American wokeness

 A few years ago, I compiled information from a number of surveys and concluded that perceived discrimination against blacks increased sharply around 2015.   I recently ran across a question that I hadn't noticed then, which I'll use to check and update those conclusions.  The question is "In general, do you think blacks have as good a chance as white people in your community to get any kind of job for which they are qualified, or don't you think they have as good a chance?"  It was first asked in 1963, then again in 1978, then in 1989 and pretty frequently since then.*  The figure shows the percent who said they did have as good a chance minus the percent who said they didn't.

It increased between 1963 and 1978, then stayed about the same for several decades.  Agreement was higher in two surveys from January and October 2009, which probably reflected general optimism associated with Barack Obama's election as president.  In February 2015, 72% thought black people had an equal chance and 28% that they didn't.  The next time the question was asked was in July 2016:  64% said they did and 36% that they didn't.  In July 2020, it was 58% and 42%.  In July 2021, it was 55% and 44%.  People often say that there was a period of "peak woke" for a year or two after the murder of George Floyd, but that it's receded as maybe even been replaced by a backlash.  However, when the question was asked in June 2025, the results were almost the same as in 2020 and 2021 (55%-42%).  

In my earlier post, I suggested that the change in opinion was the result of media coverage and viral videos about police misconduct and the mistreatment of black people in everyday life.  But why did they find such a large and receptive audience?  In a book published in 1981, Samuel Huntington proposed that American politics was marked by periods of "creedal passion"--when substantial groups of people became upset about the gap between widely held values (the "American creed") and actual social conditions.  Of course, the "American creed" is hard to define, but I would say that a belief in social mobility for both individual and groups is a major part of it.  Americans accept a lot of inequality, but don't like anything that resembles a caste system, with hereditary groups at the top and bottom.  After the civil rights laws of the 1960s, the general view was that in a generation or two, the class distributions of blacks would be similar to that of whites.  But although there was some decline in racial inequality, it was slow--that is, there was increasing tension between the ideal of a mobile society and the reality of enduring inequality.    And if racial inequality is the result of discrimination, then it's clear what can and should be done to reduce it.  As a result,  people were attracted to that explanation:  the alternative was that we might just have to live with it for a long time, maybe forever.

That leads to the question of why the change in views on race hasn't led to substantial reforms--if anything, public policy has shifted away from trying to reduce racial inequality.  I'd say it was a lack of political leadership.  In its absence, the desire to do something led to actions that were unhelpful or sometimes counterproductive (e. g., dropping standardized tests in university admissions).  

*It referred to "negroes" the first time it was asked.  I also include a few that asked:  "Do you think that blacks who live in your community do or do not...have as good a chance as whites to get a job for which they're qualified?"

Inside and outside

 A couple of weeks ago, I had a post on declining public confidence in universities.  Most people who've written on this topic say that the cause is internal--something universities have done or failed to do-- and that they need to reform in order to win back support.   I suggested that the major cause was external:  that leading Republicans had become more critical of universities, and the public (especially Republicans) followed.  In this post, I'll elaborate on that point, focusing on one frequently mentioned factor:  political bias.  Megan McArdle writes "in the wider world, asking whether academia really skews left makes you look like an idiot or, slightly more charitably, like someone so encased in a bubble that they don’t even know what they’re missing."   In 2021, an Axios/Ipsos survey asked if you agreed or disagreed with the statements "colleges and universities are biased in favor of liberal ideas and beliefs" and "colleges and universities are biased in favor of conservative ideas and beliefs."  I combined those into five groups:  those who thought they were biased in favor of only liberal beliefs, only conservative beliefs, both liberal and conservative beliefs, not biased, and don't know.*

                                    All            College grads
Liberal only                37%            49%
Conservative only        9%               7%
Both                             9%                6%
Not biased                   14%              17%
Don't know                  32%              21%

Less than half of people believe that there is a liberal bias.  Among the public, 32% think that there is a conservative bias or no bias; among college graduates, it's 30%.  And even among college graduates, a lot of people say they don't know.  So in the "wider world," there isn't a consensus on the topic.  

These results illustrate a more general point.  Although there's a good deal of media coverage of higher education, it's a niche topic--it rarely appears on TV news or in local newspapers.  Also, there are no standard measures that are regularly reported--even someone who follows the issue just gets a collection of individual events. As a result, actual conditions have little influence on public perceptions.  But if a prominent politician speaks out about universities, that is a major story, and people have a sense of how to react:  it depends on how they generally feel about that politician.  So what political leaders say does make a difference.  

*People who said they were biased in favor of one side and didn't know about the other were counted as biased in favor of only that side.  Disagree on one and don't know about the other were counted as not biased, so the "don't know" category means don't know on both questions.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Aftermath

 A few thoughts in the wake of Tuesday's election:

1.  The basic story: the voters who put Trump over the top in 2024 were expecting something like his first term, which was a pretty standard Republican administration in terms of policy, although not in terms of style.  His second term has been much more radical, and people reacted against that.  

