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Perhaps more fundamental, the rules that shape how the bricoleur selects the various elements have also changed. Religion is far less formative of our public discourse and culture in the deep, constitutive way that it was even as recently as the postwar period, due in large part to the rise of neo-liberalism.

if we ask Americans a range of questions about matters that extend beyond their immediate horizons, we would be somewhat amazed by the blind spots in our thinking. Ignorance about religion might very well extend to ignorance about geopolitical concerns or about other cultures generally. What is striking, and simultaneously disturbing, is the degree to which our comfort and certainty about ourselves as Americans and about the world we inhabit enable us to settle into a kind of willful ignorance. So I am not inclined to single out religion in this regard; something more fundamental has been revealed

To take seriously the results of the Pew quiz leads us to question the substance of our national commitment to religious tolerance and pluralism. If our knowledge of other religions (even our own) is shoddy, then what constitutes the substance of our toleration of others? Is it simply a procedural concern? And, more importantly, if we fail to know basic facts about others, do we make it easier to retreat into the comfort of insular spaces, deaf to the claims of others? Do we expect, at the end of the day, no matter our public announcements to the contrary, that all others should sound and believe as the majority of Americans do?

The Pew Forum’s Religious Knowledge Survey examines one type of religious knowledge: knowledge-that. Respondents were asked whether certain propositions about world religions were true. But it is an open question whether this really is the sort of knowledge that we have in mind when we are talking about religious knowledge. At least sometimes, it seems like we mean knowledge-how.

The unwritten premise of the survey is that belief ought to be individual, considered, and fully-informed. But that premise fits neither religious experience nor human subjectivity over the long term. Thus to ask these questions in this way is to presume a particular kind of religious subject that is largely nonexistent, then to take pleasure in clucking over its nonexistence.

what if religion is not primarily about knowledge? What if the defining core of religion is more like a way of life, a nexus of action? What if, as per Charles Taylor, a religious orientation is more akin to a “social imaginary,” which functions as an “understanding” on a register that is somewhat inarticulable? Indeed, I think Taylor’s corpus offers multiple resources for criticizing what he would describe as the “intellectualism” of such approaches to religion—methodologies that treat human persons as “thinking things,” and thus reduce religious phenomena to a set of ideas, beliefs, and propositions. Taylor’s account of social imaginaries reminds us of a kind of understanding that is “carried” in practices, implicit in rituals and routines, and can never be adequately articulated or made explicit. If we begin to think about religion more like a social imaginary than a set of propositions and beliefs, then the methodologies of surveys of religious “knowledge” are going to look problematic.

I’m reminded of an observation Wittgenstein makes in the Philosophical Investigations: One could be a master of a game without being able to articulate the rules.

belief, faith and knowledge, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, religion and science, religion in the U.S., religious literacy, surveys, U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey

Coulter’s deeper point is that for America to truly be America, it must stand apart

The core problem with embracing soccer is that in so doing, America would become more like the rest of the world.

America’s own league, Major League Soccer, draws as many fans to its stadiums as do the NHL and NBA.

I wrote an essay entitled “The End of American Exceptionalism,” which argued that on subjects where the United States has long been seen as different, attitudes in America increasingly resemble those in Europe. Soccer is one of the best examples yet.

“Soccer,” Markovits and Hellerman argue, “was perceived by both native-born Americans and immigrants as a non-American activity at a time in American history when nativism and nationalism emerged to create a distinctly American self-image … if one liked soccer, one was viewed as at least resisting—if not outright rejecting—integration into America.”

The average age of Americans who call baseball their favorite sport is 53. Among Americans who like football best, it’s 46. Among Americans who prefer soccer, by contrast, the average age is only 37.

