21 ms·

This Is How Fast America Changes Its Mind

243 points by dataminer 11y ago

acconrad 11y ago
While the speed of change is good for these issues, could that speed be detrimental in other scenarios? For example, what if this increases the speed to reverse good policies, such as carbon emissions taxes? What if the speed of change from political influence of much larger entities (corporations) also increases the influence to reverse things even faster?
- gyardley 11y ago
  'What if'? Prohibition is one of the examples - the policies aren't at all guaranteed to be good.
  - lukifer 11y ago
    As an aside, it's no accident that women's suffrage coincides chronologically with prohibition. Though it turned out to be bad policy, prohibition was a galvanizing issue that drove many women to political activism, either for religious reasons, and/or in reaction to alcoholism and domestic abuse.
    - rayiner 11y ago
      I strongly recommend watching the PBS series on the topic: http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition.
    - amyjess 11y ago
      Progressives also endorsed prohibition because local bosses often used saloons as their bases, so breaking up the saloons was seen as a way to cut off corrupt party officials.
- mikeash 11y ago
  The title is misleading. "America Changes Its Mind" sounds like it's talking about people's opinions, but the data presented is about legal status at the state level. This is misleading because there's a strong discontinuity there, and the speed at which states legalize something doesn't have to be related to the speed at which opinions change. For an extreme case, consider some issue where opinions are evenly spread out among all the states, and it very slowly changes, at a rate of, say, 0.5% per year. It would take two centuries to go from all-against to all-for at that rate, yet once you pass 50% you'd expect all the states to switch over more or less simultaneously. The real world isn't so clean, but the same idea applies. Looking at the data, the recent examples of marijuana and same-sex marriage are changing faster, at more like 1-2%/year, but you can still see that the rate of change in state legalization is way faster than the rate of change of public opinion, as one would generally expect. A couple of random pages with relevant poll data: http://www.gallup.com/poll/117328/marriage.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/117328/marriage.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/1657/illegal-drugs.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/1657/illegal-drugs.aspx
  - fizbin 11y ago
    And looking at something already settled by the courts, it's also interesting to compare the article's chart on the legal status of interracial marriage with public opinion data: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interracial_marriage_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Public_opinion_of_interracial_marriage_in_the_United_States.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interracial_marriage_in_the_Uni... Note that the "Approve" line doesn't cross the "Disapprove" line until the mid-1980s, long after the USSC had spoken. With same-sex marriage on the other hand, the "Approve"/"Disapprove" cross-over happened a bit over three years ago and the USSC has yet to speak as definitively as it did in Loving v. Virginia. (One could argue that in invalidating most of DOMA, the USSC has already spoken strongly - if not definitively - in favor of same-sex marriage, and therefore that we should use that decision when making analogies to Loving. I'm not sure about that.)
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      > One could argue that in invalidating most of DOMA, the USSC has already spoken strongly - if not definitively - in favor of same-sex marriage, and therefore that we should use that decision when making analogies to Loving Not very convincingly, because it did not hold that States cannot deny equal marriage, which would be the equivalent of the holding in Loving.
- DennisP 11y ago
  There is no carbon tax at the federal level. America changing its mind on carbon policy would be a good thing.
- gadders 11y ago
  Who defines whether a policy is "good" or not? You seem to take the definition for granted.
amyjess 11y ago
I love the data, but the animations are just obnoxious.
- metamet 11y ago
  You only see them once, so I didn't think it was that bad.
  - amyjess 11y ago
    You see them every time you scroll. Want to go back and look at something again? You now have to wait for the animation. This is objectively bad design. I want static PNGs or SVGs, not JavaScript. Also, that site got in my shitlist for taking control of my keyboard. I prefer to use the arrow keys to scroll one line at a time, and the stupid JavaScript on that site made that impossible. Actually, I'd be happiest if that entire page was just a single static .svg file.
    - classicsnoot 11y ago
      Every point you have made here is subjective.
      - cbd1984 11y ago
        It's about graphs. Their whole purpose is usability, and usability is almost entirely subjective.
      - rayiner 11y ago
        No, it's not. The animations add no information that isn't conveyed by the graph already--it just creates a delay before you can see the information. And changing the behavior of core functionality like the keyboard/pointer will confuse people, and on this page there is nothing to be gained in return.
        classicsnoot 11y ago
twoodfin 11y ago
The case comes amid a wave of gay marriage legalization... This phrase, and the title, mask the fact that in the majority of states same-sex marriage legalization came from court cases, not through legislation or referenda[1]. "America", broadly construed, is quickly changing its mind, too, but this "wave" is more a product of judicial thought than public opinion. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_in_the_United_States#States_that_fully_license_and_recognize_same-sex_marriage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_in_the_United...
