Holocaust Denial

 Nick Robertson at The Hill

A fifth of Americans ages 18-29 believe the Holocaust was a myth, according to a new poll from The Economist/YouGov. While the question only surveyed a small sample of about 200 people, it lends credence to concerns about rising antisemitism, especially among young people in the U.S. Another 30 percent of young people said they didn’t agree or disagree with the statement, while the remaining 47 percent disagreed. Only 7 percent of Americans overall believe the Holocaust is a myth, according to the poll.

 Congress and the White House have placed special attention on fighting antisemitism in recent weeks as the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza continues to divide public opinion. Leaders of top universities were grilled by a House committee this week on the topic, drawing criticism for vague answers on what comments constituted antisemitic harassment. About a third of Americans described antisemitism as a “very serious problem” in the poll, with just more than a quarter of young people saying the same. 

On Friday, a bipartisan group of senators, led by Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), introduced a bill to reauthorize the Never Again Education Act, providing federal funding for Holocaust education. “Failing to educate students about the gravity and scope of the Holocaust is a disservice to the memory of its victims and to our duty to prevent such atrocities in the future,” Rosen said in a statement. “At a time of rising antisemitism, reauthorizing the bipartisan Never Again Education Act will help ensure that educators have the resources needed to teach students about the Holocaust and help counter antisemitic bigotry and hate.”

From a 2018 survey by the Claims Conference

• Nearly one-third of all Americans (31 percent) and more than 4-in-10 Millennials (41 percent) believe that substantially less than 6 million Jews were killed (two million or fewer) during the Holocaust
• While there were over 40,000 concentration camps and ghettos in Europe during the Holocaust, almost half of Americans (45 percent) cannot name a single one – and this percentage is even higher amongst Millennials

 The survey asked an open-ended question: "From what you know or have heard, what was Auschwitz? 

......................................................All adults ..................Under 35

Concentration camp ........................40% ............................22% 

Death/extermination camp ..............23% ............................11% 

Forced labor camp ............................1% ...............................2% 

Other ................................................21% ............................31% 

Not sure ...........................................20% .............................35%

Attention to Political News

Jeffrey M. Jones at Gallup:

There are wide differences in the amount of attention paid to national political news by age and educational attainment. In the current survey, 51% of U.S. adults aged 65 and older say they follow political news very closely, as do 40% of those between the ages of 50 and 64. Far fewer 30- to 49-year-olds (26%), and especially 18- to 29-year-olds (9%), are following politics very closely.

More than four in 10 college graduates (including those with and without a postgraduate education) follow political news very closely, while fewer than three in 10 adults without a college degree do.

There are modest gender differences in attention to politics, with more men (35%) than women (30%) following politics very closely. Republicans and Democrats pay similar levels of attention, but independents pay less than either of the two major party groups.

These subgroup differences are similar to what Gallup has observed since 2001, although the levels of attention measured in the 2023 poll are lower than usual for postgraduates and young adults and higher for senior citizens. Postgraduates typically pay the closest attention to politics, with an average of 51% doing so since 2001.

An Alarming Survey Finding

Recent posts have discussed the Hamas terror attack on Israel

In a Harvard-Harris poll, a slight majority of registered voters aged 18-24 aged 18-24 think that Palestinian grievances can justify the Hamas massacre.

Young Voters

Michael Baharaeen at The Liberal Patriot:

Another front on which these cultural shifts occur is age—and this factor has offered a clear advantage to one of the two parties in recent years. To wit: the youth vote remains stubbornly Democratic at the moment. While it has historically been common for people to grow more conservative as they age, this just doesn’t appear to be happening with millennials.

The Financial Times’s John Burn-Murdoch brilliantly documented how compared to the previous three generations—all of whom voted more Republican the further they got into life—millennials have been trending in the opposite direction so far...

This was especially visible in the 2022 midterms, when Gen Z and millennial voters were the lone generation to vote more Democratic in the national U.S. House vote relative to the 2020 election. Moreover, according to the General Social Survey, young people have voted more Democratic in the last four presidential elections—compared to both other age brackets and their own cohort’s past performance—than at any other time in the past half century.

