The abysmal ignorance of the young voter in the US
Yesterday I wrote a post about some of the shocking results among respondents ages 18-24 in the recent Harvard Harris poll. But I missed a few viewpoints that group expressed in the poll that are especially revealing. See this chart and pay particular attention to the last three items on the list:
The ignorance involved in believing that “Israel is not a democracy” is bad enough, but it palls in comparison to “Hamas lets gay people live together openly.” Almost half of young people live in a fantasyland in which they believe that is so. The disconnect from reality is tremendously profound – and remember, these people are of voting age. They are not children. They are our future.
Will time and greater maturity change them? I’m not at all sure that will hold true for the most part for this group or its successors. Social media has become a powerful force in people’s lives and particularly for younger generations, and that is a huge part of the problem – along with our educational system, of course.
They are our future.
Half of them anyway. The other (“Genocide of Jews is okay”) half: topsoil enrichment.
And thus we have the Democrats baying to lower the voting age (along with voting for illegal immigrants, and rejection of voter id requirements).
My tea leaves forecast tough economic times, more wars, and deep cuts in desirable jobs due to AI.
Furthermore, today’s young are the least resilient, least prepared generation we’ve ever had.
It’s not going to be pretty.
They give mush a bad connotation.
Omri Ceren:
https://twitter.com/omriceren/status/1737130296984682840?t=fN_devcRm5b86EA_8tY8wg&s=19
I’d only offer that to me this doesn’t come across so much as “ignorance” as it does “indoctrination.”
Orwell called it perfectly…and I don’t mind repeating myself…this is what evil does. Evil inverts truth into lie & its adherent live the lie until it kills them, because evil always eats its own.
And huxley is absolutely correct…it’s going to get ugly in the not too distant future before this gets cleaned up.
I recall having to fill in the names of various European countries on a blank map for a test in maybe the sixth grade. Got Switzerland and Sweden mixed up; the “sw” thing.
Of course, that was so long ago that maps of the Middle East would have been drawn in erasable ink on wax paper. Not much use of memorizing them at the time.
And I’d challenge anybody to do the same for South America.
However, it would seem both advisable and darn near mandatory to bring a map into a discussion of territory. Depending on your motivation, of course.
I would not be surprised if the majority of young voters could not find the Gaza strip on the map.
I would not be surprised if the vast majority of them never heard of the Ottoman Empire or what caused its demise.
If shown a map of the Middle East as it existed in 1918, I would not be surprised if they could not explain why several nations that exist there today did not exist prior to 1918, ( or really the previous 500 years or so) or where / how these “missing” nations that are there today came into existence
Honestly, I would not be surprised if these college kids could tell you who fought on which side during WWII or when the American Civil War was fought.
I blame four things for this.
1. The wokification of the teacher’s unions.
2. The leftist partisanship of the MSM.
3. The awful, addictive effects of social media.
4. The naivete’ of parents who assume their children are being taught the same way they were.
In order to be educated, you have to be provided with facts and opinions. Then taught to think critically about them. Indoctrination occurs when only one side of an issue is provided, and you are expected to accept it without question.
Homeschooling, charter schools, vouchers for parents to pay for private schools, and breaking up the teacher’s unions could help stop the indoctrination in schools.
This information about the young is so shocking that many parents are waking up from their slumber concerning education.
The MSM and social media are a tougher nut to crack.
she’s not that young anymore
https://redstate.com/bonchie/2023/12/19/rfk-jr-executes-perfect-takedown-of-sniveling-anti-israel-host-should-have-resigned-in-disgrace-n2167715
JohnTyler:
Oh of course they do! Slavery ended the day Martin Luther King declared ‘free at last’ on the Capitol steps, with Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman cheering. That convinced President Kennedy and/or Lincoln to abolish it. But the evil white southerners started the Civil War the next day (by lynching Emmett Till) and allied themselves with Nazi Germany. Indeed, Robert E. Lee and Hitler regularly consulted with each other. Anyway, the war was won almost entirely because of the Navajo code talkers, whose land had been stolen and were forced into interment camps with the Japanese (the ‘Trail of Tears’)
I would not be surprised if the majority of young voters could not find the Gaza strip on the map.
John Tyler:
Have I got a link for you!
_________________________________
Vox’s Motto Should Be ‘Explaining The News Incorrectly, Repeatedly’
Yesterday, the experts at Vox claimed that Gaza and the West Bank were connected by a bridge that Israel restricts traffic on. No, really. Stop laughing….
Yes. This happened. A journalist who has a paying job as a “news explainer” wrote that Israel limits traffic on a bridge that — as anyone with even the slightest bit of knowledge about Israel knows — does not exist.
https://thefederalist.com/2014/07/17/voxs-motto-should-be-explaining-the-news-incorrectly-repeatedly/
Ackler, your comment is an example of satire approaching reality- at least as some of the woke generation define reality.
The only teenagers I know have a cousin with the IDF in Gaza, so at least they have some sense.
Like Huxley says, hard times ahead.
I think the pollsters have problems with their sampling frame.
Tell any young people you know to start using AI like ChatGPT as though their future careers depend on it. Because they do.
Everyone is going to need an AI buddy to get by.