Old-stock Americans, in other words, were elevating baseball, football, and basketball into symbols of America’s distinct identity. Immigrants realized that embracing those sports offered a way to claim that identity for themselves. Clinging to soccer, by contrast, was a declaration that you would not melt.

why is interest in soccer rising now? Partly, because the United States is yet again witnessing mass immigration from soccer-mad nations.

the key shift is that America’s sports culture is less nativist. More native-born Americans now accept that a game invented overseas can become authentically American, and that the immigrants who love it can become authentically American too. Fewer believe that to have merit, something must be invented in the United States.

why didn’t soccer gain a foothold in the U.S. in the decades between the Civil War and World War I, when it was gaining dominance in Europe? Precisely because it was gaining dominance in Europe. The arbiters of taste in late 19th and early 20th century America wanted its national pastimes to be exceptional.

Americans over the age of 50 were 15 points more likely to say “our culture is superior” than were people over 50 in Germany, Spain, Britain, and France

Americans under 30, by contrast, were actually less likely to say “our culture is superior” than their counterparts in Germany, Spain, and Britain.

Americans today are less likely to insist that America’s way of doing things is always best. In 2002, 60 percent of Americans told the Pew Research Center that, “our culture is superior to others.” By 2011, it was down to 49 percent.

the third major pro-soccer constituency is liberals. They’re willing to embrace a European sport for the same reason they’re willing to embrace a European-style health care system: because they see no inherent value in America being an exception to the global rule

When the real-estate website Estately created a seven part index to determine a state’s love of soccer, it found that Washington State, Maryland, the District of Columbia, New York, and New Jersey—all bright blue—loved soccer best, while Alabama, Arkansas, North Dakota, Mississippi and Montana—all bright red—liked it least.

the soccer coalition—immigrants, liberals and the young—looks a lot like the Obama coalition.

Sports-wise, therefore, Democrats constitute an alliance between soccer and basketball fans while Republicans disproportionately follow baseball, golf, and NASCAR. Football, by far America’s most popular sport, crosses the aisle.)

The willingness of growing numbers of Americans to embrace soccer bespeaks their willingness to imagine a different relationship with the world. Historically, conservative foreign policy has oscillated between isolationism and imperialism. America must either retreat from the world or master it. It cannot be one among equals, bound by the same rules as everyone else

Exceptionalists view sports the same way. Coulter likes football, baseball, and basketball because America either plays them by itself, or—when other countries play against us—we dominate them.

Embracing soccer, by contrast, means embracing America’s role as merely one nation among many, without special privileges. It’s no coincidence that young Americans, in addition to liking soccer, also like the United Nations. In 2013, Pew found that Americans under 30 were 24 points more favorable to the U.N. than Americans over 50.

Millennials were also 23 points more likely than the elderly to say America should take its allies’ opinion into account even if means compromising our desires.

In embracing soccer, Americans are learning to take something we neither invented nor control, and nonetheless make it our own. It’s a skill we’re going to need in the years to come.

(An early conclusion: while we were late to understand how angry white voters were, a perhaps even more serious lapse was in failing to recognize how many disaffected Democrats there were who would stay home rather than support their party’s flawed candidate.)

Stories that would have killed any other politician—truly worrisome revelations about everything from the federal taxes Trump dodged to the charitable donations he lied about, the women he insulted and allegedly assaulted, and the mob ties that have long dogged him—did not stop Trump from thriving in this election year

the Oxford Dictionaries announced that “post-truth” had been chosen as the 2016 word of the year, defining it as a condition “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

Meantime, Trump personally blacklisted news organizations like Politico and The Washington Post when they published articles he didn’t like during the campaign, has openly mused about rolling back press freedoms enshrined by the U.S. Supreme Court, and has now named Stephen Bannon, until recently the executive chairman of Breitbart—a right-wing fringe website with a penchant for conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic tropes—to serve as one of his top White House advisers.

none of this has any modern precedent. And what makes it unique has nothing to do with the outcome of the election. This time, the victor was a right-wing demagogue; next time, it may be a left-wing populist who learns the lessons of Trump’s win.

This is no mere academic argument. The election of 2016 showed us that Americans are increasingly choosing to live in a cloud of like-minded spin, surrounded by the partisan political hackery and fake news that poisons their Facebook feeds.

