Wayne Selcher1
21 de maio de 2026
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Em parceria com o Observatório Político dos Estados Unidos (OPEU), o Boletim Lua Nova republica, em cinco partes, a análise do professor Wayne Selcher, de Elizabethtown College, sobre a erosão do consenso democrático nos Estados Unidos. Este texto é o primeiro de uma série para o OPEU sobre as notícias políticas nos Estados Unidos. O texto foi originalmente publicado em 29 de fevereiro de 2024, no site do OPEU.
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Abstract: This article identifies and examines the major characteristics, trends, and tendencies in American political culture and political performance that have been evolving in recent years, for a comprehensive picture of how Americans perceive and believe about their country and its political system. The analysis places the findings in a comparative perspective, provides relevant insights from other Western democracies, and discusses the implications of the findings for American democracy. Many links to high-quality, cost-free online sources are offered to facilitate further study of relevant aspects of the contemporary situation of the United States.
An Ongoing Crisis of National Unity, Identity, and Self-Confidence
The concept of “political culture” in political sociology can be defined as “The attitudes, beliefs, and values which underpin the operation of a particular political system. These were seen as including knowledge and skills about the operation of the political system, positive and negative emotional feelings towards it, and evaluative judgements about the system” (Oxford Reference). Political culture goes beyond short-term public opinion about particular events and personalities of a moment in time to examine the more enduring, broader, and deeper perceptions, norms, understandings, identities, and patterns that a population or a sector of that population develop and rely on in their political behavior. Political culture is the attitude environment within which political perception and activity take place. It changes over time, as both cause and consequence of concrete social, economic, and political events and forces.
When considering the many national poll results of attitudes used as references in this article, it is vital, for the sake of balance from the standpoint of the individual, to note from the outset that Pew Research found in May 2023 that family time is by far the most important aspect of life for Americans, not politics. Also to observe that, as demonstrated by Gallup, American polling exhibits a long-standing tendency for individuals to rate the quality of their personal lives and opportunities differently and much more favorably than they rate aspects of the national situation (at a ratio of five-to-one in January 2022), although the degree of difference varies over time.
At the national level, the validity of the formerly common nationalistic designation of the United States as “exceptional” has come into serious question in the last decade or so, as the country struggles with a crisis in national unity and self-confidence. The national unity implied by the “United We Stand!” slogan after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 completely disappeared by the 2010s. In fact, the domestic aftermath of the terrorist attacks helped to create the current misinformation and conspiracy theory atmosphere that is skeptical of official narratives. A Washington Post-ABC poll on the twentieth anniversary of the attacks summarized: “Ahead of the 20th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on Saturday, more than 8 in 10 Americans say those events changed the country in a lasting way. Nearly half (46 percent) say the events of 9/11 changed the country for the worse, while 33 percent say they changed the country for the better.”
The two resultant major wars did not turn out well for the United States or in American public opinion–the military mission in Afghanistan failed embarrassingly after two decades, as the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, while Iran now has more influence in Iraq than the United States does. The “Long War” against terrorism has been replaced as a central concern by rising competition with China and reactions to the ongoing 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The 2008 and 2023 bank failures and the post-COVID inflation rate made many Americans question the basic health of the financial system and the economy. The COVID pandemic of 2020 into 2022 had the net effect of sharply dividing the country ideologically, pro and anti-vaccination and regarding government mandates during the pandemic, with a consequent challenging of the overwhelmed governmental and health care institutions.
In mid-2023, according to Gallup, a “near-record low” of 39 percent were “extremely proud” to be Americans, with 60 percent of Republicans, 29 percent of Democrats, and 33 percent of independents expressing that level of feeling. Younger generations (18 to 29 years of age) tend to be more critical of the current national situation and to show less pride in being American, given the experiences of their lifetimes.
