In any given period of history, there is always a battle of ideas. Thus it’s interesting to think about which ideas are gaining ground in the 21st century. These groups seem to be winning:
1. Marijuana legalization advocates
2. Gay marriage advocates:
There is an equally dramatic increase in support for interracial marriage.
3. The New Atheists:
4. International trade advocates:
5. Immigration advocates:
On many other social issues, including gun control, abortion, and right to die, there has been no major shift in public opinion in the past two decades. However, the right to die polling shows an interesting drop in support followed by a recent recovery to 2001 levels:
Despite the big fall in religious observance, a large majority of Americans continue to believe in God, although the number has trended downward in recent years.
Is there an overarching trend that would explain all of this polling data? Something like secular cosmopolitanism with a libertarian streak? Utilitarianism? What do you think?
Could the internet be driving these trends? Perhaps having the entire world at one’s fingertips makes people more cosmopolitan.
READER COMMENTS
jdnym
Apr 8 2021 at 9:42pm
Maybe this dovetails with your post on blame. Our perceived balance of externalities has changed. We’re more atomized (in the Bowling Alone sense), so we perceive fewer externalities in personal behavior, and are less moralistic about pot use, marriage, etc. But society’s arguably gotten more complex at scale, so we’re more moralistic about big externality-laden issues like climate and racial justice. Though I’m not sure trade and immigration fit well into my framework.
Scott Sumner
Apr 9 2021 at 12:17pm
Good points. On trade and immigration, maybe the internet makes foreigners seem less like “the other”.
Mark Z
Apr 8 2021 at 9:51pm
“Something like secular cosmopolitanism with a libertarian streak?”
No? (also, see trends in support for hate speech laws, tobacco bans). Perhaps the opposite trend isn’t necessarily occurring, but one can just easily pick a few issues going in the opposite direction to about as convincingly tell the opposite story. Haven’t you also argued that the internet (or at least social media) has contributed to political trends in the opposite direction? Previous communications technology revolutions coincided with increasing nationalism as well.
I’m wary of monocausalism, but I think improving living standards and technology rendering old taboos redundant explains a lot.
Christophe Biocca
Apr 9 2021 at 8:26am
I don’t think the Gallup question on trade is something you should rely on. It doesn’t ask if trade is good or bad, full-stop. It instead asks “which of these two effects of trade predicted by Mercantilism do you expect to dominate”? The person answering thinks back to what news they’ve read recently, remembers that Trump forced the Chinese to buy more soybeans, and figures that means we’re getting those all-important exports.
Notably the word “free trade” doesn’t appear in the question at all. So all you can really say from the poll is that 78% of Americans don’t believe in autarky, instead believing in managed trade that tries to maximize exports. Which fraction of the 78% are free traders that weren’t being pedantic, and just answered based on “good” vs “bad”, is impossible to tell.
Compare with the answers gotten when specifics are brought up:
Tariffs were considered an important Trump promise that he should keep by 77% of the population in 2017, which means a non-trivial percentage of the “trade is an opportunity” people want more tariffs.
LEB
Apr 9 2021 at 9:55am
I am surprised to see you taking survey evidence at face value, especially for immigration and trade.
Dale Doback
Apr 9 2021 at 11:30am
Other than maybe international trade, these strike me as issues of tolerance. It is easy to be dismissive of marijuana use, gay marriage, atheism, etc until personally involved. Younger generations are more urban, less segregated, and more exposed to these things via the internet. And boomers who do not have personal experience with these things are dying off.
Scott Sumner
Apr 9 2021 at 12:22pm
Everyone, I agree that polling data can be hard to interpret, but I still find the changes over time to be interesting.
David S
Apr 9 2021 at 3:02pm
It’s good to see the long time span on these charts—i.e. several decades as opposed to the last five years. Some things have improved in a convincing manner, and probably couldn’t be reversed by an election cycle or two. Hopefully, acceptance of marijuana will lead to more humane drug policies in general. Which could also track with more sensible policies towards end of life health care and assisted dying protocols.
KevinDC
Apr 9 2021 at 4:41pm
As much as I’d love to believe that the changes in polling data on the issues of trade and immigration are a result of free trade and open borders “winning the war of ideas,” I suspect there is an alternate and unfortunately more likely explanation. I think a lot of the increased support for free trade and immigration is simply down to signaling that one is anti-Trump. I was quickly reminded of this Slate article with the rather on the nose title of “Ever Since Trump Was Elected, Americans Are Way More Into Trade and Immigration.” The graphs you cite above for those two issues show a sudden and accelerating spike around 2016 – I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
The cynical explanation is that a large number of Americans who despised Trump noticed that Trump was opposed to free trade and immigration, and therefore decided that free trade and immigration are good. This seems more likely to me than the idea that around 2016 people suddenly learned en masse new arguments in favor of trade and immigration that they’d somehow never heard before.
I’d love to believe that free trade and free immigration are winning the war of ideas, but I suspect they’re just the fashionable beliefs of the moment for a lot of these people. I hope I’m wrong though.
Henri Hein
Apr 10 2021 at 8:36pm
I had the exact same thought when I saw the graphs.
David Seltzer
Apr 11 2021 at 6:08pm
An hypothesis to be tested. As the cost of information is lower and connection with the “other” more frequent, are people more given to critical thinking, “wokeism” notwithstanding?
E. Harding
Apr 11 2021 at 6:09pm
The U.S. is just moving left. Keep it simple.
Karl Bemesderfer
Apr 12 2021 at 1:12pm
Urbanization has a lot do with all these trends, in my opinion. Dense living forces people into contact with others who don’t share their beliefs/opinions, don’t look like them, speak different languages, etc. Proximity to others not like us drives us either toward greater tolerance of differences or to more intense searching for like-minded people, both of which the Internet enables. I don’t mean to be misunderstood. I am not saying urbanization is the sole explanation, but rather that it is an important contributing factor.
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