To help us understand it all, there were choices, but not that many: three TV networks that mattered, ABC, CBS, and NBC; two papers for serious journalism, The New York Times and The Washington Post; and two giant-circulation weekly newsmagazines, Time and Newsweek. That, plus whatever was your local daily newspaper, pretty much constituted the news.

Fake news is thriving In the final three months of the presidential campaign, the 20 top-performing fake election news stories generated more engagement on Facebook than the top stories from major news outlets such as The New York Times.

Eventually, I came to think of the major media outlets of that era as something very similar to the big suburban shopping malls we flocked to in the age of shoulder pads and supply-side economics: We could choose among Kmart and Macy’s and Saks Fifth Avenue as our budgets and tastes allowed, but in the end the media were all essentially department stores, selling us sports and stock tables and foreign news alongside our politics, whether we wanted them or not. It may not have been a monopoly, but it was something pretty close.

This was still journalism in the scarcity era, and it affected everything from what stories we wrote to how fast we could produce them. Presidents could launch global thermonuclear war with the Russians in a matter of minutes, but news from the American hinterlands often took weeks to reach their sleepy capital. Even information within that capital was virtually unobtainable without a major investment of time and effort. Want to know how much a campaign was raising and spending from the new special-interest PACs that had proliferated? Prepare to spend a day holed up at the Federal Election Commission’s headquarters down on E Street across from the hulking concrete FBI building, and be sure to bring a bunch of quarters for the copy machine.

I am writing this in the immediate, shocking aftermath of a 2016 presidential election in which the Pew Research Center found that a higher percentage of Americans got their information about the campaign from late-night TV comedy shows than from a national newspaper. Don Graham sold the Post three years ago and though its online audience has been skyrocketing with new investments from Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, it will never be what it was in the ‘80s. That same Pew survey reported that a mere 2 percent of Americans today turned to such newspapers as the “most helpful” guides to the presidential campaign.

In 2013, Mark Leibovich wrote a bestselling book called This Town about the party-hopping, lobbyist-enabling nexus between Washington journalists and the political world they cover. A key character was Politico’s Mike Allen, whose morning email newsletter “Playbook” had become a Washington ritual, offering all the news and tidbits a power player might want to read before breakfast—and Politico’s most successful ad franchise to boot. In many ways, even that world of just a few years ago now seems quaint: the notion that anyone could be a single, once-a-day town crier in This Town (or any other) has been utterly exploded by the move to Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest. We are living, as Mark put it to me recently, “in a 24-hour scrolling version of what ‘Playbook’ was.”

Whether it was Walter Cronkite or The New York Times, they preached journalistic “objectivity” and spoke with authority when they pronounced on the day’s developments—but not always with the depth and expertise that real competition or deep specialization might have provided. They were great—but they were generalists.

I remained convinced that reporting would hold its value, especially as our other advantages—like access to information and the expensive means to distribute it—dwindled. It was all well and good to root for your political team, but when it mattered to your business (or the country, for that matter), I reasoned, you wouldn’t want cheerleading but real reporting about real facts. Besides, the new tools might be coming at us with dizzying speed—remember when that radical new video app Meerkat was going to change absolutely everything about how we cover elections?—but we would still need reporters to find a way inside Washington’s closed doors and back rooms, to figure out what was happening when the cameras weren’t rolling.

And if the world was suffering from information overload—well, so much the better for us editors; we would be all the more needed to figure out what to listen to amid the noise.

Trump turned out to be more correct than we editors were: the more relevant point of the Access Hollywood tape was not about the censure Trump would now face but the political reality that he, like Bill Clinton, could survive this—or perhaps any scandal. Yes, we were wrong about the Access Hollywood tape, and so much else.

These days, Politico has a newsroom of 200-odd journalists, a glossy award-winning magazine, dozens of daily email newsletters, and 16 subscription policy verticals. It’s a major player in coverage not only of Capitol Hill but many other key parts of the capital, and some months during this election year we had well over 30 million unique visitors to our website, a far cry from the controlled congressional circulation of 35,000 that I remember Roll Call touting in our long-ago sales materials.

