In his insightful, award-winning work Fire and Ice, Environics president Michael Adams explored the growing divergence between American and Canadian values. Using the same mixture of polling and analysis in American Backlash, Adams fixes his penetrating gaze on contemporary America—the exceptional society.

Exploding the accepted wisdom of an America divided bitterly into camps of red and blue, Adams's data show that the values rift between Republicans and Democrats is negligible when compared with the gulf between politically engaged citizens (of either party) and the nearly half of Americans who are politically disaffected.

American Backlash goes beyond the red and blue dichotomy, beyond the litany of divisive political issues that receive so much attention in American public discourse: abortion, stem-cell research, euthanasia, same sex marriage, Darwin versus Genesis, and prayer in schools. Widening the lens to examine the psychology of American society as a whole, Adams's research suggests that it is neither Red nor Blue America that represents the overall trajectory of social change in the United States. Rather, it is politically disengaged Americans, people who increasingly embrace values of brash individualism and hedonism, who are the greatest barometer of where American society is headed.

Introduction

In 2004 a small crisis occurred in Spurger, Texas (population: 1,000). A controversy arose around the school district’s annual TWIRP day, a homecoming tradition that school officials said had been going on for years, maybe even generations. TWIRP stands for The Woman Is Requested to Pay. On TWIRP day girls would ask boys on dates, open doors for them, treat them to a milkshake or a burger, and generally woo them as the boys themselves would usually woo the girls (or might have in the 1950s). In the spirit of the day, boys and girls would sometimes playfully don the clothing of the opposite sex: football players dressed as cheerleaders and the like.

But no more. In November 2004 concerned parents complained that the event encouraged homosexuality by inviting young people to transgress gender norms. As one mother said, “It’s like experimenting with drugs. You just keep playing with it and it becomes customary.”

School officials in Spurger expressed surprise that such a seemingly benign tradition should cause upset, but were conciliatory. Rather than have the few parents who complained seek excused absences for their children on “moral grounds,” Spurger schools ditched TWIRP day altogether. The model of the Salem witch trials is repeated often enough: a latent cultural anxiety is harnessed by a few zealous individuals who are able to bring about considerable change, fuelled not so much by reason or political clout as by communal fear and uncertainty. But while Spurger officials were willing to give up TWIRP day, it didn’t seem fair to get rid of a festive occasion students had enjoyed without offering some alternative. The replacement? Camo Day, on which boys and girls alike dress up in military garb: camouflage, combat boots, face paint, perhaps a plastic grenade or two. While cross-dressing presented a challenge to the sensibilities of some Spurger residents, there were no reports of conscientious objectors being kept home on Camo Day.

To some Americans, the Spurger story probably seems sadly emblematic of the trajectory of American society. For progressive Americans, who have stood amazed at the political realignment that has seen conservative Republicans gain so much ground in the legislative arena (where they have duly voiced their rage about everything from Janet Jackson’s right nipple to purportedly gay SpongeBob SquarePants), a dress-up day turning from a social role–playing game to a military-themed event must look depressingly exemplary. In a column in the Detroit Free Press, Mitch Albom, author of the pop spirituality bestsellers Tuesdays with Morrie and The Five People You Meet in Heaven, argued that Spurger’s gay panic was overblown, but that there might be something more serious to worry about there. Albom reports the following conversation he had with a lawyer for one of the families who objected to TWIRP day:

“Isn’t camouflage gear associated with killing things—at the very least, animals, at the very worst, human beings?” I asked Sasser, the attorney. “What do you think about a 4-year-old dressing in camouflage?”

“We have no problem with that,” he said.

That’s something to worry about.

Even setting aside Albom’s objections, there are also those who, whatever their ideology, simply lament the vehemence of current debates on political and cultural matters. Responding to what he thought was over-the-top ideological criticism of his film Million Dollar Baby, Clint Eastwood remarked, “Maybe I’m getting to the age when I’m starting to be senile or nostalgic or both, but people are so angry now. You used to be able to disagree with people and still be friends. Now you hear these talk shows, and everyone who believes differently from you is a moron and an idiot—both on the right and the left.” To Americans like Eastwood, the Spurger story must seem further evidence that things have gotten too acrimonious and too politicized. Why could the Spurgerites of the 1950s, surely not exactly a bunch of Texan Liberaces, enjoy TWIRP day while their grandchildren in 2004 see it as a moral affront?

