4.4 - Influence of Political Events on Ideology
The Impact of Major Political Events
Major political events experienced during young adulthood can significantly shape a person's political ideology.
- Examples: the protest movements of the 1960s, the impact of 9/11, or the experience of COVID-19 and the government's experiments with expanded authority.
- Vietnam War and Watergate: the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, which ended with President Nixon resigning in 1974, sharply lowered Americans' trust in the national government, and trust has never returned to its early 1960s levels.
- Lasting impact: living through these events at an impressionable age can leave a lasting mark on someone's politics for the rest of their life.
- How it connects to socialization: living through a major event is a form of political socialization, just like learning from family or school. The event shapes a person's political attitudes (like trust in government, views on war, or how much power government should have), and those attitudes in turn shape their overall political ideology.
Event Interpretation and Divergent Ideologies
Importantly, the same event doesn't push everyone toward the same conclusion.
Example, 9/11: living through the attacks could shape people very differently.
- Conservative shift: some felt a surge of patriotism and nationalism, becoming more supportive of a strong national defense to prevent future attacks.
- Libertarian shift: others saw the overreach of policies like the Patriot Act and became more skeptical of government power.
- Liberal shift: others were shaped by the toll of the Wars on Terror and the Iraq War, becoming more critical of U.S. foreign policy.
Big picture
Major political events act like a shared spark, but how a person reacts to that spark during their formative years is what actually determines which direction, conservative, libertarian, or liberal, their politics end up heading.