...“On cultural issues, the direction the country is moving is more progressive,” said Will Marshall, president of the centrist Progressive Policy Institute. “But that’s less clear on economic issues.”

The trend to more liberal cultural views is part of a “compassionate impulse” Americans have long held, said author and historian Robert Dallek....

“There is a move in the direction of cultural pluralism,” said William Leuchtenburg, historian at the University of North Carolina, with people more accepting of different cultures, different lifestyles and different attitudes .

That’s not to say that change comes smoothly. The willingness to change “goes in cycles,” Dallek said, as people stop to absorb a wave of change. Thus, the social upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s gave way to the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment for women, the rise of the Moral Majority and evangelical Christians in politics, and the tide of culturally conservative blue-collar Democrats abandoning their party and helping elect President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s....