- bigpeopleareold 11y ago
  That is, unless the author considers "America changing its mind" and "judicial thought" to be the same thing. I immediately picked up on this as well, the common theme being what federal and state courts thinks.
  - sanderjd 11y ago
    This is really one of the most interesting questions in our system. I tend to be in favor of this sort of judicial action, but it's always in the back of my head that I'm only in favor of it because so far it has all gone my way. It is frightening to think that someday I'll find myself on the frustrating side of an issue where only a truly heroic amount of legislation can overrule the opinions of a few tens of legal minds.
    - talmand 11y ago
      That's a point that I've seen many try to make, regardless of their actual opinion on the matter, only to be shouted down. It's as if some people don't understand that such a thing could eventually be used against them. It seems that many people don't consider the long-term effects of their short-term gains. The court system can be fickle, what it does that benefits you today can be reversed in the future to your detriment.
- anthony_romeo 11y ago
  At the same time, after these courts have started legalizing gay marriage, public support for gay marriage has followed. I always suspect it's a chicken-or-egg type of situation. Sometimes there is genuine public support for a given issue. Other times, change must occur first, and then people can see that society hasn't collapsed. Once polls began to demonstrate that more people supported gay marriage than were against it (years after the Massachusetts court decision), politicians began tripping over each other to suddenly become champions of gay rights.
Kiro 11y ago
OT but took a while before I realised the table was actually a representation of a map and not according to some other taxonomy.
silverlight 11y ago
It's incredible to see how apparently progressive Kansas used to be. As someone who lives here now, I always assume we're going to be one of the slowest (I guess "most conservative" might be a nicer way of putting it) states to adapt to social change. But I guess I really would have liked the Kansas that existed before the middle of the last century...
amelius 11y ago
The gun laws are missing from these graphs. How fast would America change its mind about them?
- clarkmoody 11y ago
  What would you chart? "Gun laws" are not as clear-cut as the issues listed in the article.
  - hga 11y ago
    But their raw change has been massive. When I came of age, I could not: carry concealed in my home state or more than a hand full of them, or buy ammunition mail order, and the BATFE was in the process of exterminating US gun culture. Since then I cannot buy a machine gun manufactured after 1986, nor an imported "assault weapon", nor buy a gun from a dealer without an "instant check", and as fiatmoney mentioned, nationally "assault weapons" have mostly cycled.
- meritt 11y ago
  This graph is focused on expansion of rights, not retraction.
  - khill 11y ago
    Not if one considers the rights of the unborn.
  - bmelton 11y ago
    With a few exceptions, gun rights have, for the most part, expanded over the past couple of decades. More and more states are adopting some form of carry laws, and to my knowledge, those that have expanded gun rights have never reversed. The one notable exception that comes to mind is Colorado, with its ammo capacity ban, but even that's sort of up in the air at the moment.
    - hga 11y ago
      There's a new line of attack you might not be aware of. Well protected by his own armed security Bloomberg is now the most effective gun controller (he and his people engineered the Colorado debacle, and gerrymandering is likely to keep it all), and he's pursuing deceptive transfer laws through state initiatives, with initial success in Washington state. These laws ostensibly regulate private transfers, but in the fine print are aimed directly at hindering the creation of new gun owners and otherwise trapping us in flypaper, by criminalizing the lending and renting of guns even under supervision. The Washington state officials say they won't enforce that part of the law, but.... Next up are Nevada and Oregon, last time I heard about this.
lambda 11y ago
Hmm. This seems to focus on a few issues that neatly fall into a sense of "progress" in social change, in which something changes in a number of states culminating in a Supreme Court decision that causes that change to affect the entire country. However, it ignores some issues that don't fall into such a pattern. For example, the issue of teaching evolution vs. creation in public schools; where teaching about evolution has never been questioned (as far as I know) in some states, while others have had laws on the books, and there is continuing pressure and laws that offer limited "workarounds" of the supreme court decision in order to promote "teaching the controversy", so it's not really a clear cut case of progress. Another that isn't covered is capital punishment; some states have never had capital punishment, some have repealed it over the years, and the Supreme Court briefly suspended it nationwide but it was reinstated later, and many states still practice it. Abortion, which is used as an example in this article, faces a similar problems as teaching of evolution. While abortion was allowed nationwide by Roe v. Wade, states are slowly introducing laws that restrict it so heavily that it's not available to a large fraction of people who need it. The turning point nationwide is being slowly turned back by laws that skirt the existing precedent. It seems like picking these couple of issues, to show how "it may happen again", is a bit disingenuous without also covering major cases in which change hasn't followed this pattern, or has backslid since the original change.
- titanomachy 11y ago