Are these two reads on the TWIRP controversy accurate? Is American society indeed engaged in a culture war? And if so, is the conservative side winning and growing, as political developments would seem to suggest?

Let’s deal first with the idea of the culture war, before we try to decide who’s winning. In 1991 sociologist James Davison Hunter published a book entitled Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. The book argued that in America, two broad socio-political camps were emerging around such hot-button issues as guns, gays, abortion, prayer in schools—the now familiar litany. These two camps cut across some of the lines that had traditionally defined political affiliation, including religion and class. Increasingly, people’s politics were defined not merely by their demographics (whether they were rich or poor, black or white, young or old), but by what Hunter called their world views. Essentially, Americans had entered the age of clashing values; the values consensus of mid-century could no longer be assumed. (Of that old consensus, Samuel Huntington, a prominent and conservative Harvard political scientist, remarked, “We were all liberals, and Franklin Roosevelt was God. I couldn’t imagine that anyone thought differently.”)

There is some debate over when the culture war was declared, but many trace its current incarnation to the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 that aroused such an angry reaction from the anti-abortion camp. That anger, of course, has yet to abate: as George W. Bush nominates Supreme Court justices, religious Republicans are pushing hard for candidates who will undo the decision that has so incensed them for over three decades.

Just a year after Hunter’s Culture Wars was published, Pat Buchanan gave a famous speech at the 1992 Republican convention. Buchanan, banished from the ticket but granted a prominent speaking role, spoke of a culture war that would shake the nation: “There is a religious war going on in this country,” Buchanan boomed, “a cultural war as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.” George Bush Sr., the convention’s kinder, gentler presidential nominee, was more moderate in his rhetoric. But he emerged from the 1992 convention as a candidate branded with two words that would help define the Republican Party throughout the culture war to come: family values.

Of course, family values didn’t win the election for the Republicans that year. Bill Clinton was elected. He came, he saw, he triangulated (that is, he carved out a “third way” distinct from both Republican and Democratic ideology and party lines). He also, in his way, became one of the icons of the culture war. The Monica Lewinsky affair was a lightning rod for those alarmed by what they saw as America’s moral decline: if even the president couldn’t act with dignity in the highest office in the land, where was the nation headed? Polls showed that most Americans didn’t much care about the president’s particular indiscretion with “that woman.” But if the media coverage it received was any indication, the affair seemed to have touched a tender nerve with the American people. Personal conduct, standards of propriety, and private and public morality became central topics of debate.

As the Clinton years ended, the slate of American books examining the so-called culture war grew long. Some of the titles speak to the binary terms of the dialogue: One Nation, Two Cultures (Gertrude Himmelfarb, 1999); The Two Americas (Stanley Greenberg, 2004); Values Divide (John White, 2002); The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America (John Sperling et al., 2004); How to Win the Culture War (Peter Kreeft, 2002). There have also been titles that questioned the by now dominant idea of a culture war: One Nation, After All (Alan Wolfe, 1999); Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America (Morris P. Fiorina et al., 2005); Is There a Culture War? (Alan Wolfe and James Davison Hunter, forthcoming).

Social scientists, pollsters, politicos, journalists, and polemicists have all weighed in on the nature of the culture war, its fronts, and its likely outcomes. But for a war that’s supposed to be about values, there’s been relatively little empirical investigation of the values at stake. The same old polling numbers on abortion and gun control tend to be batted about endlessly. The amazing growth of evangelicalism and megachurches is scrutinized, with some seeing a growing embrace of traditional values and others merely a population seeking support and social services anywhere they can be found. But perhaps the most discussed battle of all in the culture war is in the political arena, where Republicans and Democrats are supposed to be scarcely able to speak to one another, so shocked is each at the other’s moral perfidy (Republicans are warmongering, xenophobic bigots, of course, while Democrats are America-hating narcissists whose self-indulgent quest for pleasure tramples everything decent people hold dear).

None of this information, however—polling, church membership, party affiliation—gets at the heart of Americans’ values. These are all secondary indicators, behavioural or attitudinal data that flow from people’s values but give us only partial information about the nature of those values.

