Are America’s Best Days Behind Us? New Survey Gives Insight into What’s Impacting American Prosperity

Last Monday, a new Wall Street Journal-NORC poll found that traditional values such as patriotism and religious faith are “receding in importance to Americans” for Americans. Some other trends reflected by the survey found that the U.S. is highly divided on social issues along party lines. The Wall Street Journal conducted the poll in conjunction with NORC at the University of Chicago, a nonpartisan research organization.

For example, the poll found that “38% of respondents said patriotism was very important to them, and 39% said religion was very important,” which is a striking decline from the 70% who deemed patriotism to be very important and 62% said so of religion back in 1998 when the same poll was conducted. 

Moreover, the difference is even more shocking among generations. The Wall Street Journal notes, “Some 23% of adults under age 30 said in the new survey that patriotism was very important to them personally, compared with 59% of seniors ages 65 or older. Some 31% of younger respondents said religion was very important to them, compared with 55% among seniors.” 

One example of the division along political parties is that when respondents were asked if society had gone far enough when in promoting racial and ethnic diversity, 61% of Democrats said diversity efforts hadn’t gone far enough, compared with 52% of Republicans who thought diversity efforts had gone too far. Interestingly, the one metric the survey found had increased in importance for Americans was money, which “was cited as very important by 43% in the new survey, up from 31% in 1998.”

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Conservatives found much to lament in this poll, citing it as evidence confirming many of their critiques regarding American society. As Ben Shapiro has noted, “America has destroyed its intermediate institutions for at least half of its population […], and the result is atomized individuals who retain individual economic desires but lack cohesive values.”

For his part, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) declared on Twitter that the loss of common culture was the greatest challenge that the nation faces.

Overall, the Wall Street Journal-NORC poll confirms long-standing trends in American society. Recent trends in American society reflect increasing social pathologies, a mental health crisis, an opioid epidemic, and crime waves. All factors presumably have led to a rise in a feeling of a nation in trouble. 

Some years ago, the sociologist Charles Murray wrote a book detailing the growing problems of the American white working class, for example, in his book Coming Apart. The political scientist Yuval Levin has written extensively on the issues confronting the disintegration of American society and ways to reconstruct the social network. 

As the philosopher Peter Kreeft has written, the crisis of Western societies is at its root; a spiritual problem is a product of relativism. Most importantly, as the theologian Scott Hahn has noted, the American social order can only begin to be reconstructed as a result of strong families, which, since the cultural revolution of the 1960s, have been shattered by progressivism. The vital challenge confronting American conservatives is how to reconstruct the social order, along with those intermediate institutions which give individuals meaning as part of a community.

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