Disturbing the twitterverse

 On September 11, 2020, Paul Krugman tweeted:  "Overall, Americans took 9/11 pretty calmly. Notably, there wasn't a mass outbreak of anti-Muslim sentiment and violence, which could all too easily have happened. And while GW Bush was a terrible president, to his credit he tried to calm prejudice, not feed it."  His tweet got a strong negative reaction on Twitter, as people pointed to examples of anti-Muslim prejudice and hate crimes.  But Krugman was clearly right if you judge the reaction by historical standards.

 A few years ago, I had a post on public opinion about the internment camps for Japanese-Americans during the Second World War.  There were no survey questions that directly asked about approval or disapproval of the camps, but on December 1942, a Gallup poll asked "Do you think the Japanese who were moved inland from the Pacific coast should be allowed to return to the Pacific coast when the war is over?"  Only 35% said yes, 48% said no, and 15% weren't sure.  

 Here are a few more examples of public opinion towards people of Japanese ancestry at the time.  In April 1944, a NORC survey asked "After the war, do you think Japanese living in the United States should have as good a chance as white people to get any kind of job, or do you think white people should have the first chance at any kind of job?" 16% said they should have an equal chance, 21% gave a conditional answer (like "if loyal" or "if a citizen"), and 61% said whites should have the first chance.  The same survey asked whether we should let in "a certain number" of people of different nationalities after the war was over or "stop some of the groups from coming at all."  For Japanese, only 20% said we should allow some in, and 75% said we should stop them from coming in at all.  

In April 1945 another NORC survey asked whether "Japanese who are loyal American citizens should have as good as all other people to get any kind of job, or do you think other people should have the first chance" 56% said they should have as good a chance, and 39% said "other people" should have the first chance.  That is, almost 40% endorsed ethnic discrimination against "loyal American citizens."  A randomly selected half were asked about about "Japs [sic] now living in the United States who are not American citizens".  Only 6% said "as good a chance," 52% said other people first, and 32% said that they should be sent back to Japan.  The same survey asked "Of all the Japanese who are American citizens, about how many do you think would want to do something against the United States if they had the chance?" 15% said practically all of them, 9% said most, another 9% said about half.  That's a total of 33% saying half or more.  34% said a few, 19% said practically none, and 15% said they didn't know. 

In my next post, I'll discuss survey evidence about the effect of 9/11 on attitudes towards Muslims.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Double play

A couple of short items:

1.  I have recently written about a question on whether the United States is the greatest country in the world, one of a number of great countries, or is behind some other countries.  As you might expect, opinions differ by education:  more educated people are less likely to say "greatest in the world."  But the relationship was considerably stronger in 1955 than in 2015:

1955            Greatest   Great    Others better

No college        71%        28%        1%

Some college    55%        43%        2%

College grad     32%         65%       3%

2015             Greatest   Great    Others better

No college        40%        48%        12%

Some college    35%        51%        13%

College grad     27%         60%       13%

The questions aren't exactly the same--the 1955 one said "better than all other countries in every possible way," while the 2015 said "stands above all other countries."  The 1955 statement sounds stronger to me, so maybe the greater educational difference reflects a greater gap between the options.  The 1955 version was also asked in 1991 and 1996, so I'll look at educational differences on those in a future post.

2.  When did partisan polarization on vaccines begin?  Ross Douthat says "the mainstream right clearly found it easier to be uncomplicatedly pro-vaccine when anti-vax sentiment was coded as something for crunchy 'Left Coast' parents, as opposed to conservatives skeptical of the public-health bureaucracy ..."  Other people have noticed that in the months before the 2020 election some prominent Democrats expressed skepticism about a "Trump vaccine."  So did the partisan division once go in the opposite direction?  A survey from September 18-21, 2020 asked "How likely, if at all, are you to get the first generation COVID-19 (coronavirus) vaccine, as soon as it's available?"  The results by party:

                             Very     Somewhat    Not very     Not at all

Democrats              10%        34%            28%          28%

Independents          12%        33%            26%          40%

Republicans             9%         28%           28%          35%

The differences are small, but Democrats were somewhat more likely to say that they would take it right away.   It's possible that this reflects a general difference in confidence in the scientific/medical authorities, or it may involve the politics of the coronavirus--from an early stage, Republican leaders (especially Trump) suggested that it just wasn't that big a deal and would go away by itself, so Republicans may have been less likely to think that they needed to do anything.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

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]