Among the theories for why younger voters are staying liberal into adulthood is that these voters have also adopted other traits that differ from previous generations—traits that have made them more predisposed to voting Democratic. For example, younger Americans are a less religious cohort. Many are getting married later in life and also forgoing having children. Young people are also growing up in a much more tolerant and diverse society than many of their parents did.

Additionally, there is some evidence that the political events that happened during their formative years—the War on Terror, the 2008 financial crisis, the rise of Donald Trump, increased gun violence, climate change—likely left an imprint on them that will not soon be shaken. Political scientists affiliated with the Democratic data firm Catalist have used sophisticated statistical modeling to track differences by age group over time. 

Why Are Young People Leaving Religion

Many posts have discussed the role of religion in American life.   

Daniel Cox, at The Survey Center on American Life:

The question remains: what is the reason so many young people are leaving religion? There’s no single answer, but the most compelling explanation is that changes in American family life precipitated this national decline. American families have changed dramatically over the past few decades and many churches have been slow to respond. Americans raised in blended families, interfaith families or single-parent families are far less likely to have participated in religion growing up. And these types of family arrangements have become far more common today than they once were. The family explanation is compelling for a few reasons: 

1. Young people today are leaving much earlier than those of previous generations. Seventy percent of young adults who have disaffiliated shed their formative religious identities during their teen years.
2. The Americans most likely to “leave” religion are those with the weakest formative attachments. Compared to previous generations, Generation Z reports having a less robust religious experience during their childhood.
3. Most Americans who disaffiliate say they “drifted away” from religion rather than experiencing a singular negative or traumatic event that pushed them out. To put it another way, they quiet quit.
4. A wealth of research has shown that religious socialization in the family is a key component of the transmission of religious values, identity, and beliefs across generations.

Military Recruitment

 Ben Kesling at WSJ:

The children of military families make up the majority of new recruits in the U.S. military. That pipeline is now under threat, which is bad news for the Pentagon’s already acute recruitment problems, as well as America’s military readiness.

“Influencers are not telling them to go into the military,” said Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in an interview. “Moms and dads, uncles, coaches and pastors don’t see it as a good choice.”

After the patriotic boost to recruiting that followed 9/11, the U.S. military has endured 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan with no decisive victories, scandals over shoddy military housing and healthcare, poor pay for lower ranks that forces many military families to turn to food stamps, and rising rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide.
...

Only 9% of young people ages 16-21 said last year they would consider military service, down from 13% before the pandemic, according to Pentagon data.

...

The lowest-ranking troops make less than $2,000 a month, although pay is bolstered by benefits including healthcare, food and housing, leaving them few out-of-pocket expenses.

Families or those who live off base can find expenses outstrip income. More than 20,000 active-duty troops are on SNAP benefits, otherwise known as food stamps, according to federal data.

National Pride 2023

 Megan Brenan at Gallup::

At 39%, the share of U.S. adults who are “extremely proud” to be American is essentially unchanged from last year’s 38% record low. The combined 67% of Americans who are now extremely or “very proud” (28%) also aligns with the historically subdued 65% reading one year ago.

Another 22% of U.S. adults currently say they are “moderately proud,” while 7% are “only a little” and 4% “not at all.”

...
Party identification remains the greatest demographic differentiator in expressions of national pride, and Republicans have been consistently more likely than Democrats and independents to express pride in being American throughout the trend. That gap has been particularly pronounced since 2018, with more than twice as many Republicans as Democrats saying they are extremely proud. Republicans are also nearly twice as likely as independents to express the highest degree of pride.

The latest findings, from a June 1-22 Gallup poll, show 60% of Republicans and 29% of Democrats expressing extreme pride in being American. Both figures are statistically similar to last year’s readings. Independents’ current 33% extreme pride is also essentially unchanged, but it is their lowest on record by one percentage point.

...

In addition to party identification, age appears to significantly affect Americans’ national pride. Whereas 50% of U.S. adults aged 55 and older say they are extremely proud to be American, 40% of those aged 35 to 54 and 18% of 18- to 34-year-olds say the same.

Aggregated data from 2020 to 2023 provide a sufficient sample for analysis and show that younger adults in all party groups are significantly less proud than older adults of the same political persuasion.