  I don't think capital punishment and creationism follow the same trend as women's suffrage, interracial marriage, etc. The issues in the article started with low state-level support and rapidly gained acceptance across the country; at some threshold the Supreme Court stepped in and said "this is now accepted as law nation-wide. I don't have the numbers to back this up, but I don't think creation teaching and capital punishment started at a low level of support and rapidly ramped up across many states. State-level legislation on creation-teaching is limited to a few conservative areas. Capital punishment has been around forever and support for it has fluctuated with the times. I agree that abortion doesn't really fit the pattern of the other issues in the article, though. Supreme court approval seems to have come prematurely in that case.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
glial 11y ago
From the last graph, it seems like the rate of change (if that's what you'd call it) is closely related to the time period in which the change is taking place, or at least the time period in which the change started. I wonder if this has to do with a general increase in malleability of (judicial) opinions, or faster information transfer, or something else.
- mokus 11y ago
  Perhaps it's a sampling bias - a slow change that started recently may not yet have been detected to be included on the graph (or may not have enough reliable data to support inclusion).
  - glial 11y ago
    True, that's an interesting point.
smackfu 11y ago
They probably should have left abortion out, since it's not clear that American ever changed their mind on that. Over the last 20 years, it's still roughly 50/50. http://www.gallup.com/poll/170249/split-abortion-pro-choice-pro-life.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/170249/split-abortion-pro-choice-...
- wwweston 11y ago
  They should have indeed left it out. Abortion is a different (and tougher) issue because there isn't just a preconception/prejudice at work -- there are multiple important values in tension with one another.
- 3minus1 11y ago
  The article is about a pattern where laws change in a very short span, and abortion fits that pattern. The title is just a misnomer. It should be called "How Fast America's Lawmakers/Supreme Courts change their mind.
joshuaheard 11y ago
Abortion and gay marriage were changed in the courts, so I don't know if that counts as America changing its mind. That being said, I would posit that any increase in the rate of America changing its mind is due to the increase in the rate of information exchange due to advances in communication technology.
- saturdaysaint 11y ago
  Right, few of these "mind changes" are really analogous in terms of how they were enacted. Voter referendums are much more responsive to public opinion (ie something like "America") than legislatures, let alone the higher bar of constitutional change.
- torbit 11y ago
  agree. The south is very religious & a high percentage would say they are Christian over non religious. I bet they verbally support it when asked.. to not be shamed when speaking against it. When it comes to voting, they are against it.
- wanderingstan 11y ago
  Gay marriage has been steadily gaining in public approval, as seen here: http://www.gallup.com/poll/169640/sex-marriage-support-reaches-new-high.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/169640/sex-marriage-support-reach... This is indeed America changing its mind. You're right that there is not a direct connection between America's laws and America's minds, but the article was clear in what it was reporting. It would have been interesting to also include information on public polling of these issues, but this information doesn't exist beyond a few decades ago.
  - kelukelugames 11y ago
    There is a chart with "age" on the y axis and "year for the poll" on the x axis. The delta is also shown for each group from 1996 to 2014. http://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/tbpelkodp0spw8exj7rmuw.png http://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Prod... I wish there thy y axis was birth year. That way we can see if older people are actually changing their minds instead of just aging into the next bracket.
intopieces 11y ago
The problem with the analysis re: Marijuana is that it appears to leave out the anti-drug treaties we've signed with other UN members. As I understand it, federal legalization is a nonstarter w/r/t that agreement.
- adventured 11y ago
  Any treaty that's inconvenient will be abandoned, with hardly a second thought. Those treaties are the least concerning challenge in the entire legalization process, they are truly irrelevant. Nothing will happen to the US if it abandons those treaties. It'll be a blip in the news for one day, as a few grumbles are heard. Other than that, what you'll hear is mostly cheering and celebrating. Other countries will take it as a cue that the global war on drugs the US has been prosecuting is now over, and they will begin legalizing (this is already underway). It's no longer a question of if; at this point nothing will stop the inevitable rolling back of the war on drugs, the momentum is overwhelming.
- sanderjd 11y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding has always been that the US has been the one pushing for those treaties. If that is the case, it seems possible that if anti-Marijuana policy loses support here, its support in the UN won't be so strong.
  - unics 11y ago
    The US has been behind it and putting mountains of cash along with it to enact the treaties.
- gdubs 11y ago
  The US has a pretty casual understanding of international law...
  - kbenson 11y ago
    Or perhaps the US has a fairly nuanced understanding of international law, and when it can circumvent it, when it can ignore it by expending some power or international good-will, and when it will cost too much.
serve_yay 11y ago
"In any event, the sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems. These have been dealt with, when they have been dealt with at all, out of necessity — and in political terms, anyway, necessity means concessions made in order to stay on top." - Daniel Baldwin