My firm has conducted social values studies in the United States every four years since 1992, around the time when discussions of a culture war as such hit the mainstream in America. In our four survey waves (’92, ’96, ’00, and ’04) we have amassed 8,351 questionnaires completed by representative samples of Americans aged fifteen or older, each one with responses to over 600 questions on values.

Our surveys are not polls of people’s opinions; rather, we seek to measure the deep values structures that underlie their opinions. While a poll might ask whether you favour same-sex marriage, our research measures the values that drive your position on same-sex marriage: your views on gender, family organization, religion, personal autonomy, and the role of the state. Through computer number-crunching and human interpretation, we can combine all this data and gain insight into how people’s values hang together to create a coherent world view, and how those world views relate to people’s decisions in the world.

When we ask Americans directly about their values, not what church they attend or what candidate they support, what do we learn about the so-called culture war? For one thing, we find that whatever the culture war is, it is not a war between ordinary Republicans and average Democrats. When we look at the values of politically engaged Republicans and politically engaged Democrats, there are some differences between them, but there are also huge swaths of common ground.

On a personal level, Republicans and Democrats are quite similar in their efforts to exert control in their own lives. Both groups share a do-it-yourself approach to many areas of life, from proactive efforts to stay healthy to a desire to manage their own financial affairs with minimal assistance from professionals. Politically engaged Republicans and Democrats also share a strong work ethic, reporting more than the average American that they try hard to instill this value in their children. So we find that engaged citizens, regardless of their political persuasion, are more likely than average citizens to value making their own decisions and moving forward under their own steam.

When it comes to relating to others, we again find important similarities between engaged Republicans and engaged Democrats. Both groups are committed to some vision of community. While some differences emerge in what each group sees as the ideal community, there is consensus on three important pillars of public life: strong civic engagement, a deep belief in ethical behaviour as a foundation for relations with others, and an interest in taking time to connect emotionally with other people—whether family members, friends, neighbours, or even acquaintances.

On matters of social organization—the rules, both formal and informal, that should govern societies—Republicans and Democrats start to differ somewhat more. Both groups feel they have responsibilities toward the society in which they live, but they disagree on the nature of those responsibilities. Republicans on the whole stress patriotism and duty, while Democrats stress fairness and equality. These similarities and differences will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 2.

Despite these differences in approach, the values of politically engaged Democrats and Republicans indicate agreement on a number of fundamental issues. Moreover, where differences arise, they certainly don’t appear drastic enough to constitute anything resembling a “war.”

So if Republicans and Democrats are having such a love-in, why does the political climate seem so acrimonious? Where did the idea of the culture war come from? Part of the culture war is, of course, a matter of representation. Conflict sells, and flipping on the TV to watch a couple of informed, thoughtful, conciliatory people developing pragmatic solutions to policy problems on which they differ … well, it might sound like heaven to a few cerebral souls, but it’s unlikely to drive ratings and advertising revenues through the roof. Rush “femi-Nazi” Limbaugh sells. Bill “Bush acts like a girl on the rag” Maher sells. Ann “invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity” Coulter sells.

Daily Show host Jon Stewart made a famous appearance on CNN’s Crossfire in which he literally begged the show’s hosts, Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala, to change the show’s format and tone and help uplift America’s political dialogue. Implausible, to say the least, particularly for a show whose raison d’être is, well, crossfire. The scornful response Stewart received as he repeated over and over “Please stop. Please. You’re hurting America. Stop, please” (I paraphrase) was testament to the problem he was speaking of. All Carlson could think to do was ask Stewart why he didn’t use his show to uplift political dialogue. And so it goes.

But the culture war is not all sound and fury signifying nothing. There is indeed a values divide in America, with its strong religious and moralist elements on the one side and its famously hedonistic popular and consumer culture raising the bar of excess on the other. A values divide also emerges strongly in our data, but the armies of the culture war, we find, are not defined by their political affiliation.

While much of the culture-war rhetoric seems to suggest that, politically, there are two kinds of people in America, Republicans and Democrats, there are, in fact, three kinds of people: Republicans, Democrats, and those who don’t vote. The third group is the largest. Since the late 1970s voter turnout in the United States has been a little more than half. In the 2004 election, turnout rose to 60 percent. But even at that, a little less than 30 percent of Americans voted for Kerry, a little more than 30 percent voted for Bush, and the plurality—nearly 40 percent—didn’t show up. They stayed home, even in the face of an election that both sides called the most important in a generation.

