Tag: Pew Research Center
Trump Is Becoming Frighteningly Clear About What He Wants
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In 2019, Kennedy Ndahiro, the editor of the Rwandan daily newspaper The New Times, explained to readers of The Atlantic how years of cultivated hatred had led to death on a horrifying scale.
“In Rwanda,” he wrote, “we know what can happen when political leaders and media outlets single out certain groups of people as less than human.”
Ndahiro
The Seven Social-Media Commandments – The Atlantic
Like any other technology, whether nuclear power or the printing press, social media is only as good as the people who use it—and over the past decade, we haven’t exactly used it well. What began as a promising prospect for connecting communities and amplifying new voices has gradually evolved into an engine for sowing upset, distrust, and conspiracy. As the next generation of social-media sites emerges, one question is: Can we do better?
I think so. Rather than holding out
Tim Keller: How American Christianity Could Grow Again
Upon joining the Presbyterian ministry, in the mid-1970s, I served in a town outside Richmond, Virginia. New church buildings were going up constantly. When I arrived in Manhattan in the late ’80s, however, I saw a startling sight. There on the corner of Sixth Avenue and West 20th Street was a beautiful Gothic Revival brownstone built in 1844 that had once been the Episcopal Church of the Holy Communion. Now it was the Limelight, an epicenter of the downtown club
The Power of Millennial and Gen Z Voters in the South
ATLANTA—The three dozen young Black men and women who gathered in a church meeting room last Friday night were greeted with a rousing exhortation that had the added benefit of being true.
In welcoming remarks, Bryce Berry, a senior at nearby Morehouse College and the president of the Young Democrats of Georgia club, told the group that none of the party’s national-policy accomplishments of the past two years would have been possible without people like them. “Without young Georgians, young
Are Latinos Really Realigning Toward Republicans?
Once the backbone of the Democratic base, working-class white voters have been migrating toward the Republican Party since the 1960s, largely out of alienation from the Democrats’ liberal stands on cultural and racial issues. Half a century later, those working-class white voters—usually defined as having less than a four-year college education—have become the indisputable foundation of the Republican coalition, especially in the era of Donald Trump.
Now a chorus of centrist and right-leaning political analysts are claiming that the
The Doom Spiral of Pernicious Polarization
Until a few decades ago, most Democrats did not hate Republicans, and most Republicans did not hate Democrats. Very few Americans thought the policies of the other side were a threat to the country or worried about their child marrying a spouse who belonged to a different political party.
All of that has changed. A 2016 survey found that 60 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of Republicans would now balk at their child’s marrying a supporter of a
The Abortion Policy Most Americans Want
The relationship between public opinion and the codification of rights is not linear. Public opinion lagged decades behind the courts on the question of interracial marriage, but led the way on same-sex marriage. In theory, rights supersede public opinion—you should have the right to free speech even if what you’re saying is very unpopular. In practice, rights are safer when they are popular.
Now that the Supreme Court seems poised to reverse itself on Roe v. Wade, abortion-rights advocates
Who Really Benefits From Student-Loan Forgiveness?
In March 2020, the government stopped bugging me—and 40 million other Americans—for student-loan payments. It also stopped collecting interest on outstanding debt. And with so many other things to worry about, I largely stopped thinking about that debt. Some survey data indicate that many of my peers became similarly disengaged. Two years later, one estimate from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget suggests that $5,500 per borrower has been effectively canceled, largely because of the lack of interest that
Why America’s COVID-19 Vaccine Rates Are Plummeting
America’s vaccination rates have fallen off a cliff, and nothing seems to help.
On June 2, President Joe Biden announced a frantic plan to reverse what already seemed to be an awful, exponential slide: At the peak of the country’s vaccine rollout in mid-April, almost 3.5 million doses were being put into arms every single day, but that number had quickly dropped by half, and then by half again.
Biden’s “month of action” came and went, and nothing really changed;
How People Voted in 2020
Can Big Data explain the passion and vitriol of American politics? Like almost everything else in modern life, the choices are multiplying for analysts looking to understand how the key groups in American society divide in presidential elections.
Once, researchers and political operatives had only a few options: some postelection academic surveys (particularly the University of Michigan’s American National Election Studies), precinct-level analyses, and, above all, the mainstay of Election Day television broadcasts—exit polls.
Now the choices for understanding the