Chesterton always has the right quote: "Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which you are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked. There are two meanings of the word 'nervous,' and it is not even a physical superiority to be actually without nerves. It may mean that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal, and that you are a paralytic."
I was going to do a very similar analysis to this one based on the General Social Survey, but I do not think the GSS is a good instrument for investigating what the "normal guy in 1995" meme is referring to.
First, note that it would be worth unpacking whether issues gained a partisan split between 1995 and now.
For instance, in your plot, the view that abortion should be legal for any reason appears to have a relatively small change from 1995 to 2024, going from a minority view (~42%) to a majority view (~58%).
However, when you look at views by party lean (https://borncurious.blog/i/157321174/partisanship), there is a much more dramatic change starting in the 1990s. Republican leaning voters support abortion-legal-for-any-reason pretty much at the same levels they did in 1998 (~30%). During that same time frame, Democrat-leaning voters went from minority support (~41%) to a whopping 82% super-majority support in 2022.
Indeed, abortion-legal-for-any-reason went from bipartisan majority opposition to becoming a signature view of the Democratic Party and a purity test for whether someone is accepted within its constituency.
This is much closer, I think, to the pattern of what was once a mainstream viewpoint being construed as "far right" between 1995 and now.
When I stumbled on that phenomenon for abortion, I thought about doing a broader analysis on "The Big Lurch", i.e., the phenomenon in which the Democratic Party's constituency rapidly changed from majority moderate-to-conservative cultural viewpoints to majority radical cultural viewpoints in the 21st century.
However, the GSS just doesn't ask the right questions for this. Abortion-legal-for-any-reason was an outlier because it was added in 1977 in response to Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton in 1973.
The problem is that most GSS questions are from the 1970s and 1980s. It either doesn't ask about the relevant questions for The Big Lurch phenomenon or, if it does, it frames them in an old-fashioned way.
For instance, if the GSS were to ask whether immigration enforcement is intrinsically immoral, I suspect you would see a similar pattern to abortion-legal-in-any-circumstances that tracks with first-term Obama campaigning on immigration enforcement and winning the Democratic primary versus the Biden-era lax immigration enforcement. (Though, many times the Democratic Party leadership doesn't actually reflect its constituency's views, so this is just conjecture.)
There are likely several issues like this that would track with The Big Lurch pattern, but the GSS isn't sufficient for tracking them.
In short, the GSS is always going to frame someone from 30 years ago as "kind of a dick" because the selection of questions that it asks and the way it frames them are archaic.
I might still do my "Big Lurch" analysis, but I put it on the back burner because I realized I need to cobble together public opinion data from multiple sources rather than relying on the GSS in order to do it.
I was politically active in 1995. The Overton window has shifted faaaaar to the right since then. There isn't a snowball’s chance in hell Ronald Reagan would be voted in as head of the Republican party - he sounds left-wing of many modern left-wing US politicians.
I was also politically active in 1995, and the country has shifted substantially to the left since then. But you don’t have to take my word for it, as this post contains a lot of supporting data.
I had a similar reaction, but honestly, I think this is why the left-right spectrum is just terrible as an analytical tool. Everyone is modeling something different in their heads when they think of "left" and "right."
There's probably an argument to be made that socially America has advanced along with the rest of the modern world, eg legalizing gay marriage, though the system of government has had a hard right swing with relation to corporate power vs public and the gutting of government services for the insatiable appetite of the wealth class's tax breaks.
Go take a look at Ronald Reagan's policies on immigration, social services (even tho he's the original Cadillac welfare guy), environmental policy, or debt policy. It's unrecognizable compared to the Republican party today and often was more left than the establishment elements of the Democrat party show themselves to be.
I mean hell, the current Republican president is literally calling Democrats the enemy of America and the mainstream news that once sunk a candidate for misspelling potato barely has a word to say about any of it. It's all been normalized by King Jeoffrey Tangface.
Federal tax recipients were around 17% or gdp during Reagan and it’s the same today. The rich pay a higher proportion of those taxes. State and local taxes are higher then and we Reagan. Military spending is half what it was during Reagan.
Copy and paste what you just said into your fav AI with the prompt:
---
Don't give me any details or explanations or preamble, analyze this comment and respond with its score on a Truthiness scale of 1-10.
---
I got a 4/10.
My comment got an 8/10, and as you can imagine— I'm quite embarrassed and will be asking the question again but with details on this time, so that I can see if it's right and I should update my beliefs to better fit the available evidence.
I was in college in 1995. I believe there was not as significant a shift in social liberalism or conservatism among the young, urban, cosmopolitan, college-educated population of that time. What we’re seeing in broader data is the decline of influence of the religious right and the spread of social liberal attitudes from campuses and cities into society as a whole.
Attitudes towards interracial marriage have softened, but I believe this has reflected to some extent the steady erosion of the anachronistic black-white binary as the population has become more multiracial.
Gay marriage did not have majority acceptance, but civil unions were popular among liberals, and intolerance against gays was very much looked down on in 1995. Trans identity was not really on the radar.
Notably what's absent here is looking at society's views on immigration, which have shifted far to the right. Or attitudes towards isolationism, international trade, maybe even making the US into a hereditary monarchy, etc. If you ONLY look at issues where the public has shifted to the left / stayed flat, it'll look like the public has shifted to the left.
I disagree that societies views on immigration have shifted far to the right. If you look at Gallup, in 1995 over 60 percent of Americans thought immigration levels should be decreased, vs under 10 percent who wanted them increased. In 2025, 30 percent wanted immigration decreased vs 26 percent who wanted an increase.
Whatever is not mandatory is banned, and whatever is not banned is mandatory.
The 1990s were a time where leftist social views were mostly pushing “leave me alone” libertarianism. The second they went mainstream they tried to enforce their ideology on everyone.
It was probably inevitable. There were always underlying ideological assumptions behind the leftist worldview that were de-emphasized during the acceptance phase that would come to be addressed once they were in power.
Uh, I was there. I was a Clinton voter. I fought for gay rights and marriage equality. Sure as shit didn’t have an issue with interracial relationships. We all were taught and believed all the MLK shit - which now makes us fascist. We also thought criminals were criminals, men couldn’t have babies, and that socialism was a proven failure as evident by the fall of the eastern block and USSR. I wouldn’t recognize the city I live in now - tents, rats, dysentery, drugs and zombies everywhere, urine and meth smoke on mass transit. Fine I’m a dick I guess. But you massively understate the difference between then and now. You site brief surveys when the real change is how things actually work in everyday life, how government and the societal machinery like the media, corporate HR, and higher ed turned into an Orwellian blob of ruthless enforcement of leftist orthodoxy and thought. We are well outside the range of the 1995 overton window.
The detailed racial liberalism chart shows almost a flat line at around 30% approval (very moderately increasing) for the last 30 years on the question of approval of a relative marrying a Black person.
But the last chart shows approval for interracial marriage at a higher level, starting at around 50% and increasing sharply to 90%.
They obviously measure a different thing, but it's not clear to me what exactly the difference is.
In the late 1980s, I had a client, a privately held business that installed and maintained a particular type of equipment at large commercial and industrial facilities.
The people on the trucks were mostly Irish, as was the owner, but there was a smattering of Eastern Europeans, and I asked the owner– who I had gotten to know quite well – how they came to be hired.
“They married into the family, so I had to give them a chance”.
I had personally witnessed job applications by Black applicants thrown into the trash can after they walked out the door, so I was curious: “What would happen if a Black man married into the family and needed a job?”
That was a showstopper… the owner had obviously never considered the possibility - and he took his time before answering.
“That would be a REALLY big problem… a lot of my guys would give him a REALLY hard time, and this can be a dangerous job… I would have to be VERY careful who I sent him out with…”
“But you would consider giving him the job?”
“Half the people in my family wouldn’t speak to either of them, but if my sisters or someone else like that asked, I would HAVE to give him at least the chance to try to do the job; if he was already there anyway….”
The social dynamics of this are complicated - the tribal family thing cuts both ways, and in complicated and sometimes (to me anyway) counterintuitive directions.
Idk, I think you're making a stronger case here than you yourself are willing to admit.
The best counter-point is that while these views *would* have been unacceptable a decade ago, we're now moving into some weird new paradigm where you almost *have* to buck left-wing political trends to be considered on the cutting edge.
I say this as an eternal political outsider who has been accused of radicalism by all kinds of persons over the years.
Would be interesting to know how the views of different age cohorts affect this. The 65+ are in the odd position of being kind of culturally moribund while still holding a great deal of political power due to their consistent voting...
"Liberals have this right about conservatives: they stand for stagnation and regression. With conservatives no lesson is never learned. In fact, the desire is go back before the lesson was learned when we were "innocent" and naive. It's a form of psychological infantilism"
I wish I could have those 52 years back. If I went back anytime at all I would tell myself stop trying to save the world with a knowledge Renaissance, save yourself, they are too stupid to get this. Yet here I still am and I should be saying that to myself. For complicated reasons I will be stopping this year and part of it is that reasoning. People simply are too stupid to be saved. We are more like that bacteria in the petri dish that grows until it kills itself off. We believe in endless growth and that's all they want and knowledge Renaissance for!
And yet living standards, health, freedom, opportunity, child safety, literacy, education and access to entertainment are incomparably better than prior eras. Funny.
Hm, I was there in the 90s and paying attention to politics. I think trying to cut this either way is dumb because some issues have practically switched "sides" and some different things are culturally relevant than were then. Issue by issue things don't fit neatly into left/right boxes. I also think if you limited it to looking at under 40 year olds in 1995 and those that age today, it wouldn't be that different. It most certainly was NOT OKAY for anyone to say out loud in 1995 that they didn't think interracial marriage was okay. If you're seeing that in studies, it reflects a lot of old religious people who are now dead and probably only said that shit to each other, but even they knew now to say it out loud in public or polite company.
The throughline here seems to be for the most part that everyone is a lot more libertarian and has lower moral standards they're willing to impose on others in general. I don't really see much of this breaking down left or right. Economically people definitely aren't more left. On sex/culture/race issues they certainly are, which to me just means nowadays people aren't willing to impose laws on anyone restricting them from doing much at all.
That cartoon was due to the biologist, or former biologist, Colin Wright. I believe his perspective was particularly shaped by changing views on sex and gender, and I think it is there that you would probably see the biggest shift relative to 1995. I suspect back then you wouldn't have gotten too much support for some of the positions and policies that are quite common now with respect to sex and gender (youth gender medicine etc).
I suspect the other one that has really moved is ‘color blind’ approaches to race equity. My sense is that this has been moved from being considered an obvious desiderata to being considered harmful and ‘part of the problem’ at least on the left.
Chesterton always has the right quote: "Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which you are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked. There are two meanings of the word 'nervous,' and it is not even a physical superiority to be actually without nerves. It may mean that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal, and that you are a paralytic."
I was going to do a very similar analysis to this one based on the General Social Survey, but I do not think the GSS is a good instrument for investigating what the "normal guy in 1995" meme is referring to.
First, note that it would be worth unpacking whether issues gained a partisan split between 1995 and now.
For instance, in your plot, the view that abortion should be legal for any reason appears to have a relatively small change from 1995 to 2024, going from a minority view (~42%) to a majority view (~58%).
However, when you look at views by party lean (https://borncurious.blog/i/157321174/partisanship), there is a much more dramatic change starting in the 1990s. Republican leaning voters support abortion-legal-for-any-reason pretty much at the same levels they did in 1998 (~30%). During that same time frame, Democrat-leaning voters went from minority support (~41%) to a whopping 82% super-majority support in 2022.
Indeed, abortion-legal-for-any-reason went from bipartisan majority opposition to becoming a signature view of the Democratic Party and a purity test for whether someone is accepted within its constituency.
This is much closer, I think, to the pattern of what was once a mainstream viewpoint being construed as "far right" between 1995 and now.
When I stumbled on that phenomenon for abortion, I thought about doing a broader analysis on "The Big Lurch", i.e., the phenomenon in which the Democratic Party's constituency rapidly changed from majority moderate-to-conservative cultural viewpoints to majority radical cultural viewpoints in the 21st century.
However, the GSS just doesn't ask the right questions for this. Abortion-legal-for-any-reason was an outlier because it was added in 1977 in response to Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton in 1973.
The problem is that most GSS questions are from the 1970s and 1980s. It either doesn't ask about the relevant questions for The Big Lurch phenomenon or, if it does, it frames them in an old-fashioned way.
For instance, if the GSS were to ask whether immigration enforcement is intrinsically immoral, I suspect you would see a similar pattern to abortion-legal-in-any-circumstances that tracks with first-term Obama campaigning on immigration enforcement and winning the Democratic primary versus the Biden-era lax immigration enforcement. (Though, many times the Democratic Party leadership doesn't actually reflect its constituency's views, so this is just conjecture.)
There are likely several issues like this that would track with The Big Lurch pattern, but the GSS isn't sufficient for tracking them.
In short, the GSS is always going to frame someone from 30 years ago as "kind of a dick" because the selection of questions that it asks and the way it frames them are archaic.
I might still do my "Big Lurch" analysis, but I put it on the back burner because I realized I need to cobble together public opinion data from multiple sources rather than relying on the GSS in order to do it.
I was politically active in 1995. The Overton window has shifted faaaaar to the right since then. There isn't a snowball’s chance in hell Ronald Reagan would be voted in as head of the Republican party - he sounds left-wing of many modern left-wing US politicians.
I was also politically active in 1995, and the country has shifted substantially to the left since then. But you don’t have to take my word for it, as this post contains a lot of supporting data.
I had a similar reaction, but honestly, I think this is why the left-right spectrum is just terrible as an analytical tool. Everyone is modeling something different in their heads when they think of "left" and "right."
There's probably an argument to be made that socially America has advanced along with the rest of the modern world, eg legalizing gay marriage, though the system of government has had a hard right swing with relation to corporate power vs public and the gutting of government services for the insatiable appetite of the wealth class's tax breaks.
Go take a look at Ronald Reagan's policies on immigration, social services (even tho he's the original Cadillac welfare guy), environmental policy, or debt policy. It's unrecognizable compared to the Republican party today and often was more left than the establishment elements of the Democrat party show themselves to be.
I mean hell, the current Republican president is literally calling Democrats the enemy of America and the mainstream news that once sunk a candidate for misspelling potato barely has a word to say about any of it. It's all been normalized by King Jeoffrey Tangface.
Federal tax recipients were around 17% or gdp during Reagan and it’s the same today. The rich pay a higher proportion of those taxes. State and local taxes are higher then and we Reagan. Military spending is half what it was during Reagan.
Copy and paste what you just said into your fav AI with the prompt:
---
Don't give me any details or explanations or preamble, analyze this comment and respond with its score on a Truthiness scale of 1-10.
---
I got a 4/10.
My comment got an 8/10, and as you can imagine— I'm quite embarrassed and will be asking the question again but with details on this time, so that I can see if it's right and I should update my beliefs to better fit the available evidence.
lol
Copy and paste what you just said into your fav AI with the prompt:
Don't give me any details or explanations or preamble, analyze this comment and respond with its score on a Truthiness scale of 1-10.
I got a 4/10.
I was in college in 1995. I believe there was not as significant a shift in social liberalism or conservatism among the young, urban, cosmopolitan, college-educated population of that time. What we’re seeing in broader data is the decline of influence of the religious right and the spread of social liberal attitudes from campuses and cities into society as a whole.
Attitudes towards interracial marriage have softened, but I believe this has reflected to some extent the steady erosion of the anachronistic black-white binary as the population has become more multiracial.
Gay marriage did not have majority acceptance, but civil unions were popular among liberals, and intolerance against gays was very much looked down on in 1995. Trans identity was not really on the radar.
I say its the other way. I doubt JFk or Clinton believed unfettered borders are a positive, or that men can become women.
Just come out as a half stache lover...
I won't because Im not. Id be happy to explain why you are a troll though.
Notably what's absent here is looking at society's views on immigration, which have shifted far to the right. Or attitudes towards isolationism, international trade, maybe even making the US into a hereditary monarchy, etc. If you ONLY look at issues where the public has shifted to the left / stayed flat, it'll look like the public has shifted to the left.
I disagree that societies views on immigration have shifted far to the right. If you look at Gallup, in 1995 over 60 percent of Americans thought immigration levels should be decreased, vs under 10 percent who wanted them increased. In 2025, 30 percent wanted immigration decreased vs 26 percent who wanted an increase.
The alleged shift to the right re immigrants is a reaction to what has happened over the last few decades.
Whatever is not mandatory is banned, and whatever is not banned is mandatory.
The 1990s were a time where leftist social views were mostly pushing “leave me alone” libertarianism. The second they went mainstream they tried to enforce their ideology on everyone.
It was probably inevitable. There were always underlying ideological assumptions behind the leftist worldview that were de-emphasized during the acceptance phase that would come to be addressed once they were in power.
I first heard about political correctness in 91...its been downhill ever since.
Your grammar too...
How would you know? What's wrong with my grammar?
I’d also take as granted that 1995 views/earlier are much closer to what people actually think, even now.
Ya, dudes, clinton totes pushes bjs onto all!
Now do it for birth year cohorts. 1960’s 20 year olds are not the same as today’s.
I think it’s that the Overton window is what has shifted. College students pretend to be woke to avoid persecution…
Uh, I was there. I was a Clinton voter. I fought for gay rights and marriage equality. Sure as shit didn’t have an issue with interracial relationships. We all were taught and believed all the MLK shit - which now makes us fascist. We also thought criminals were criminals, men couldn’t have babies, and that socialism was a proven failure as evident by the fall of the eastern block and USSR. I wouldn’t recognize the city I live in now - tents, rats, dysentery, drugs and zombies everywhere, urine and meth smoke on mass transit. Fine I’m a dick I guess. But you massively understate the difference between then and now. You site brief surveys when the real change is how things actually work in everyday life, how government and the societal machinery like the media, corporate HR, and higher ed turned into an Orwellian blob of ruthless enforcement of leftist orthodoxy and thought. We are well outside the range of the 1995 overton window.