Challenges to Governance and Performance–
The U.S. ranks fourth in the world in territory and third in population. The size and growing diversity of the country on many measures present serious challenges to democratic and representative governance. The central place of liberty, individualism, and suspicion of central authority in American political culture, combined with localism and the way federalism disperses power in the country, tends to make governing more difficult at the national level. There are major differences within the country by region, social class, race, education level, religious preference, and urban vs. suburban vs. rural settings, among other variables. To take regional variations as an example, Bill Schneider expressed the regional clash of values succinctly in his 2018 book “Standoff: How America Became Ungovernable,” as “People in Kennesaw [a small town in Georgia] worry about their children getting into heaven. People in Bethesda [a Maryland suburb of Washington, DC] worry about their children getting into Yale.”Colin Woodard’s best-selling 2012 book, “American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America” classified the United States as a “Balkanized federation,” divided by history into eleven regions, or “nations.”
“North America was settled by people with distinct religious, political, and ethnographic characteristics, creating regional cultures that have been at odds with one another ever since. Subsequent immigrants didn’t confront or assimilate into an ‘American’ or ‘Canadian’ culture, but rather into one of the eleven distinct regional ones that spread over the continent each staking out mutually exclusive territory.”
As a result, in early 2023, Woodard found significant regional variations in a survey that asked about perceptions regarding ten alleged threats to democracy in the United States today, in voting patterns relative to Trump, and in frequency of incidents of gun violence. Further, he argues,
“The United States’ civic narrative–the pursuit of the American Experiment in liberal democratic self-government–is the glue that holds it together. Without it, the federation has always been vulnerable to collapse because it is in reality a Balkanized federation of rival regional cultures–‘stateless nations’ if you will–that otherwise agree on very little.”
That American civic narrative, traditionally the key uniting element of American political culture, is under serious strain today. The national motto of E Pluribus Unum (“From Many, One”) is becoming more difficult to put into practice. There is a widespread feeling that the country has “lost its way” (although not just a recent sentiment), but there is major disagreement about what that national “way” or purpose should be or just where being “lost” has taken the country. In May 2023, Gallup noted that only 18 percent of Americans were satisfied with the way things were going in the nation. A June 2022 Pew Research summary poll on American attitudes toward their democracy showed that
“About six-in-ten U.S. adults (58%) say they are not satisfied with the way democracy is working in America, according to a spring 2021 survey of people in 17 advanced economies around the world. A median of 41% across all the publics surveyed said the same about their own democracy. In addition, the vast majority of Americans (85%) said that the U.S. political system either needs major changes (43%) or needs to be completely reformed (42%). Among U.S. adults who say they want significant political reform, 58% said they are not confident the system can change.”
An April 2023 CBS News poll noted that 72 percent of the public believed that things were “out of control” in the country, with politics and the economy being the objects of greatest concern. Gallup observed in May 2023 that “Americans lack confidence in a variety of key U.S leaders on economic matters.” Republican House Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (Georgia), known for her tendentious comments, made a suggestion on Twitter in February 2023 that “We need a national divorce. We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government.”
A poll taken in response to that radical statement by Economist/YouGov found that 23 percent of respondents agreed and that 21 percent would support the secession of their state from the union, reactions that included both parties and independents. However legally and geographically unfeasible the proposal or however serious the poll’s responses, the results indicate remarkable national disunity on a very fundamental matter.
Comparative Insights
When Americans compare their country with the rest of the world, contrast is nearly always drawn superficially with troubled developing countries or failed states in dire conditions, in a deliberately self-congratulatory way. However, some more comparable, standard international statistical references are far more useful to place the current American situation in a broader context to understand more fully how things have gone awry, some of the “whys” of the national discontent that is now a very prominent part of the political culture, more so than in many Western democracies. The Twitter postings of John Burn-Murdoch, renowned data journalist and columnist for the Financial Times of London, are quite well-informed, documented, and revealing about social conditions in the United States and about the contrasts between the U.S. and the U.K. on many points, such as the great difference in conservative politics–“UK Cons are *way* more liberal than US Reps on ~every measure.”
