This is GPS, the Global Public Square. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Farid Zakaria coming to you live from New York.

On the program, Russia will celebrate a victory tomorrow its defeat of the Nazis in World War II.

This year, the holiday will almost certainly focus on Ukraine.

But what would victory look like there for either side and who is most likely to achieve it? We will explore.

Also, as America gets ready to mark a million dead from COVID, Bill Gates says we are not out of danger yet, not even close.

I will talk to him about the pandemic and the inevitable next one.

But first, here's my take. As the prospect of Roe vs. Wade being overturned, Loom's large and America braces for another round of culture wars, I've been puzzling about why clashes over values seem to be more intense in the United States than elsewhere, and why the competing camps seem more divided than before.

One key to this might be found in a 2020 Pew survey showing that on many cultural issues, the American political divide was the widest among rich countries surveyed.

Asht weather the country would be better off in the future if it sticks to its traditions and ways of life, 65% of Americans on the right said yes, versus just 6% on the left, a 59-point gap. That compares with a 19-point gap in tradition-bound France.

Asht weather being Christian was a crucial aspect of being a citizen of the country, the gap in America was 23 points compared to just 7 points in the UK.

These attitudes are fleshed out further in a 2018 Pew survey which asked people in several rich countries whether religion should play a larger role in their societies.

In America, 71% of people who identified as conservatives said yes, while just 29% of liberals agreed. That difference, 42% of points, was off the charts compared to the other countries.

The gap was 17 points larger than those in the next highest countries analyzed, Canada and Poland, and roughly four times the gap between right and left in Sweden and Germany.

In the UK, 35% of conservatives wanted religion to play a larger role in their country versus 28% of liberals, a mere 7-point gap.

So why is America exceptionally polarized? It's a tough question to answer. Many of the forces that seem to be at work, globalization, technological change, immigration are happening in other western societies as well.

In fact, if you use the size of trade in a country's economy as a measure, America is less globalized than many European countries.

It's not even special when it comes to immigration. Canada and Sweden have a larger share of foreign-born people in their societies than does the United States.

And of course, technology is at work everywhere.

In his last book, Religion's sudden decline, the distinguished social scientists Ronald Engelhart offered an answer.

Engelhart pointed out that the most striking cultural shift of our times is the decline in religiosity in most countries.

When Engelhart and his colleague, Pippa Norris, analyzed survey data on attitudes toward religion from 1981 to 2007, they found that most of the country's studies had become more religious.

But between 2007 and 2020, the overwhelming majority became less religious.

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