, we journalists were still able to cover the public theater of politics while spending more of our time, resources, and mental energy on really original reporting, on digging up stories you couldn’t read anywhere else. Between Trump’s long and checkered business past, his habit of serial lying, his voluminous and contradictory tweets, and his revision of even his own biography, there was lots to work with. No one can say that Trump was elected without the press telling us all about his checkered past.

politics was NEVER more choose-your-own-adventure than in 2016, when entire news ecosystems for partisans existed wholly outside the reach of those who at least aim for truth

Pew found that nearly 50 percent of self-described conservatives now rely on a single news source, Fox, for political information they trust.

As for the liberals, they trust only that they should never watch Fox, and have MSNBC and Media Matters and the remnants of the big boys to confirm their biases.

And then there are the conspiracy-peddling Breitbarts and the overtly fake-news outlets of this overwhelming new world; untethered from even the pretense of fact-based reporting, their version of the campaign got more traffic on Facebook in the race’s final weeks than all the traditional news outlets combined.

When we assigned a team of reporters at Politico during the primary season to listen to every single word of Trump’s speeches, we found that he offered a lie, half-truth, or outright exaggeration approximately once every five minutes—for an entire week. And it didn’t hinder him in the least from winning the Republican presidential nomination.

when we repeated the exercise this fall, in the midst of the general election campaign, Trump had progressed to fibs of various magnitudes just about once every three minutes!

By the time Trump in September issued his half-hearted disavowal of the Obama “birther” whopper he had done so much to create and perpetuate, one national survey found that only 1 in 4 Republicans was sure that Obama was born in the U.S., and various polls found that somewhere between a quarter and a half of Republicans believed he’s Muslim. So not only did Trump think he was entitled to his own facts, so did his supporters. It didn’t stop them at all from voting for him.

in part, it’s not just because they disagree with the facts as reporters have presented them but because there’s so damn many reporters, and from such a wide array of outlets, that it’s often impossible to evaluate their standards and practices, biases and preconceptions. Even we journalists are increasingly overwhelmed.

So much terrific reporting and writing and digging over the years and … Trump? What happened to consequences? Reporting that matters? Sunlight, they used to tell us, was the best disinfectant for what ails our politics.

2016 suggests a different outcome: We’ve achieved a lot more transparency in today’s Washington—without the accountability that was supposed to come with it.

According to Common Sense Media, teens spend an average of nine hours a day online (paywall), compared to about six hours for those aged eight to 12 and 50 minutes for kids between 0 and eight

“It’s not a drug, but it might as well be. It works the same way… it has the same results,

A startling 44% of teens tell Pew that they often check their phones for messages or notifications as soon as they wake up; 28% say they check at least sometimes.

The knowledge that video games possess this power, that they allow us to adopt new identities and grant us new ways of seeing ourselves, is as old as Mario’s quest for his princess.

Nearly all the AAAS scientists (98%) say they have some level of interaction with citizens at least from time to time, and 51% have at least some contact with reporters about research findings. In addition, nearly half of AAAS scientists – 47% – use social media to talk about science or read about scientific developments at least some of the time.

The scientists who are most likely to be involved in public activities show distinct patterns by age, by the level of public debate and public interest they perceive in their specialty, and by discipline. Virtually all scientists engage with citizens. Mid-career and older scientists are especially likely to speak to reporters. Younger scientists are more likely to use social media. And blogging is something that equally spans the generations under age 65.

Nationally, neither has a ghost of a chance of becoming president for the simple reason that Americans in increasing numbers find the convergence of religion and politics distasteful if not loathsome

especially true for political moderates and millennials, according to a just-released Pew Research Center study.

Young people, who missed the Golden Age when most people didn't talk about their religious beliefs or their politics -- and never in combination -- perceive that to be religious is to be politically conservative

They're saying "no thanks" to that and, by extrapolation, to anyone with an (R) after his or her name.

Pew demographic projections forecast that Muslims eventually will surpass Jews as a religious minority owing to immigration and birth rates

one religious group is flourishing -- Muslims.

