Fewer Americans believe there is “plenty of opportunity” to get ahead in America today than have said so across three previous measurement points over the last 59 years. A bare majority (52%) say the country has plenty of economic opportunity, down from 57% in 2011 and more substantially from 81% […] Read more »
Love and Politics
… Once things have come to this pass — once Democrats think that Republicans are bigoted know-nothings who serve only Mammon, and Republicans think that Democrats are bent on destroying the freedoms in whose name the American revolution was fought — is there a way out? Is there an antidote […] Read more »
150 Years of Racism: Attitudes in the American South
… A new paper by Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen has discovered that the proportion of enslaved residents in 1860—153 years ago—predicts race-related beliefs today. As the percent of the population in a county accounted for by the enslaved increases, there is a decreased likelihood that contemporary white […] Read more »
Few think all of Martin Luther King’s goals have been met
There is widespread consensus about the impact of Martin Luther King Jr. on the lives of black Americans — more than four in five Americans think he improved their lives, according to a new CBS News poll released Wednesday. Eighty-five percent of Americans think he made things better for blacks, […] Read more »
50 years after March on Washington: Americans’ views on race
Fifty years after the March on Washington, there is a wide divergence between the views of white and black Americans on the issue of racial discrimination. While sizeable majorities of both whites and blacks think there is at least some racial discrimination today, blacks are more apt to say it […] Read more »
Were Republicans really the party of civil rights in the 1960s?
With Republicans having trouble with minorities, some like to point out that the party has a long history of standing up for civil rights compared to Democrats. Democrats, for example, were less likely to vote for the civil rights bills of the 1950s and 1960s. Democrats were more likely to […] Read more »