在此处添
The United States always gives a young, open and progressive image.
Over the past two decades, the Internet has become the main tool and public opinion front for younger generations of communication around the world, and it has strengthened this stereotype. Minority rights, feminist movements, LGBTQ and environmental protection, almost every social movement with a progressive label is inextricably linked to major cities on the east and west coasts of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, New York and Boston.
But the reality is that progressives and liberals are having a good time on the Internet. Silicon Valley Internet companies are pouring more resources to scream for them. They just hide the fact that the United States is essentially a conservative country and let it be conservative. In the noisy movement, theists were able to quietly attack the city on the ruling level.
According to Gallup's January survey, Americans believe that conservative Americans still outnumber self-recognition liberal Americans, 35% and 26% respectively. Even with the most serious split between the two parties, the proportion of liberals in the Democratic Party is just over 50%.
At the upper level of the government, conservative forces also sit in most positions. President Trump, who is high above, naturally does not say that the Republican Party has increased again in the Senate after the recent midterm election. Although the House of Representatives is presided over by a Democratic Party composed of ethnic minorities, moderate whites, and young liberals, at the state level, the seat of the 2010 elections has benefited the Republican Party.
In addition, the Supreme Court now has five conservative judges. For the Republican Party, even if it faces the dilemma of shrinking the base and aging on the basis of voters, the structural advantages are still obvious.
This may be why, in the current situation of marijuana, feminist movements and LGBTQ, there is no so-called progress on issues such as abortion, gun control and death penalty that touch the underlying beliefs of the Americans, but it is more in the direction of the conservatives. .
Such as abortion.
In the past few months, Georgia, Ohio, Mississippi, and Kentucky have passed laws that restrict abortion, but these laws are nothing compared to the new law passed last week in Alabama.
On May 15th, the Alabama Senate passed the most stringent ban on abortion by ultra-high votes, advancing the most stringent “six weeks later” of the above states to “egg fertilization”. In addition to extreme conditions such as the risk of life threatening pregnant women, abortions will be prosecuted for criminal offences in any case, facing a prison sentence of up to 99 years. On top of this, pregnancy caused by rape and incest is no exception.
After the news came out, the proposal was too barbaric around the world, but the timing and the behind-the-scenes were actually ignored.
With the advantage of the state-level legislature established in 2010, coupled with the Supreme Court, now composed of conservative justices, the conservatives saw a rare overthrow of the Roy case in decades (the case made abortion An opportunity for a constitutional right). Conservatives who are not satisfied with the first heartbeat as a ban on abortion (the earliest can be the sixth week of pregnancy) publicly stated that the new bill would become an arrow in the heart of the Roy case.
After Roy v. Wade in 1973, abortion rights were protected by the Constitution, so in the eyes of ultra-conservative Americans such as evangelicals, a full abortion would have to overthrow the Roy case. So Alabama’s criticized abortion bill was unconstitutional from the start.
But in the eyes of American conservative positions - national commentary, an unconstitutional bill is what Alabama right-wing legislators want, and they want to intensify the contradiction between abortion supporters and opponents in an extreme way. The abortion became a single choice between the “all-out ban” and the “40-week can still be carried out”, with a view to allowing the conservative Supreme Court to be forced to make a choice.
The latter is aimed at a bill passed by the State of New York in January this year, which allows pregnant women to choose abortions 24 weeks before pregnancy, and after 24 weeks, with the permission of a professional, they can also choose to “affect mother’s health and life”. Give up the baby.
Both sides used extreme examples to slap each other. "The Republican Party focused on attacking a very small number of late abortion cases, and the Democratic Party concentrated on attacking cases of victims of the same rare rape and incest case being forced to give birth," commented the article by the National Review.
Abortion is a matter of principle for the United States. Unlike other regions that use science and data as arguments, the United States will certainly turn to Christ for help when it comes to abortion. After the Alabama abortion case, the evangelicals who supported the conservatives on social media would thank God for expressing their joy and compare the fetus to the gift of God.
For example, a fan of Trump's fanatic supporter on Weibo said that “every child is a gift from God, and every child has the right to survive, Amen!”
Religious fanaticism is another layer of American conservativeism.
After Trump was elected president, many analytical articles have pointed out that the neglected rust belt white evangelical Christians helped Trump win the election. According to the Pew Center survey of 35,000 people in 50 states in the United States, 71% of people in the United States believe in Christianity, and 6% believe in religions such as Jewish, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Among Christian believers, 25.4% are evangelicals and 20.8% are Catholics.
Therefore, in the discussion of many social issues, it can be regarded as the debate between the secular and traditional factions within the religion. Looking at the map of the United States as a screening factor for abortion policies, evangelical populations, and political affiliation, the relationship between the three must be positive: Kentucky, Arkansas, and Alabama, which have the strictest abortion restrictions, can also rank The top five states with the most populous evangelicals are the traditional red states.
The proportion of the population with the traditional view is experiencing years of decline, but due to the structural advantages and the number of people, the conservatives have not lost their positions on the issue of the values of abortion and guns. Some time before and after the mid-term elections last year, the frequent shooting of vicious shootings did not pay attention to the issue of gun control. On the contrary, Florida also passed the teacher's gun law at the beginning of the month to deal with campus safety issues.
Maybe someone will pin their hopes on younger and more open-minded people, at least millennials will be more open-minded than their parents? In fact, the situation is not so optimistic.
There is an article on the Times magazine website called "Young Americans have not actually become more progressive". It pointed out that in the 2016 presidential election, 37% of young people voted for Trump, and the proportion of young people in white is up to 48. %. In the iGen and millennials born between 1995 and 2010, two out of every five people voted for the “white nationalist” Trump.
The article then quoted data that the proportion of high-ranking high school students claiming to be conservatives rose from 23% in 2000 to 29% in 2015, which is more pronounced than the conservative trend of the X generation, which was born in the Reagan era by the Great Depression.
First of all, iGen is not as optimistic as the imagination of ethnic and sexual minorities. Compared with the baby boomers and X generations more than half a century ago, young whites’ attitude toward African descent is “only better than the 1990s. There was a slight improvement in the later period, and “support for community diversity and diversification of the working environment” was “not changed” after 1970.
At the same time, a new generation of conservative young people cares about immigration issues, and this is exactly what Trump has repeatedly manipulated and received significant results before and after the campaign.
In contrast, the current US government's establishment of the immigration policy after the establishment of the government and the adoption of undifferentiated nationalism and protectionist measures in foreign trade, as well as the president's record-high success rate in the polling rate, are constantly reminding us Under the cover of the dazzling "progressive movement", the United States has always been a unique conservative country.
After Huawei was sanctioned, most of the US online public opinion was supporting official practices. Even the New York Times opinion column, which was biased toward the extreme left, wrote a rare article on solidarity with the government.
In the "Right Country", the author once reminded that although the polarization of American political parties is becoming more and more obvious and the extremism of social issues is becoming more and more common, "the commonalities among these angry elements are better than theirs. I have to realize more."