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Home » The abysmal ignorance of the young voter in the US

The abysmal ignorance of the young voter in the US

The New Neo Posted on by

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.

Comments

The abysmal ignorance of the young voter in the US — 29 Comments

  1. They are our future.

    Half of them anyway. The other (“Genocide of Jews is okay”) half: topsoil enrichment.

  2. And thus we have the Democrats baying to lower the voting age (along with voting for illegal immigrants, and rejection of voter id requirements).

  3. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. 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.

  9. 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.

  11. 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’)

  12. 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/

  13. 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.

  16. 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.

  18. 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?

  19. 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.

  20. @ 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.

  21. @ 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

    At the time I met them Peter [Collier] and David [Horowitz] had already written three of their best-selling family biographies and were at work on one more, this one on the Roosevelts. For me, however, their abandonment of the left, where they had first made their names, and their eloquent support of conservative causes — they had come out as conservatives in support of President Reagan in 1985 — had served as a thrilling inspiration.

    I am thinking especially of Peter and David’s essay “Lefties for Reagan,” originally published in a Sunday edition of the Washington Post on March 17, 1985. It is a wrenching essay that had a substantial impact on me and others at the time of its publication. Peter and David later gave us permission to post it on Power Line under the original title they had given it, “Goodbye to all that.”

    Peter went on to found Heterodoxy Magazine with David. Wanting to encourage us, Peter published the first of several articles John and I wrote on the abominable Donald Barlett and James Steele in an early edition of Heterodoxy and sent us a check that was drawn, as I recall, on his personal account. We were more than encouraged. We were ecstatic.

    Peter also went on to found Encounter Books and to write more books of his own, including a moving biography of Jeane Kirkpatrick (C-SPAN interview here). Encounter’s page on Peter is here.

    Peter reflected long and deeply on his days as a radical. My favorite of these reflections is his essay “Coming Home,” in Second Thoughts: Former Radicals Look Back at the Sixties. In this essay Peter recalled the trip he took with his laconic father to South Dakota, where his father had been born, while his father was dying. During one long stretch of Nevada highway, his father announced: “You know, I’m glad I was born a South Dakotan and an American. I’m glad I saw the beginning of the twentieth century. I’m glad I lived through the Depression and the War. I think these things made me a stronger person. I’m glad I came to California, because I met your mother there. I’m glad we had you for a son.”

    Peter commented: “It was the longest speech I’d ever heard him make…It was a moment of acceptance and affirmation by someone whose life had often been disfigured by hard work and responsibility and for whom words had never come easily. What he said and how he said it was so different from the chic bitterness and facile nihilism of my radical friends that I was shaken. It was like hearing speech, real and authentic speech, for the first time in years.”

    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

    The instruments of popular culture may perhaps be forgiven for continuing to portray the 1960s as a time of infectious idealism, but those of us who were active then have no excuse for abetting this banality. If in some ways it was the best of times, it was also the worst of times, an era of bloodthirsty fantasies as well as spiritual ones. We ourselves experienced both aspects, starting as civil¬rights and antiwar activists and ending as co¬editors of the New Left magazine Ramparts. The magazine post allowed us to write about the rough beast slouching through America and also to urge it on through non¬editorial activities we thought of as clandestine until we later read about them in the FBI and CIA files we both accumulated.

    Like other radicals in those days, we were against electoral politics, regarding voting as one of those charades used by the ruling class to legitimate its power. We were even more against Reagan, then governor of California, having been roughed up by his troopers during the People’s Park demonstrations in Berkeley and tear¬gassed by his National Guard helicopters during the University of California’s Third World Liberation Front Strike. But neither elections nor elected officials seemed particularly important compared with the auguries of revolution the left saw everywhere by the end of the decade—in the way the nefarious Richard Nixon was widening the war in Indochina; in the unprovoked attacks by paramilitary police against the Black Panther Party; in the formation of the Weather Underground, a group willing to pick up the gun or the bomb. It was a time when the apocalypse struggling to be born seemed to need only the slightest assist from the radical midwife.

    When we were in the voting¬booth this past November—in different precincts but of the same mind—we both thought back to the day in 1969 when Tom Hayden came by the office and, after getting a Ramparts donation to buy gas masks and other combat issue for Black Panther “guerrillas,” announced portentously: “Fascism is here, and we’re all going to be in jail by the end of the year.” We agreed wholeheartedly with this apocalyptic vision and in fact had just written in an editorial: “The system cannot be revitalized. It must be overthrown. As humanely as possible, but by any means necessary.”
    …
    How naive was the New Left can be debated, but by the end of the 1960s we were not political novices. We knew that bad news from Southeast Asia—the reports of bogged¬down campaigns and the weekly body¬counts announced by Walter Cronkite—was good for the radical agenda. The more repressive our government in dealing with dissent at home, the more recruits for our cause and the sooner the appearance of the revolutionary Armageddon.

    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. Never had we thought that the United States, the arch¬imperial power, would of its own volition withdraw from Indochina. This development violated a primary article of our hand¬me¬down Marx¬ism: that political action through normal channels could not alter the course of the war. The system we had wanted to overthrow worked tardily and only at great cost, but it worked.

    When American troops finally came home, some of us took the occasion to begin a long and painful reexamination of our political assumptions and beliefs.

    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.

  22. 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.

  23. 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.”

  24. 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!

  25. 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.

  26. Ackler – Welp, it’s the final countdown. Nothing to do but smoke a bowl and watch Idiocracy.

  27. 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.

  28. }}} 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. 😀

  29. 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?

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