Multiple polls lately have said that young Americans are more antisemitic than older Americans. Young conservatives are somewhat more antisemitic than liberals, but the dramatic difference is by age.
Some possible explanations:
- Is the online antisemitism I consider rather silly actually having a huge impact?
- Is it largely about the changing status of Israel, from small, threatened nation to powerful bully?
- Is it anti-globalism, anti-international finance attitudes?
Other thoughts?
There was analysis on twitter, which simply divided the data by the race. It seems young whites are actually less antisemitic.
ReplyDeletehttps://x.com/SAshworthHayes/status/1888323679505064398
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ReplyDeleteOther thoughts?
As I usually do with these sorts of things, I looked at how they define their terms.
First, there's the actual question they asked people: "Do you have a favourable or unfavourable opinion of Jewish people?".
The phrasing is pretty typical of surveys, and it definitely has a lot of vagueness built into it. "Jewish people" is a complicated topic because of the confluence of culture, religion, and the Israeli government.
It really does come down a lot to the exact phrasing being used, and the education / awareness of the person being asked the question. For example, a lot of people would differentiate between "Jewish People" and "Jewish Americans", for example. Another quibble might be the distinction between being "Jewish" (which is sometimes just treated as a cultural / ethnic descriptor) and being "a Jew" (which is often a strictly religious descriptor). And then there's the difference between being "Jewish" and being "Israeli".
And I could absolutely see a freshly registered 18 year old voter ticking off boxes on a survey sheet looking at it and not really thinking through the possible intricacies of what is actually being asked, but just marking an answer immediately because they have another dozen answers after it and they want to get on with their day.
Yes, if you stop and think about it with the appropriate experience and context, you can realize the question is trying to awkwardly ask, "Are you full blown anti-semetic?" without using those words. But young people frequently lack the kind of experience and context that helps them catch that sort of thing.
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ReplyDeleteThe other half of the problem is we're looking specifically at the population of "registered voters", and the 18 to 24 year old bracket of the general population is NOTORIOUS for their low rate of voter registration compared to literally every other age bracket.
Young registered voters are MUCH more likely to have become registered voters BECAUSE they have a strong political opinion one way or another. So a relatively small change among the general populace can easily be amplified and over-represented as a much larger change in the 18-24 registered voter demographic.
So my ultimate thoughts....
I think there are several factors at work. Yes, obviously, the war and broader cultural shifts in how we talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its long dark history has soured a lot of people on Israel as a country / government, and that has bleed over effects.
Yes, obviously, there's fact that in the modern day we have a bad habit of ignoring online hate speech because many see it as "silly", and then it turns out it actually is instill REAL hatred in people in reality. (Because humans aren't rational actors, and "It's silly, let's ignore it" is literally how the original Nazis succeeded.)
Yes, obviously, the flourishing of conspiracy theories and our politics broadly becoming unhinged from reality has allowed the "Globalist" nutjobs to attract followers and spread even more hatred.
But I think also that the question being asked on the survey is bad because it is vague, and any conclusions drawn from self-reporting based on such a question must be taken with a massive grain of salt...
...and I think that we need to keep in mind that the 18-24 year olds answering the question are self selected to be more politically extreme than their peers, and are young enough to not be taking the question seriously / not understanding the full implications of the question...
...AND I think we need to keep in mind that in general, there's a lot more demonstrative "rebellious" cultural expression going on in the world at large, both online and in our mainstream politics, where making outrageous comments (regardless of their veracity) is a form of social and political currency that can gain you cache and influence among others...
...AND ALSO, we need to keep in mind that this same atmosphere is emboldening people who were ALREADY Far Right / Neo-Nazi / Anti-Semites to speak up and loudly proclaim their allegiances in the open, when previously they might hesitate to do so.
So it may not even be an "uptick" at all, just an accidental reveal of what was already there but concealed.