The poll numbers keep supporting this headline: Liberals have won the culture war
Anyone remember Pat Buchanan?
He was a far-right conservative who ran an insurgent 1992 campaign against George H.W. Bush for the Republican nomination. When Bush announced his desire to run for a second term, it was assumed that he would have no real challenger in his own party. But Buchanan was a bomb thrower and excoriated Bush for being too moderate. America needed a strong voice that didn’t want to compromise on core issues.
Buchanan actually had a strong showing during the primary, despite the fact that he was facing an incumbent president. He earned 38% of the votes in New Hampshire, just 15 points behind Bush. In most early states, Buchanan received 25-30% of the vote and hung around for a lot longer than many would have assumed.
Once Bush locked up the nomination, he did the traditional party building gesture of inviting his opponent to speak at the Republican National Convention. On August 17th, 1992, he delivered a speech that will be remembered for decades. Buchanan stated:
The agenda that Clinton & Clinton would impose on America — abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units – that’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America needs.
…[M]y friends, we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.
This was quickly dubbed the “Culture Wars” speech and set the tone for electoral politics for three decades. Buchanan (a Roman Catholic) gave that speech right as Protestant evangelicalism was hitting its peak in terms of both raw numbers and political influence. It seemed like every discussion was about abortion, homosexuality, pornography or the role of women in a changing society.
Buchanan and his supporters wanted, at a minimum, to stop the leftward drift that they believed was happening in the United States on social issues. If not push the country in a more conservative direction. Well, I’ve looked at the data from the General Social Survey and it’s clear to me that Christian conservatives failed miserably in this endeavor. On every single social issue, the average American is more liberal today than they were just two decades ago.
I took five social issues that the General Social Survey has been asking about for decades and analyzed their trajectory over time. Here are the five positions:
What is your opinion about a married person having sexual relations with someone other than the marriage partner--is it always wrong, almost always wrong, wrong only sometimes, or not wrong at all? (% who say not wrong at all.)
Homosexual couples should have the right to marry one another. (% saying strongly agree or agree).
Do you think the use of marijuana should be made legal or not? (% saying should be legal).
Here are the results:
Between the early 1970s through the late 2000s, the share of Americans who believed that extramarital sex was wrong actually rose from about 70% in 1972 to just over 80% in 2008. But somewhere around 2012, things began to change, with support dipping a bit each year. In 2018, the share was only 75% and it dropped a full 10 percentage points in the 2021 data to 64%. That may have something to do with survey mode, by the way. I wrote about that here.
For legalizing marijuana, support didn’t really shift through the early 1990s. It hovered right around 20%, but then things started to change. By 2000, it was above 30%. By 2010, it was north of 40% and had reached majority support by 2014. In the most recent data, 74% of Americans were in favor of legalizing marijuana — a shift of more than 50 percentage points since the early 1970s.
It’s really interesting to me how support for same-sex marriage runs on a very similar track as marijuana legalization in this data beginning in 2006.
In every single year, support for both is less than one percentage point different. In 1988, just 12% of Americans were in favor of same-sex marriage. When the question was asked again in 2006, that share had risen to 35%. It reached a majority by 2014 and in the most recent data it’s right around 73%. Although, it does seem to have plateaued when you look at some subgroups.
One of the most interesting trends in public opinion research over the last 20 years is the issue of same-sex marriage. The General Social Survey first asked about it in 1988, when 18% of respondents said that “homosexual couples should have the right to marry one another.” They didn’t ask about it again until 2004, when the share in favor had more than doubled to 37%.
The share of Americans who wanted to make pornography completely illegal was stuck at about 40% for decades, even into the mid-2000s. But in the last few years, that portion of the sample who favors a ban on porn has noticeably dipped down to 30% in 2010 and then to just 25% in 2021. One has to wonder if the rise of internet pornography has something to do with this.
Finally, abortion. The GSS asks folks if a women should have access to an abortion for any reason. In the early days of the GSS, support for abortion on demand was in the upper 30s. By 1990, it had snuck just above 40% and stayed in that same range until the late 2000s. Just between 2010 and 2021, the share of Americans who favored abortion for any reason has risen from 43% to 54% — the highest on record.
There’s no doubt that the Dobbs Supreme Court decision is changing the healthcare industry when it comes to access to abortion services. But, what about views of abortion? There’s ample reason to hypothesize that folks would react in strong ways (in either direction) to a SCOTUS case the makes abortion nearly illegal in huge swathes of the country.
OK, so why is this happening? One culprit is a simple one: the United States is becoming a heck of a lot less religious and the nones are socially liberal. That is having a big impact on the overall percentages that were visualized in the graph above. That is definitely happening. But that is not the primary reason for the overall leftward shift on social issues. Instead, even religious people are becoming more left leaning on these types of issues.
CONTINUE READING: “Liberals Have Won the Culture War” by Ryan Burge on the Graphs about Religion Substack feed.