American exceptionalism poll shows a decline.
This finding (pdf) from a large new Pew Research poll will no-doubt raise some eyebrows. In short, the idea of American exceptionalism is slowly falling out of favor:
However, the current polling shows the American public is coming closer to Europeans in not seeing their culture as superior to that of other nations. Today, only about half of Americans believe their culture is superior to others, compared with six-in-ten in 2002. And the polling finds younger Americans less apt than their elders to hold American exceptionalist attitudes.
Relatedly, Pew found that the further you go up the education scale, the less likely it is that you'd buy into exceptionalism:
In the four Western European countries and in the U.S., those who did not graduate from college are more likely than those who did to agree that their culture is superior, even if their people are not perfect. For example, Germans with less education are twice as likely as those with a college degree to believe their culture is superior (50% vs. 25%); double-digit differences are also present in France (20 percentage points), Spain (18 points) and Britain (11 points), while a less pronounced gap is evident in the U.S. (9 points).
