2013--A Year Of Declining Morality, Increasing Internet Influence And Other Issues

Thursday,January 02, 2014

[Editor's Note: The following post is by TDV Editor-in-Chief, Jeff Berwick, and is but a small excerpt from the TDV Newsletter]

Should 2013 be remembered as the year in which the War On Drugs, war, and statism all reached all time popularity lows?

For sure, the US is changing dramatically and quickly.

Pew Research Center found a large range of "data milestones, breakthroughs, peaks and valleys in 2013," such as record support for same-sex marriage and the legalization of weed. But more importantly (yes, even more important than weed), record levels of distrust of the federal government. Perhaps this is because, for the first time in 2013, 50% of the population received its news from the internet.

From Pew:

1. Just over half (51%) of the public now favors same-sex marriage, while 42% are opposed.
2. A majority of Americans (52%) now favor legalizing the use of marijuana.
3. A majority agrees the U.S. should mind its own business internationally, the highest measure in nearly a half century of polling.
4. The share of Americans saying they do not want their own representative in Congress reelected – 38% – is at its highest point in two decades.
5. For the first time, a majority of the public (53%) says that the federal government threatens their personal rights and freedoms.
6. 36% of the nation’s young adults ages 18 to 31—the so-called Millennial generation— now live in their parents’ home, the highest share in at least four decades.
7. A record 40% of all households with children under the age of 18 include mothers who are either the sole or primary source of income for the family.
8. The U.S., which has a total population of 317 million, is now home to a record 40.4 million immigrants.
9. A record seven-in-ten (69%) Hispanic high school graduates in the class of 2012 enrolled in college that fall, two percentage points higher than the rate (67%) among their white counterparts.
10. The percentage of Americans who say the U.S. plays a more important and powerful role as a world leader than it did 10 years ago has fallen to a 40-year low of just 17%.
11. The percentage of American Catholics calling themselves “strong” Catholics is at a four-decade low.
12. For the first time since Pew Research Center began tracking smartphone adoption, a majority of Americans now own a smartphone of some kind.
13. 50% of the public now cites the internet as a main source for national and international news.

Statism At All-Time Low

A Reuters poll, amid mainstream media balderdash aimed towards inspiring intervention in Syria, found only 9 percent of Americans supported military intervention in Syria (a factor that might have, for the first time in history, prevented a war). Mainstream media is only trusted by 23 percent of the public.

Such low sentiment has long also reflected public opinion of Congress, and even the Presidency.

Secretary of State John Kerry, before a group of State Department workers, told the audience that the world has been "complicated" by "... this little thing called the internet and the ability of people everywhere to communicate instantaneously and to have more information coming at them in one day than most people can process in months or a year."

According to Kerry, the internet "makes it much harder to govern, makes it much harder to organize people, much harder to find the common interest."

I take that as a compliment.