In 1993, 1994, 2010, and 2021, the General Social Survey asked representative samples of Americans to choose a “America’s highest priority, the most important thing it should do” from a list of four items: maintaining order in the nation, giving people more say in government decisions, fighting rising prices, or protecting freedom of speech.

I presume that these items were meant to test Ronald Inglehart’s “postmaterialism” thesis, the idea that once a society attains a high level of economic development, many voters become most concerned about non-economic issues. Inflation is a materialist concern, and the others are “post-materialist.”

Above, I show the responses to this question by political ideology (liberal, moderate, or conservative). I omit 1993 because it looks very similar to 1994. The GSS asks people to place themselves on a 7-point ideological scale, but I collapse that into three categories to increase the numbers in each cell.

You might imagine that conservatives would be more likely to want to maintain order. Compared to liberals, that was true in 1994 and 2010, but not in 2021, when conservatives were the least likely to choose “order” as their priority. Furthermore, moderates were the most committed to order in 1994, not conservatives.

In 1994 and 2010, conservatives and moderates were more committed than liberals to popular voice in government. Perhaps this was “The West Wing” era, when many liberals were content to be technocrats. In 2021 (while a liberal was president) liberals and moderates had become more committed to voice than conservatives were.

Freedom of speech has not divided liberals from conservatives during this period. About one third of both groups have chosen it as the top priority in each year.

Inflation polarized opinion in 2021, with 55% of conservatives and only 19% of liberals choosing it as the top issue. Inglehart’s framework would suggest that moderates were the most “materialist” group in 1994, but conservatives had become the “materialists” by 2021. But I doubt that this is the right framework for interpreting the 2021 results. I think that conservatives’ spike in concern about inflation was a verdict on the incumbent Biden Administration, not a deep shift in values.

See also: trusting experts or ordinary people; class inversion as an alternative to the polarization thesis; moving to the center is a metaphor, and maybe not a good one; recent changes in tolerance for controversial speakers