#WTH: American patriotism RIP?

We chat with Patrick Ruffini about that viral WSJ poll

Three things from this week’s kinda depressing pod with pollster Patrick Ruffini:

1. The viral WSJ poll that said Americans are no longer patriotic, religious or interested in community was methodologically weak and a little overstated.

2. But the trends are real. And part of the reason is hyper-partisanship that has grown among elites.

3. In the real (non-twitter, non-coastal) world, there are non-hyper partisans. But increasingly, politicians don’t play to them.

First, the poll. We didn’t know — perhaps you do — that polls conducted over the phone get different results than polls conducted over the internet. And if you’re trying to compare two polls (in this case the 1989 and 2019 ones the Journal used as a basis for comparison) and identify the trends, but your earlier polls have always been on the phone, and then you switch to the internet, even if the questions are the same, the results will be quite different. That, at least in part, explains what the hell is going on with that viral WSJ poll that identified a massive drop in feelings of patriotism among Americans. But the reality is that Americans are less patriotic. And less religious. And less community oriented.

Is there a “why” behind this bad news for what we have come to think of as the pillars of Americanism? Explanations were legion (too woke/too fanatical/Trump/Biden), but the poll doesn’t identify any root causes. Nonetheless, we can guess at some of reasons for the growth of negativity in America. It doesn’t explain everything, but the hyper-partisanism of American life is certainly one reason.

Americans increasingly inhabit different worlds. Those who care about politics are siloed away into their ideological bunkers, not simply convinced of their views, but unlikely to know anyone who disagrees with them. (If you’re interested, Ruffini writes more about that here.) Of course, there are still people in the middle, and lots of them. The majority of Americans no longer identify as D or R. But politicians don’t play to them. Money comes from attention, and attention comes from clickbait-y behavior. So there are more and politicians catering to the fringes and not to the center.

How does this all tie up? Perhaps it doesn’t. Religiosity is declining the world over, and so is community sentiment. But the decline in patriotism is certainly rooted in a declining love of country, a declining affection for our fellow Americans. And our politics aren’t helping.

HIGHLIGHTS

So, tell us about that WSJ poll?

PR: I think the thing that really jumped out at me was this finding that just four years ago, 62% of Americans said that community involvement was very important to them, and this year, only 27% said that was true. Well, that's interesting. On the one hand, we're wired to believe this declinist narrative that everything's going down the tubes. And in some ways that's true. I mean, if you look at the Gallup trend line on patriotism, you look at the trend lines on religiosity, all these trends have been going down for quite some time. But this idea of a 35 point drop in just four years, that was something that just strikes me as implausible. And I think it says something that this chart went viral. It says something about really how we're wired to consume information, what information spreads, that the results that seem very dramatic or very surprising get outsized play.

But there were some technical reasons for the numbers, right?

PR: The survey that was conducted just now was conducted online. The survey that was conducted four years ago and prior to that was conducted over the phone. Now, why should that matter? Why is this technical detail so important? It's important because of something called mode effects. The idea that if you're answering a survey in a certain format in a certain way, you're going to answer differently. And particularly on what we would term socially desirable types of characteristics or values, things like I am a person who is very highly involved in my community. I am patriotic. I go to church. All of those things are things you are more likely to say to a telephone interviewer over the phone than if you're answering privately and anonymously, not facing another person directly when you're doing it.

And so that really, I think, explains a lot of the difference. I don't disagree that maybe the long-term trend line has been for a lot of these values questions to go down over time, but the hair on fire moment of, "Oh my gosh. It's declined by 35 points. Patriotism has declined by 23 points in just the last four years." That's what I take issue with the idea that we are over-hyping these trends because of a change in how the survey questions were asked in the last two times.

What’s the why behind this?

PR: You can certainly speculate as to what you think the cause of a certain trend may be, but the numbers themselves do not tell us what the underlying causes are. They are just numbers. […] So a lot of this is generationally-driven in terms of we're seeing the numbers increasingly drop precipitously more on a lot of these measures among younger generations in particular, particularly on patriotism and particularly on the well-confirmed and well-observed trends about religiosity, where you're seeing much younger respondents being much less religious than they have been in the past. It's not that young people are taking over. In fact, young people are less of a share of the population now than they were 20, 30 years ago with the rise of the baby boom and the trends there. The population is getting older, but the levels of all of these things among younger people have been a lot lower.

Political segregation is another big factor in how these polls come out, correct?

PR: Yeah, that's really an important thing to note because if you spend your life on social media, if you spend your life on Twitter, everything is a war every single day, 24-7, politically, right? And you very rarely encounter people who are genuinely conflicted on the issues, right, on any given issues, whether it's guns, abortion, any and all of the above. And that makes sense because again, if you're engaging in these public spaces, you are somebody who is highly politically engaged. You're are somebody who knows a lot about the issues and you've probably long since made up your mind.

The people who are not engaged in these spaces are overwhelmingly people who don't live and breathe politics 24-7. They're working class defined as not having a college degree. So they're just less interested in politics generally. Maybe they'll turn out in presidential elections, but not necessarily in midterm elections or in special elections, all the things that political Twitter is obsessed over. And what you find when you actually break down these people by demographic group is that there are vast demographic differences by race. So you really see people who are not white specifically are much more likely not to have these extremely hyperpolarized views on either extreme of the political spectrum. When they answer lots and lots of issue questions on a survey, they're clustered in the middle.

