New York Times: “Then, around 2016, something shifted, a new analysis shows. Women ages 18 to 29 became significantly more liberal than the previous generation of young women. Today, around 40 percent identify as liberal, compared with just 19 percent who say they’re conservative. The views of young men — who are more likely to be conservative than liberal — have changed little.”

“It’s unusual for shifts in political ideology to be so pronounced, political scientists say. Young women are much more liberal than women 30 and up, according to the analysis by the pollster Gallup, which analyzed the answers to 54 questions about political beliefs that it has asked over time.”

“Fewer Americans want companies to take a public stand on current events and public policy,” new results from a Gallup-Bentley University study reveal.

“By taking a stance on political candidates, companies risk taking a hit to their bottom lines.”

“Just 38% think businesses in general should take a public stance on current events, according to the survey of 5,835 U.S. adults fielded from late April to early May.”

Now trending on the political dictionary: “happy warrior.”

Philip Bump: “Democrats are more proud of the U.S. Republicans are more likely to view it as the greatest country on Earth.”

A new Gallup poll finds just 41% of Americans say they are “extremely proud” to be American, the fifth consecutive year this reading has been in the 38% to 43% range.

A new Marist poll finds 52% of Americans think people in the United States are less patriotic than they were a few years ago, 32% believe they are about as patriotic as they were while 14% believe those in the U.S. are more patriotic.

Washington Post: “There is a deepening sense of fear as population loss accelerates in rural America. The decline of small-town life is expected to be a looming topic in the presidential election.”

David Leonhardt: “A defining quality of the new centrism is how much it differs from the centrism that guided Washington in the roughly quarter-century after the end of the Cold War, starting in the 1990s. That centrism — alternately called the Washington Consensus or neoliberalism — was based on the idea that market economics had triumphed.”

“The new centrism … is a recognition that neoliberalism failed to deliver.”

New York Times: “This was just a typical month in American public life, where a steady undercurrent of violence and physical risk has become a new normal. From City Hall to Congress, public officials increasingly describe threats and harassment as a routine part of their jobs. Often masked by online anonymity and propelled by extreme political views, the barrage of menace has changed how public officials do their work, terrified their families and driven some from public life altogether.”

“By almost all measures, the evidence of the trend is striking. Last year, more than 450 federal judges were targeted with threats, a roughly 150 percent increase from 2019, according to the United States Marshals Service. The U.S. Capitol Police investigated more than 8,000 threats to members of Congress last year, up more than 50 percent from 2018. The agency recently added three full-time prosecutors to handle the volume.”

David Ignatius: “The United States might be stumbling toward a decline from which few great powers have ever recovered. It has many of the tools of national recovery but doesn’t yet have a shared recognition of the problem and how to fix it.”

“That’s not a quote from a MAGA or progressive leaflet. It’s a summary of a startling new study by Rand that was commissioned by the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment. It should serve as a loud wake-up call for America in this crucial election year.”

Wall Street Journal: “The total fertility rate fell to 1.62 births per woman in 2023, a 2% decline from a year earlier, federal data released Thursday showed. It is the lowest rate recorded since the government began tracking it in the 1930s.”

“The decline reflects a continuing trend as American women navigate economic and social challenges that have prompted some to forgo or delay having children. A confluence of factors are at play. American women are having fewer children, later in life. Women are establishing fulfilling careers and have more access to contraception.”

“At the same time, young people are also more uncertain about their futures and spending more of their income on homeownership, student debt and child care. Some women who wait to have children might have fewer than they would have otherwise for reasons including declining fertility.”

Damon Linker: “The examples are almost too numerous to list: a disastrous war in Iraq; a ruinous financial crisis followed by a decade of anemic growth when most of the new wealth went to those who were already well off; a shambolic response to the deadliest pandemic in a century; a humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan; rising prices and interest rates; skyrocketing levels of public and private debt; surging rates of homelessness and the spread of tent encampments in American cities; undocumented migrants streaming over the southern border; spiking rates of gun violence, mental illness, depression, addiction, suicide, chronic illness and obesity, coupled with a decline in life expectancy.”

“That’s an awful lot of failure over the past 20-odd years. Yet for the most part, the people who run our institutions have done very little to acknowledge or take responsibility for any of it, let alone undertake reforms that aim to fix what’s broken.”

“Despite the country’s deep political polarization, most Americans share many core beliefs about what it means to be an American, according to a new poll,” the AP reports.

“The poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that about 9 in 10 U.S. adults say the right to vote, the right to equal protection under the law and the right to privacy are extremely important or very important to the United States’ identity as a nation. The survey also found that 84% feel the same way about the freedom of religion.”