Stacking Up How We Rate Our Values

Part III of a series Feb.  23, 2025

We’re united on a number of important American values.  National security, justice, and individual rights are among 10 shared values that all political persuasions rank as highly important.

Democracy and equality, two cornerstones of who we are as a nation, are not among them.

These findings emerge from Our Common Purpose’s study of American values, what about them unites and divides us, and what we might do about it.   The results are based in good part on a nationwide public opinion survey focusing on 25 key American values.  The 2,500 respondents, who mirror the characteristics of the nationwide voting population, were asked in September by Survey USA to answer a lengthy set of questions using a sliding scale of -100 to +100.

This unique study, which is built upon and validates the concepts known as values pluralism that were first put forward by the British scholar Isaiah Berlin way back in the 1950s, shows the unrecognized but considerable impact that values pluralism has on American society in general and political strife in particular.

There are even more significant implications of this way of thinking that will be presented in upcoming installments of this series.  But today’s installment provides an important baseline on how we view our values.

You can get a bird’s eye view in the 2×2 matrix shown above.  The 25 values that were included in the study are arrayed on two dimensions:  1) the vertical dimension is how they scored on the importance meter, and 2) the horizontal dimension is the degree of agreement about them across political differences.  The highest agreement is on the right, the lowest agreement on the left.

The upper right quadrant, with high importance and high agreement, might be called Shared Values.  The lower right quadrant, with lesser importance but still high agreement, consists of Subordinate Values.  The upper left quadrant, with high importance but lesser agreement, could be called Conflicted Values.  The lower left quadrant, doomed both to lower importance and lower agreement, is designated as Partisan Values because, despite whatever their other attributes, they have been politicized.

One way to think about this is that values shown in the two quadrants on the right tend to bring us together, although many of them are so taken for granted that their unifying effects go unrecognized.  By comparison, the values in the two quadrants on the left end up being more divisive than we would like.

A wondrous example of a Shared Value is individual rights.  Overall, Republicans give it a score of +68, and Democrats +70, on the scale of -100 to +100.  Even more telling, the lines on this graph showing the distribution of the ratings by Republicans, Democrats and independents lay over one another almost perfectly.  The red line is there, it’s just covered up by the other lines.  We ascribe to our rights as individuals in exactly the same proportions.

The companion graphs for the other Shared Values are nearly as aligned as this one.  We’re together on all of them.  However, as we move leftward on the 2×2 matrix, the results begin to fray.

Democracy, for instance, falls into the Conflicted Values category.  In that our democracy has been kicked around pretty thoroughly of late, it’s not entirely surprising – though still distressing – that the fissures are showing.

Its importance is fairly well acknowledged, with a composite score of +65 that ranks just above the average for all the values.  Unfortunately, it’s not regarded with equal enthusiasm.  The scores climb an ideological ladder.  “Very conservatives” put it at +56, conservatives and moderates +62, liberals +75, and “very liberals” give it a whopping +83.

Those differences are not otherwise attributable to income, race, education, religion, or region of the country.  The one demographic that does bear mention is age.  Disturbingly, young people are less sold on democracy than us older folk.

The ideological gap is repeated for the other Conflicted Values of fair and equal treatment, compassion and equality.  (Fair and equal treatment, a derivative of equality, needs to be considered separately for reasons to be explained in the next installment.)   It’s important to note that the Conflicted Values are alike in the sense that it’s Republicans who score each of them lower.

The remainder of the values surveyed by Our Common Purpose have it even worse.   The lower left quadrant is called Partisan Values because they are just that – more deliberately leveraged, for or against, for political purposes.  They average out as lower in importance and lower in agreement.  In a couple of cases, off-the-chart lower in agreement.

This cuts both ways.  Republicans diss the safety net, social justice and diversity.  Democrats in turn undercut country first, patriotism and religious faith.  Country first obviously conjures up the Make America Great Again crusade.  It’s a relatively high priority for Republicans with a score of +68.  It’s a lower priority for Democrats at +49.  Patriotism follows much the same pattern.

The biggest victims are diversity and religious faith.  Diversity was covered in the previous installment of this series but let’s take a look at religious faith.

Despite all the allusions to the leading role it has played — God bless America, in God we Trust, one nation under God — it gets the lowest overall importance of all the values that were surveyed.  There are probably several contributors to the composite score of +26 but one of them likely is reaction – positive and negative – to the Christian Right and perhaps particularly to Christian nationalism.  The ideological scale runs just the opposite to the one for democracy.  “Very conservatives” score religious faith relatively high at +60, but the regard for it drops rather quickly with conservatives at +39, moderates +25, liberals and “very liberals” both at -1.

Other factors certainly contribute to this result.  The 27% in this survey who claim no religion gave faith an average score of -22.   Age-wise, seniors graded it highest but even they weren’t overly enthusiastic at +37.  Young people came in low at +15.

Religion may be slowly falling out of favor for other reasons but the connection to politics isn’t helping.  The disharmony shows in the chart above, a very different picture than the way individual rights dovetail in the earlier chart.  A percentage give it high importance but the number who put it in negative territory is greater than for any other value.

The values that tend to divide us are the ones that get all the ink.  Meanwhile many of the ones we share tend to go unnoticed.  Amazingly, however, this is the least of it.  The theory of Values Pluralism, upon which this study is based, holds that each of our values do not exist in a vacuum.  The real trouble starts when they go head to head with one other.

Next:  The inevitable conflict among values

Part I:  Our Key Values Both Unite and Divide

Part II:  Some Values Get More Regard than Others

Part III:  How 25 American Values Stack Up

Part IV: When Values Clash