This report by Aaron Zitner in the Wall Street Journal has some resonance with things I’ve been saying around here recently:
Patriotism, religious faith, having children and other priorities that helped define the national character for generations are receding in importance to Americans, a new Wall Street Journal-NORC poll finds.
The survey, conducted with NORC at the University of Chicago, a nonpartisan research organization, also finds the country sharply divided by political party over social trends such as the push for racial diversity in businesses and the use of gender-neutral pronouns.
Some 38% of respondents said patriotism was very important to them, and 39% said religion was very important. That was down sharply from when the Journal first asked the question in 1998, when 70% deemed patriotism to be very important, and 62% said so of religion.
The share of Americans who say that having children, involvement in their community and hard work are very important values has also fallen. Tolerance for others, deemed very important by 80% of Americans as recently as four years ago, has fallen to 58% since then.
and this is disheartening:
The share of Americans who say that having children, involvement in their community and hard work are very important values has also fallen. Tolerance for others, deemed very important by 80% of Americans as recently as four years ago, has fallen to 58% since then.
As you might expect there’s some difference between the priorities of Millennials and Baby Boomers or Silent Generation but the decline in importance of those traditional values was observed among all cohorts.
Much of the rest of the report is devoted to searching, largely in vain, for an explanation for the dramatic change. I’ve already provided my explanation.
The failure to have children is the key problem. It means we have failed to adapt to modern society, and we are going extinct, literally. Populations are crashing or beginning to crash everywhere in the First and Second Worlds. In the US, the native white population is crashing.
Note that the crash is a world problem, not the problem of any single country or race. Only Third World are escaping the population crash.
Also there is no cure. Populations will decline until the modern world system collapses.
You did not mention that the poll found that money had increased in importance as a value since the last poll. In other words, material wealth means more than patriotism, religion, community involvement and having children (which are a drain on material wealth).
Bye, Bye Ms. American Pie . . .