M8 11y ago
I wonder how quickly will this one get recognized, at the moment it's just an underground movement on Reddit and "Manosphere" etc.: http://www.singularity2050.com/2010/01/the-misandry-bubble.html http://www.singularity2050.com/2010/01/the-misandry-bubble.h...
- serve_yay 11y ago
  I don't recommend the link above. It's garbage
  - M8 11y ago
    I am sure every civil rights movement faces similar kind of backlash in the beginning.
    - mikeash 11y ago
      Probably, but that doesn't imply that every movement that faces a similar kind of backlash is a civil rights movement. They laughed at Einstein, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
  - Vaskivo 11y ago
    You have a five minute difference in your posts. Did you ever read the article? I'm not agreing completely with it, but I'll refrain from commenting until I finished reading it.
    - mikeash 11y ago
      Maybe he was already familiar with it before? I also wonder just how far into an article like this you have to read before you can accurately describe it as garbage. You come across nice quotes like "Contraception made it possible for females to conduct campaigns to act on their urges of hypergamy." pretty early on. Is it really necessary to drink the entire bottle of crap before one can safely declare that it is, in fact, crap?
    - psychometry 11y ago
netcan 11y ago
On a long enough timescale (which can still sometime be pretty short) stuff seems to move together. The centre. The fringes. The legislation, the courts. And of course, public opinion. Democracy form a certain perspective is built in to us. Or at least people (demo) have in built mechanisms for moving together.
andrewla 11y ago
This is an interesting analysis, but it would be more interesting to look at the generalization of the trends, rather than the cherry-picked examples of "interesting" policies. Specifically, take all US Supreme Court decisions that resulted in the invalidation of state legislature, and track what the trend looked like in terms of historical trends of states that conformed to the decision before the decision was made. Is anyone aware of any data sources that would have this information in some form? The complexity seems to be that if a law was struck down by a state in 1956, and the Supreme Court made a decision relative to that law in 1960, determining whether the law would have been struck down could be more subtle than a binary yes/no. But even having this data in a basic form, measuring state legislature activity leading up to a relevant federal court decision, could at least give an indication of how long issues take to gain some momentum. This ignores the other axes; like state judicial decisions being overridden or validated by the federal level, or other variants, but still would be very interesting.
jfmercer 11y ago
It is worth noting that the first two issues were settled via Constitutional Amendments, whereas the second two were decided by the Supreme Court. If I were a betting man, I would bet that the SSM issue will also be settled by the Supreme Court, not by Constitutional Amendment. It seems that, as a nation, we Americans can no longer settle divisive national (and therefore Federal) issues via the democratic process envisioned by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution: amendment of the Constitution itself. Instead, we leave ultimate decision making power in the hands of the Supreme Court. Former Chief Justice Earl Warren expressed concern that if the Court's power became too widespread, America would have, instead of democracy, kritarchy: rule by judges.
- jfmercer 11y ago
  Correction: It was Supreme Court Justice Stanley Reed [1], not Chief Justice Earl Warren [2], who "expressed concern that if the Court's power became too widespread, America would have, instead of democracy, kritarchy". He did so in late July 1953, specifically regarding the not-yet-decided Brown v. Board of Eduction decision of May 1953, in a discussion with one of his law clerks, John David Fassett. He confronted Fassett with the question, "Are you one of those people who believes in krytocracy?" Apparently, he discussed this question at length with his law clerks in the months leading up to the Brown decision. I could find no evidence that he spoke with his Supreme Court colleagues about it, but, then again, I've done no real research. Also according to Fassett, in a February 1953 memo--three months before the Brown ruling--fellow Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson [3] used the term "a ruthless use of judicial power." Although Jackson did not use the term "krytocracy," Fassett commented, "That was sort of Justice Reed's feeling too--his krytocracy thought was the same thing." I found all of the above in this article [4]. Finally, it is worth noting that, regardless of certain Justices' concerns about the Constitutional limits of judicial authority, the Brown v. Board of Education ruling overturned Plessy v. Ferguson by a unanimous vote, 9-0. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Forman_Reed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Forman_Reed [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Warren https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Warren [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Jackson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Jackson [4] http://www.roberthjackson.org/files/theman/speeches-articles/files/articles/15fc4e650c204cfe9e7170bc4428d890.pdf http://www.roberthjackson.org/files/theman/speeches-articles...
Terr_ 11y ago
They should scale each state by its population, or you overemphasize the (ostensible) opinions of the people in very small states.
qq66 11y ago
The flip-flop is not as fast as the law makes it seem, because a law against X only gets passed when X seems like a real possibility. Nobody was passing gay marriage bans in 1850 -- only when it seemed imminent did people try to fight it.