Attention and Credulity

 Natalie Jackson at National Journal:

At best, only one third of Americans pay close attention to politics. In a recent Marquette Law School poll, just 36 percent of respondents said they follow politics most of the time. Using different wording, a Grinnell College-Selzer poll from March found that 28 percent of Americans say they pay a lot of attention to political news.

...

When it comes to paying attention to presidential campaigns, there is even more reason to think we dramatically overestimate how invested people are. Pew Research has asked respondents how much thought they have given to the candidates running for president in the lead-up to the last several presidential elections. In the summer of 2019, barely a quarter had given the candidates much thought. The figures were similar in mid-2015. (Pew has not yet asked the question for the 2024 cycle.)

The poll also found that older people are more likely to say that they follow politics "most of the time" 

• 18-29  36%
• 30-44  43%
• 45-59  63%
• 60+    74%

And so they tend to have more contextual knowledge, which helps them sort fake headlines from true ones.

 Sawdah Bhaimiya at Business Insider:

Boomers have always taken the flack for falling for fake news stories, but a survey has found it's younger generations that are more susceptible to online misinformation.

The survey of 1,516 US adults, published Thursday, was conducted by polling organization YouGov in April 2023. It examined how likely people were to be fooled by fake headlines. The survey is based on a framework called The Misinformation Susceptibility Test, developed by University of Cambridge psychologists.

The 2-minute test, now available to the public, required participants to look at 20 headlines and determine which were fake and real. It found that, on average, 65% of those surveyed were able to correctly classify them.

Surprisingly, the survey found that younger respondents were not as adept at spotting the difference between real and fake headlines as their older counterparts who have often been memed for their online naivete.

Opinion About World Leaders: Knowledge and Polarization

Jacob Poushter  and Moira Fagan at Pew:

Americans’ awareness of foreign leaders varies greatly by age. Adults under 30 are much less likely than those ages 65 and older to be familiar with every leader included in the Center’s new survey – with the exception of Putin, who is known to the vast majority of the public.

For example, nearly six-in-ten Americans ages 18 to 29 say they have never heard of Modi, compared with 28% of those 65 and older. Large age differences also appear for Scholz, Netanyahu and Macron.

There are also consistent gaps in awareness by other demographic factors. Men, for instance, are more likely than women to offer an opinion on various world leaders and less likely to say they have never heard of them. The same is true of more educated Americans relative to those with less formal education. This tracks with past Center research on specific international knowledge among Americans.

Gen Z

Carl Smith at Governing:

In Brief:

• Gen Z and millennial voters are on their way to becoming the majority of the voting population.
• In 2026, Gen Z will become the first majority nonwhite generation.
• Some think these trends could benefit Democrats, but researchers find that the life challenges young voters face make them care more about policy than party.

...

A survey published in February by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution found that more than 5 in 10 Republicans believe the U.S. should be “a strictly Christian" nation. Nearly as many Gen Zers and millennials say that they have no religious affiliation at all.

Younger voters are the issue.

It comes from years of radical indoctrination - on campus, in school, with social media, & throughout culture. We have to counter it or conservatives will never win battleground states again. @yaf pic.twitter.com/eG0pt3w8hk

— Scott Walker (@ScottWalker) April 6, 2023

Age and Congress

Carrie Blazina and Drew DeSilver at Pew:

The U.S. House of Representatives is getting younger – at least a bit – while the Senate’s median age continues to rise, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the newly installed 118th Congress.

The median age of voting House lawmakers is 57.9 years, down from 58.9 in the 117th Congress (2021-22), 58.0 in the 116th (2019-20) and 58.4 in the 115th (2017-18). The new Senate’s median age, on the other hand, is 65.3 years, up from 64.8 in the 117th Congress, 63.6 in the 116th and 62.4 in the 115th.

Few Young Adults Aspire to Careers in Public Service

Many posts have discussed public administration and public service.

On January 11-18, 2023, Generation Lab and Axios surveyed 824  young people, 18-29 years old, about career aspirations and priorities. 

• Small, medium, and large businesses were roughly equally desired places to work (28%, 27%, and 31% respectively)
• Nearly half of youth prioritize personal fulfillment and happiness, while only 8% prioritize societal impact
• Just 14% of young people want to spend most of their career in government and non-profit sector.