In spite of its unusually resilient economy with a high per-capita income, innovation, and output (at about 25 percent of world GDP), the United States ranked tenth in international competitiveness in the World Competitiveness Center’s survey in 2022, down from the first rank in 2018. The United States has relatively high spending on health care and education, but has fallen behind many other industrialized democracies on key measures of well-being, such as education, public health, and life expectancy.
The United States ranks far behind most high-income countries in life expectancy, and its average life expectancy is declining. This public health deficiency long predates the COVID-19 pandemic and affects all social categories, but especially working-age adults and persons of color. A study, “Falling Behind,” in the American Journal of Public Health (2023) concluded that, relative to other countries, “The US life expectancy disadvantage began in the 1950s and has steadily worsened over the past 4 decades. Dozens of globally diverse countries have outperformed the United States. Causal factors appear to have been concentrated in the Midwest and South.” As Burn-Murdoch states it, citing standard statistics: “*The average American* has the same chance of a long and healthy life as someone born in the most deprived part of England, a place with the highest rates of relationship breakdown and some of the highest rates of antidepressant prescribing.”
The United States scores higher on most measures of inequality, such as income distribution, than do the other major Western democracies. U.S. income inequality is higher than that in all West European democracies, Japan, and Israel, and not far below that of Bulgaria, with a long-term tendency toward greater concentration of income and net worth at the very top. Pew Research noted in 2020 that
“The growth in income in recent decades has tilted to upper-income households. At the same time, the U.S. middle class, which once comprised the clear majority of Americans, is shrinking. Thus, a greater share of the nation’s aggregate income is now going to upper-income households and the share going to middle- and lower-income households is falling… The share of American adults who live in middle-income households has decreased from 61% in 1971 to 51% in 2019.”
A 2023 working paper from the Rand Corporation showed graphically the nearly constant faster growth of incomes in the top five percent of the population, contrasted with slower growth of those in the lower percentiles, relative to GDP growth during and after the mid-1970s.
“In other words, over these 43 years [1975 to 2018], per capita GDP grew 118 percent, but at the bottom, income only rose 13.5 percent; at the top, it grew by 166 percent… The difference between 1975 and 2018, in terms of the share of income taken home by the bottom 90 percent, is 17 percentage points—or $2.5 trillion in a single year. Over the whole 43 years, it’s $47 trillion. That’s so large, it becomes difficult to interpret. But that’s what happens when incomes at the bottom grow at a rate that’s about 20 percent of GDP, and top incomes grow at 300 percent of GDP over four decades.”
Working-class Americans (defined as those without a four-year college degree) are in a disadvantaged position relative to the level of protections and benefits that workers in most other developed countries enjoy. Many U.S. workers are increasingly stressed and suffer precarious or desperate financial situations, increased health issues, and shorter life spans, especially with the immediate post-COVID inflation rate. Upward social mobility has become far more difficult because of the high degree of income inequality, including as compared with several key Western democracies. The OECD notes “In five OECD countries (Chile, Costa Rica, Israel, Turkey and the United States), more than 20% of children live in relative poverty.” The U.S. child poverty rate is similar to those of Bulgaria and Chile in OECD statistics. “Downward mobility” is a concern among the young.
The Legatum Institute (UK) in 2023 ranked the United States at 19th among 167 countries on its Prosperity Index, a composite of many measures of well-being; the country ranked only 69th in the “safety and security” and “health” categories and 29th in “personal freedom.” The Social Progress Imperative NGO ranks the United States at 25th place among 169 countries in its Social Progress Index, a composite measure of 60 social and environmental outcomes. Sub-nationally, there are major differences between Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics in regard to life expectancy, infant mortality, homicides, and imprisonment.