When compared with the values of non-voters, the values of politically engaged Republicans and Democrats look virtually identical. It is between voters and non-voters that the real chasm lies. An example: earlier I mentioned that social organization is the area in which Republicans and Democrats diverge most sharply. According to our data, Republicans place more emphasis on patriotism than Democrats do; that is, Republicans are well above average on the value we label National Pride while Democrats are just slightly above average. Meanwhile, Democrats feel strongly that they have an obligation to help those worse off than themselves, and that the rich should try to help the poor. On this value, which we label Social Responsibility, Democrats are well above average while Republicans are just slightly above average. But on both these trends, Americans who say they are unlikely to vote are far below average.

The values of the politically disengaged show a distinct lack of idealism; these Americans seem to reject both the Republican and the Democratic visions of the good life and the ideal community. They don’t believe in the importance of a father-led home as Republicans do disproportionately, but neither do they embrace gender equality as Democrats do disproportionately. They don’t embrace traditional, institutional religion as Republicans do, but neither do they report being attracted to more personalized forms of spiritual practice as Democrats are. They reject traditional values and social norms, but not because they embrace a dream of inclusion and tolerance—the politically disengaged disproportionately reject both the traditional and the progressive.

People who take the time to reflect on a vision for America, who talk about that vision with other people or listen to a discussion about it on television (even from a polemicist!), and who finally vote for their favourite candidate are people who could probably agree on a great deal. As it turns out, it’s not so much the content of the vision that matters; it’s caring to have a vision at all that really counts.

It isn’t that the contest of conservative and progressive ideas and policies doesn’t exist in America. Of course it does, and it’s articulated around the clock through a thousand channels. The point is that that debate, the political debate, doesn’t get at the most important values gap in American society—the gap between the engaged and the disengaged.

So what do America’s politically disengaged care about? They can’t reject everything. This brings us around to one of the two questions I posed earlier. The first question was whether there’s a culture war. Our values data show there is, but it isn’t the one we might have expected. The second question was, If there is a culture war, who’s winning—progressives or conservatives? The answer is neither. When we look at changes in Americans’ values over time (from 1992, when we began our surveys, to the summer of 2004, just before President Bush was re-elected), it’s not the values of the politically ascendant conservatives or the values of the politically challenged progressives that are growing most rapidly. The values that are showing the strongest growth in America—especially among youth—are the values of the politically disengaged.

What are these values? According to our data, the values showing the most pronounced growth in the United States from 1992 to 2004 fell into three categories: risk-taking and thrill-seeking, Darwinism and exclusion, and consumption and status-seeking.

On average, Americans report increasing attraction to the pursuit of strong jolts of sensation. These jolts might be derived from drugs or adrenaline-pumping activities like extreme sports, intense media experiences like ultra-realistic video games, or even the thrills (and spills) of gambling and financial risk-taking. The values of the average American also reveal a growing resignation to life in a world of dog-eat-dog competition: Americans increasingly register a Darwinist attitude toward both economic and social life, becoming more likely to reason that those who suffer misfortune in life deserve what they get and that others shouldn’t worry too much about helping them. (In the words of one journalist, “Many people look at the ever-widening gap between rich and poor in this country and think to themselves, Hey, it’s a great time to be rich.”)

Finally, and to a lesser extent, Americans have become somewhat more attached to status-seeking and consumption. If life is going to be a war of all against all, you might as well flaunt the spoils of your own victories, however small or great.

This may all seem a little dystopian to a reader sipping lemonade on a porch in Olympia, Washington, or half watching a Little League game in Dunlap, Illinois. Where most Americans are sitting, it probably doesn’t look as though looting or A Clockwork Orange–style violence perpetrated by roving gangs of amoral youth are about to break out at any moment. True enough. It’s important to note that these are not the dominant values in American society at present. But they are the values, on average, growing most rapidly. The trajectory of social change in America over the past dozen years has been away from the traditional values of both deference to authority and attraction to community (respect your elders, don’t talk back, and bring over a casserole if someone from the church gets sick) and toward the more individualistic and self-centred values described above.

