American greatness

 I recently had a post mentioning this question, which was asked in 1955, 1991, and 1996: 

"Suppose you were talking to a person, in a general way, about the United States and other countries. Which one of these statements best expresses your own point of view? A. The United States is the greatest country in the world, better than all other countries in every possible way. B. The United States is a great country, but so are certain other countries. C. In many respects, certain other countries are better than the United States."

I found that a very similar question has been asked a number of times starting in 2011:  "Which of these statements best describes your opinion about the United States?  (a)  the US stands above all other countries in the world (b) the US is one of the greatest countries in the world, along with some others (c) there are other countries better than the US."

 The changes over the years:

 Support for the "greatest" option declined between 1955 and the 1990s, and seems to have declined more in the 2010s.  Support for "greatest, among others" increased from the 1950s to the 1990s, and has stayed about the same since then.  Support for "others better" went from almost nothing (1%) in the 1950s to around 10% in the 1990s.  It seems to have increased further in the 2010s (it fell in 2017, but rose to its highest level ever in 2019, which was the last time the question was asked).  

One of the surveys was taken in August and September 2015, just as the campaign for the presidential nominations was getting seriously underway, and it had questions about views of several candidates, plus Barack Obama.  The relationship between views of America and approval of the Democrats:

All of them were regarded less favorably by people who said the US "stands above all other countries".  There was no clear difference between "one of the greatest" and "others better" except maybe for Sanders.  So you could say there was a contrast between people who believed in "American exceptionalism" and everyone else.

The Republicans:

For all of them, approval was highest among people who thought the US was the greatest, lowest among people who thought some other countries were better, and in the middle among people who thought America was one of the greatest, along with others.  Donald Trump's slogan, "Make American Great Again," implied that America was no longer great, and if I remember correctly he sometimes said that explicitly, so I was interested in whether the pattern was different for him--that is, if he did relatively well among people who said that some other countries were better than the US.  That was the case to some extent, compared to the other Republicans.  But it wasn't a very strong tendency--among people who thought that some other countries were better, he still had the lowest approval rating of all Republican candidates.  A more striking difference is that the relationship between approval and views of American greatness was weaker for him and Jeb Bush than for the other Republican candidates.  Among Democrats, it was weaker for Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton than for Bernie Sanders.  Views on the "greatness" question have a pretty strong connection to self-rated political ideology--conservatives rate the US more highly than liberals do.   Approval ratings for the moderates on both sides (Biden, Clinton, and Bush) were more weakly connected to opinions on greatness than views of the more ideological candidates (Cruz, Sanders, Rubio, and Carson).  So what these figures suggest is that at this point, people were mostly reacting to Trump as a relative moderate.  That makes sense, since his ideological position was ambiguous then. 

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]