In its 2022 Human Freedom Index report, the Cato Institute ranked the United States 23rd among 165 jurisdictions for 2020 in human freedom, “a broad measure that encompasses personal, civil, and economic freedom,” made up of 83 indicators. According to the Global Gender Gap Report 2022 of the World Economic Forum, the United States ranks 27th among the 146 countries analyzed in its achievements in closing the gender gap in economic opportunities, education, health, and political leadership. Transparency International ranked the United States at 24th out of 180 countries in its 2022 report on perceptions of public sector corruption, on a scale from 1 (least corrupt) to 180 (most corrupt).
The U.S. has a much higher rate of death by firearm (homicide and suicide) than any other developed democracy, with frequent mass shootings (many with racial or ethnic motivations or involving children), less-publicized neighborhood shootings with a higher total impact, and increasing threats of violence against public officials, including election officials and workers. The FBI reported in 2021 that hate crimes in 2020 were at a 12-year high. The FBI report covering the year of 2021, with more complete data, showed another record high, including a several-year spike in anti-Jewish incidents.
As of 2023, the United States had the highest total number of persons in prison and the sixth highest incarceration rate in the world, measured as the percentage of the population in prison, behind El Salvador, Rwanda, and Cuba, among others, and very far above other Western democracies. Those in prison are disproportionally persons of color, an aspect of both U.S. racial and ethnic tensions and the failure of decades of drug policies, including about marijuana. Police procedures have become a major and divisive issue. For context, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, “The United States far exceeds most wealthy democracies in killings by police [per capita], and officers seldom face legal consequences… Black Americans are… about three times more likely to be killed by police [than Whites].”
The 2022 World Happiness Report placed the U.S. at 16th in life satisfaction among the more than 150 countries surveyed in polls. A Pew Research survey in December 2022 concluded that “At least four-in-ten U.S. adults (41%) have experienced high levels of psychological distress at least once since the early stages of the coronavirus outbreak.” The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services noted in January 2023: “Nearly 1 in 4 adults 18 and older, and 1 in 3 among adults aged 18 to 25, had a mental illness in the past year.”
In May 2023 the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory stating that the country was suffering an “epidemic of loneliness,” deepened by the COVID-19 pandemic, a “public health crisis of loneliness, isolation, and lack of connection,” which weakens the social fabric, in addition to its individual health risks. (One can only wonder what the longer-term effects on personality and citizenship will be of the large-scale immersion of youth into virtual reality and social media platforms.). Mental health is becoming a major national concern, particularly among youth, as is substance abuse, including growing deaths from fentanyl. An October 2022 “Stress in America” survey by the American Psychological Association concluded that “a majority of adults are disheartened by government and political divisiveness, daunted by historic inflation levels, and dismayed by widespread violence.”
Challenges to Traditional Values
In contrast to traditional American optimism, an April 2023 poll by Pew Research discovered that
“Sizable majorities of U.S. adults say that in 2050–just over 25 years away–the U.S. economy will be weaker, the United States will be less important in the world, political divisions will be wider and there will be a larger gap between the rich and the poor. Far fewer adults predict positive developments in each of these areas… And when Americans reflect on the country’s past, the present looks worse by comparison. Around six-in-ten (58%) say that life for people like them is worse today than it was 50 years ago…”
An American Perspectives survey done in January 2021, by the American Enterprise Institute soon after the attack on the Capitol, turned up widespread dissatisfaction and a considerable questioning about the realities of American life and democracy, a rejection of past platitudes.
