Tolerance

For a long time, going back to at least the 1950s, there seemed to be a growth in tolerance of people with unpopular opinions.  Recently there have been some claims that things are moving in the other direction.  Often these are about particular kinds of people, like liberals, millenials, or college students, but I'll start with people in general.  The General Social Survey has a series of questions going back to the 1970s about whether various kinds of people should be allowed to "make a speech in your community," "teach in a college or university," and if their books should be removed from your public library.   It asks about five types of people:  a Communist, "a man who admits that he is a homosexual," "a person who advocates doing away with elections and letting the military run the country" (or militarist for short), "a person who believes that blacks are genetically inferior" (racist),  and "a person who is against all churches and religion" (atheist).   I computed a score of tolerance for each one by adding the three items (which were all yes/no).  The means:

Support for the rights of a type of person depends on two things:  how you feel about what they say or do and how committed you are to the general principle of tolerance.  The more rapid increase for the "man who admits that he is a homosexual" can plausibly be explained by a trend towards acceptance of gays and lesbians.  On the other side, the lack of an increase for the racist can be explained by a trend toward stronger disapproval of those views.  The other three all have very similar upward trends.  Apart from the difference in trends, the year-to-year changes are very similar.  I thought there might be some distinctive movements at least for the Communist, as people might have seen it as less of a threat after the breakup of the Soviet Union, but there's no evidence of that.  The period 2004-10 saw a plateau or slight decline in tolerance, but then it started up again through 2016.  So unless you think that people happen to have become more sympathetic to Communists, militarists, and opponents of religion, it seems that there has been and still is a fairly steady growth in support for the principle of toleration.