Most of the growth in these values is caused by intergenerational social change. It’s not that individual Americans are changing their values but rather that younger Americans are simply more likely to favour the values of hard hedonism and Darwinist competition than are their parents or grandparents. And this isn’t mere teenage distemper: Americans well into middle age are scoring higher on trends associated with thrill-seeking, hedonism, and Darwinism. Our data reveal deep, intergenerational values change. American teenagers aren’t growing out of what we term Exclusion and Intensity values; American society is growing into them. As the saccharine cliché goes, children are our future—for better or for worse. The culture is shifting to a new place.

But how can it be that America’s youth are leading the country toward values of hard hedonism and unscrupulous individualism even as the political climate appears to grow ever more conservative? The answer leads us back to the special character of the politically engaged that I discussed above. American voters, regardless of party preference, are becoming more attracted to values associated with order and authority. In this way engaged American citizens are steadily diverging not only from their non-voting compatriots but indeed from the net trajectory of social change in their country.

Many have attributed what they see as the increased conservatism of American politics to the trauma of 9/11, arguing that the desire for stronger leadership arises from the fear and uncertainty engendered by a sudden attack from an enemy whose motives and boundaries are equally mysterious. This may be true to some extent, but our data show that politically engaged Americans have had a growing attraction to authority since at least 1996. I believe the political climate in America is a reaction to the social change Americans sense is afoot at home more than a reaction to foreign enemies. Our data suggest that the “moral decline” of which religious conservatives speak with such alarm may well exist. But in their struggle to “restore America’s values,” many conservatives misapprehend their enemy. In terms of social change in the United States, they have much less to fear from those idealistic Deaniacs (as Howard Dean’s army of energetic young supporters was nicknamed) than from their fellow Americans who don’t even care to enter the discussion.

The Social Values Method

Our method begins with a battery of over 600 questions. Our social values survey isn’t a poll, but it does share some of the characteristics of polling. Like a poll, this survey asks people to do things like agree or disagree with a statement; take two ideals and prioritize one over the other; and describe their social affiliations—religious, political, demographic, and so on.

But polls usually measure one or two issues at a time; for example, what proportion of the population supports an idea or a candidate. In addition, they might cross-reference a respondent’s position on an issue with his or her membership in a group, such as a political party, religious denomination, or demographic category. The social values method, by contrast, offers the analysis of multiple variables. Our statistical routines can examine not just one correlation but many at the same time. Of course, it would be impossibly confusing to try to display relationships among answers to 600 questions in a table or in writing, as polls are usually reported. Instead, we use a social values “map” that uses two-dimensional space to display relationships among many values and many people.

Take the issue of gun control. Instead of just knowing that Republicans are more likely than Democrats to favour private citizens’ right to carry a concealed weapon, or that men are more likely than women to do the same, we could generate a values profile of someone who believes that any private citizen should be able to carry a concealed weapon, and gain a better sense of where that person is coming from. Is he strong on values like Anomie-Aimlessness and Acceptance of Violence, favouring concealed weapons because he’s resigned to the idea that society is a war of all against all, where everyone is as disconnected, hostile, and dangerous as he is? Or is he a libertarian, strong on Everyday Ethics and Civic Engagement, who doesn’t care to carry a gun himself but believes on principle that the state shouldn’t be able to dictate these kinds of rules? Or is he a father, strong on Duty and Patriarchy, who believes that he must under all circumstances be able to physically overpower anyone who would threaten his family—and that a gun (which he may never fire) guarantees his ability to do so? Or is she a woman, strong on Gender Equality and Personal Control, who feels that in order to assert control over her life and person in a dangerous world, she should have the right to carry a .357 Magnum if she so desires? Values profiles allow us to link people’s opinions to their overall mental postures.

The Values

Before looking at the social values map, we need to understand its contents: the values we measure. Each of the values (or trends) on the map usually represents two to four actual questions we’ve asked in our social values surveys. (A few contain just one question.) The questions are designed to measure, from different angles, a respondent’s orientation to a single concept. For example, since 1992 we’ve been tracking a value we call Acceptance of Violence. This trend is made up of four items with which respondents are asked to agree or disagree on a four-point scale:

            1.         Violence can sometimes be exciting.

            2.         When a person can’t take it any more and feels as if he/she is about to explode, a little violent behaviour can relieve the tension. It’s no big deal.

            3.         Violence is a part of life. It’s no big deal.

            4.         It’s acceptable to use physical force to get something you really want. The important thing is to get what you want.