“There is a great deal of skepticism among the public about how well democracy reflects the interests of everyday Americans as opposed to the wealthy and well-connected. The view that the political system is rigged against conservatives and people who hold traditional values is also widespread, particularly on the political right…. There is bipartisan agreement that the American system of democracy is failing to address the concerns and needs of the public. Nearly seven in 10 (69 percent) Americans agree that American democracy serves the interests of only the wealthy and powerful. Seventy percent of Democrats and 66 percent of Republicans hold this view… The belief that the political system works against the interests of conservatives also finds considerable support among the public. Nearly half (48 percent) of Americans believe the political system is stacked against conservatives and people with traditional values. Roughly as many Americans (47 percent) disagree with this statement…
A majority (56 percent) of Republicans support the use of force as a way to arrest the decline of the traditional American way of life. Forty-three percent of Republicans express opposition to this idea. Significantly fewer independents (35 percent) and Democrats (22 percent) say the use of force is necessary to stop the disappearance of traditional American values and way of life. Although most Americans reject the use of violence to achieve political ends, there is still significant support for it among the public. Nearly three in 10 (29 percent) Americans completely or somewhat agree with the statement: ‘If elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves even if it requires taking violent actions.’ More than two-thirds (68 percent) of Americans disagree with this statement.”
Fundamental (“bedrock”) values once considered vital to the national character and success are being challenged and are changing rapidly at the societal level in ways that are unsettling for some Americans and encouraging for others. A Wall Street Journal-NORC poll in March 2023 stirred commentary because it concluded that
“Patriotism, religious faith, having children and other priorities that helped define the national character for generations are receding in importance to Americans… Some 38% of respondents said patriotism was very important to them, and 39% said religion was very important. That was down sharply from when the Journal first asked the question in 1998, when 70% deemed patriotism to be very important, and 62% said so of religion. The share of Americans who say that having children, involvement in their community and hard work are very important values has also fallen. Tolerance for others, deemed very important by 80% of Americans as recently as four years ago, has fallen to 58% since then… Aside from money, all age groups, including seniors, attached far less importance to these priorities and values than when pollsters asked about them in 1998 and 2019. But younger Americans in particular place low importance on these values, many of which were central to the lives of their parents.”
A June 2022 Gallup poll found that
“A record-high 50% of Americans rate the overall state of moral values in the U.S. as ‘poor,’ and another 37% say it is ‘only fair.’ Just 1% think the state of moral values is ‘excellent’ and 12% ‘good’…Beyond consideration of others, racism, lack of faith/religion, lack of morals, sense of entitlement and lack of family structure were mentioned by the respondents as causes of the moral decline… Americans’ views of the state of moral values in the U.S. are dismal, and their expectations for the future are grim. This has generally been the case over the course of the 20-year trend, but negative ratings of the current state of moral values are the worst they have ever been.”
One of the most distinctive ways in which the U.S. has differentiated itself from other wealthy democracies is in its higher degree of religiosity. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found in July 2023 that 79% of adults say that they believe in God or a higher power, 69% say that they believe in angels, and 56% believe in the existence of Satan. But, according to Pew Research in late 2021, “Self-identified Christians make up 63% of U.S. population in 2021, down from 75% a decade ago.” Given this continuing decline, religious commitment has taken on a strong political significance in the last several decades, in terms of both liberal and (especially) conservative denominations, as each one responds to the changing national society according to its own interpretation of Christianity, religious pluralism, and secularization. In the minds of many, especially conservatives, being an American and being a Christian are related.
A major October 2022 poll by Pew Research on American attitudes toward religion stated that
“Overall, six-in-ten U.S. adults–including nearly seven-in-ten Christians–say they believe the founders ‘originally intended’ for the U.S. to be a Christian nation. And 45% of U.S. adults–including about six-in-ten Christians–say they think the country ‘should be’ a Christian nation. A third say the U.S. ‘is now’ a Christian nation… but the survey also finds widely differing opinions about what it means to be a ‘Christian nation’ and to support ‘Christian nationalism.’”
Even so, the character and morality of candidates in their personal lives does not carry as much weight as it used to in voters’ assessments of candidates for office, including even among conservatives and evangelical Christians, who were traditionally demanding in that respect, but readily made their peace in 2016 with former President Trump’s rhetoric, behavior, and character flaws because of his policies. Evangelicals are heavily White and made up 14 percent of the public in 2020, with a tendency for that percentage to decline. They and Christian nationalists made considerable progress under Trump and with the federal judges and Supreme Court justices that he nominated.
