Pervasive pessimism and nostalgia, waning support for a racial reckoning, anti-feminist retrenchment, and so many conspiracies… A deep dive into the American Values Survey, Part II
The post-WWII public education many of us enjoyed was only with us for a few fabulous decades before it began to be eroded. Before and after, people were/are being taught what, not how, to think.
Charter schools and vouchers have led to such defunding of public education that schools have had to abandon civics and critical thinking skills across broad swaths of the electorate.
It is worth noting that superstition and conspiracy have been a feature of Americans’ commonly held beliefs since white folks first set their boots on this soil. Often this has involved violence, repression, othering, misogyny, and general weirdness. Witches, blood suckers, baby eaters, whatever. Ignorant people fill the empty spaces in their brains where facts should be with emotionally satisfying fear-mongering and conspiracy theories.
It’s ignorance and charlatans who fill empty heads with lies that are killing democracy.
One of the greatest problems faced by US society (and also EU society) is that the future we have been led to believe is our destiny is simply becoming less and less plausible every year. The "American future" is generally considered by most Americans to include an ever growing economy with higher standards of living/consumption available to all who are willing & able to work towards that goal. [Yes, I know: this has always been a foundational myth and "getting ahead" was always strongly dependent on the sex, class, and race one was born into].
What has become apparent to a small but growing fraction of US citizens: Our entire way of life and expectations for an endless "American future" of prosperity are being shrunk every day by decreasing supplies of affordable fossil fuels (combined with the need to stop burning such enormous amounts), a worsening global climate that is making many areas of the country less and less livable (e.g., Phoenix, Houston, south Florida). Add to this accelerating inequality as the wealthiest Americans absorb ever more of the nation's wealth and income. Then mix in unsustainable levels of government and private debt (esp. credit card debt, student debt and mortgage debt). Lastly note that the US healthcare system is badly failing a substantial majority of Americans.
As more Americans come to realize that not only is the "American dream" not available to them, but that their tenuous hold in society is slipping. More and more people are one paycheck away from bankruptcy, or losing their home/apartment. This makes tens of millions of US citizens furious - what they have expected of the American future and their place (and their children's place) in it is disappearing.
No one seems to have much of a plan: Trump offers American fascism and a crackdown on everyone not a "real American". [Translation: If you're not a conservative white person, you are in increasing jeopardy]. Biden & liberal/centrist Democrats offer some modest level of energy & climate investment combined with a few more regulations on the largely unregulated American capitalist system. What's totally missing: A bold, comprehensive multi-decade plan to respond to the climate, energy, inequality & health emergencies. IOW a plan that will excite younger citizens and give them a reason to have hope for the future. To state the obvious: Such a plan is simply impossible given the current state of American politics and polarization.
So instead we and the world will play a set of games of musical chairs, where the chairs represent remaining resources.
I swear, reading your newsletters is like a pint of ice-cold water on a humid, sun-blasted day.
(1) It's awesome to see that sanitising American history is so unpopular! I've had my own experience of having school history sanitised, on the exact subject of slavery, as it happens. When I was 13, I was taught that in 1833, the British Empire abolished slavery... and that was it. What they did *not* mention was that we paid an enormous amount of reparations to the slaveOWNERS. I first learnt about it because a David Olusoga documentary on this subject *happened* to be on in the background (no-one put this specific programme on either). I don't feel guilty that the UK enslaved people or compensated slaveowners for the loss of their "property", I feel *angry* that I was *lied to* about it.
(2) I'm a Gen Z woman, and it was very disappointing to learn that 60% of Gen Z men in the US think the country is "too soft and feminine". Moreover, what is that supposed to mean?
(3) The rise of QAnon among Democrats is genuinely terrifying, and completely inexplicable to me too. Most of what I know about QAnon comes from Dan Olson's video "In Search Of A Flat Earth" (37 mins onwards), and he makes it clear that QAnon is a reactionary movement driven by a desire for a "restorative authoritarianism"; Democrats, whatever their faults, are not supposed to be reactionaries or anti-democratic (small d), so what gives? I think it would be worth digging much deeper into this, as it suggests a fundamental pathology beginning to take root on the other side of the political divide as well.
"An approach focused on economics seems rather ill-suited to “lowering the temperature” and bridging the divide when most Republicans, and especially those in the MAGA camp, are focused a lot more on the “culture wars” over who deserves equality and who gets to define national identity. If what people on the Right, especially the mythical white working class, are concerned about is not so much the decline of manufacturing and industry per se, but their relative decline of societal status associated with the undermining of white Christian patriarchal dominance, Bidenomics as a strategy based on alleviating economic anxiety and its downstream effects will struggle to reach them."