Respondents’ answers on all four of these items (their degrees of agreement and disagreement) are aggregated into an overall score on the trend Acceptance of Violence. We ensure that the individual items that compose the trends are indeed measuring a single orientation by testing the degree to which they correlate with one another.

We make no claim that these and the other items we use are perfect measures. One of the major interpretive projects in this work is the creation of questions that effectively measure people’s orientations to some meaningful concept. Survey questions, no matter how they may strive to be unbiased, are not sterile scalpels; they’re made of words with all kinds of cultural baggage attached to them.

True, some surveys are intentionally biased, and their bias taints their results. When questions deliberately lead respondents in one direction to offer a misleading picture of public opinion, it’s called push polling. The famous example is “If you knew that [name of political candidate] was a convicted sex offender, would you be more or less likely to vote for him?” The candidate needn’t actually be a sex offender in order for the poll results (not to mention the subsequent rumours) to get pretty ugly.

One critic, in response to my last book, Fire and Ice, accused me of bias because some of the items in our social values survey ask people to agree or disagree with extreme, many would say offensive, views. But the goal of this survey is not to prove some absolute fact about the nature of American society. Rather, its goal is comparative: we use our data to compare groups of respondents with each other (as when we compare young with old, or New Englanders with Midwesterners) or with themselves over time. The questions we ask can be provocative, but their “bias” does not corrupt our findings, provided we keep asking people exactly the same “biased” questions. If 5 percent of American women agree with a statement widely viewed as unreasonable, and 15 percent of American men agree with the same statement, that’s a worthwhile finding—no matter how unreasonable the statement might be. And if proportions agreeing or disagreeing with the statement increase or decrease over time, that too is significant.

The comparative nature of the social values method gives rise to an important difference between how we report our results and how pollsters report theirs. While polls usually show what proportion of the population agrees or disagrees with an idea, we deal primarily with relative scores on groups of questions (values) and not absolute scores on individual questions. As a result, we use index scores to express our findings.

On the value Acceptance of Violence, for example, we take the combined rate of agreement of the U.S. population and establish that as our base: we give it a score of 100. When we look at groups within the population (demographic groups, regional groups, political groups, and so on), their index scores show whether they’re stronger or weaker on a given value than the general population. On the trend Acceptance of Violence, Americans under the age of twenty have an index score of 255; they’re considerably more likely than average to agree with the four statements listed above. Americans over the age of sixty, by contrast, have an index score of 56; they’re considerably less likely than average to agree with the four statements listed above. The social values map contains over a hundred values constructed as I’ve just described.

The Social Values Map

Agree or disagree: The Father of the family must be master in his own house. This is one of the most telling items in our social values survey. To some, the idea that “Father must be master” seems a self-evident truth. To others, the statement seems hopelessly outdated, or as offensive as asking whether a husband has a natural right to beat his wife. Not only do most people feel strongly about this item, but their answer—whatever it is—is so fundamental to their world view that they’re often surprised to even be asked to make their position on it explicit. Does the sun revolve around the earth or vice versa? The answer is obvious and universally understood—until you run into Galileo or the Pope.

To begin to orient yourself on the map we use to display social values graphically, imagine the kind of person you think would reply “Of course!” to the statement that the father must be master of the house. Now imagine the kind of person you think would reply “You’re kidding, right?” Even in the absence of data from thousands of social values surveys, you might intuit that these two imaginary souls would differ on many issues, not just the distribution of power in the family. You would probably be right. Some values on the map tend to correlate positively with each other; others correlate negatively. In other words, if we know someone believes strongly that the father must be the master of the house, we can make good predictions about the other values that person is likely to espouse.

In addition to the trend Patriarchy, then, let’s look at three other trends located nearby on the map: Obedience to Authority, Traditional Family, and Religiosity. These values fall close together on the map because people who believe strongly in one of them are likely to believe strongly in the others as well. Americans over the age of sixty, for instance, are above the U.S. average in agreeing that the father of the family must be master of the house (we label this value Patriarchy). They’re also above average on the trends Traditional Family, Obedience to Authority, Duty, and Religiosity. Trends tend to hang together on the map to the extent that they hang together in people’s minds; these four values frequently occur as part of a single mindset or world view.