Uncomfortable with America’s growing religious diversity and multiculturalism, the decline in church membership (now under 50 percent of the public), the straying from traditional values, and the growth of the religiously-non-affiliated in the public (about 30 percent), evangelicals and Christian nationalists remain among Trump and the Republican Party’s most faithful supporters. Concern about discrimination against Christians is a major worry of this group, backed up by some public support. In 2021, Pew Research found that “In the U.S., for example, nearly half say Christians face at least some discrimination, though fewer than a third say the same in the European countries surveyed.”
A major Public Religion Research Institute and Brookings Institution survey of the topic in 2023 stated that “10% of Americans are avowed Christian nationalists, what the survey calls ‘adherents,’ while an additional 19% are sympathetic to Christian nationalist ideals.” Their goal is to make America an officially Christian nation to promote more conservative values, even though that legal step appears to contradict the First Amendment of the Constitution and is opposed by most Protestant denominations and a majority of Americans, especially among the young, who tend to hold weaker religious ties. Bills to promote Christianity in the public sphere, including in schools, such as with “In God We Trust” mottos and posting the Ten Commandments, are being presented in some state legislatures and locally, particularly in Republican-dominated states. A common rationale employed is that the long-standing legal doctrine of “separation of church and state” is contrived and contrary to the principles of the founders of the republic.
Threats to national unity, traditions, and social peace were dramatized worldwide by international alarm at the violent assault on the U.S. Congress by a pro-Trump mob trying to prevent a peaceful transition of power to Joe Biden on January 6, 2021 and the subsequent lack of Republican concern about Trump’s role in encouraging the riot and his other well-documented attempts (judicial and otherwise) to reverse the 2020 election that he lost. The Republican Party has shown unwillingness to come to honest terms with the threat to constitutional government and democracy that the startling event and the election denial process represented, instead denying any wrongdoing on Trump’s part and preferring to “move on” from the 2020 election, even as Trump’s dominant position in the 2024 party nomination process continued in mid-2023. Heated partisan arguments in 2021 and 2022 about whether the attack was an “insurrection” or not seem far from the main point for scholars of democracy in the Western world. Republican attempts to ignore or to excuse it, trying to deflect public attention elsewhere, are much worse.
In somewhat the same historically revisionist vein motivated by partisanship, there are “political correctness” attempts by both liberals and conservatives to discredit or “cancel” historical persons, political stances, books, school curricula, speech, or actions that they consider unacceptable or offensive to their vision of what the country should be. After years of condemning liberal “judicial activism,” “government overreach,” “indoctrination,” “cancel culture,” “political correctness,” “identity politics,” “weaponization of government,” and “victimology,” many conservatives have eagerly adopted and implemented their own versions of the same styles, without any apparent sense of irony.
Both Republicans and large corporations are reconsidering their historic relationship of cooperation, as some major corporations adopt more progressive public stances. Some conservatives are calling for resistance to companies who have “given in to the left,” an effort led by Florida governor Ron DeSantis against the Disney corporation, who affirmed, “Old-fashioned corporate Republicanism won’t do in a world where the left has hijacked big business.”
* Este texto não reflete necessariamente as opiniões do Boletim Lua Nova ou do CEDEC. Gosta do nosso trabalho? Apoie o Boletim Lua Nova!2
- Wayne A. Selcher, PhD, é professor Emérito de Estudos Internacionais no Departmento de Ciência Política, na Elizabethtown College, PA, USA, e colaborador regular do OPEU. É fundador e editor da WWW Virtual Library: International Affairs Resources, um guia para pesquisa on-line sobre os mais diversos tópicos. Contato: wayneselcher@comcast.net. ↩︎
- Referências imagéticas: A crowd-erected gallows hangs near the United States Capitol during the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol (Credit: Tyler Merbler from the United States/Wikimedia Commons) ↩︎
