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In his insightful, award-winning work Fire
and Ice, Environics president Michael Adams explored
the growing divergence between American and Canadian values.
Using the same mixture of polling and analysis in American
Backlash, Adams fixes his penetrating gaze on contemporary
America -- the exceptional society.
Exploding the accepted wisdom of an America
divided bitterly into camps of red and blue, Adams's data
show that the values rift between Republicans and Democrats
is negligible when compared with the gulf between politically
engaged citizens (of either party) and the nearly half of
Americans who are politically disaffected.
American Backlash goes beyond the
red and blue dichotomy, beyond the litany of divisive political
issues that receive so much attention in American public
discourse: abortion, stem-cell research, euthanasia, same-sex
marriage, Darwin versus Genesis, and prayer in schools.
Widening the lens to examine the psychology of American
society as a whole, Adams's research suggests that it is
neither Red nor Blue America that represents the overall
trajectory of social change in the United States. Rather,
it is politically disengaged Americans, people who increasingly
embrace values of brash individualism and hedonism, who
are the greatest barometer of where American society is
headed.
Michael Adams is president of the Environics
group of marketing research and communications consulting
companies with offices in the United States and Canada.
He has written three bestselling books, including Fire
and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging
Values, which won the prestigious
2004 Donner Prize for the best book on public policy in
Canada.
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