Republicans wishing to become president might steer clear of religious grandstanding

The attorney representing 10 of the families who lost relatives in the Sandy Hook massacre told me that he welcomed YouTube's Wednesday action, but said it was "too late to undo the harm" that has been caused to his clients from conspiracy theories circulating on the platform over the past several years. "Sandy Hook happened now nearly seven years ago, and so during that entire time the clients were subject to hostile postings on YouTube that disseminated this false narrative and caused undue harassment, threats, and fallacies as they were trying to heal," said the attorney, Josh Koskoff. "At the same time, better late than never."

Moving forward, it will be interesting to see if other social media company adopts guidelines similar to the ones YouTube announced on Wednesday regarding content that denies well-documented violent events like Sandy Hook. "All social media platforms who have not taken this step, should look in the mirror and decide whether they want to continue to facilitate harassment and hate in this day and age where that has serious consequences," Koskoff told me. And Pozner echoed that, saying that he hoped "Twitter and other hosting platforms will follow suit in implementing and enforcing more socially responsible policies."

First, as Pew’s software made choices, the system selected longer videos. It’s as if the software recognizes that the user is going to be around for a while, and starts to serve up longer fare. Second, it also began to recommend more popular videos regardless of how popular the starting video was.

more than 70 percent of the videos that YouTube recommended showed up on the list only once. It’s impossible to examine how hundreds of thousands of videos connect to each first random video when there are such limited data about each one.

People want to know if YouTube regularly radicalizes people with its recommendations, as the scholar Zeynep Tufekci has suggested. This study suggests that YouTube pushes an anonymous user toward more popular, not more fringe, content.

For my November magazine story about children’s YouTube, the company’s answer to these kinds of troubling suggestions was that YouTube isn’t for kids. Children, they told me, should be using only the YouTube Kids app, which has been built as a safe space for them

nd that group is growing.

“Even as Americans who primarily turn to social media for political news are less aware and knowledgeable about a wide range of events and issues in the news, they are more likely than other Americans to have heard about a number of false or unproven claims.”

Specifically, they’ve been far more exposed to the conspiracy theory that powerful people intentionally planned the pandemic. Yet this group, says Pew, is also less concerned about the impact of made-up news like this than the rest of the U.S. population.

They’re absorbing fake news, but they don’t see it as a problem. In a society that depends on an informed citizenry to make reasonably intelligent decisions about self-governance, this is the worst kind of trouble.

In a sweeping piece on disinformation and the 2020 campaign in February — in the pre-pandemic era — the Atlantic’s McKay Coppins concluded with a telling quote from the political theorist Hannah Arendt that bears repetition now. Through an onslaught of lies, which may be debunked before the cycle is repeated, totalitarian leaders are able to instill in their followers “a mixture of gullibility and cynicism,” she warned.

Over time, people are conditioned to “believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” And then such leaders can do pretty much whatever they wish

The largest single faith group is Catholics, who make up about 22 percent of the population. Their numbers have held steady, mostly because an influx of immigrants

more than one-third of those ages 18 to 22 are religiously unaffiliated.

The “Nones,” as they are called, now make up the nation’s second-largest religious grouping

“The significant majority of the religiously unaffiliated tend to be left-leaning, tend to support the Democratic Party, support gay marriage and environmental causes,”

it is not clear that Americans are necessarily moving toward the European model. The Pew report found that even among Americans who claimed no religion, few qualified as purely secular. Two-thirds say they still believe in God, and one-fifth say they pray every day. Only 12 percent of the religiously unaffiliated group said they were atheists and 17 percent agnostic.

Mark Zuckerberg is 3.17 degrees of separation from all Facebook users.

The typical Facebook user has 155 friends, but only describes 50 of them as friends in real life, according to a 2014 study from the Pew Research Center. Thirty-five percent of people have Facebook friends they've never met in person.

The original "six degrees of separation" experiment required people to know each other fairly well: They had to be on a first-name basis, at a time when society was slightly more formal, in order for the connection to count.

About one-third of the documents eventually reached the stockbroker, after a chain of, on average, six people — the six degrees of separation. It's a small world after all, Milgram concluded.