Unmarried Voters

 Karlyn Bowman, Ruy Teixeira, and Nate Moore at AEI:

Understanding the unmarried share of the electorate will be increasingly important in coming years. Married voters are still a significantly larger share of the electorate than unmarried ones. But young people are marrying later, if at all. In 2021, according to General Social Survey data, only 15 percent of 18–29-year-old women were married, half of what it was in 2000. The young today are more ethnically diverse, less conventionally religious, and more Democratic or independent than previous generations.

Two trends confirm the liberalism of young women today. An Astin study of entering college freshmen found that in 2016, before the Me Too movement exploded, 41 percent of the women self-identified as liberal or far left, but only 28.9 percent of the young men did. Between 1966, when this survey began, and 1980, men were more liberal. The gap shrank during the Reagan administration, and since the late 1980s, women have been more liberal/left than men in their first year of college. Our AEI colleague Dan Cox showed a similar pattern using Gallup data from 1998 through 2021, with 44 percent of young women describing themselves as liberal in 2021 compared to 25 percent of young men. Additionally, as the August American Perspectives Survey shows, the Dobbs decision appears to be a significant generational moment for young women, who saw the decision as more ominous than their male counterparts. If young women carry these attitudes with them as they age, Democrats will reap the rewards.

Family Dinner and Inequality

Many posts have discussed economic and educational inequality. The effects of inequality reach many corners of American life.

Daniel A. Cox at the Survey Center on American Life:

The family dinner was once a ubiquitous feature of American life, an experience shared across cultural, religious, and class lines, but it has disappeared in many households. Far fewer Americans report having regular meals with their family during their formative years. Baby Boomers were far more likely to have grown up having meals with their families than Millennials and Gen Zers. Only 38 percent of Gen Zers who are now adults report that their family ate together regularly growing up.

The disappearance of family dinner is not simply a function of generational changes in values and priorities. Increasingly, family dinners reflect the growing class divide in American society. In Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, Robert Putnam documents how the class divide in family dinners emerged during the 1990s and has expanded since. Today, college educated Americans are far more likely than those without a college education to have been raised in homes where family dinners were the norm. This wasn’t always the case.

Older Americans, regardless of educational background, report having eaten dinner as a family regularly during childhood. Nearly three-quarters (74 percent) of Americans age 50 or older without any college education report that they had family meals every day during childhood, roughly as many (79 percent) Americans that age with a post-graduate education who say the same.

For younger Americans, the story is entirely different. Among Americans under the age of 50, education now strongly predicts whether one had regular family meals growing up. Only 38 percent of younger Americans without a college education were raised in homes that shared meals every day. In contrast, more than six in ten (61 percent) younger Americans with a post-graduate education say their family ate together regularly.

Trusting MSM and Social Media Sites

Many posts have discussed social media sites and their political impact. 

Polarization and the Environment

 Megan Brenan at Gallup:

Party is a greater differentiator than age in Americans' views about the environment, as the gaps on multiple measures between young and older Republicans are smaller than the gaps between every age group of Republicans and their Democratic counterparts. Still, unlike the homogeneity of Democrats when it comes to concerns about the environment, young Republicans worry more and are more likely than older members of their party to believe that the effects of climate change have begun.

Independents are similarly divided by age in their worry about the environment, though their degree of concern is higher than Republicans'. Yet, majorities of independents across age groups believe global warming is already having an effect.

Republicans aged 18 to 34 are significantly more worried than older Republicans about the quality of the environment. https://t.co/hqFLROA4Uk pic.twitter.com/h8YACMiCnM

— GallupNews (@GallupNews) July 25, 2022

 

Fathers

At AEI, W. Bradford Wilcox and colleagues write:

The decline of marriage and the rise of fatherlessness in America remain at the center of some of the biggest problems facing the nation: crime and violence, school failure, deaths of despair, and children in poverty.