243 points by dataminer 11y ago

While the speed of change is good for these issues, could that speed be detrimental in other scenarios? For example, what if this increases the speed to reverse good policies, such as carbon emissions taxes? What if the speed of change from political influence of much larger entities (corporations) also increases the influence to reverse things even faster?

gyardley 11y ago
'What if'? Prohibition is one of the examples - the policies aren't at all guaranteed to be good.
- lukifer 11y ago
  As an aside, it's no accident that women's suffrage coincides chronologically with prohibition. Though it turned out to be bad policy, prohibition was a galvanizing issue that drove many women to political activism, either for religious reasons, and/or in reaction to alcoholism and domestic abuse.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    I strongly recommend watching the PBS series on the topic: http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition.
  - amyjess 11y ago
    Progressives also endorsed prohibition because local bosses often used saloons as their bases, so breaking up the saloons was seen as a way to cut off corrupt party officials.
mikeash 11y ago
The title is misleading. "America Changes Its Mind" sounds like it's talking about people's opinions, but the data presented is about legal status at the state level. This is misleading because there's a strong discontinuity there, and the speed at which states legalize something doesn't have to be related to the speed at which opinions change. For an extreme case, consider some issue where opinions are evenly spread out among all the states, and it very slowly changes, at a rate of, say, 0.5% per year. It would take two centuries to go from all-against to all-for at that rate, yet once you pass 50% you'd expect all the states to switch over more or less simultaneously. The real world isn't so clean, but the same idea applies. Looking at the data, the recent examples of marijuana and same-sex marriage are changing faster, at more like 1-2%/year, but you can still see that the rate of change in state legalization is way faster than the rate of change of public opinion, as one would generally expect. A couple of random pages with relevant poll data: http://www.gallup.com/poll/117328/marriage.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/117328/marriage.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/1657/illegal-drugs.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/1657/illegal-drugs.aspx
- fizbin 11y ago
  And looking at something already settled by the courts, it's also interesting to compare the article's chart on the legal status of interracial marriage with public opinion data: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interracial_marriage_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Public_opinion_of_interracial_marriage_in_the_United_States.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interracial_marriage_in_the_Uni... Note that the "Approve" line doesn't cross the "Disapprove" line until the mid-1980s, long after the USSC had spoken. With same-sex marriage on the other hand, the "Approve"/"Disapprove" cross-over happened a bit over three years ago and the USSC has yet to speak as definitively as it did in Loving v. Virginia. (One could argue that in invalidating most of DOMA, the USSC has already spoken strongly - if not definitively - in favor of same-sex marriage, and therefore that we should use that decision when making analogies to Loving. I'm not sure about that.)
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > One could argue that in invalidating most of DOMA, the USSC has already spoken strongly - if not definitively - in favor of same-sex marriage, and therefore that we should use that decision when making analogies to Loving Not very convincingly, because it did not hold that States cannot deny equal marriage, which would be the equivalent of the holding in Loving.
DennisP 11y ago
There is no carbon tax at the federal level. America changing its mind on carbon policy would be a good thing.
gadders 11y ago
Who defines whether a policy is "good" or not? You seem to take the definition for granted.

amyjess 11y ago

I love the data, but the animations are just obnoxious.

metamet 11y ago
You only see them once, so I didn't think it was that bad.
- amyjess 11y ago
  You see them every time you scroll. Want to go back and look at something again? You now have to wait for the animation. This is objectively bad design. I want static PNGs or SVGs, not JavaScript. Also, that site got in my shitlist for taking control of my keyboard. I prefer to use the arrow keys to scroll one line at a time, and the stupid JavaScript on that site made that impossible. Actually, I'd be happiest if that entire page was just a single static .svg file.
  - classicsnoot 11y ago
    Every point you have made here is subjective.
    - cbd1984 11y ago
      It's about graphs. Their whole purpose is usability, and usability is almost entirely subjective.
    - rayiner 11y ago
      No, it's not. The animations add no information that isn't conveyed by the graph already--it just creates a delay before you can see the information. And changing the behavior of core functionality like the keyboard/pointer will confuse people, and on this page there is nothing to be gained in return.
      - classicsnoot 11y ago

twoodfin 11y ago

The case comes amid a wave of gay marriage legalization... This phrase, and the title, mask the fact that in the majority of states same-sex marriage legalization came from court cases, not through legislation or referenda[1]. "America", broadly construed, is quickly changing its mind, too, but this "wave" is more a product of judicial thought than public opinion. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_in_the_United_States#States_that_fully_license_and_recognize_same-sex_marriage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_in_the_United...