She found instead that Milgram's conclusions rested on a shaky foundation, and that class and race divided Americans more than his original paper admitted. The majority of Milgram's letters didn't make it to the Boston stockbroker. And further experiments that factored in class and race suggested that making connections across those barriers was even more challenging

While middle- and high-income people were able to find their targets regardless of their household income, low-income people could only connect with other low-income families, Kleinfeld wrote in a 2002 article in the journal Society.

The correct interpretation of Milgram, she argued, was not the optimistic conclusion that we're all only a few degrees of separation away. Instead, it's that there are still barriers that are insurmountable.

But the real divide is between people who are on Facebook and those who aren't on the internet at all. Facebook users make up about 62 percent of American adults but 72 percent of all internet users. Americans without the internet are disproportionately older, rural, and less educated. As Facebook users get closer, they might be becoming ever more isolated.

A debate over “partisan perceptual bias” has raged in the political science literature ever since, Princeton’s Larry Bartels noted that it was particularly pronounced during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, with surveys showing that “Democrats were strikingly impervious to the good economic news.” Lee Drutman noted in Slate in 2010 that something similar seemed to apply to Republicans' reporting of their own economic conditions between 2008 and 2010.

The landmark 1960 The American Voter, a study of the elections of 1948 through 1956, found something similar of voter attitudes toward the Korean War, speculating that when a voters’ views conflict with his party allegiance, “allegiance presumably will work to undo the contrary opinions.”

“The economy” simply means different tings to different people.

the Obama campaign has long ago stopped trying to convince Americans that the economy is better than they thought, targeting their message at a “severely conservative” Romney.

And while the Romney campaign made the economy the core of their campaign earlier this year, they’ve recently diversified after struggling — mostly in vain — to persuade voters despite a steady stream of negative data points. Now, the economic argument is part of a broader case the campaign tries to make

how open is Facebook willing to be in return?

not very.

that should concern anyone of any political persuasion as Facebook continues to gain influence over the national — and international — conversation

Increasingly, those users are spending time on Facebook not only to share personal nuggets with friends, but, for more than 40 percent of American adults, according to Pew Research Center, to stay on top of news

It now has an inordinate power to control a good part of the national discussion should it choose to do so, a role it shares with Sili

There was the initial statement that Facebook could find “no evidence” supporting the allegations; Facebook said it did not “insert stories artificially” into the Trending list, and that it had “rigorous guidelines” to ensure neutrality. But when journalists like my colleague Farhad Manjoo asked for more details about editorial guidelines, the company declined to discuss them.

Only after The Guardian newspaper obtained an old copy of the Trending Topics guidelines did Facebook provide more information, and an up-to-date copy of them. (They showed that humans work with algorithms to shape the lists and introduce headlines on their own under some circumstances, contradicting Facebook’s initial statement, Recode noted.) It was openness by way of a bullet to the foot.

a more important issue emerged during the meeting that had been lying beneath the surface, and has been for a while now: the power of the algorithms that determine what goes into individual Facebook pages.

“What they have is a disproportionate amount of power, and that’s the real story,” Mr. Carlson told me. “It’s just concentrated in a way you’ve never seen before in media.”

What most people don’t realize is that not everything they like or share necessarily gets a prominent place in their friends’ newsfeeds: The Facebook algorithm sends it to those it determines will find it most engaging.

For outlets like The Daily Caller, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post or The New York Times — for whom Facebook’s audience is vital to growth — any algorithmic change can affect how many people see their journalism.

This gives Facebook enormous influence over how newsrooms, almost universally eager for Facebook exposure, make decisions and money. Alan Rusbridger, a former editor of The Guardian, called this a “profound and alarming” development in a column in The New Statesman last week.

, Facebook declines to talk in great detail about its algorithms, noting that it does not want to make it easy to game its system. That system, don’t forget, is devised to keep people on Facebook by giving them what they want

the Internet has deepened that divide. It makes it easy for people to read only news and opinions from people they agree with. In many cases, people don’t even make that choice for themselves. Last week, Twitter said it would begin showing people tweets even from people they don’t follow if enough other people they follow favorite them.