The predicament of the American male is of particular importance here. The percentage of boys living apart from their biological father has almost doubled since 1960—from about 17% to 32% today; now, an estimated 12 million boys are growing up in families without their biological father.1 Specifically, approximately 62.5% of boys under 18 are living in an intact-biological family, 1.7% are living in a step-family with their biological father and step- or adoptive mother, 4.2% are living with their single, biological father, and 31.5% are living in a home without their biological father.2

Lacking the day-to-day involvement, guidance, and positive example of their father in the home, and the financial advantages associated with having him in the household, these boys are more likely to act up, lash out, flounder in school, and fail at work as they move into adolescence and adulthood. Even though not all fathers play a positive role in their children’s lives, on average, boys benefit from having a present and involved father.

 1. Numbers are calculated based on the 2019 American Community Survey, and Lydia R. Anderson, Paul F. Hemez, and Rose M. Kreider, “Living Arrangements of Children: 2019,” Current Population Reports, P70-174, U.S. Census Bureau, Washington, DC, 2021.

2. Ibid.

Guns: Leading Cause of Death among Children and Adolescents

Jason E. Goldstick, Ph.D. Rebecca M. Cunningham, M.D.  Patrick M. Carter, M.D at The New England Journal of Medicine:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently released updated official mortality data that showed 45,222 firearm-related deaths in the United States in 2020 — a new peak.1 Although previous analyses have shown increases in firearm-related mortality in recent years (2015 to 2019), as compared with the relatively stable rates from earlier years (1999 to 2014),2,3 these new data show a sharp 13.5% increase in the crude rate of firearm-related death from 2019 to 2020.1 This change was driven largely by firearm homicides, which saw a 33.4% increase in the crude rate from 2019 to 2020, whereas the crude rate of firearm suicides increased by 1.1%.1 Given that firearm homicides disproportionately affect younger people in the United States,3 these data call for an update to the findings of Cunningham et al. regarding the leading causes of death among U.S. children and adolescents.

 The previous analysis, which examined data through 2016, showed that firearm-related injuries were second only to motor vehicle crashes (both traffic-related and nontraffic-related) as the leading cause of death among children and adolescents, defined as persons 1 to 19 years of age.4 Since 2016, that gap has narrowed, and in 2020, firearm-related injuries became the leading cause of death in that age group (Figure 1). From 2019 to 2020, the relative increase in the rate of firearm-related deaths of all types (suicide, homicide, unintentional, and undetermined) among children and adolescents was 29.5% — more than twice as high as the relative increase in the general population. The increase was seen across most demographic characteristics and types of firearm-related death (Fig. S1 in the Supplementary Appendix, available with the full text of this letter at NEJM.org).

In addition, drug overdose and poisoning increased by 83.6% from 2019 to 2020 among children and adolescents, becoming the third leading cause of death in that age group. This change is largely explained by the 110.6% increase in unintentional poisonings from 2019 to 2020. The rates for other leading causes of death have remained relatively stable since the previous analysis, which suggests that changes in mortality trends among children and adolescents during the early Covid-19 pandemic were specific to firearm-related injuries and drug poisoning; Covid-19 itself resulted in 0.2 deaths per 100,000 children and adolescents in 2020.1

Although the new data are consistent with other evidence that firearm violence has increased during the Covid-19 pandemic,5 the reasons for the increase are unclear, and it cannot be assumed that firearm-related mortality will later revert to prepandemic levels. Regardless, the increasing firearm-related mortality reflects a longer-term trend and shows that we continue to fail to protect our youth from a preventable cause of death. Generational investments are being made in the prevention of firearm violence, including new funding opportunities from the CDC and the National Institutes of Health, and funding for the prevention of community violence has been proposed in federal infrastructure legislation. This funding momentum must be maintained.

Leading Causes of Death among Children and Adolescents in the United States, 1999 through 2020.



.

Generations, Cold War Memories, and Russia

Philip Bump at WP:

I guess we're far enough along with this newsletter that I can make a confession: I am a member of Generation X.... We were the youngest Americans to experience the Cold War firsthand. Again, not really; I at no time flew a U-2 plane over Kamchatka or anything. But when we played good guy/bad guy games, the bad guys were Russians and not terrorists.

And now we come to a chart. This is via the Economist, which conducts regular, detailed polling with YouGov. (An aside: It's really great polling with lots of questions and trends over time. Go look.)

How to read this chart? Fairly simple. I wanted to balance sympathy for Ukraine on one side with sympathy for Russia on the other, but the “neither”s made that slightly more complicated. So I made “neither” the middle point, preserving (I hope!) the sense of balance.

