Success is in the Eye of the Beholder

            In my last post, I talked about the fact that conservatives and liberals have distinct views of the world.  Here’s some more evidence on the point.

            According to the Pew Research Center, Americans differ on the secret of America’s success.  44% of Americans believe that America is successful because of its “reliance on long-standing principles,” while 51% of Americans think that America has been successful because of its “ability to change.”  5% of those surveyed declined to answer or didn’t know.  You can read the full report HERE.

            Here’s the main graphic from the article:

There is a clear generational gradient to the choice of perspective.  As you move from one generation to the one before it, respondents tend to have a greater belief that the “principle’ perspective is correct.

            But this graphic misses the larger story. While the article does points out that 77% of liberal Democrats support the “change” perspective while 72% of conservative Republicans think that the “principle” perspective is correct, it doesn’t tie its age story to the ideology story.

            I used Pew’s data to create my own graphic that shows how ideology affects the principle vs. change debate on a generational basis. In this chart

each line represents one of the four generations now able to participate in politics.

            The lines are stacked one on top of the other in an orderly way, from the “Silent Generation" (ages 69-86) to the "Boomers" (ages 50-68) to "Generation X" (ages 34-49)  to the Millennials (ages 18-33).  Older generations are indeed more likely to say that American success should be attributed to principle rather than change.

            But my chart shows something else.  Staunch conservatives of every generation are more likely to think that America’s success is best explained by “reliance on long-standing principle.”  The difference in the rate at which staunch conservatives across generations agree that principle is the best explanation for America’s success is relatively slight compared to the difference within generations.  The same is true for every level of political ideology along the horizontal axis of the graph, which runs from very conservative to very liberal.

            Pew’s question, therefore, doesn’t really speak to generational differences shaped by different historical experiences.  It speaks, instead, to distinctive worldviews held by liberals, moderates and conservatives, and it shows that these worldviews don’t vary by much across generations.

            The perspective favored by conservatives looks back, perhaps to a simpler time when American power was at its pinnacle and we knew who the good guys were.  The liberal perspective looks ahead and finds American strength in its resilience and flexibility.

            The divergence in worldviews helps explain why it is so difficult to make public policy.  On the one hand, we have people who embrace change, and in fact, welcome it, perhaps even for its own sake.  On the other, we have people who prefer the tried and true in a world where principles are clear and strongly held.

            Pew notes that almost 90% of Americans think of themselves as being “very patriotic.”  We all love America.  The problem is that we don’t agree on what America is, where it is going and how it should get there.