September 17, 2024

Politics

Doomer Optimists

Religion News -  Americans who hold Christian nationalist views are also likely to express support for forms of authoritarianism, according to a new report, pointing to a possible link between those who advocate for a Christian nation and people who agree with statements such as the need to “smash the perversions eating away at our moral fiber and traditional beliefs.”  The Public Religion Research Institute unveiled the new survey last week .... A statement sent to RNS on Monday, Melissa Deckman, CEO of PRRI, framed the study as an effort to connect recent research on Christian nationalism with longstanding efforts to assess authoritarianism. “While most Americans do not espouse authoritarian views, our study demonstrates that such views are disproportionately held by Christian nationalists, who we know in our past research have been more prone to accept political violence and more likely to hold antidemocratic attitudes than other Americans,” Deckman said.

Common Dreams  - Polling results released Monday show that working-class voters in the United States are broadly more supportive of major progressive agenda items than those in the middle and upper classes, offering Democratic political candidates what one union leader called a "clear roadmap to winning back voters we've lost to a GOP that's growing more extreme by the day." The survey of over 5,000 registered U.S. voters was conducted last August by HIT Strategies and Working Families Power (WFP), a sibling organization of the Working Families Party.

The poll found that a majority of working-class voters either somewhat or totally support a national jobs guarantee (69%), a "public healthcare program like Medicare for All" (64%), a crackdown on rent-gouging landlords (74%), and tuition-free public colleges and universities (63%), landing them "overwhelmingly to the left" of higher-income segments of the population.

Upper- and middle-class respondents were far less likely to support the above policy proposals. Just 39% of upper-class voters surveyed, for instance, said they completely or somewhat support "a nationwide jobs guarantee" that would provide "stable, good-paying work for everyone who needs it."

WFP found that the "differences between classes are much smaller on social and cultural questions compared to economic fairness questions, and they do not uniformly point to a working class that is more socially and culturally conservative than the middle and upper classes."

 

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