Selected Trends, 2004 Positions

The other side of this coin is that values that correlate negatively with each other tend to be far apart on the map. Near the bottom of the map, we find the values Flexible Gender Identity, Penchant for Risk, Equal Relationship with Youth, and Sexual Permissiveness. The fact that these values fall so far away from the ones discussed above (Patriarchy and so on) suggests that people who are strong on one group are likely to be weak on the other. Another look at Americans over sixty as a test case confirms this expectation: these Americans, stronger than average on Patriarchy and the other top-of-map values, are considerably weaker than average on many values at the bottom of the map, including Sexual Permissiveness, Penchant for Risk, Equal Relationship with Youth, and Flexible Gender Identity.

Americans over Age 60: Partial Values Profile, 2004 Data

Selected Trends, 2004 Positions

When all the values are distributed in this manner, with positively correlated values close together and negatively correlated values far apart, discrete and coherent mental postures begin to emerge in different areas of the map.

The U.S. values map is defined by two axes. The vertical axis positions values that are oriented toward Authority at the top of the map and values oriented toward Individuality at the bottom of the map. The horizontal axis positions values associated with personal Fulfillment at the right of the map and values associated with sheer Survival at the left of the map. The two axes yield four quadrants, which we’ve labelled (on the next page) according to the values they contain. Each quadrant’s label points to the world view that emerges when all the values in that quadrant are considered together.

Plotting People on the Map

Once the parameters of the map are established and all the values are in place, we’re able to plot individuals and groups in the map space just as we plot values. The place that a person or group occupies on the map is determined by the values they embrace or reject most strongly. A group’s position on the map is the average position of all the individual respondents within that group.

We’ve just seen that Americans over the age of sixty are stronger than average on some top-of-map values and weaker than average on some of those at the bottom. When their scores on all the trends are taken into account and the computer plots them, the result is fairly intuitive. Americans over age sixty fall near the top of the map, close to the authority-oriented values they embrace most strongly.

Recall the two imaginary people you recently conjured—the ones who agreed and disagreed, respectively, with the idea that the father of the family must be master of the house. Perhaps these imaginary respondents took the form of the stereotypical Red and Blue Americans, one registering his belief that Dad should be boss from in front of his gun rack–equipped pickup (conservative talk radio audible through the window), the other glancing up wearily from her latte and laptop in a San Francisco café.

If we ask the computer to plot those two people on the map based on their responses to that one question only, the person who agreed that Father must be master would fall right on top of the trend Patriarchy in the upper-left (Status and Security) quadrant of the map, and the person who disagreed would be in roughly the opposite area of the map: the lower-right (Idealism and Autonomy) quadrant.

But the map contains, as we’ve begun to see, not just this one value, but more than a hundred values relating to all aspects of life: religion, the family, the environment, consumption, self-image, social belonging, justice, violence, community, gender, health … the list goes on.

The positions of our two hypothetical respondents might change considerably depending on their values in these other areas. The person who disagrees with “Father must be master” might do so on grounds of sheer egalitarianism, falling into the Authenticity and Responsibility quadrant near the value Gender Parity. This person might simply believe that women and men are inherently equal and that God made them that way.

Another way to disagree with the “Father must be master” statement is on the grounds that men and women aren’t just equal but are social constructs with no inherent properties other than anatomical ones. This person might be in the lower-right Idealism and Autonomy quadrant near the trend Flexible Gender Identity.

A third person might disagree that Father should be master because he or she rejects all forms of hierarchy, and even all forms of social order. This person would fall into the Exclusion and Intensity quadrant, strong on values like Anomie-Aimlessness and Civic Apathy. Each quadrant of our map, with it’s full slate of values, is displayed in Appendix C.

Talk about “values”—particularly in the political sphere—is too often limited to a narrow set of binaries on such issues as abortion, guns, same-sex marriage, the death penalty, prayer in schools, and so on: those now famous “moral values.” The social values map offers a broader terrain in which we can think about and discuss values; it offers an empirical basis for dispassionate discussions of values (I am an optimist) and how they are changing; and, crucially, it allows us to examine correlations among a diverse set of values—analysis that yields not two possible ways of seeing the world but a set of possibilities that’s almost boundless. With this tool, the shopworn stereotypes of the gun rack and the latte can be, if not eliminated, then assigned their rightful (marginal) place in discussions of American social values and social change.