bigpeopleareold 11y ago
That is, unless the author considers "America changing its mind" and "judicial thought" to be the same thing. I immediately picked up on this as well, the common theme being what federal and state courts thinks.
- sanderjd 11y ago
  This is really one of the most interesting questions in our system. I tend to be in favor of this sort of judicial action, but it's always in the back of my head that I'm only in favor of it because so far it has all gone my way. It is frightening to think that someday I'll find myself on the frustrating side of an issue where only a truly heroic amount of legislation can overrule the opinions of a few tens of legal minds.
  - talmand 11y ago
    That's a point that I've seen many try to make, regardless of their actual opinion on the matter, only to be shouted down. It's as if some people don't understand that such a thing could eventually be used against them. It seems that many people don't consider the long-term effects of their short-term gains. The court system can be fickle, what it does that benefits you today can be reversed in the future to your detriment.
anthony_romeo 11y ago
At the same time, after these courts have started legalizing gay marriage, public support for gay marriage has followed. I always suspect it's a chicken-or-egg type of situation. Sometimes there is genuine public support for a given issue. Other times, change must occur first, and then people can see that society hasn't collapsed. Once polls began to demonstrate that more people supported gay marriage than were against it (years after the Massachusetts court decision), politicians began tripping over each other to suddenly become champions of gay rights.

Kiro 11y ago

OT but took a while before I realised the table was actually a representation of a map and not according to some other taxonomy.

silverlight 11y ago

It's incredible to see how apparently progressive Kansas used to be. As someone who lives here now, I always assume we're going to be one of the slowest (I guess "most conservative" might be a nicer way of putting it) states to adapt to social change. But I guess I really would have liked the Kansas that existed before the middle of the last century...

amelius 11y ago

The gun laws are missing from these graphs. How fast would America change its mind about them?

clarkmoody 11y ago
What would you chart? "Gun laws" are not as clear-cut as the issues listed in the article.
- hga 11y ago
  But their raw change has been massive. When I came of age, I could not: carry concealed in my home state or more than a hand full of them, or buy ammunition mail order, and the BATFE was in the process of exterminating US gun culture. Since then I cannot buy a machine gun manufactured after 1986, nor an imported "assault weapon", nor buy a gun from a dealer without an "instant check", and as fiatmoney mentioned, nationally "assault weapons" have mostly cycled.
meritt 11y ago
This graph is focused on expansion of rights, not retraction.
- khill 11y ago
  Not if one considers the rights of the unborn.
- bmelton 11y ago
  With a few exceptions, gun rights have, for the most part, expanded over the past couple of decades. More and more states are adopting some form of carry laws, and to my knowledge, those that have expanded gun rights have never reversed. The one notable exception that comes to mind is Colorado, with its ammo capacity ban, but even that's sort of up in the air at the moment.
  - hga 11y ago
    There's a new line of attack you might not be aware of. Well protected by his own armed security Bloomberg is now the most effective gun controller (he and his people engineered the Colorado debacle, and gerrymandering is likely to keep it all), and he's pursuing deceptive transfer laws through state initiatives, with initial success in Washington state. These laws ostensibly regulate private transfers, but in the fine print are aimed directly at hindering the creation of new gun owners and otherwise trapping us in flypaper, by criminalizing the lending and renting of guns even under supervision. The Washington state officials say they won't enforce that part of the law, but.... Next up are Nevada and Oregon, last time I heard about this.

lambda 11y ago

Hmm. This seems to focus on a few issues that neatly fall into a sense of "progress" in social change, in which something changes in a number of states culminating in a Supreme Court decision that causes that change to affect the entire country. However, it ignores some issues that don't fall into such a pattern. For example, the issue of teaching evolution vs. creation in public schools; where teaching about evolution has never been questioned (as far as I know) in some states, while others have had laws on the books, and there is continuing pressure and laws that offer limited "workarounds" of the supreme court decision in order to promote "teaching the controversy", so it's not really a clear cut case of progress. Another that isn't covered is capital punishment; some states have never had capital punishment, some have repealed it over the years, and the Supreme Court briefly suspended it nationwide but it was reinstated later, and many states still practice it. Abortion, which is used as an example in this article, faces a similar problems as teaching of evolution. While abortion was allowed nationwide by Roe v. Wade, states are slowly introducing laws that restrict it so heavily that it's not available to a large fraction of people who need it. The turning point nationwide is being slowly turned back by laws that skirt the existing precedent. It seems like picking these couple of issues, to show how "it may happen again", is a bit disingenuous without also covering major cases in which change hasn't followed this pattern, or has backslid since the original change.

titanomachy 11y ago
I don't think capital punishment and creationism follow the same trend as women's suffrage, interracial marriage, etc. The issues in the article started with low state-level support and rapidly gained acceptance across the country; at some threshold the Supreme Court stepped in and said "this is now accepted as law nation-wide. I don't have the numbers to back this up, but I don't think creation teaching and capital punishment started at a low level of support and rapidly ramped up across many states. State-level legislation on creation-teaching is limited to a few conservative areas. Capital punishment has been around forever and support for it has fluctuated with the times. I agree that abortion doesn't really fit the pattern of the other issues in the article, though. Supreme court approval seems to have come prematurely in that case.
deleted 11y ago
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glial 11y ago

From the last graph, it seems like the rate of change (if that's what you'd call it) is closely related to the time period in which the change is taking place, or at least the time period in which the change started. I wonder if this has to do with a general increase in malleability of (judicial) opinions, or faster information transfer, or something else.

mokus 11y ago
Perhaps it's a sampling bias - a slow change that started recently may not yet have been detected to be included on the graph (or may not have enough reliable data to support inclusion).
- glial 11y ago
  True, that's an interesting point.

smackfu 11y ago

They probably should have left abortion out, since it's not clear that American ever changed their mind on that. Over the last 20 years, it's still roughly 50/50. http://www.gallup.com/poll/170249/split-abortion-pro-choice-pro-life.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/170249/split-abortion-pro-choice-...

wwweston 11y ago
They should have indeed left it out. Abortion is a different (and tougher) issue because there isn't just a preconception/prejudice at work -- there are multiple important values in tension with one another.
3minus1 11y ago
The article is about a pattern where laws change in a very short span, and abortion fits that pattern. The title is just a misnomer. It should be called "How Fast America's Lawmakers/Supreme Courts change their mind.

joshuaheard 11y ago

Abortion and gay marriage were changed in the courts, so I don't know if that counts as America changing its mind. That being said, I would posit that any increase in the rate of America changing its mind is due to the increase in the rate of information exchange due to advances in communication technology.

saturdaysaint 11y ago
Right, few of these "mind changes" are really analogous in terms of how they were enacted. Voter referendums are much more responsive to public opinion (ie something like "America") than legislatures, let alone the higher bar of constitutional change.
torbit 11y ago
agree. The south is very religious & a high percentage would say they are Christian over non religious. I bet they verbally support it when asked.. to not be shamed when speaking against it. When it comes to voting, they are against it.
wanderingstan 11y ago
Gay marriage has been steadily gaining in public approval, as seen here: http://www.gallup.com/poll/169640/sex-marriage-support-reaches-new-high.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/169640/sex-marriage-support-reach... This is indeed America changing its mind. You're right that there is not a direct connection between America's laws and America's minds, but the article was clear in what it was reporting. It would have been interesting to also include information on public polling of these issues, but this information doesn't exist beyond a few decades ago.
- kelukelugames 11y ago
  There is a chart with "age" on the y axis and "year for the poll" on the x axis. The delta is also shown for each group from 1996 to 2014. http://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/tbpelkodp0spw8exj7rmuw.png http://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Prod... I wish there thy y axis was birth year. That way we can see if older people are actually changing their minds instead of just aging into the next bracket.

intopieces 11y ago

The problem with the analysis re: Marijuana is that it appears to leave out the anti-drug treaties we've signed with other UN members. As I understand it, federal legalization is a nonstarter w/r/t that agreement.

adventured 11y ago
Any treaty that's inconvenient will be abandoned, with hardly a second thought. Those treaties are the least concerning challenge in the entire legalization process, they are truly irrelevant. Nothing will happen to the US if it abandons those treaties. It'll be a blip in the news for one day, as a few grumbles are heard. Other than that, what you'll hear is mostly cheering and celebrating. Other countries will take it as a cue that the global war on drugs the US has been prosecuting is now over, and they will begin legalizing (this is already underway). It's no longer a question of if; at this point nothing will stop the inevitable rolling back of the war on drugs, the momentum is overwhelming.
sanderjd 11y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding has always been that the US has been the one pushing for those treaties. If that is the case, it seems possible that if anti-Marijuana policy loses support here, its support in the UN won't be so strong.
- unics 11y ago
  The US has been behind it and putting mountains of cash along with it to enact the treaties.
gdubs 11y ago
The US has a pretty casual understanding of international law...
- kbenson 11y ago
  Or perhaps the US has a fairly nuanced understanding of international law, and when it can circumvent it, when it can ignore it by expending some power or international good-will, and when it will cost too much.

serve_yay 11y ago

"In any event, the sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems. These have been dealt with, when they have been dealt with at all, out of necessity — and in political terms, anyway, necessity means concessions made in order to stay on top." - Daniel Baldwin