You should perceive, then, that sympathy for Ukraine is far higher with older Americans than younger ones. Younger Americans still sympathize with Ukraine on net, but it's far more lopsided as you get older.

Bringing me to my thesis. Part of reading a chart, of course, is understanding the implications of the chart. So: This is a graph of familiarity with the Cold War.

I can't prove that empirically here, but the dates line up. If you are 29 or younger, you were born in 1993 or later, meaning after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. If you are aged 30 to 44, you were probably born sometime between 1978 and 1992, meaning that you probably no more than a preteen when that collapse occurred. Perhaps you similarly grew up with Russians as America's default enemy, but not in the same way.

Gen Z and the Future of Faith

At the Survey Center on American Life, Daniel A. Cox has a report titled  "Generation Z and the future of faith in America,"

Key Points

Compared with previous generations, Gen Zers report being much less involved in regular religious activities during their childhood. Formative religious experiences that were once common, such as saying grace or attending Sunday school, have become more of the exception than the norm.

In a change from the past, most Americans raised without religion do not find it later in life. Today, nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of Americans who report having no childhood religious affiliation say they still are unaffiliated as adults, rivaling that of established religious traditions.

Religious disaffiliation can strain family relationships and may lead to feelings of loneliness and distrust, especially for those who have left more conservative religious traditions, such as evangelical Protestantism.

Read the PDF.

The story of religious change in America, especially religious disaffiliation, is often cast as the result of independent decisions made by a rising generation living by a different set of values.But new evidence paints a much more complicated picture than the traditional narrative of generationally driven disaffiliation. Young adults today have had entirely different religious and social experiences than previous generations did. The parents of millennials and Generation Z did less to encourage regular participation in formal worship services and model religious behaviors in their children than had previous generations. Many childhood religious activities that were once common, such as saying grace, have become more of the exception than the norm.

We have long known the importance of formative religious experiences in setting the trajectory of faith commitments throughout life. For as long as we have been able to measure religious commitments, childhood religious experiences have strongly predicted adult religiosity. They still do. If someone had robust religious experiences growing up, they are likely to maintain those beliefs and practices into adulthood. Without robust religious experiences to draw on, Americans feel less connected to the traditions and beliefs of their parents’ faith.

There is little evidence to suggest that Americans who have disaffiliated will ever return. First, the age at which Americans choose to give up their families’ religion—most well before they turn 18—suggests that they have not established a deeply rooted commitment to a set of religious beliefs and practices. Disaffiliated Americans express significant skepticism about the societal benefits of religion, even more than those who have never identified with a religious tradition. They also strongly disagree with the majority of religious Americans, who believe in the importance of raising children in a religious faith. Moreover, having children does not appear to affect religious involvement. Unaffiliated parents are not any more likely to be religiously active than those without children, and most are unconvinced that religion serves as an important source of moral instruction.

Religious participation has typically been tightly connected to the timeline of important life events, such as getting married and having children. These events and experiences can serve as crucial opportunities for those who have left their childhood faith to reconnect to a religious community. But declining confidence in organized religion and a growing trend of secular relationships and marriages may make these seminal moments less likely to encourage Americans to return.

These changes have considerable personal and societal consequences. Individually, Americans who report leaving their formative religion report more significant personal hardship than those who were raised—and remain—religious. This is particularly true for Americans who disaffiliate from more conservative religious traditions; 39 percent of Americans raised evangelical Protestant but who no longer identify with the religion say they feel lonely or isolated from the people around them most or all the time. In contrast, only 23 percent of former Catholics say the same.

The decline of religion has implications for American civic and social life as well. Religious Americans are generally more socially and civically active. However, the frequency of religious participation—not one’s religious identity—appears to be the most important factor in determining the level of engagement in other social and civic activities. Americans who regularly attend services are far more engaged in community life than are those who seldom or never attend religious services.

And although higher education has been shown to be strongly associated with an increased propensity toward joining social groups and civic associations, religion still appears to play a significant function. There is evidence that education level and religious involvement both augment participation in community life. College-educated Americans who are religious tend to exhibit the highest levels of civic engagement.