Jan. 20th, 2006

kent_allard_jr: (Default)
I highly recommend this article in American Prospect, which summarizes recent public opinion research by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger. I don't know if Nordhaus and Shellenberger's work is any good -- their results aren't publicly available -- or if Garance Franke-Ruta has summarized it accurately. All I know is that I'm horrified by their portrait of the American psyche:
Looking at the data from 1992 to 2004, Shellenberger and Nordhaus found a country whose citizens are increasingly authoritarian while at the same time feeling evermore adrift, isolated, and nihilistic. They found a society at once more libertine and more puritanical than in the past, a society where solidarity among citizens was deteriorating, and, most worrisomely to them, a progressive clock that seemed to be unwinding backward on broad questions of social equity. Between 1992 and 2004, for example, the percentage of people who said they agree that "the father of the family must be the master in his own house" increased ten points, from 42 to 52 percent, in the 2,500-person Environics survey. The percentage agreeing that "men are naturally superior to women" increased from 30 percent to 40 percent. Meanwhile, the fraction that said they discussed local problems with people they knew plummeted from 66 percent to 39 percent. Survey respondents were also increasingly accepting of the value that "violence is a normal part of life" -- and that figure had doubled even before the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks.
I'm not sure what's going on here, especially with that last part, since objectively this country is a less violent place than it was 15 or 20 years ago. My only guess is that more people are moving to the South and Southwest, both of which are more violent than the population-hemorrhaging Northeast; and as they do so, they embrace the reactionary Protestantism that's come to dominate these regions. (That's the only source I can think of for the belief that “men are naturally superior to women.” Where, other than the Bible and Dave Sim, do you hear that kind of argument? Even Larry Summers would never say such a thing.) Whatever the cause, Nordhaus and Shellenberger present a view of the American mind that no one -- liberal or conservative -- should find particularly admirable, no matter how much they might benefit in the short term.

Profile

kent_allard_jr: (Default)
kent_allard_jr

November 2018

S M T W T F S
    123
45678910
1112 131415 1617
18192021222324
252627282930 

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags