New Deal era than today, was never able to gain a clear majority of the American electorate, even when Roosevelt was handily winning elections and when the social programs he explicitly tried to link to symbolic "liberalism" were quite popular.
This can be seen in the graph of identification surveys:
Percent of people Self-identified as Liberal
This decline is mirrored by an increase in those identifying themselves as conservatives relating mostly to social issues. As Lyndon Johnson created the Great Society, it coincided with race riots, counterculture movements and a propaganda effort to associate welfare with single black mothers despite the majority being white and married.
Thus by the late 1960s it became a "new reality that "liberal" was on balance an unpopular term." This lead to a feedback loop that was taken advantage of by conservative politicians,
as popular politicians avoid the liberal label, it provides an opportunity for their conservative opponents to the vacuum with unpopular personalities...Indeed, berating the stereotypical ideas and images associated with the word "liberal" but not, importantly, the specic social programs that underlie the label is virtually the raison d'etre of conservative talk radio.
it ultimately lead to the situation today where
a steep decline in symbolic liberalism that corresponds with
observed changes in American political discourse, in particular changing the dominant symbols of ideological liberalism from the white working-class American of FDR to the largely non-white underclass as well as the counterculture movement of the 1960s and beyond.
So what does this mean? Well put simply self-identification is a horrible barometer for measuring people's opinions and that, when it comes to policy, both political parties are far to the right of the population. Most of the liberal self-identification has been used to rationalize a further increasingly right-wing policy but these all fail since, for whatever reason, the word "liberal" has never had a prestige to it even during one of the biggest landslides in US history.
What matters is what policy people want, not how they identify themselves.