Political discourse can make it seem people on the left and right live in completely different universes, but buried in a new paper you almost certainly missed in the journal Political Psychology this week is a bittersweet insight:
We actually all agree about the state of the world today, specifically that it sucks.
Instead the research leads with the rather anodyne finding that people’s political beliefs shape how they interpret history. Researcher Dr. Francesco Rigoli from City University London’s department of psychology surveyed people in the USA, UK, Italy, South Africa, Mexico, and Poland, having them place their political ideology somewhere on a left-right spectrum and asking a series of questions about their attitudes toward the past, present and future.
The results bolster tropes we’ve heard for years about conservatives and others to the right romanticizing the past while the left-wing looks to the future as an opportunity for something in between progress, liberation and revolution.
“These observations may help to clarify why people on the right often resist change: this may occur not much because they like the present, but, rather, because they like the past and they may view change as being a further step away from the past,” Dr. Rigoli said in a statement.
“The analyses also reveal that left-wing supporters believe that human actions can make a difference: their opinion is that, if appropriate choices are made, the future can improve substantially. However, the left’s optimism was evident only in the USA, Poland and possibly the UK, indicating that this is not a general phenomenon.”
I detect some generalized suspicion of (or perhaps disappointment with) the right in some of the word choices used by the author, which I myself found suspicious, despite being a life-long left-wing voter. But this is not what I found most interesting in these results.
The surprising result in some otherwise forgettable research is that political orientation had no bearing on how people feel about the present.
“Contrary to predictions, the present does not appear to be evaluated differently by the left and the right,” the paper reads.
Given our hyper-polarized times, I would think that the headline finding here might be something Onion-esque like “Researcher Surprised To Find We All Agree On Something.”
You have to dig a little bit into the data to learn we all agree the present is rather terrible.
When Rigoli analyzed the results by country, independent of ideological identification, the data shows all countries except Mexico evaluate the present as being worse than the past. (Mexican participants seem to believe the past and the present are more or less the same qualitatively.)
It’s Just Terrible For Everyone Else
This tracks with a trend towards cynicism or pessimism about the present that has become entrenched, at least in the United States, for about the last 25 years. Gallup has been measuring satisfaction with the way things are going in the US since the late 1970s. The last time more than half of the country felt more satisfied than dissatisfied with the state of things was in 1999 during the dot-com boom. Since then it’s been much more doom and gloom than boom, with the low point coming during the 2008 economic crisis.
But there’s an odd and oft-cited disconnect when these sorts of general sentiments come up: Gallup has also been measuring Americans’ satisfaction with their individual personal lives over the same period of time. The number of people in the US satisfied with their lives has hovered between 73 and 90 percent non-stop for the past 45 years.
I guess I’m just a little less interested what any of us think about the past or the future since it’s impossible to actually live in either. We universally seem to think that things are getting worse all around us, but we’re always doing great individually.
So what gives?
While many have ventured guesses about this bizarre gap, it hasn’t been rigorously studied. That’s a shame, because it would certainly yield some findings worthy of grabbing more headlines than how the right-wing is sooo into nostalgia.