M8 11y ago

I wonder how quickly will this one get recognized, at the moment it's just an underground movement on Reddit and "Manosphere" etc.: http://www.singularity2050.com/2010/01/the-misandry-bubble.html http://www.singularity2050.com/2010/01/the-misandry-bubble.h...

serve_yay 11y ago
I don't recommend the link above. It's garbage
- M8 11y ago
  I am sure every civil rights movement faces similar kind of backlash in the beginning.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    Probably, but that doesn't imply that every movement that faces a similar kind of backlash is a civil rights movement. They laughed at Einstein, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
- Vaskivo 11y ago
  You have a five minute difference in your posts. Did you ever read the article? I'm not agreing completely with it, but I'll refrain from commenting until I finished reading it.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    Maybe he was already familiar with it before? I also wonder just how far into an article like this you have to read before you can accurately describe it as garbage. You come across nice quotes like "Contraception made it possible for females to conduct campaigns to act on their urges of hypergamy." pretty early on. Is it really necessary to drink the entire bottle of crap before one can safely declare that it is, in fact, crap?
  - psychometry 11y ago

netcan 11y ago

On a long enough timescale (which can still sometime be pretty short) stuff seems to move together. The centre. The fringes. The legislation, the courts. And of course, public opinion. Democracy form a certain perspective is built in to us. Or at least people (demo) have in built mechanisms for moving together.

andrewla 11y ago

This is an interesting analysis, but it would be more interesting to look at the generalization of the trends, rather than the cherry-picked examples of "interesting" policies. Specifically, take all US Supreme Court decisions that resulted in the invalidation of state legislature, and track what the trend looked like in terms of historical trends of states that conformed to the decision before the decision was made. Is anyone aware of any data sources that would have this information in some form? The complexity seems to be that if a law was struck down by a state in 1956, and the Supreme Court made a decision relative to that law in 1960, determining whether the law would have been struck down could be more subtle than a binary yes/no. But even having this data in a basic form, measuring state legislature activity leading up to a relevant federal court decision, could at least give an indication of how long issues take to gain some momentum. This ignores the other axes; like state judicial decisions being overridden or validated by the federal level, or other variants, but still would be very interesting.

jfmercer 11y ago

It is worth noting that the first two issues were settled via Constitutional Amendments, whereas the second two were decided by the Supreme Court. If I were a betting man, I would bet that the SSM issue will also be settled by the Supreme Court, not by Constitutional Amendment. It seems that, as a nation, we Americans can no longer settle divisive national (and therefore Federal) issues via the democratic process envisioned by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution: amendment of the Constitution itself. Instead, we leave ultimate decision making power in the hands of the Supreme Court. Former Chief Justice Earl Warren expressed concern that if the Court's power became too widespread, America would have, instead of democracy, kritarchy: rule by judges.

jfmercer 11y ago
Correction: It was Supreme Court Justice Stanley Reed [1], not Chief Justice Earl Warren [2], who "expressed concern that if the Court's power became too widespread, America would have, instead of democracy, kritarchy". He did so in late July 1953, specifically regarding the not-yet-decided Brown v. Board of Eduction decision of May 1953, in a discussion with one of his law clerks, John David Fassett. He confronted Fassett with the question, "Are you one of those people who believes in krytocracy?" Apparently, he discussed this question at length with his law clerks in the months leading up to the Brown decision. I could find no evidence that he spoke with his Supreme Court colleagues about it, but, then again, I've done no real research. Also according to Fassett, in a February 1953 memo--three months before the Brown ruling--fellow Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson [3] used the term "a ruthless use of judicial power." Although Jackson did not use the term "krytocracy," Fassett commented, "That was sort of Justice Reed's feeling too--his krytocracy thought was the same thing." I found all of the above in this article [4]. Finally, it is worth noting that, regardless of certain Justices' concerns about the Constitutional limits of judicial authority, the Brown v. Board of Education ruling overturned Plessy v. Ferguson by a unanimous vote, 9-0. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Forman_Reed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Forman_Reed [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Warren https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Warren [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Jackson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Jackson [4] http://www.roberthjackson.org/files/theman/speeches-articles/files/articles/15fc4e650c204cfe9e7170bc4428d890.pdf http://www.roberthjackson.org/files/theman/speeches-articles...

Terr_ 11y ago

They should scale each state by its population, or you overemphasize the (ostensible) opinions of the people in very small states.

qq66 11y ago

The flip-flop is not as fast as the law makes it seem, because a law against X only gets passed when X seems like a real possibility. Nobody was passing gay marriage bans in 1850 -- only when it seemed imminent did people try to fight it.