I agree with the assessment that a focus on economic policy *won't* reach that part of the electorate that's obsessed with the culture wars/replacement theory rhetoric. I was wondering though if you think there *is* something reasonable that Biden could be saying/doing that WOULD reach them? If so, what is it? There is obviously no amenable middle ground compromise between a society with basic human equality and one where we put the women, brown people, the LGBTQIA+ community, and immigrants back into a state of second and third class citizenship (which is what they pine for).
For me it seems a bit of a foregone conclusion that these people are so far down the course of emotional rage and fear, that there's nothing you could really do to "turn down the temperature" so to speak, except for just not putting those issues at the forefront of Biden's campaign and speeches (which they won't see on Fox News anyhow).
And in doing so, that's pandering to the people who weren't going to ever vote for him, while potentially dampening enthusiasm and buy in from people in those groups who stand to lose equal rights and status... and those who consider themselves allies, particular younger more progressive minded people.
Nothing, NOTHING will reach the cult members and too many RW/GOP Americans. They consume nothing but Fox propaganda and worse :( https://mediaanddemocracyproject.org/
"America has “become too soft and feminine.”" I absolutely hate this type of question which is totally biased and feeds into misogyny. It equates being feminine with being soft, and being soft is the antithesis of the manly-man myth. This is something that is obvious in US culture and it permeates society and politics. Women can't be leaders because they're too emotional (ignore the Republican men in Congress yelling, name calling and wanting to fight each other); the Republican Party having so few women in Congress but the press concentrating on the "crazy" ones (I don't support any of them); athletic coaches calling their male players "girls" because that's so very insulting; women earning less than men in the same jobs; and on, and on and on. I've had to live with this my entire life and while it's less visible, it still exists. What if the survey linked a derogative term to Black individuals, instead of linking a derogative term to women. What about linking derogative terms to people of one specific religion. I didn't see any questions linking mental illness to QAnon beliefs.
There is no worse "tool" in the world than surveys and polls. You have written an entire piece based on a single survey. Taking the opinioins provided by 2,500 people and claiming they represent the country as a whole is unacceptable.
This is disingenuous at best. You've done much better, and with better source material.
Well, both of my pieces on the 2023 AVS link to *plenty* of additional qualitative and quantitative evidence that supports the general results. Have you looked at any of that? Which of my actual arguments do you have a problem with? Which of the AVS findings do you disagree with? What you do here is the absolute worst kind of online discourse: No substantive criticism, just lazy lashing out. Do you really think your comment has contributed anything of value?
People are notoriously bad at stating their actual preferences, which is why we compare surveys and polls to the results of elections. Or evaluate the direction and relative magnitude of responses.
I’m grateful for Prof Zimmer but I am BONE TIRED of reading survey and poll results that don’t FIRST AND FOREMOST established the respondents’ SOURCES OF NEWS & INFO!!!! I don’t consider ANY survey that includes people who listen only to RW propaganda like Fox, Breitbart, Salem Radio and worse to be valid. Moreover, even we in the fact-based community are barraged by “both sides” corporate media like CNN, NY Times, and even WaPo’s atrocious political coverage. My group, the Media and Democracy Project, is pushing back, calling out the mainstream media, fighting Fox at the FCC, and more https://mediaanddemocracyproject.org/
Look, those people who only consume right wing media choose to do so. They have access to everything on the Internet in the palm of their hand and still choose it. They actually believe it, pretending Fox is solely to blame is foolish.
Surveys and polls have much more limited evidential value than they are generally treated as having, but that doesn't mean that they have *no* evidential value. How do you propose that we find out what people are thinking besides asking them? How do you propose that we accomplish that without picking a sample?
Moreover, your criticism of the sample size is facile and simply statistically illiterate. It is perfectly valid to draw inferences from sample sizes of a few thousand when the sample is chosen appropriately; likewise, an enormous sample can lead you to severe error. The Literary Digest polled 2.4 million people before the 1936 presidential election and got it completely wrong, predicting that Alfred Landon, not FDR, would win in a landslide. (https://open.ocolearnok.org/reach-higher-data-analysis/chapter/sample-surveys/)
The problem is a poorly educated electorate.
