As a trustee of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, I’m proud of our new partnership with Gallup called the Democracy for All Project, which released the first results of a national survey yesterday. That study shows broad support for democratic values and cultural diversity.

The survey finds that commitment to democracy rises with age and is lowest among adults under 30:

I show the percentages who agree that democracy is the best form of government. Among youth, another 35% are neutral and 12% disagree. The lower level of support among younger people is an important issue. I also recommend CIRCLE’s April 2025 report on that topic.

Here I’ll add a historical dimension. Although I haven’t found precisely the same question on surveys going back decades, the General Social Survey (GSS) did ask a relevant item in each decade from the 1990s through the 2010s. In a battery about which aspects of the country made people proud, one question asked about pride in democracy.

As shown in the line graph above this post, each generation has been somewhat less proud than its predecessors, but Boomers and Gen-Xers showed increasing pride as they grew older from 1996-2004 and were prouder in 2014 than they had been two decades earlier. On the other hand, Millennials lost a lot of pride in democracy between 2004 and 2014.

I am not sure how I would have answered that question at those times. I am committed to democracy but not necessarily “proud” of the way it functions in the USA. Nevertheless, the GSS trends show that today’s differences by age are fairly typical, and people change their views as they go through life and as history plays out.

This background might discourage us from assuming that something has recently gone wrong with civic education in K-12 schools or that the current media environment is uniquely toxic. Both civic education and media deserve attention, but not because of a unique generational gap in the present.

(The GSS data are here.)