These views on morality are reflected in American concerns on a range of public issues including public concerns about illegal drugs. Among the worries Americans have about their country’s illicit drug problem, the negative effects banned substances are thought to have on the national character and on public morals rank among the top four (Blendon and Young 1998). In 1997, only 26% of Americans favoured legalizing marijuana while in the same year 51% of Canadians, perhaps reflecting a more relaxed view of morality, thought marijuana should be decriminalized (Savas 2001). Only 34% of Canadians believe that illicit drugs represent a serious problem for Canada (Harvey 2001), while more than 81% of Americans think that addiction is a very serious problem for the U.S. (Lock, Timberlake and Rasinski 2002).

Confidence in the state has also declined within Canada’s once deferent and docile population. The rejection of authority in Canada is reflective of a well-documented shift in values taking place in industrialized nations from those based on the materialist concerns of the Great Depression to what Ronald Inglehart has termed the “postmaterialist” beliefs of the post-war generations. Inglehart’s thesis of value change posits that economic security produced in advanced industrial societies has gradually changed the goal orientations of its citizens, not so much replacing concerns about economic and physical security as adding and giving greater prominence to higher-order considerations to do with self-expression, freedom and quality of life. The explanation of why this value shift has occurred is still being debated, but the fact that it has occurred is one of the most highly confirmed of social science generalizations (Warwick 1998).

The changes taking place in Canada are consistent with those documented in 11 other advanced industrialized nations, and are strongly correlated with lack of confidence in government and non-government institutions, higher levels of moral permissiveness, growing secularism, and more emphasis on egalitarianism in spousal and parent-child relationships (Layman and Carmines 1997). As Canadians disengage from the guidance of their institutions, consensus breaks down and rebuilds on along different lines. Linked to the “quality of life” issue, areas of public policy around which there used to be a greater degree of consensus are thus emerging as controversial again--areas like abortion, gambling, death penalty, euthanasia, pornography, gay rights, and drug use (Mooney 1999).

In the U.S. the same phenomenon is happening but with a somewhat different cast. It has been argued that the greater influence of religion in the U.S. has obscured the postmaterialist value shift that has been occurring there. While religion has become a much less salient part of politics and society in most advanced industrial democracies, it continues to play a very important part in American political culture. As some segments in the U.S. population have moved towards greater secularism, there has been a counterbalancing growth in conservative Protestant congregations with all of their emphasis on a “strict father” interpretation of issues. In recent decades postmaterialist value-based issues relating to school prayer, abortion rights, the threat to traditional sex roles and sexual orientation, to name only a few, are beginning to steal ground from the old class-based materialist issues of economic growth and publicly-funded health care. Even the old materialist concern of law and order is being recast along moral, value-based lines. Looking at how these issues breakdown politically, it appears that the postmaterialist category contains both social liberals and social conservatives, while the materialist category contains both economic conservatives and economic liberals so that:

...as value-based concerns move to the political foreground, the important cleavage is not between those who focus on postmaterial concerns and those who focus on matters of economic and physical security. Instead, it is between those who hold more progressive stances on postmaterial, value-based concerns and those who hold more traditional positions on these matters (Layman and Carmines 1997:768).