Seriously.
https://chat.openai.com/
I’d like to think AI and self-education might help relieve political ignorance.
However, I fear the AIs will be trained on woke data and therefore will be part of the problem and not the solution.
I’ll have to start checking how woke chat is.
https://reason.com/volokh/2023/12/17/dont-put-too-much-stock-in-survey-finding-that-67-of-18-24-year-olds-say-jews-are-oppressors/
A majority of Americans can’t name the three branches of government, don’t know when the Civil War happened, and support mandatory labeling of food containing DNA (the latter probably because they don’t understand what DNA is). Political scientists also find that most of the public has little understanding of such basic political concepts as “liberal” and “conservative.”
Upon what basis might one imagine that such a population is capable of competent self-governance?
Upon what basis might one imagine that such a population is capable of competent self-governance?
Geoffrey Britain:
They are human beings with an innate drive to survive and thrive who possess functioning brains which require massive feedback to get better at surviving and thriving, i.e. humans make a whole lot of mistakes before they get better.
In the 70s I was a New Left hippie with bizarre simultaneous notions of doom and utopia. I was wrong on both counts, at least in the short term, but it took me a while to get smarter. Nonetheless I did.
To some extent I suppose I’m an outlier, but I think you underestimate how adaptable humans are, even today’s woke leftists.
@ Art Deco & huxley – thanks for the links; I would not have found those posts on my own. Cheers for crowd-sourced research!
Somin’s cautions about the poll are well taken. It appears to me that the majority of protesters, especially in colleges, are jumping on the trendy bandwagon without any idea what they are actually talking about, because the genuine anti-Israel anti-Semites (having had much practice) made promoting The Cause their top priority.
That they were able to hit the ground running before Israel had even responded to the Hamas attacks, with professionally printed signs and other accessories (as they have in other “spontaneous grass-roots” demonstrations), is a testimony to the fact that, for the Left, politics is their day job.
@ huxley > “To some extent I suppose I’m an outlier, but I think you underestimate how adaptable humans are, even today’s woke leftists.”
We sincerely hope that a lot of them get much smarter very soon.
Did you see this post at Powerline on the adapting / changing of a prominent leftist from the past? I found the story to be fascinating, and encouraging.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/12/a-collier-remembrance.php
I know Horowitz, of course, but was not familiar with Collier. Their post about becoming Reagan Republicans is here:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/11/collier-horowitz-goodbye-to-all-that.php
Their title is identical to that of the autobiography of the English poet Robert Graves, which is also fascinating reading, although personal rather than political in nature. That the Washington Post felt it necessary to retitle it “Lefties for Reagan” speaks to their belief, even then, that their readers would be too ignorant to understand the connection and thus some of the subtle implications of the essayists.
AI will very quickly obliterate the middle class. The (former) middle class will respond by obliterating AI.
No thinking job is safe. The slaughter will be deep and wide. AI will go from an aide to a replacement very quickly. When the AI legal aide knows more than the lawyer, why do you need a human? Many big writers book series are cowritten by a collaborator and edited by the author. Sounds like a job for AI.
Replying to myself, I still don’t think the students KNOW what they are talking about, but they got on the bandwagon earlier than I was aware of.
T J on December 19, 2023 at 5:37 pm said:
How US Public Schools Teach anti-Semitism” — and not just schools, K to pre-K.
https://www.thefp.com/p/how-us-public-schools-teach-antisemitism
The stories in that post are frightening; as one Jewish mother concerned for the safety of her bullied child said: “I’ve said things to her that someone would have told my family in the 1940s,” she said. “This is lunacy. This is New York City in 2023.”
Our assumption that Vietnam would be the political and moral fulcrum by which we would tip this country toward revolution foresaw every possibility except one: that the United States would pull out. … The system we had wanted to overthrow worked tardily and only at great cost, but it worked.
AesopFan:
This was a banana peel, as a leftist in the 70s/80s, I kept slipping on. I wanted to denounce Middle of the Road (MOR) Americans, but they just kept being moral and reasonable.
The nerve!
Gringo,
Yes, it’s definitely satire approaching reality. I can’t decide whether it is more apt as a slightly exaggerated depiction of the average college freshman or of Joe Biden ad libbing it on any given day.
Ackler – Welp, it’s the final countdown. Nothing to do but smoke a bowl and watch Idiocracy.
The 2019 “Democratic Socialist” convention (H/T: MA Rothman):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moWe3rk7LzQ
Freaking dunderheaded idiots, with zero spine or actual capacity to endure any kind of difficulty at all.
When The Shit Hits The Fan — as it seems inevitable at this point — they are all going to go catatonic when faced with real conflict.
}}} I would not be surprised if the majority of young voters could not find the Gaza strip on the map.
I’d wager the majority wouldn’t grasp the problem if they were asked
to find it on a map of Japan. 😀
Lots of young folk will understand that they were crazy … when they were young.
Here’s a song that I like now by an artist that I haven’t liked too much, but her prior hit was pretty good too. Her voice is moving towards a Janis Joplin kind of sincerity I like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZ3XMOdOdKM
(lots of good links in the last few days, thanks)
But when the young understand that they’ve made mistakes, what will they start to believe then?