Wayne Baker's America's Crisis of Values: Reality and Perception offers a recent addition to a growing literature in political science that examines the perception and, perhaps, reality of the polarization of American politics around cultural and moral issues. In this book, Baker sets out to provide an empirical examination of three aspects of America's perceived crisis of values. The first of these is the trend hypothesis: In recent decades, America has experienced a significant decline in its commitment to traditional moral values. The second is the comparison hypothesis: Moral values in the United States have declined relative to most other nations. Third and finally is the distribution hypothesis: Americans have become increasingly polarized in their commitment to traditional moral values.
To test these hypotheses, Baker relies on survey data from the World Values Survey, a large, cross-national survey conducted in various waves between 1981 and 2000. These surveys measure respondent attitudes on numerous questions regarding social and cultural values. Baker has arrayed these results along two dimensions. The first scales respondents along a continuum between traditional values and secular-rational values. The second dimension provides a continuum between values of self-expression versus survival values. It is along these dimensions that Baker plots the United States along with other nations in the survey. Because the surveys were conducted in multiple waves, he can also track changes over time along these dimensions.
Regarding the trend hypothesis, Baker finds that between 1981 and 2000, the United States exhibited almost no change on the traditional versus secular values scale. As a result, Baker argues that there is little evidence of a decline in America's commitment to traditional moral values. On the other hand, the United States did during this time move significantly toward the self-expression pole of the survival versus self-expression dimension. Thus it seems that Americans have not changed their own values, though they have become more tolerant of the expression of values different than their own.
Baker similarly finds little support for the comparison hypothesis. If anything, America's relative adherence to traditional moral values has become even stronger as a result of the shift of most other industrialized nations toward secular-rational values. Finally, Baker's analysis of the survey data leads him to conclude that the distribution hypothesis is largely false. Americans may perceive that they are polarizing into warring cultural and moral camps, but there is no evidence to suggest that they actually are. He writes, “The social attitudes, cultural values, and religious beliefs of Americans are not polarized; Americans have a lot in common and tend to share the same attitudes, cultural values, and religious beliefs” (p. 108).
In addition to his reporting of these empirical findings, Baker also attempts to answer two analytical questions. First, why the perceived crisis of American values when there is little or no empirical evidence of such a crisis? Baker's analysis suggests that such crises are a periodic feature of American history as technological and economic changes pose challenges to traditional values. Such crises are most acute at the midpoints of these cycles as newer values increasingly compete with tradition ones, but are not yet dominant. This analysis is similar in some ways to cycles of “creedal passion” set out years ago by Samuel Huntington.
The second of Baker's questions asks why is it that the United States is such a global outlier when it comes to moral values. As Baker shows, the United States occupies a relatively unique global position, with a very strong commitment to traditional moral values compared to other industrialized democracies. In fact, on this dimension the United States looks more like some developing nations. Baker attributes this unique position to the peculiarities of American political culture. As a nation founded on certain ideals, to move away from those ideals would entail a loss of national identity. In contrast, nations founded on birthright status can alter their moral values with no threat to their national identity. Was the United States founded upon a consistent set of ideals? Rogers Smith has argued persuasively that American political culture is the result of the interplay of multiple political traditions, some, as Baker claims, based on certain ideological tenets, but others based on such attributes of birth as sex, race, and ethnicity.
Baker also wants to argue that America's founding values are not the typical Lockean liberal values of democracy, liberty, and equality, but traditional religious values. According to him, “America's traditional values—strong belief in religion and God, family values, absolute moral authority, national pride, and so on—are fundamental to what it means to be American” (p. 54). Such values have played an extremely important role in American political thought and culture, but they are hardly the only ones. Moreover, one can readily argue that certain traditional moral values run contrary to American founding principles. For example, believing that individuals should have the right to control their own bodies and reproductive choices is arguably more in line with the notions of liberty in the American creed than religiously based antiabortion views.
Though his analysis of American political culture is largely unconvincing, Baker's book is nonetheless a useful addition to the literature on political polarization. Like Morris Fiorina, Alan Abramowitz, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, he succeeds in bringing empirical rigor to bear on a complex topic that is too often reduced to something as simplistic as a red and blue map of state-level 2004 election results. In particular, Baker's use of the Global Values Survey provides a much needed global context to this important topic.
