This morning comes a poll asking if we are proud to be Americans, published by Issues & Insights and done by the TIPP polling organization. In a spooky coincidence, it relates to the “cohort change” post immediately below, which I filed yesterday.
TIPP sliced the data in many different groups by gender, ethnicity, age, politics, urban vs. rural, etc. In every group except one, a majority said they were either very or extremely proud to be Americans.
The not-so-proud group was young people in the 18-24 age cohort, of whom only 36% were very or extremely proud of our nation. If the “cohorts don’t change their beliefs” hypothesis Robert Putnam propounds is correct, this bunch will be trouble going forward.
OTOH, arguing that we do change as we age is the wisdom in the trope “if you aren’t a socialist at 20 you have no heart, if you aren’t conservative at 30 you have no head.” It’s a quote variously attributed to Churchill, Disraeli, George Bernard Shaw, and others but its actual origin is unknown, lost in the mists of centuries.
The “change with age” trope describes my own political evolution. I was raised in an FDR/Democrat household and became conservative in my late 20s and early 30s. Reading Irving Kristol’s op-ed essays in the 1970s Wall Street Journal was a definite contributing factor.
