Tag Archive for: progressive politics

Millennials Are a Lot Less Progressive Than You Think

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Millennials have long been cast as the great progressive hope, or “New Progressive America: The Millennial Generation,” as one study would have it. 25- to 40-year-old Americans, already the largest portion of the current adult population, have been cast by progressives as “a hero generation” that will escape the material trappings of their Boomer parents’ suburban lives and pull American politics far to the Left.

To be sure, millennials are the most Democratic-leaning of generations, as the Pew Research Center found; they have close to a 60 percent fealty to Democrats, and their votes clearly helped get rid of Donald Trump. So it’s fitting that their avatar is the congressional “Squad” led by the ubiquitous 30-year-old Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of their own.

It’s also undeniable that the ideological cast of millennials, who will be the largest voting block by 2024, will shape our political future. But a closer look at millennial attitudes suggests that the difference between their lives and the lives of their parents is not always by design, and that given the choice, many millennials would prefer to be parents and enjoy family life in the suburbs (and the attendant centrist politics) than be the “heroes” of a left-wing movement.

You can see this in the fact that millennials have been increasingly leaving big cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago for more conventional locales, as an analysis of the past decade found. Millennials have spent the past 10 years moving en masse to less expensive, redder metros in the Sunbelt and to the suburbs and exurbs of select Midwestern cities like Columbus, Des Moines and Indianapolis.

Millennials just aren’t the overwhelmingly enthusiastic urbanites that people say they are; big skies and small towns are in high demand for a significant number of younger Americans. Some 26 percent told researchers they would like to end up in small-town or rural America, while another 39 percent are headed for the suburbs. This even applies to better educated workers, nearly 70 percent of whom prefer suburban or small-town living. This pattern is strongest among whites and Latinos, but even among African Americans, roughly half opt for suburban living.

And this desire to leave cities is correlated strongly with marital status. Almost a third of married millennials want to move out to the country—compared to 21 percent of singles. It reflects a political divide between primarily childless, left-leaning urbanites and more conservative or centrist families on the periphery.

Reflecting their geographic diversity, millennials are also proving less uniformly Left than imagined, as Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist, found; as they age and start families, millennials tend to focus more on economic improvement than abstract notions of cultural or social justice.

A poll of over 1,400 people sponsored by the Los Angeles Times and Reality Check Insights after the November 2020 elections revealed that a plurality of millennials consider themselves centrists. 50 percent are politically independent or lean only a bit in one direction, while another 16 percent are conservative. Just a third identify as liberal.

Read the rest of this piece at Newsweek.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Samuel J. Abrams is professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Photo: picjumbo via Pexels.

Why Jews Are Confused

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Assailed from two sides, American Jewry is having an acute crisis of identity.

Es iz schver tzu zein a yid. (It is hard to be a Jew.)

—Sholem Aleichem

From missiles falling on Tel Aviv and the assault on synagogues during last summer’s riots to mob violence on the streets of LA and New York, the sense of well-being among America’s Jews has been shattered. After decades of relentless social and political ascendency, Jews now face rising anti-Semitism in ways not encountered in over half a century. Attacked from the far right, as well as an increasingly vitriolic far left, Jews are pincered and suffering whiplash.

Amidst what Hoover Institution fellow and Somali immigrant Ayaan Hirsi Ali describes as a rampant rise of “tribalism,” anti-Semitism is becoming normalized in America. Yet in the face of this rising risk, Jews themselves are divided and deeply conflicted. The Jewish establishment has generally focused on white nationalists as the prime threat and, to be sure, lone racists have expressed their anti-Semitism lethally from Kansas City and Pittsburgh to Poway. To a people who have experienced centuries of persecution from the Tsarist regime to the Nazis and the Klan, the far right’s elevated profile fueled by the power of social media—if not the actual size of the white nationalist movement—is nevertheless terrifying.

Yet this is not the real measure, or even the bulk, of the threat. Groups like the Anti-Defamation League focus on Islamists and right-wing hate groups, but their statistics have been roundly criticized in such respected magazines as Tablet, and are widely thought to reflect their increasingly progressive bias. The reality, missing from the mainstream narrative, ignores the arguably more potent threat from an aroused, and increasingly radicalized, left.

The roots of leftist anti-Semitism are nurtured in anti-Zionism that has been brewing for a half century on the left. But now, for the first time, even Congress has a band of anti-Zionists who denounce Israel’s strong response to missile attacks as a war crime. The assault on Israel’s right to self-defense—though still backed by President Biden—comes from the ascendant left faction of the Democrats—led by such figures as Rashida Tlaib and the openly anti-Semitic Ilhan Omar. They assign exclusive blame to Israel for their response to the mass missile attacks on their cities from groups like Hamas, whose genocidal urges are well demonstrated and enshrined in the group’s founding documents, and whose Judenrein territorial goal, “from the river to the sea,” is now chanted by street mobs around the world, and tweeted by none other than the labor union at the New Yorker magazine.

Israel appears to have lost support among American Jews, particularly the younger and less affiliated. Having alienated the Obama administration with their West Bank settlement policies and opposition to the Iran nuclear agreement, Israeli policy-makers now worry more about Democratic Administrations. A former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. recently opined that Israel should prioritize the “passionate and unequivocal” support of evangelical Christians over that of American Jews, who he said are “disproportionately among our critics.” Certainly the new administration’s intent to return to the Iran accords are troubling, as are charges that John Kerry, the president climate czar, gave intelligence to the Iranians, who openly promote eradication of the Jewish state.