The post-WWII public education many of us enjoyed was only with us for a few fabulous decades before it began to be eroded. Before and after, people were/are being taught what, not how, to think.
Charter schools and vouchers have led to such defunding of public education that schools have had to abandon civics and critical thinking skills across broad swaths of the electorate.
It is worth noting that superstition and conspiracy have been a feature of Americans’ commonly held beliefs since white folks first set their boots on this soil. Often this has involved violence, repression, othering, misogyny, and general weirdness. Witches, blood suckers, baby eaters, whatever. Ignorant people fill the empty spaces in their brains where facts should be with emotionally satisfying fear-mongering and conspiracy theories.
It’s ignorance and charlatans who fill empty heads with lies that are killing democracy.
One of the greatest problems faced by US society (and also EU society) is that the future we have been led to believe is our destiny is simply becoming less and less plausible every year. The "American future" is generally considered by most Americans to include an ever growing economy with higher standards of living/consumption available to all who are willing & able to work towards that goal. [Yes, I know: this has always been a foundational myth and "getting ahead" was always strongly dependent on the sex, class, and race one was born into].
What has become apparent to a small but growing fraction of US citizens: Our entire way of life and expectations for an endless "American future" of prosperity are being shrunk every day by decreasing supplies of affordable fossil fuels (combined with the need to stop burning such enormous amounts), a worsening global climate that is making many areas of the country less and less livable (e.g., Phoenix, Houston, south Florida). Add to this accelerating inequality as the wealthiest Americans absorb ever more of the nation's wealth and income. Then mix in unsustainable levels of government and private debt (esp. credit card debt, student debt and mortgage debt). Lastly note that the US healthcare system is badly failing a substantial majority of Americans.
As more Americans come to realize that not only is the "American dream" not available to them, but that their tenuous hold in society is slipping. More and more people are one paycheck away from bankruptcy, or losing their home/apartment. This makes tens of millions of US citizens furious - what they have expected of the American future and their place (and their children's place) in it is disappearing.
No one seems to have much of a plan: Trump offers American fascism and a crackdown on everyone not a "real American". [Translation: If you're not a conservative white person, you are in increasing jeopardy]. Biden & liberal/centrist Democrats offer some modest level of energy & climate investment combined with a few more regulations on the largely unregulated American capitalist system. What's totally missing: A bold, comprehensive multi-decade plan to respond to the climate, energy, inequality & health emergencies. IOW a plan that will excite younger citizens and give them a reason to have hope for the future. To state the obvious: Such a plan is simply impossible given the current state of American politics and polarization.
So instead we and the world will play a set of games of musical chairs, where the chairs represent remaining resources.
I swear, reading your newsletters is like a pint of ice-cold water on a humid, sun-blasted day.
(1) It's awesome to see that sanitising American history is so unpopular! I've had my own experience of having school history sanitised, on the exact subject of slavery, as it happens. When I was 13, I was taught that in 1833, the British Empire abolished slavery... and that was it. What they did *not* mention was that we paid an enormous amount of reparations to the slaveOWNERS. I first learnt about it because a David Olusoga documentary on this subject *happened* to be on in the background (no-one put this specific programme on either). I don't feel guilty that the UK enslaved people or compensated slaveowners for the loss of their "property", I feel *angry* that I was *lied to* about it.
(2) I'm a Gen Z woman, and it was very disappointing to learn that 60% of Gen Z men in the US think the country is "too soft and feminine". Moreover, what is that supposed to mean?
(3) The rise of QAnon among Democrats is genuinely terrifying, and completely inexplicable to me too. Most of what I know about QAnon comes from Dan Olson's video "In Search Of A Flat Earth" (37 mins onwards), and he makes it clear that QAnon is a reactionary movement driven by a desire for a "restorative authoritarianism"; Democrats, whatever their faults, are not supposed to be reactionaries or anti-democratic (small d), so what gives? I think it would be worth digging much deeper into this, as it suggests a fundamental pathology beginning to take root on the other side of the political divide as well.
Professor Zimmer, you wrote:
"An approach focused on economics seems rather ill-suited to “lowering the temperature” and bridging the divide when most Republicans, and especially those in the MAGA camp, are focused a lot more on the “culture wars” over who deserves equality and who gets to define national identity. If what people on the Right, especially the mythical white working class, are concerned about is not so much the decline of manufacturing and industry per se, but their relative decline of societal status associated with the undermining of white Christian patriarchal dominance, Bidenomics as a strategy based on alleviating economic anxiety and its downstream effects will struggle to reach them."
