What Will Replace America’s Fading Values?

We’ve discarded outdated ideas, but we need to replace them with something

What do Americans believe in?

Nothing much, anymore, according to a new Wall Street Journal poll. The pollsters asked 1,000 Americans all sorts of questions about their economic status, their values, and their identities. Much of the poll is interesting but not especially surprising — people feel uncertain about their economic future and feel that America’s best days may be behind it. Respondents weighed in on culture-war issues like transgender athletes (most respondents are opposed) and school book bans (also opposed).

But what I found most interesting was people’s commitment to what might be considered traditional American values.

Mike Allen at Axios summarized the findings this way:

Look at the tectonic shifts from a Journal/NBC poll 25 years ago, in 1998:

Patriotism is very important: Dropped from 70% to 38%.

Religion is very important: Dropped from 62% to 39%.

Having children is very important: Dropped from 59% to 30%.

Community involvement is very important: Dropped from 47% to 27%.

Money is very important: Rose from 31% to 43%.

The bottom line: The poll quantifies a generational and political divide that shows a rot at the very soul of our nation.

Now, I think his language is a little hyperbolic. If you dig into the results, it seems that many people have moved from finding certain values “very important” to believe that they are “somewhat important.” Eighty percent of Americans still say that “community involvement” is very or somewhat important, for example. That number is 73% for patriotism and 65% for belief in God.

Almost everybody agrees on some core things — at least 90% of respondents said that hard work and tolerance for others were important values for them. A little more worryingly, the only other “values” that over 90% of Americans could agree on were a little less inspiring: self-fulfillment and money.

I think this poll reflects a few crucial facts about America today:

• We’re fragmented.
• We feel like things aren’t going well overall— even if they are going well in our own personal lives.
• We’ve slid away from most of the values and institutions that used to hold us together.
• And we don’t have anything new to replace them with yet.

The old values are fading

It’s not necessarily bad that Americans aren’t quite sold on traditional values and institutions like patriotism and religion.

Anybody who has lived through the last couple of decades has had their sense of patriotism cynically exploited over and over again. In their efforts to salvage the foundering war in Afghanistan and justify the misbegotten conflict in Iraq, Republicans played the patriotism card over and over again.

The warmongers insisted on a particularly simplistic, militaristic, and jingoistic version of love of country — giant flags and “the troops” and Lee Greenwood. Every time I go to a baseball game — two decades after the wars started — there’s a “salute to the troops” in which the whole stadium is asked to stand and applaud a military servicemember. It’s a lovely gesture, but it feels forced and hollow to me— an artifact of a misguided war, the servicemember a political pawn as much as anything.

During the Trump era, things got even worse. Trump’s MO has always been to attack his opponents for his own weaknesses. He, of course, has never been willing to choose the best interests of the country over himself — as we saw in Ukraine, his relations with Vladimir Putin, on January 6th, and in the basement of Mar-a-Lago where he kept all those stolen classified documents.

So what did he do? He constantly claimed that his enemies were the real traitors, while he (literally) hugged and kissed the flag. After all this, it’s no wonder that fewer Americans think of themselves as patriotic. Patriotism, after all, has become less a civic religion than a theater in our partisan political wars, cynically exploited by politicians for a moment’s gain.

And speaking of religion, I’m not surprised that this is also fading as an American value. How many religious institutions have shown themselves to be hypocritical or even criminal in recent decades? And — especially among evangelical Christians — how many religious leaders have betrayed their religious values for short-term political gain?

Religious belief and religious affiliation are two different things, but they’re both fading. Many people don’t want to be a part of an organized religion anymore. And belief in the supernatural is fading all over the world as science and technology fulfill more of religion’s traditional purposes. Despite the decline in religious belief, almost half of Americans believe firmly in God, which makes our country a little old-fashioned compared to other wealthy countries.

The more worrying decline is community involvement. As many experts have pointed out, Americans are no longer “joiners” — we find fraternal organizations and organized sports leagues faintly silly. Though this trend began before the dawn of the smartphone, it’s accelerated in the last decade as we substitute Netflix, Doordash, and Instagram for going out into the real world with real people.

What are the new American values?

No wonder Americans feel unmoored. Our world is changing aggressively around us, our politics is uncertain, to say the least, and the economy is perilous. And we have very little in common to fall back on — what values can bind us together amidst this mess?

I don’t know that we’re ever headed back toward the olden days when our lives would be anchored by the church, the boy scouts, and Thursday nights down at the Elks Lodge.

There are a few directions we can go in, I think. Not all of them are good.

First, the bad option. Americans have been shedding lots of identifiers, but have been getting more political in recent years. Political involvement is all well and good, but most people seem to think that “engaging in politics” is clicking on outrage-inducing headlines, posting doomsday predictions, and commiserating with each other about how terrible the other guys are.

For a lot of people, this sort of political engagement doesn’t build community, it destroys it. Though it is certainly possible for someone to join a local campaign or organization, engage in a good fight, make friends, and strengthen their community, I doubt that this is what will happen if we decide to organize our lives around politics. It’s more likely to turn the country into even more of a toxic sewer of resentment and isolation.

Another option is a redefined patriotism. I’ve long wished that we could take patriotism back from, well, the assholes. Patriotism doesn’t have to be about F-35 flyovers and flags the size of the football field. What if we widened and softened the concept of patriotism?

We could make patriotism less about power and more about community. Rather than being an arm of American imperialism, a new patriotism could embrace all forms of service. It could be centered on dignity for all and a commitment to the community. Sure, let’s applaud soldiers at baseball games. But let’s also applaud nurses and teachers and food bank volunteers. They’re patriots too.

The third option, I think, is to get local again. Most “politically engaged” Americans could probably tell you more about the superficial dramas between our national politics’ main characters — Ted Cruz, AOC, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, etc. — than about what their local city council is doing. And much of their money goes to national organizations like the Red Cross rather than to local organizations.

I’m intrigued by mutual aid societies, a concept whose modern philosophical basis is in 19th-century anarchism but whose main idea goes back even further. The idea is that everyone has something to contribute, and everyone has things that they need. So people in a community get together and pitch in what they can — it might be money, time, or skills. You might have time to do grocery shopping for someone who is sick; they might be able to pitch in money when you need a little financial help or help you with your plumbing when your sink clogs up.

Mutual aid societies have existed in different forms over time — medieval guilds had many of the same characteristics, and the fraternal societies that were so popular a century ago operated along some of the same lines. They’re different from traditional charity work, in which the haves give to the have-nots. Mutual-aid societies are based on the idea that we are all part of a community; we can and should give and receive help.

During the early days of the pandemic, I found it heartwarming to read about all of the mutual aid societies that sprung up around the world. Mutual aid built community and helped people during an isolating disaster. Maybe it’s not just an emergency measure. Perhaps it’s a new way to build community in a country where community is hard to come by.

America has understandably shed some of our old unifying values. We’re a more diverse country, and some of the organizations and ideas that used to bring us together have been discredited. But we can’t just get rid of old values without replacing them with anything. So, America — what will our new values look like?

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