Meanwhile, whites, but specifically whites with college degrees have a majority of people who are clustered on these ideological extremes, either very far to the left or very far to the right. They're actually both pretty evenly matched. The far left and the far right are pretty evenly matched, and you have a much smaller space in the middle.

You wrote in your Substack that social media politics isn’t like real America politics…?

PR: So in that post, that's what I was trying to get at, that the reality that maybe you and I experience day to day in political conversation on Twitter. It's just very, very different than what the average swing voter is the information environment that the average swing voter is inhabiting and how they view these issues. And you're right that there's a large persuadable middle that we often ignore because of this narrative that we're so polarized, elections are decided by one or two percentage points, and we just often ignore the opportunity. So we have to persuade those folks in the middle.

But isn’t that middle smaller and smaller?

PR: [There] used to be a lot more overlap between Republicans and Democrats in terms of how they viewed the issues. So the average Democrat was not really that far to the left than the average Republican just 20 years ago, and now there's very little overlap. Now it's gotten absolute to an extreme point among elites, right, but it's still at a more muted point among, let's say the rank and file. The rank and file are still pretty ideologically open and ambidextrous and can subscribe to points of view across the political spectrum. But that's happening, generally speaking, a lot less.

What I'm interested in though is how this filters into behavior. And I was struck in a recent focus group that I moderated that speaking to a woman that was a die hard MAGA, almost bought into every conspiracy theory that was out there around 2020 around anti-vax stuff, everything. And the thing that she said that struck me was the belief that when we were talking about this idea that yeah, there are maybe swing voters in the middle that the Republican party needs to persuade. And she said back to me, I don't ever really see that. All I see is people like me, and then people on the opposite side of it, waving their pride flags or doing things on the far left side of the political spectrum.

And I thought that was a very telling comment because if you don't actually believe because of the media environment that there are people in the middle to persuade, then I think it radicalizes you. It inspires behavior that I think is very different than you would if you actually encountered more folks who are in the middle, and I think that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Right? We ourselves become more extreme because we perceive that there are not others who can be won over through persuasion.

Charles Murray wrote in Coming Apart that increasingly we are living in different political and class bubbles…

PR: What actually matters is you're surrounded by people who all share a particular set of demographic characteristics and you zoom to the left or you zoom to the right based on the signals that you're getting. I think the argument that I make is this has inspired all sorts of bad behavior, right, and I'm not talking bad behavior among elites. I'm also talking about bad behavior, frankly, at the everyday voter level. Where again, if you yourself are not really encountering people with these different beliefs, you're not necessarily incentivized to act kindly towards them. You're not inspired to give them the benefit of the doubt, perhaps, and I just think that's very sad.

At this point, people are moving to get away from people they can’t live with… out of California and to Texas and Florida. So this problem will get worse, right?

PR: I would bet on polarization continuing to get worse or continuing to become more important. Where I think really the real jumping off point, and I'm somebody who has made my career starting out and doing digital politics and doing things online, is with the importance of the internet rising, particularly between the 2000 and 2004 elections, that's when you started to see a lot of this polarization, regional polarization, education polarization, really get going. And obviously, it was supercharged and Trump threw a match on it in 2016, absolutely. But it really got going with the rise of alternative cable news outlets for different partisan camps that we really saw take off around that period of time, and also with the rise of the internet, where you can spend practically your entire day immersed in an information environment that completely confirms what you're already predisposed to believe.

You also have the fact, and liberals like to say this is because of gerrymandering, but you also have the fact that most, because of this geographic polarization, most members of Congress are elected in districts where there's absolutely no chance that either a Democrat or Republican will beat them. That if they're going to get beat, it's going to be in the primary. And what does that mean? Well, it incentivizes all the sorts of behaviors that you talk about where my incentives are all mostly focused for the vast majority of Republicans or Democrats who are elected to Congress. They're all focused on holding my base. And you only have a very, very tiny sliver of members who come from genuinely competitive districts who are concerned about winning over the middle. So within the Democratic caucus, within the Republican caucus, with whoever is governing at the time, those groups are absolutely dominated by people who only are accountable to primary electorates, and that's a problem.

Is anyone playing to the persuadable? To the actual majority?

PR: Again, it's those perverse incentives that I think people have to, intending to, I think fully intending to say, go out and win a majority and be focused on winning 50% plus one and being able to unite, let's say, the right with the center. That you have people who very intentionally start out trying to do that. And then it devolves into, "Well, I said this, a thing that really fired up the base and my donations really went up. My page views really went up." Meanwhile, those people in the middle didn't seem that engaged or enthused or interested. The problem is, the problem with all of that is, they do show up in elections. So the daily feedback mechanisms that we have are not necessarily very good or very well attuned to getting that feedback and doing that communication and persuasion to the middle.

Full transcript here.

SHOWNOTES

Why this extremely viral poll result might not be real (The Intersection Substack, March 28 2023)

The shape of polarization in America (The Intersection Substack, March 28 2023)

America Pulls Back From Values That Once Defined It, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds (Aaron Zitner, WSJ, March 27 2023)

Nationalism and Patriotism (Nick Catoggio, The Dispatch, March 29 2023)

A Better Poll on the Decline of American Patriotism (John McCormack, National Review, March 28 2023)

Glass Half Full or Men Half-Hearted (Michael Brendan Dougherty, National Review, March 27 2023)

America Is Still Recognizable (Abe Greenwald, Commentary, March 27 2023)

Record-Low 38% Extremely Proud to Be American (Gallup, June 29 2022)