I agree with the assessment that a focus on economic policy *won't* reach that part of the electorate that's obsessed with the culture wars/replacement theory rhetoric. I was wondering though if you think there *is* something reasonable that Biden could be saying/doing that WOULD reach them? If so, what is it? There is obviously no amenable middle ground compromise between a society with basic human equality and one where we put the women, brown people, the LGBTQIA+ community, and immigrants back into a state of second and third class citizenship (which is what they pine for).
For me it seems a bit of a foregone conclusion that these people are so far down the course of emotional rage and fear, that there's nothing you could really do to "turn down the temperature" so to speak, except for just not putting those issues at the forefront of Biden's campaign and speeches (which they won't see on Fox News anyhow).
And in doing so, that's pandering to the people who weren't going to ever vote for him, while potentially dampening enthusiasm and buy in from people in those groups who stand to lose equal rights and status... and those who consider themselves allies, particular younger more progressive minded people.
The good news is we don't need to reach them to win presidential elections, if Biden gets the same voters he had in 2020, he wins.
Nothing, NOTHING will reach the cult members and too many RW/GOP Americans. They consume nothing but Fox propaganda and worse :( https://mediaanddemocracyproject.org/
"America has “become too soft and feminine.”" I absolutely hate this type of question which is totally biased and feeds into misogyny. It equates being feminine with being soft, and being soft is the antithesis of the manly-man myth. This is something that is obvious in US culture and it permeates society and politics. Women can't be leaders because they're too emotional (ignore the Republican men in Congress yelling, name calling and wanting to fight each other); the Republican Party having so few women in Congress but the press concentrating on the "crazy" ones (I don't support any of them); athletic coaches calling their male players "girls" because that's so very insulting; women earning less than men in the same jobs; and on, and on and on. I've had to live with this my entire life and while it's less visible, it still exists. What if the survey linked a derogative term to Black individuals, instead of linking a derogative term to women. What about linking derogative terms to people of one specific religion. I didn't see any questions linking mental illness to QAnon beliefs.
There is no worse "tool" in the world than surveys and polls. You have written an entire piece based on a single survey. Taking the opinioins provided by 2,500 people and claiming they represent the country as a whole is unacceptable.
This is disingenuous at best. You've done much better, and with better source material.
Well, both of my pieces on the 2023 AVS link to *plenty* of additional qualitative and quantitative evidence that supports the general results. Have you looked at any of that? Which of my actual arguments do you have a problem with? Which of the AVS findings do you disagree with? What you do here is the absolute worst kind of online discourse: No substantive criticism, just lazy lashing out. Do you really think your comment has contributed anything of value?
Who the hell are you?
Please propose an alternative.
People are notoriously bad at stating their actual preferences, which is why we compare surveys and polls to the results of elections. Or evaluate the direction and relative magnitude of responses.
I’m grateful for Prof Zimmer but I am BONE TIRED of reading survey and poll results that don’t FIRST AND FOREMOST established the respondents’ SOURCES OF NEWS & INFO!!!! I don’t consider ANY survey that includes people who listen only to RW propaganda like Fox, Breitbart, Salem Radio and worse to be valid. Moreover, even we in the fact-based community are barraged by “both sides” corporate media like CNN, NY Times, and even WaPo’s atrocious political coverage. My group, the Media and Democracy Project, is pushing back, calling out the mainstream media, fighting Fox at the FCC, and more https://mediaanddemocracyproject.org/
Look, those people who only consume right wing media choose to do so. They have access to everything on the Internet in the palm of their hand and still choose it. They actually believe it, pretending Fox is solely to blame is foolish.
Surveys and polls have much more limited evidential value than they are generally treated as having, but that doesn't mean that they have *no* evidential value. How do you propose that we find out what people are thinking besides asking them? How do you propose that we accomplish that without picking a sample?
Moreover, your criticism of the sample size is facile and simply statistically illiterate. It is perfectly valid to draw inferences from sample sizes of a few thousand when the sample is chosen appropriately; likewise, an enormous sample can lead you to severe error. The Literary Digest polled 2.4 million people before the 1936 presidential election and got it completely wrong, predicting that Alfred Landon, not FDR, would win in a landslide. (https://open.ocolearnok.org/reach-higher-data-analysis/chapter/sample-surveys/)
The Q Anon stats😬