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.