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This dreary thesis of a nation fumbling toward its own demise has been aggressively marketed by a number of Canadian pundits lately, and it's what a great many Canadians have no doubt come to believe. But Adams is on the case now, and he says it ain't, er, isn't so.

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Hah! Eat THAT, Stephen Harper! Eat THAT, Mike, Ernie, Gordo and Ralph!

It would seem that Canadian cultural values have not been eroded away even under the relentless right-wing assault on these very values in a concerted effort to turn us into USAians. This is a good portent of the future; Canadians by and large still believe in the solutions the NDP offers and which the Liberals used to offer, even if they don't vote NDP due to perception problems.

Americans and Canadians have different myths. They have guns; we have snow. They have to defend themselves from enemies; we have to survive the winter.

I didn't find it on the site, but I'll quote something:

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Over the past decade, Americans have retrenched: More Americans, especially the young, have migrated to the exclusion quadrant [apparently with social values polling methodology, there are four "quadrants": are people attracted to status and security, to authenticity and responsibility, exclusion and intensity, and idealism and autonomy], a survival of the fittest ethic, so much so that in 2000, at 31% of this sample, this was the largest category on the American socio-cultural map. Adam's findings are consistent with the work of Robert Putnam, who in Bowling Alone amassed evidence of the decline of America's community. The culture war, as Adams writes, is not between southern based religious conservatives and 1960's style boomers, but, rather, between fast growing, nihilistic, competitive and even violence prone third of Americans, and everyone else. The analogy is Blade Runner, not a rerun of Easy Rider.

In Canada, the trend is radically different. Nearly one half of Canadians are in the idealist/autonomy quadrant, with Quebeckers and British Columbians leading the way, more than double the percentage of Americans who express these values. Richard Gwyn, in his 1995 book Nationalism Without Walls, wrote about Canada being a "post modern dominion," and that is a thesis Adams's data confirms.
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I have been teaching part time in the United States for nearly 20 years, and my personal experience is in complete accord with Adams's statistical insights. When I first began teaching at Harvard, the New Deal coalition continued to be in place and liberal politicians such as Edward Kennedy were still major figures and even potential presidents. Today, the old Roosevelt tradition is gone the way of the dodo, to be replaced by a tax cutting, neo conservative, fundamentalist-religious base centered in the south. Moderates such as Bill Clinton can still win, but only by appropriating a parts of the agenda of the conservative majority.

In Europe and in Canada, meanwhile, the liberal-social democratic centre has not only held, but it has expanded. When Canada diverges from our neighbour on issues such as the ICC, land mines, Iraq or marijuana it is because our politicians our responding to Canadian value systems, just as Bush responds to the values in his country. Demography may not be destiny, but values certainly are

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Essentially, what I see as wrong with American society is the Great Myth so well entrenched by Puritanism and other Calvinist doctrines: if something bad happens to you, it's your own fault. The wealthy are well-off because they deserve to be. The religious determinism has faded somewhat, but is replaced by a near-religious adherence to free-market doctrine, which states that anyone can accomplish anything if they try hard enough. If you're poor, obviously you didn't try hard enough. You can imagine what a burden this places on the disadvantaged.

This doctrine leads in turn to the wide split between the ultra-rich and the rest of us. This leaves a lot of people in the "lives of quiet desperation". People who are stressed tend to react in various ways, may of which are predictable. Some look to authority - religious and governmental - with childlke faith, hoping that Daddy will protect them. Some let wishful thinking ease the pain: they think they can win the lottery, or tap New Age power, or start their own business that will be the next Microsoft. Some are desparing and bitter, seeing the hypocrisy around them, but feleing helpless to change it. Others become radicalized - and the more extreme the conditions, the more radical the ideas.

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Even before these momentous events, our research was showing us the cultural seeds of divergent American and Canadian decisions. In 41 of the 56 comparable trends in our data, we found strong evidence of dissimilar values in Canada and the U.S. On 24 trends, the gap actually widened between 1992 and 2000. At a time when the political, economic and technological forces of globalization suggested convergence, Canadians' social values were becoming more distinct from those of Americans.

The portrait of these two distinct societies of North America starts with a comparison of their religious convictions. We know that Christian fundamentalism has far deeper and more enduring roots in the U.S., particularly in the Bible Belt, than in Canada. Yet not so long ago, we were more conventionally religious. In the mid-1950s, 60 per cent of Canadians told pollsters they went to church each Sunday; the proportion in the U.S. then was only 50 per cent. Today, only a fifth of Canadians claim weekly church attendance, whereas the proportion in the U.S. is four in 10. A 2002 Pew Research Center poll found religion to be important to six in 10 Americans (the highest proportion of all the developed nations it surveyed) and to only three in 10 Canadians, a rate similar to that found in Britain and Italy. In less than a generation, Canadians have evolved from being much more religious than Americans to being much less religious.

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