Humans are acutely attuned to the approval of others, constantly reading cues to judge whether people agree with them, the researchers said. Active social media users get many more of these cues — like status updates, news stories people choose to share and photos of how they spend their days — and so they become less likely to speak up.

The study also found that for all the discussion of social media becoming the place where people find and discuss news, most people said they got information about the N.S.A. revelations from TV and radio, while Facebook and Twitter were the least likely to be news sources.

It also offers its experts' predictions about what the most-desired life skills (for young people, but ostensibly for everyone else, too) will be in the year 2020. Among the skills they highlighted: public problem-solving through cooperative work -- crowdsourcing and the like; the ability to search effectively for information online; the ability to distinguish the quality and veracity of online discoveries; the ability to synthesize, or combine facts and details from different sources into coherent narratives; the ability to concentrate; and the ability to distinguish between the signal and the noise as the information we're exposed to gets bigger, and broader, and more plentiful.

All these skills can be taught. The question is whether kids will learn them in school, or outside of it.

Many Americans, then, are holding two contradictory ideas in their mind at once: the optimistic belief that their success is in their hands (on display since Tocqueville’s Democracy in America) and the acknowledgement that wages have been steadily stagnating (on decline since the band America).

In his story, Gabler concedes that, no matter how illogical and uninformed his financial decisions might have been, he remained seduced by a superseding assumption that he “would always overcome any adversity, should it arrive.”

“This is the genius and the Achilles’ heel of American culture,” Newman says. “We do have a strong belief in self-determination and agency, even when our expectations fly in the face of reality.”

Struggling white-collar workers and managers, she says, especially stood out in her research for how likely they were to believe they were the authors of their own fate. “And if your destiny isn’t working out very well,” she says, “you only have yourself to blame,” in their telling.

part of what makes financial fragility so distressing in the United States is that citizens aren’t afforded the regimen of protections offered by Europe’s wealthier governments.

“These are social democracies that come to the rescue of people in trouble or are just more generous even if they’re not in trouble,” says Newman. “So the kind of suffering that will happen in a society like that is not one of material deprivation nearly as much as what we call in the trade ‘social exclusion.’”

In March, Pew asked people whether life was better for people like them 50 years ago — and a majority of Republicans answered yes. Trump supporters were the most emphatic, with 75 percent saying things were better in the mid-1960s.Democrats, though, were less enthusiastic about the past. Forty-eight percent said life was better now than it was 50 years ago, while 17 percent of Democrats said it was the same, and only 28 percent said it was worse.

In the Morning Consult survey, 44 percent of people over all said America’s greatest years were ahead of it, while 36 percent said those years had already passed. But in an election when America’s past greatness has played such a starring role, we wanted to see more details about just how voters saw the past and the future.

So, when was the greatest year?Over all, 2000 was the most popular choice, a preference that cut across political party, candidate preference, gender and age. The year’s popularity may partly reflect people’s fondness for round numbers. But many voters explained their choice by referring to a greater sense of security. The Sept. 11 attacks occurred the following year. (An election year also has something for all partisans to grab onto. Bill Clinton was president that year, but George W. Bush won the election to replace him.)

Some people, of course, reached farther back into history. The year the Declaration of Independence was signed, 1776, got a few votes. One person chose 1789, the year the Constitution took effect. One person chose 1800. One chose 1860, the year Southern states began to secede from the Union. But most answers were of a more recent vintage.

partisan patterns in views of America’s greatness. Republicans, over all, recall the late 1950s and the mid-1980s most fondly. Sample explanations: “Reagan.” “Economy was booming.” “No wars!” “Life was simpler.” “Strong family values.” The distribution of Trump supporters’ greatest years is somewhat similar to the Republican trend, but more widely dispersed over the last 70 years.

Democrats seem to think America’s greatest days were more recent; they were more likely to pick a year in the 1990s, or since 2000. After 2000, their second-most-popular answer was 2016. Sample explanations: “We’re getting better.” “Improving social justice.” “Technology.” Even 2008, a year of financial collapse, was pretty popular, perhaps because President Obama was also elected that year.