and increasing retrenching behind those values.
http://www.theglobalist.com/DBWeb/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=3501 U.S.-Canada: Just Who's the Docile One?
By Michael Adams | Tuesday, November 30, 2004
Canadians have long been considered more docile than Americans. But as President Bush visits Canada on November 30, 2004, does this stereotype still hold true? Michael Adams — author of "Fire and Ice" — argues that Canadians are emerging as the more liberal and pluralist people. In contrast, Americans are increasingly becoming deferent to authority.
... Group rights, public institutions and deference to authority have abided north of the border — while individualism, private interests and mistrust of authority have remained strong to the south. So much for the officially sanctioned saga. In the last quarter century, some counterintuitive developments have occurred on both sides of the 49th parallel.
Canadians have distanced themselves from traditional authority — organized religion, the patriarchal family and political elites. Peter C. Newman has characterized recent social change in Canada as the movement from deference to defiance.
Worth reading the whole article -- and the book (I'll get around to that some day ...)
http://erg.environics.net/media_room/default.asp?aID=456... Nearly 20 years ago, my colleagues at Environics in Toronto and CROP in Montreal began a study of Canadian social values. In our first survey of Canadian values in 1983, we asked Canadians if they strongly or somewhat agreed or disagreed that: "The father of the family must be the master in his own house." We posed more than 100 such questions to respondents that year. Our intention was to track these 100 items over time, dropping some, adding others; we hoped we'd measure what was important to Canadians or what was changing in our values and perspectives on life.
... Nineteen ninety-two was the first year we began conducting social-values research in the United States, the world capital of individualism and egalitarianism, of civil rights movements and affirmative action (remember, an American was the first to deflower the feminine mystique). We speculated that the United States would be ahead of Canada and France on this trend.
We found to our surprise that 42 per cent of Americans told us the father should be master, while 57 per cent disagreed and 1 per cent had no opinion. The gap between the two countries was a substantial 16 per cent.
... In Canada, almost everyone was part of this revolution, even men, who by 2000 had only 23 per cent of their numbers in support of dad being boss at home. ...
Meanwhile, we found that where 42 per cent of Americans believed the father should be master in 1992, the number increased to 44 per cent in 1996. ...
This time {2002}, 48 per cent of Americans said the father of the family must be master in his own home; 51 per cent disagreed and 1 per cent had no opinion. We were stunned.
I think Michael Adams has hit the nail on the head.
What he says integrates well with what this writer says, which was re-drawn to my attention here at DU a few days ago:
http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/projects/strategic/nationasfamily/nationasfamilyIn American culture there are two opposed and idealized models of the family, the Nurturant Parent model and the Strict Father model. The metaphor of the Nation as a Family maps the values and relationships from those family models onto our politics, creating "liberal" and "conservative" political positions that we understand through our models of family structure.
The progressive worldview represents, metaphorically, the Nurturant Parent family model, and the conservative worldview represents the Strict Father model. The two models come with distinct moral systems that are founded on different assumptions about the world, interpret shared values such as responsibility or fairness differently, and center around different moral priorities.
In other words, our beliefs about what a family should be exert a powerful influence over our beliefs about what kind of society we should build. For instance, those with a strong Strict Father model are likely to support a more punitive welfare or foreign policy than someone with a strong Nurturant Parent model, who are likely to favor more cooperative approaches. Those with a strong Nurturant Parent model are more likely to favor social policies that ensure the well-being of people such as health care and education, whereas someone with a strong Strict Father model would object to social programs in favor of promoting self-reliance.