These divides are particularly dangerous as the community is aging rapidly, faces increasing pressures to assimilate, while major institutions are under pressures not seen in generations. Overall, the American Jewish population—unlike that of demographically robust Israel—is unlikely to grow by 2050. There is no likely replacement for the influx of Persian, North and South African, and Russian Jews who rescued the community from demographic decline over the last half century. It is also a community that is no longer the global center of Jewry, and has been replaced by Israel, a state that acts primarily in its own self-interest, sometimes in ways that upset many American Jews.

Although Trump made some modest gains among Jewish voters in 2020, the bulk of American Jews, nearing 70 percent according to Pew, identify with the Democratic Party. Jews are widely represented in the upper echelons of the Democratic Party, including Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer and progressive icon Bernie Sanders, and are well represented in the media, academic, and corporate communities that have rallied behind President Biden. Democrats account for 36 out of the 38 Jews in Congress, and one-third of them are members of the far-left leaning Congressional Progressive Caucus, whose leading members, during the current hostilities, moved to block a planned $735 million weapons package for Israel.

Leading progressive Jews often embrace the notion of tikkun olam (“healing the world”) as the mission of the faith. In their mind, Jewish values are intrinsically progressive and point with pride to the community’s support for the African American civil rights movement, and their more recent unrequited backing for the Black Lives Matter movement and the Women’s March. Yet many of these groups are led in part by enthusiastic backers of the most influential anti-Semite of our time, National of Islam head Louis Farrakhan, who smirks that he is an “anti-termite” and insists that Jews controlled the slave trade, and other leaders who accuse Israel of genocide, and of running an apartheid state. Professedly anti-Zionist, BLM has allied with Islamist groups and disparaged Israel during last year’s DC demonstrations as well as during the recent Gaza conflict. BLM protests have also led to rioters vandalizing synagogues and trashing Jewish owned businesses in Los Angeles, New York, and Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Moreover, violent, unprovoked attacks on Jews in Los Angeles, New York, Raton, Montreal, London,  Argentina, Chile, Germany, Austria, Poland, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, and Turkey demonstrate that much of anti-Zionism is in reality anti-Semitism.   

Read the rest of this piece at American Mind.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Edward Heyman is currently active as a volunteer and consultant in the Orange County, California, Jewish community, following a career as a partner in a software development firm serving the defense and intelligence communities.

Photo credit: Gregory Hauenstein via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

America’s First Infantada

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We are here to guide public opinion, not to discuss it.
Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, 1804

By the calendar, the American republic is mature, but it’s becoming rapidly ever more infantilized. In everything from schooling to Covid-19 to race and global warming, we seem to be looking for simple, easy answers that a toddler might appreciate but healthy adults know are too pat to be true. Read more

Podcast: Joel Kotkin Talks to Brendan O’Neill

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By: Brendan O’Neill
On: spiked

Press play below to listen to the podcast, or listen on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher or Spotify.

Joel Kotkin, author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, joins spiked’s editor for the latest episode of The Brendan O’Neill Show. They discuss the aristocratic arrogance of the tech oligarchs, the failure of ‘progressive’ politics and the battle to preserve liberal democracy.

Read more

Woke Politics Are a Disaster for Minorities

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Bill Clinton may have been lionized as the “first black President,” and Barack Obama actually was half African, but no politician in American history owes more to African-American leadership and voters than Joe Biden. His campaign never smoldered, much less caught fire, until he was embraced by South Carolina’s heavily black Democratic electorate. African Americans paced his path also through states such as Texas, where he did far less well among whites and Latinos.

Yet will this triumph at the polls translate to a better life for most minorities, most of whom are working-class or poor? It depends which minorities. Biden’s commitment to healing the “sting of systemic racism” and repudiating “white supremacy” will certainly benefit the elite minorities—actors, lawyers, professors, media figures, corporate apparatchiks, non-profit functionaries—whose careers will be super-charged by demands that people be appointed to high office by race.

Viruses have no known biases, but even the pandemic cannot escape the taint of “systemic racism.” States like California are basing their re-opening policies on whether the infections and fatalities can be equalized by race, despite differences between races in health factors, housing, and work life. Some at the CDC, many state officials—including in overwhelmingly white Oregon—and numerous academic health experts have even suggested minorities get vaccinated first as a demonstration of “racial justice,” even if it threatens the most vulnerable, but grievously whiter populations of seniors.

The “Talented Tenth” v. the Vast Majority

But what about the vast majority of African Americans and Latinos? Even in the best of times, back in February, our economy was failing many of these minorities, as well working people in general. Corporate mea culpas about racism and solidarity with BLM may blunt criticism, but assertions of guilt don’t address the fundamental problem of diminished expectations, particularly in minority and working-class communities that continue to suffer economic distress and hopelessness. Minorities make up over 40% of the nation’s working class and will constitute the majority by 2032.

In writing about African-American progress, the great 20th-Century philosopher W.E.B. Du Bois embraced the notion of “the talented tenth”—the educated upper stratum of black America—as the primary vehicle for social change. Others with a more popular touch embraced either the crude nationalism of Marcus Garvey or the ameliorative, grassroots improvement approach of Booker T. Washington.

The elitist vision of minority outlook was epitomized by the Obama Administration, where African Americans and other “people of color” enjoyed enormous influence and access while the conditions for middle- and working-class minorities generally declined. Minorities with elite degrees flourished, but policies that protected banks and targeted homeowners wiped out much black and Hispanic wealth. “The first black president in American history,” notes the widely-read Marxist blog Jacobin, “ turned out to be a disaster for black wealth.”

Read the rest of this piece at American Mind.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.