Gallup: Record USA Liberal Moral Views. Why?

USA: Why Liberal Morality and Conservative Politics?

Gallup: The Acceptability of Various Moral Behaviors
Topic	2017	Record	First Year	Gain Loss	Year First Asked
Birth Control	91%	High	89%	+2	2012
Divorce	73%	High	59%	+14	2001
Unmarried sex	69%	High	53%	+16	2001
Gambling	65%		63%	+2	2003
Gay/lesbian relations	63%	High	40%	+17	2001
Unmarried pregnancy	62%	High	45%	+17	2002
Human Stem cell research	61%		52%	+9	2002
The death penalty	61%	Low	63%	-5	2001
Doctor assisted suicide	57%	High	49%	+8	2001
Animal fur wearing	57%		60%	-3	2001
Animal medical testing	51%	Low	63%	-14	2001
Abortion	43%		42%	+1	2001
Sex between teens	36%		32%	+4	2013
Pornography	36%	High	30%	+6	2011
Suicide	18%		13%	+5	2001
Polygamy	17%	High	7%	+10	2003
Extramarital Affairs	9%		7%	+2	2001

Data extracted and rearranged from Americans Hold Record Liberal Views on Most Moral Issues

Liberals have been very successful in spreading their moral views in these first two decades of the twenty first century.  As the above chart indicates, divorce, unmarried sex, gay/lesbian relationships, and unmarried pregnancy have reached new highs this year, have achieved double digit gains since 2001, and now have substantial majorities (60% plus).  This has not been accompanied by sweeping liberal political gains.  No issue shows significant gains in the conservative moral direction; however politically conservatives have taken control of many state governments, the Congress, the Presidency and the Supreme Court..

Andrew Greeley maintained that the sixties sexual revolution was greatly exaggerated.  Acceptance of extramarital affairs, and sex between teens remains low even now. What has happened is that marriage has been redefined to include serial marriage, monogamous sex before marriage, and now gay marriage. Although polygamy and pornography have made some gains now, their acceptability still remains low. The acceptability of abortion has remained essentially the same, the acceptability of suicide remains low.

Is there a good sociological theory that explains how we can be conservative and liberal at the same time? Yes, there is!    

The World Values Study & Liberal Cultural Success

The World Values Survey, which started in 1981, is the largest non-commercial, cross-national, time series investigation of human beliefs and values ever executed, currently including interviews with almost 400,000 respondents. The WVS consists of nationally representative surveys conducted in almost 100 countries which contain almost 90 percent of the world’s population, using a common questionnaire.

The Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map 2017 integrates all the changes in values that have been taking place as a result of moving from agrarian to industrial and service economics in terms of two variables and regional cultural labels. The table below and its following describe are your guides to using this map which should open in a different tab. Flip back and forth to understand all this.

Guide to the Ingel-Welzel Cultural Map (2017)
Very Secular	+2 Std.	Baltic China	Confucian		Protestant Europe
Secular	+1 Std.	Orthodox	Catholic Europe	Catholic Europe	English Speaking
Traditional	-1 Std.	Orthodox African Islamic	South Asia African Islamic	South Asia Latin America	English Speaking
Very Tradition	-2 Std.	African Islamic	African Islamic	Latin America
Industrial Economy		-2 Std.	-1 Std.	+1 Std.	+2 Std.
Service Economy		Very Survival	Survival	Expressive	Very Expressive

Graph is in terms of standard deviations with 0 being the world average, 68% of the data within 1 Std., 95% of the data within 2 Std.

1. The major correlate of Industrialization is that societies move from traditional values (bottom of graph) to secular values (top of graph).

Traditional values emphasize religion, human life, authority, and family.

Secular-rational values have the opposite preferences to the traditional values. Divorce, abortion, euthanasia and suicide are seen as relatively acceptable.

2. The major correlate of the service economy is that societies move from survival values (on the left of the map) to self-expressive values (on the right of the map).

Survival values place emphasis on economic and physical security, ethnocentrism, low levels of trust and tolerance.

Self-expression values give high priority to environmental protection, tolerance, gender equality, and democracy in economic and political life.

3. Where societies are in the map is also a function of the values derived from their historic cultures (this is an implicit third variable).

Protestant Europe is both very secular and very self-expressive. Catholic Europe is secular, and either survival or self-expressive. English speaking countries are very self-expressive but straddle the border between secular and traditional.  Latin American countries are self expressive; some are traditional and some are very traditional..

Confucian countries are very secular and survival oriented. Orthodox countries are very survival oriented, and either secular or traditional.  Right after communism they were very secular, up in the corner with the Baltics (some of which have a Protestant history which may be why they stayed there).

Interpreting American Values

American values, and value changes must be seen in the following two contexts:  we are a very self-expressive country influenced by the post-industrial economy; and we are a traditional society little influenced by the changes from agrarian to industrial society (i.e. we never become as secular as other places became).  

In comparison to secular Catholic Europe and very secular Protestant Europe the United States is traditional. The Orthodox also became very secular under communism These differences may have  originated in how these cultures adapted to the Industrial Revolution. Cultural regions of the world tend to stick together on the map. Values change very slowly over generations and even centuries.  Nations rarely change their scores more than half a standard deviation over the waves of the World Values study. As one of the WVS researchers remarked in a conference “My Russian colleague and I are both atheists, except that he is an Orthodox Atheist, and I am a Lutheran atheist.”

The United States is very similar to Protestant Europe and most English Speaking countries in being very self-expressive. Post-industrialization is a recent phenomenon; there is a strong generational effect in the survival vs. self-expressive scales. People raised during the depression who experience World II retain survival values. The sixties in Europe and the USA represent the coming of maturity of people who had no personal experience of these events. They have self-expressive values which flourish when people are economically secure and have choices (education, birth control, etc.).

Current liberal values in the Gallup Survey are not a product of industrialization. They are not the downgrading of God, family and life in the name of materialism. They are the product of the post-industrial economy where people have freedom, choice, and are tolerant of others. They can abandon tradition without denigrating it.  The gains in liberal values since 2001 may be due to the dying of the older generations who clung to traditional values because they associated them with survival.

Are the liberal values of the Gallup survey permanent changes?  If they are due to self-expressive values fostered by people growing up without concern for survival, the answer is not necessarily.

There is considerable evidence that self- expressive values retreat during economic bad times: however they bounce back with economic good times. People return to the self-expressive values of their youth anytime they feel secure. For example the recent recession had little long term effect on liberal values.

Could the decline of middle class wealth, the vanishing of the American Dream, and the rise of Trump and other xenophobic politicians in the West have something to do with the return of survival values? The answer is yes but very indirectly. This will be discussed in a future post.

Could another depression, i.e. a long term major economic collapse, bring about a return to survival values, traditional values, and wipe out liberal values. Possibly. That appears to have happened in the economic collapse that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union.  Orthodox countries were very secular but have steadily moved to traditional values. The key event in value reversal is when the economic collapse is long enough that generations begin to be raised in survival values rather than in self-expressive values.

The key lesson for Democratic liberals is that the economy is more important than promoting liberal values! Sanders was right; that is why he has such high approval ratings. All this will become clear when I summarize and review an article by Inglehart on “Trump and the Xenophobic Populist Parties.”