Tolerance--a long-delayed part 2

This post is inspired by the controversy over Tom Cotton's NY Times op-ed which let to the resignation of the Times opinion editor.  Some people argue that liberals have become less committed to free speech (or that "liberals," who are committed to the principle, are being replaced by "progressives," who aren't).   To quote Bari Weiss "the New Guard has a different worldview . . .in which the right of people to feel emotionally and psychologically safe trumps what were previously considered core liberal values, like free speech."  Is there any evidence of this in surveys?  The basic trend is simply increasing support for free speech, as I discussed in this post, which looked at changes since the 1970s in whether certain kinds of people should be allowed to teach in college, make a public speech in your community, or have a  book in the public library.  For four of the examples--a gay man, a Communist, an atheist, and someone who believes in "letting the military run the country"--there were steady upward trends.  For "a person who believes that blacks are genetically inferior" there was no real change.  I suggest that this difference was because there was increasing disapproval of the view that blacks were genetically inferior, and that worked against the general tendency to support more freedom of speech.

What if we look at the trends in particular groups?   Usually, they are about the same--all groups move in the same direction at about the same pace.  But views about whether "a person who believes that blacks are genetically inferior" (I'll say "racist" for short) should be allowed to teach in a college are different*.  Breaking it down by race and education:

 


Support for allowing such a person to teach has grown among whites without college degrees, and among blacks, but has declined among whites with college degrees.  Looking more closely, the trend seems to have stopped or even reversed slightly among whites without college degrees in the last ten years or so.  That may be true for black college graduates too, although the numbers are too small to be sure.  But the basic story is a difference between white college graduates and everyone else.  As a result of the differing trends, there's been convergence among the groups:  in the 1970s, white college graduates were a lot more favorable than others, but now they're only slightly more favorable (and in some years, the black college graduate sample has been more favorable than the white college graduate sample). 


I followed by looking at the differences among college graduates by self-rated ideology.

 


Once again, there are different trends.  For liberals, there's been gradual decline in support.  For conservatives and moderates, it stayed about the same until about 10 years ago, and seems to have declined since then.  Once liberals were more in favor of allowing a racist to teach, but now there's no clear difference by ideology.

This raises a question of whether the change among college-educated liberals is general or limited to issues involving race.  There's no relevant data (as far as I know)--the GSS asks about someone who favors military rule, but that's not an active political issue.  What you'd want is a question on tolerance of something like a person who is opposed to same-sex marriage. 

There is also a question of whether the trends will change.  If you extrapolate from the first figure, within a few years college-educated whites will be less tolerant on this issue than blacks.  That doesn't seem likely to me.  At the moment, I think the position that blacks are "genetically inferior" has come to be almost universally condemned, even among whites--you can't go much farther in that direction.  So support for the principle of tolerance will drive the trends, and I think support for that principle will continue to grow.  I'll discuss why I think that in a future post.  

*There are also the items on whether a person like that should be allowed to make a speech or have a book in the public library.  I haven't looked at them--the one on teaching in college seemed most relevant to current controversies.