Benjamin Cain recently posted an article on Medium.com, The Trump Cult and the Albatross Around America’s Neck, in which he argued that the Trump cult is fueled by southern racism, religious fundamentalism, and a backlash against modernity. He claims that “In this respect, half of the US is closer to the anti-modern Islamist states than to ultra-secular Europe.”

I realized that my recent analyses of levels of pre-modern beliefs in over 100 countries included in the Integrated Values Survey (IVS) (see here and here) could be extended to check this claim. The IVS is the combined data from the World Values Survey and the European Values Study, which have carried out seven waves of surveys in over 100 countries, spanning the period 1981 to 2021.

To examine variations in pre-modern versus modern values across countries and time, I estimated a continuous latent variable “modernity” based on responses to 11 selected questions in the IVS (see following box) whose responses will vary depending on how modern or pre-modern the respondent’s values are. which assumed there is an unobserved underlying continuous variable that describes the individual’s level of modernity of values and predicts (or correlates with) their answers to specific values questions. I used general linear modelling methods to estimate a continuous latent variable “modernity” from the responses to the 11 selected values questions. See here for more details.

The latent variable has been scaled so that average values for countries ranged from just above zero to slightly below 10. Higher values denote higher prevalence of modern values. The following table ranks countries in descending modernity of values based on estimates for waves 5 to 7 of the IVS, covering years 2005 to 2020.

The average modernity value for the USA is 6.73, a similar level to that of Spain, Italy, and Japan. US surveys from 1995 onwards included the location of the interview (region or state) and a question “Which political party would you vote for (first choice)?” with 80% of respondents answering Democrat or Republican. I classified location of interview as either “Blue State” or “Red State” based on State votes in Presidential elections from 2000 onwards as reported by Wikipedia.

The following graph and table show the average modernity scores for Democrats and Republicans in Blue and Red states for survey data for the broad period 2005-2020.

It’s clear that Democrat voters have higher modernity scores that Republic voters, and that Democrat and Republic voters have lower modernity scores in Red states than in Blue states. Average modernity scores for Red and Blue states differ by less than average modernity scores for Democrat and Republican voters because the average scores for the state groups is an average across both Democrat and Republican voters. Given the first-past-the-post nature of most US elections, the modernity levels of Democrat voters in Blue states and Republican voters in Red states is a better measure of the real difference in modernity between the Red and Blue states.

The following graph summarizes trends over time for the average modernity of Democrat voters in Blue states and Republican voters in Red states.

It is immediately clear that modernity of values has been increasing at a substantial rate for Democrat voters in Blue States. And modernity of values has increased only slightly in Red states over the same period, leading to a widening values gulf.

To put this in context, the modernity of Blue-Dems in 1995 was about the same as that of Russians in 2020 and rose in 15 years to be similar to that of the Netherlands today. In contrast, Red-Repubs values in 1995 were similar to those of Kazakhstan today and rose in 15 years to be somewhat less modern than Russia in 2020.

I selected groups of 3 to 4 comparison countries with similar values to the two US subgroups to compare trends over time in the following graph.  I also included a group of the three countries with the most modern values and three countries with very pre-modern values to provide a global context for the range and trends in modernity. Averages for the country groups are arithmetic averages of their modernity scores, not population-weighted averages.

So Cain is not exactly wrong to suggest that Red states are closer to anti-modern  Islamist countries than to modern secular countries of Europe, if we take the latter to be represented by the Scandinavian countries.  However, the Islamic states and India show a trend of increasing anti-modernism which is not reflected in the data available for Red-Repubs.  The latest US survey was carried out in 2017 and its entirely possible that data from 2018 onwards would also reflect increasing anti-modernism given the dramatic increase in moral panic among Red Repubs about gays and trans people, the rising censorship of books and speech in the south, and the increasing reproductive re-enslavement of women.

Blue-Democrats have followed a very similar trajectory to the average of Australia, New Zealand and Switzerland over the last three decades, with relatively rapidly rising levels of modernity. This puts them very much in the company of modern Western secular states.  In contrast, the Red-Republicans level of modernity tracks closely the average for Russia, Poland, and China, and currently falls about halfway between that of China and Russia.  This might help to explain why they are quite happy for their cult leader Trump to openly admire and express support for Putin and other dictators and despise the leaders of the democratic countries of Europe.

I can only agree with Bernard Cain that Trump supporters are “animated by savage, racial [and religious] grievances, so that they’d rather burn down the country than let minorities and secular elites flourish in it. As a chaos agent, Trump is just an instrument of vengeance. Just as Christ is expected to return to destroy his enemies who had triumphed over God’s values, Trumpers want their golden calf to annihilate modernity itself.”