2.  Paul Krugman writes "the 2024 election was mainly about economics", particularly inflation, and that 2025 was too.  This overstates the importance of inflation and understates the importance of immigration in 2024.  I'm not sure about the overall impact of immigration in 2025:  most voters like the reduction in illegal immigration, but regard Trump's methods as too harsh.  But in 2024 the sense that the Biden administration had let things get out of control definitely helped Trump. 

3.  Jamelle Bouie writes "As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump is a phenomenally effective vote-winner, capable of turning out millions of otherwise infrequent voters to deliver the White House and Congress to the Republican Party."  I think this is wrong--his record in the 2016 and 2020 general elections was very poor.  In 2016, he got 45.9% of the vote against Hillary Clinton's 48%, even though Clinton was one of the weakest major-party candidates in a long time.  In 2020 he got 46.8% against Joe Biden's 51.2%--it was only the peculiarities of the Electoral College that made it a close election.  This time, Trump had the advantage of incumbency, which should have been even larger than usual because people tend to rally around leaders in a crisis.  All Trump had to do was act like he was taking Covid seriously, but he couldn't bring himself to do that.  Bouie is right that Trump turned out millions of infrequent voters, but many (or most) turned out in opposition to him.  

This leads to the question of why the party renominated him.  People sometimes say that it was because he was so popular among ordinary Republican voters that he couldn't be stopped.  I don't think that this is it.  The figure shows very favorable ratings (4 or 5 on a -5 to +5 scale of major party presidential candidates since 1952:

31% gave Trump a very favorable rating in 2024, which was better than 2016, but still pretty ordinary--Mitt Romney had 30% in 2012 and George W. Bush had 34% in 2004.  Trump was only a slightly ahead of Harris, who had 29%.*

I think the major reason for Trump's renomination is that leading Republicans didn't put up much resistance.  Why not?  My (tentative) answer it's because being seen as divided is a negative for a party, and it was clear that if Trump lost a battle for the nomination, the party was going to be divided--he wouldn't accept defeat and urge everyone to unite around the nominee.  So their strategy was to hope that once he was out of office, he wouldn't be the center of news news coverage, and that his support would just fade away.  This wasn't unreasonable, since there was no previous experience with a situation like this.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research and Gallup]

*There were two surveys in 2024, one in May and one in October.  Both Democratic and Republican very favorable ratings were higher in October:  29% for Harris vs. 20% for Biden, 31% for Trump in October vs. 25% in May.  My initial version of this post mislabeled May 2024 as 2020.  There was a survey in October 2020, but the report doesn't have a breakdown of the degree of favorability.  

We're going wrong

 Andrew Gelman had a post on "the last time that it seemed that the United States was coming apart, in the late 1960s."  He says that there was there was "the same feeling of things spinning out of control and the idea that conventional politics was failing."  I was going to leave a comment, but it expanded into this post: 

The most important difference is that in the late 1960s there was a lot more confidence in political and institutional leaders.  The Gallup poll sometimes asks people to rate public figures on a scale of +5 to -5.  In October 1968, 79% gave Richard Nixon a positive rating, with 23% giving him a +5, and only 6% giving a -5.   Hubert Humphrey got 72% positive, with 16% giving a +5 and 8 a -5.   In October 2024, 51% gave Donald Trump a positive rating, with 21% at +5 and 35% at -5.  Kamala Harris got 48% positive, with 16% at +5 and 29% at -5.   That is, in 1968 many people thought that both candidates were pretty good, and few people thought that the one they were voting against was terrible; now it's the reverse.  We also have data for confidence in "the people running" various institutions, from the Harris Poll in 1967 and the General Social Survey in 2024.  In 2024, confidence was lower for 12 of the 13 institutions, and about the same for the remaining one (organized labor.

But I think that the sense that things were spinning out of control continued through the 1970s and early 1980s.  Although there were ups and downs, there was a constant background of economic problems ("stagflation"), rising crime and social disorder, and international setbacks.  Confidence in all thirteen institutions fell between 1967 and 1980, although the 1980 levels are higher than today's, with the exception of the military and organized labor.  As far as political leaders:

Both Carter and Reagan got low ratings compared to most previous candidates, but both were favorable on balance:  Carter had 68% positive and Reagan 64%, and both had more +5 than -5 ratings.  Independent candidate John Anderson also had over 60% positive.  

Turning to the general mood, I have to rely on impressions rather than data.  I was born in 1959 and wasn't paying attention to politics and public affairs in the late 1960s, but my sense that most people thought that the country had serious problems, but that its leaders could solve them.  By the late 1970s, there was a feeling that maybe our problems were too big for anyone to solve.  Now there's a feeling that the leaders aren't even trying to solve problems, but are causing them.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]