You must need smelling salts...
Do you actually have anything substantive to add. Or is it just snipey character assasination?
The detailed racial liberalism chart shows almost a flat line at around 30% approval (very moderately increasing) for the last 30 years on the question of approval of a relative marrying a Black person.
But the last chart shows approval for interracial marriage at a higher level, starting at around 50% and increasing sharply to 90%.
They obviously measure a different thing, but it's not clear to me what exactly the difference is.
In the late 1980s, I had a client, a privately held business that installed and maintained a particular type of equipment at large commercial and industrial facilities.
The people on the trucks were mostly Irish, as was the owner, but there was a smattering of Eastern Europeans, and I asked the owner– who I had gotten to know quite well – how they came to be hired.
“They married into the family, so I had to give them a chance”.
I had personally witnessed job applications by Black applicants thrown into the trash can after they walked out the door, so I was curious: “What would happen if a Black man married into the family and needed a job?”
That was a showstopper… the owner had obviously never considered the possibility - and he took his time before answering.
“That would be a REALLY big problem… a lot of my guys would give him a REALLY hard time, and this can be a dangerous job… I would have to be VERY careful who I sent him out with…”
“But you would consider giving him the job?”
“Half the people in my family wouldn’t speak to either of them, but if my sisters or someone else like that asked, I would HAVE to give him at least the chance to try to do the job; if he was already there anyway….”
The social dynamics of this are complicated - the tribal family thing cuts both ways, and in complicated and sometimes (to me anyway) counterintuitive directions.
Idk, I think you're making a stronger case here than you yourself are willing to admit.
The best counter-point is that while these views *would* have been unacceptable a decade ago, we're now moving into some weird new paradigm where you almost *have* to buck left-wing political trends to be considered on the cutting edge.
I say this as an eternal political outsider who has been accused of radicalism by all kinds of persons over the years.
Would be interesting to know how the views of different age cohorts affect this. The 65+ are in the odd position of being kind of culturally moribund while still holding a great deal of political power due to their consistent voting...
"Liberals have this right about conservatives: they stand for stagnation and regression. With conservatives no lesson is never learned. In fact, the desire is go back before the lesson was learned when we were "innocent" and naive. It's a form of psychological infantilism"
- Mark Brahmin
Nice article. Don't societies usually always shift left in the long wrong, since what's conservative is relative to the past?
I wish I could have those 52 years back. If I went back anytime at all I would tell myself stop trying to save the world with a knowledge Renaissance, save yourself, they are too stupid to get this. Yet here I still am and I should be saying that to myself. For complicated reasons I will be stopping this year and part of it is that reasoning. People simply are too stupid to be saved. We are more like that bacteria in the petri dish that grows until it kills itself off. We believe in endless growth and that's all they want and knowledge Renaissance for!
And yet living standards, health, freedom, opportunity, child safety, literacy, education and access to entertainment are incomparably better than prior eras. Funny.
You're wrong on all of those except entertainment.
Wow! Thanks for sharing. You might want to tell these folks…
https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy
Tell them what? That life expectency decreased? Because I never said that.
There are other pages on the site. Please feel free to explore.
Not a word on affordability, family formation, housing costs, crime or long term debt. Funny that.
Hm, I was there in the 90s and paying attention to politics. I think trying to cut this either way is dumb because some issues have practically switched "sides" and some different things are culturally relevant than were then. Issue by issue things don't fit neatly into left/right boxes. I also think if you limited it to looking at under 40 year olds in 1995 and those that age today, it wouldn't be that different. It most certainly was NOT OKAY for anyone to say out loud in 1995 that they didn't think interracial marriage was okay. If you're seeing that in studies, it reflects a lot of old religious people who are now dead and probably only said that shit to each other, but even they knew now to say it out loud in public or polite company.
The throughline here seems to be for the most part that everyone is a lot more libertarian and has lower moral standards they're willing to impose on others in general. I don't really see much of this breaking down left or right. Economically people definitely aren't more left. On sex/culture/race issues they certainly are, which to me just means nowadays people aren't willing to impose laws on anyone restricting them from doing much at all.
That cartoon was due to the biologist, or former biologist, Colin Wright. I believe his perspective was particularly shaped by changing views on sex and gender, and I think it is there that you would probably see the biggest shift relative to 1995. I suspect back then you wouldn't have gotten too much support for some of the positions and policies that are quite common now with respect to sex and gender (youth gender medicine etc).
I suspect the other one that has really moved is ‘color blind’ approaches to race equity. My sense is that this has been moved from being considered an obvious desiderata to being considered harmful and ‘part of the problem’ at least on the left.