The NYTimes published a few charts from the 2006 General Social Survey. I want to comment on a several more.
Four first charts show the influence of the hippies. The first: hippy pot smokers have replaced the earlier generation but they are still only one third of the adult population and are not gaining in influence.
Many drugs became illegal nationally in the early 1980s. From that point the legality of pot took on a new meaning. Support for pot smoking rose from 15% to 30% over twenty years and seems to have reached its peak. Pot will be legal in some parts of the country and illegal in the rest....something we already know.
Pre-marital sex is more
accepted. Thanks to hippies. Strong anti-pre marital sex attitudes
have steadily dropped from 35% to 25%.
Porn is more common.
Hippy "free love" attitudes have had a small effect raising the
proportion of people who see porn from 15% to 25%. Hippies only
created the millieu, video tapes and the Internet provided the technology.
Hippies
also softened attitudes toward spanking children, which is only
measured from the early 1980s. Oppostion to spanking rose from 15% to
25%.
The two most interesting charts of this entire study, for me, are about newspapers and Congress.
Newspaper
daily readership has dropped steadily from 1972 at 70% to 35% in 2006.
"Steadily" is the key word. The Internet did not destroy newspapers,
they were already in decline twenty years earlier. TV and radio were
replacing newspapers before the Internet came along. The leveling off
in the 1980s and the continued decline after that also suggests the
Limbaugh hypothesis. When right wing radio emerged on the scene, the
Leftism of the newspapers became more obvious and less acceptable.
That was particularly true in the late 1990s with the explosion of
popularity of Fox News.
This
point is confirmed in the
"Confidence" chart that shows a steadily decline in confidence in
journalists from a high of 35% to the current 10%. Are we supprised?
Most recently The Weekly Standard published an expose' of George Polk
in
whos' name the highest journalism award is given. Polk turns out to
have been a total liar. None of the Lefty media would publish the
expose'. We are right to distrust journalists.
Lastly,
in the confidence chart, Congress has always been at the bottom of
Americans' confidence charts. What this chart shows is that when
Democrats are out off power in Congress, the public likes Congress
more. Big surprise.