I thought of this after hearing a Dan Rather blurb on the radio last week. He was talking about how “America is better” than much of today’s discourse, and referred to shared American values, such as the right to vote.
I’ve given it a bit of thought, and am hard pressed to come up with anything that I truly would consider a widely shared national value. I mean, I can come up with plenty of things folk SAY they respect and share, but the practice seems somewhat different. Take Rather’s “voting” example. Given our nation’s 230 year history, it is hard to say that has been universally treasured over time. The civil rights act was only 50+ years ago, and even today, many folk convincingly suggest apparent efforts towards voter suppression. There seem to be a whole bunch of things that folk advocate for themselves, but not necessarily for everyone else.
I’m not trying to turn this into a criticism of the current administration, and I welcome folk offering their thoughts about nations other than the US. I wonder if it is meaningless to speak of shared national values in a nation as large and diverse as the US.
About the best I’ve been able to come up with is a general respect for the rule of law, and the judicial system. Though even that has issues.
If feeling modestly cynical, I could suggest some APPARENT shared values which aren’t very complimentary, but I don’t need to take the thread too far in that direction right off the top. Of course, even these tendencies are largely independent of political affiliation.
There are lots of shared national values, but you don’t notice them for the same reason fish don’t notice water. Note that a shared value doesn’t have to be universal.
For example: very few Americans think we should have a hereditary monarchy. You might think that’s obvious, but there are countries where that is normal and accepted.
The general independence of younger generations from their parents is a commonly shared value. In many cultures it is normal for the parents of adults to take a much larger role in the daily life of their adult children than in America.
There are a ton of these. We notice where the edges of our shared values are in conflict, and we notice where values are not shared, but the vast majority of values that we share are mostly ignored.
But there’s something I noticed a while back about the US and the attitudes of its people towards its government. In most countries, there is a national pride but it tends to be attached to the land and to the culture — our beautiful Lake Whatchamacallit, our special yogurt concoction, our uniquely flavored distilled whiskey, etc. In the US, a really substantial portion of our national identity is attached, amazingly enough, to a bunch of abstractions! Our Way of Government!! Our Democratic Principles!! I’ve read more than a double-handful of science fiction stories over the years in which some Americans got themselves stranded / fell through a wormhole / colonized the 3rd planet orbiting Beta Draconis / got flung back in time / etc, and they persevere and triumph by bringing America with them, setting up a bicameral legislature and an executive ofice and establishing one person one vote and barring any official state religions and enshrining freedom of speech and freedom of the press and so on.
I don’t think I’ve ever read similar tales of French or German or Chinese or Sudanese people so bent on recreating their form of government elsewhere as some kind of “here I stand” statement to the universe. I could believe there might be such tales featuring main characters from Britain or Israel, which have at least a modicum of that kind of attitude, but I think the US has more of that kind of national identity than anywhere else.
Admittedly, there’s a striking lack of consensus on exactly what the “American Way” actually means in the final analysis. (Is the Bible involved? Gun rights? Freedom from police officers being officious? Successful capitalist profit-making? I farmed it and you can’t take it away from me for taxes?) But we’ve got a lot of Americans who believe that there is an “American Way” and we tend to identify with it even more than with the land or our cuisine or our language or even our pop culture, nonetheless.
Nothing is universal, but I think there is general agreement in terms of freedom to criticize the government. If Trump ordered Federal agents to arrest Dana Milbank purely based on his OP-eds against Trump, I think all but a sliver of the die hard Trump supporters would be taken aback, while in some other countries arrest would be the expected result of such blatant criticism.
100% disagree with Rather that the right to vote is a universal American value. Given the large amount of effort spent on restricting voting rights, it’s trivial to see that segments of the population think there are many people that don’t deserve to vote.
Alabama is probably going to elect a senator that thinks Muslims should be banned from office (and probably worse) so I’m not sure freedom of religion is universal.
Freedom of speech is more universal. I think very few people would say expressing your opinion should be restricted. Disagreement here is more about what distribution methods should be required to allow any speech.
I think we talk a good game about our values, but most of us can be easily persuaded to go against that “good game” in support of a person or movement that is charismatic enough. Especially if we are convinced that our survival is on the line.
Just a decade ago, we seemed to be unified in our suspicion of Russia. Now, 30-40% of us seem to think that Russia is an American ally. I have no doubt that the same percentage could be convinced that reinstating chattel slavery is consistent with the spirit of the Constitution and the 1st Amendment should be amended to allow some forms of government-sanctioned punishment. Then there is the huge number of people who don’t give a fuck. As long as their lives aren’t disrupted in a noticeable way, they don’t care what values the country wants to embraced.
