Cultural Shifts

We’re not the same country we were five years ago, ten or even twenty years ago and certainly not a century ago. We are shaped by wars, science and technology, plagues, social and demographic changes, evolving sports and entertainment, urbanization, changes in religiosity, fluidity in travel and trade, climate, economic cycles and always, how we are educated and raised. Patterns of attitudinal change do not push Americans forward in unison. We step forward, and sometimes we step backwards. 

The Ku Klux Klan is a good lesson. Before the film Birth of a Nation – a film glorifying the Klan and vilifying African Americans – was produced in 1915, the Klan seemed to have burned itself out. But that cultural event, supported by high-ranking politicians (such as President Woodrow Wilson), resurrected the Klan, which rose to incredible political power in the years following, that by the mid-1920s thousands of hooded Klan members were able to march in broad daylight in recognized phalanxes down Pennsylvania and Constitution Avenues, the US Capitol looming in the background. 

Some patterns tend to linger. Even as US affiliation with a formal religion has dropped about 15% over the past decade, the number of Americans who define themselves as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular,” has according to Pew Research risen from 17% to 26% in the same period. One staunch group, evangelicals (76% are white, about half live in the South), have remained at approximately 25% of the overall population since the 1970s, with only the slightest sign of erosion. The biggest difference in this group has been the rise of political leadership that has been willing to incite this usually apolitical segment, by active support and social media, into passionate political activism. Fake news and conspiracy theories have become a mainstay of this constituency.

Among rising generations, event-driven shifts in priorities and concerns are profound. Shaped by the Vietnam War (Boomers), but for Millennials and younger: the Great Recession that began in 2007, the soaring cost of education (now deemed a vocational necessity), the lack of affordable housing, the increasingly obviously ravages of climate change and most recently the pandemic. Religion has taken a back seat, and tolerance for diversity has taken a deeper root for these younger Americans. Fears of “socialism,” for example, are born of the red scare of the  1950s-1970s but have little or no resonance for younger generations. 

Writing for the June 7th Los Angeles Times, David Lauter, notes where changes have been significant and where the needle remains roughly the same: “On some issues — LGBTQ relationships, for example — American attitudes have shifted profoundly over the last two decades… In 1996, only about 25% of Americans said they believed that same-sex marriages should be valid, according to Gallup’s polling. By 2004, a majority remained opposed, but support had grown to about 40%. By 2015, when the Supreme Court ruled for marriage equality, a majority of Americans said same-sex unions should be legal. By now, two-thirds of Americans say so.

“Some of that shift involves generational change, but the flip in public attitudes happened so quickly only because tens of millions of older Americans changed their minds. That change in attitudes toward marriage equality went hand in hand with a shift in what Americans deemed to be moral… As recently as 2006, a majority of Americans told Gallup that gay and lesbian relations were ‘morally wrong.’ By 2010, a clear majority felt the opposite. Last year, Americans rejected that view by 2 to 1, Gallup found…

“On other issues, such as abortion, the division of opinion has barely changed: About 6 in 10 Americans say the procedure should be legal in all or most cases, about 4 in 10 say it should be illegal in all or most cases, and the division in opinion is about the same now as it was in the mid-1990s.

“American feelings about the death penalty occupy a middle ground between those two poles: Support for executions dropped a lot from the mid-1990s until a few years ago, but since then has plateaued, as new data from the nonpartisan Pew Research Center show… ‘While they often get talked about together, these issues are all very different,’ and the differences often surface in unpredicted ways, said Carroll Doherty, Pew’s director of political research.

“Because cultural issues involve people’s personal values and beliefs, they’re often seen as intractable. But the record suggests something different: New facts and experiences can change people’s beliefs, but only up to a point…

“One of the biggest factors in the shift in attitudes involved a new fact in the public debate: Starting in the 1990s, DNA testing began to prove that wrongful convictions were real — and not uncommon. The wave of exonerations of people wrongly convicted of crimes included scores who had faced death sentences. The Death Penalty Information Center counts 185 cases of people sentenced to death who have been exonerated.

“Those exonerations have had an impact on how the public sees the death penalty. In 1991, only about 10% of death penalty opponents said that the risk of an innocent person being executed was a reason for their stand. By 2011, not only were a lot more people opposed to the death penalty, but more than 25% of opponents cited concern about the wrongfully convicted being killed as a reason, Pew found.

“Acknowledgment of that risk, however, doesn’t necessarily cause people to oppose the death penalty. In Pew’s latest survey, 78% of Americans said that there was ‘some risk that an innocent person will be put to death’ — that’s twice as many as said they opposed the penalty.” Attitudinal shifts are most profound among educated and urban Americans, most transfixed among older, white Americans with more rural values. The fact that the United States is slowly being governed by younger voters, with the highest educational levels in American history, can project where belief systems will carry the future of America. But as noted, even older voters change their minds.

What makes this sea-change of shifting values most difficult is the generational/segmented overlap, the continued existence of increasing divergent views of the world, of people whose passion dictates their political views. Those who are most negatively impacted by these changes – those lacking skills or education for a reconfigured economy or whose assumed transcendency has been severely challenged – fill the ranks of those with the greatest intransigence to change. That segment is most likely to embrace a charismatic leader to “do whatever is necessary” to stem those changes, to suppress anything that threaten traditional white majority rule, even if that sacrificial lamb is democracy itself. The only certainty is change itself.

I’m Peter Dekom, and we seem to be in a very literal race against time; can the generational shift in attitude take political power before the national unravels in a brutal and conflict-driven demise?