Really, the only thing I think we have in common is that we like being able to buy stuff whenever we want, in whatever quantity we want. Take away that right and we would probably all go “OH HELL NAW!”
Most countries have shared values. The Germans hate inflation and war. The Japanese have made politeness a national religion. Britain apparently worships the NHS given that it was a huge part of their Olympic celebration, which even many liberals in the US found a bit odd. I’d honor the RAF personally, that’s who saved Britain last time they faced total destruction, but I guess short memories are also a British trait.
As for the US, we don’t like monarchs, we don’t like long term family dynasties(although we do like short term ones just fine, like the Kennedys, Clintons, and Bushes). We are individualistic and suspicious of government. We are overtly patriotic to a point that many foreigners think is profane. We are more welcoming of immigrants than any other country, although we’ve always had our problems in that regard. And yet, our immigrants become fully integrated within a couple of generations. That does not seem to be happening in Europe, although that’s understandable given that unlike America, Europe is actually a homeland for various ethnic groups who are expected to regard their countries as first for the indiginous people of those homelands, with immigrants as guests rather than full fledged members of the club.
We also love our celebrity culture. I don’t know if this is the same in other countries, but if Jennifer Aniston has a wedding it’s getting more coverage than a dirty bomb going off in Miami.
More welcoming than Argentina, Peru, Colombia, or Brazil? I seriously doubt it. The USA thinks it’s more welcoming “than any other country,” because we refuse to remember that Latin America even exists independently of us, let alone understand it. So we compare ourselves merely to Europe and the Far East, and caricatures of them at that.
As for shared values of the major political factions and Pew typology groups, there are certainly a few typical Yank assumptions: a lot of liberalism (in the technical poli-sci sense), pro-growth thinking, and individualism. We like Life, Freedom, and Prosperity, not necessarily in that order. So, yeah, there are some.
True, I don’t know how it is in Latin America. Usually when the US is compared to other countries, it’s compared to Canada and Europe. If Latin America is more progressive on immigration than everyone else, that’s something that should be more widely publicized.
I think the overwhelming majority of Americans support the free market and capitalism; support the basic structure of our legal system (while disagreeing over some of the details and individuals and apparent misuses); support the existence of the states as distinct political entities while seeing the federal government as a higher level government; regard things like public education, policing, fire-fighting, highway construction, and the armed forces as legitimate government functions; agree with the general principle of taxation (while arguing over specific taxes); agree with the existence of the President, the two houses of Congress, Governors, and state legislatures; and support the idea that everyone is entitled to general legal equality.
Hmmmm, that seems less about values than consensus about certain political issues. There is some overlap, to be sure, we revere our armed forces in a way similar to how Canadians revere Medicare. But I don’t know how much of a gut commitment we have to two houses of Congress beyond status quo bias.
Other democratic countries have different political systems. The fact that we believe ours is preferable seems like a value. It’s not like we measured the difference between a President and a Prime Minister and chose the one that fit our country better.
That’s pretty much how I’d define a value; a consensus that doesn’t have an objective rational basis. It’s just a widespread opinion.
But is that status quo bias or a genuine affection for a Presidential, bicameral system? Likewise with health care, it seems that nations with single payer really like single payer and nations with multi payer have no desire to go single payer. When people like what they have, they want to keep it.
I’m probably just being confusing here, but I do think that certain aspects of American governance are shared values. You mentioned states as distinct political entities, and I think that’s one.
What do you see the difference being between a shared value and a status quo bias?
A consensus like “smoking is bad for you” is, in my opinion, more than just a shared value. You can produce objective evidence to support the idea that smoking is bad for you. So it’s a consensus because people have rational reasons to believe in it.
A consensus like “families are good” is a shared value but it has no national character. It’s a universal human trait and it’s probably genetic.
National shared values, to me, are consensuses that don’t fit those groups. They don’t have a rational basis to support them and they’re not universal. So why do people in one country believe a President is better than a Prime Minister and people in another country believe the reverse? Because that’s what they’ve experienced. As you put it, it’s a status quo bias.
It doesn’t mean it’s not real. A status quo that has existed for a few centuries will build up stability and respect that will make it work better than the alternatives regardless of whether it’s objectively better than those alternatives.
I guess that pressure must be pretty intense when the choices of where to make millions of dollars playing pro football are pretty much limited to one country.
