Ignorant voters = authoritarianism?; What is antisemitism?

A NYT opinion (not behind paywall) by David French opines: 

It’s not often that a poll result causes me to do a double take. This month, however, a Pew Research Center survey grabbed my attention. As part of a comprehensive poll on the importance of religion in public life, Pew compared Americans’ knowledge of and support for Christian nationalism between September 2022 and February 2024 and found no meaningful change at all. The exact same percentage of Americans said they’d heard or read about Christian nationalism — 45 percent in 2022 and 45 percent in 2024. The exact same percentage of Americans said they’d never heard or read about Christian nationalism — 54 percent in both years.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized my surprise was misplaced. .... The Hidden Tribes of America project, which was put together by a group called More in Common. It surveyed 8,000 Americans to try to explore their attitudes and conflicts beyond the red-blue divide, and one of its central conclusions is critical to understanding the modern moment: Only a minority of Americans are truly active in political debates, and they’re exhausting and alienating the rest of the country.

One-third of Democrats post political content on social media; two-thirds do not. And the differences between the two groups were significant. Online Democrats were far more liberal, disproportionately white and far more likely to engage in activism, such as attending a protest or donating to a candidate. .... The highly polarized left and the highly polarized right shared characteristics. For example, the most polarized conservatives are also disproportionately white and are almost twice as likely to list politics as a hobby.

One friend told me, “I got sick of the constant rage.” So he deleted his social media accounts, turned his cable television from Fox News to ESPN and never looked back. “My blood pressure is down,” he said, “and I’m a better husband and father.” Good for him, I thought, but bad for us. Another decent man has disengaged. Another member of the jury has left the courtroom.

What is one to make of this? People disengage because of the ferocious emotional and mendacious games that Faux News and other authoritarian radical right (ARR) sources routinely employ to divide, deceive, distract, polarize and otherwise de-rationalize people. It drives some people away. That is one of the key things what the elites that drive America’s ARR wealth and power movement want, along with bad things like fomenting irrational deceit, distrust and polarization.

Q: Does this opinion strike you as unreasonably bothsidesism (false balancing) by roughly equating the left and the right, or is it just me who sees it that way? 

“Counting” ballots in Russia

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In view of endless, bitter controversy, it seemed reasonable to think that antisemitism is an essentially contested concept. Apparently some others have come to the same conclusion. The NYT writes:

Definitions of the term are highly contested, so a group monitoring antisemitism on Columbia University’s campus has avoided picking sides. It is still facing criticism.

A Columbia University task force set up to combat antisemitism on campus in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks is attempting to avoid one of the most contentious issues in university debates over the war: Its members have refused to settle on what the definition of “antisemitism” is.

Competing factions on campus and beyond are pushing for two different definitions. The first, favored by the U.S. State Department and many supporters of Israel, says “targeting of the state of Israel” could be antisemitic, a definition that could label much of the pro-Palestinian activism sweeping campus as antisemitic.

The second is narrower. It distinguishes between anti-Zionism and antisemitism and could lead to criticism that the school is not taking antisemitism seriously enough.

The debate over the definitions has become a lightning rod for the Columbia task force and for other universities around the country. The task force is charged with “understanding how antisemitism manifests on campus” and improving the climate for Jewish faculty and students. But the refusal to pick a definition has also been met with harsh criticism on both sides.

“If you don’t diagnose the problem, you don’t have to deal with it,” said Shai Davidai, a Columbia professor who is Israeli and favors the more sweeping definition. He added, “Saying we don’t want to define it so we don’t have a problem, that’s copping out.”

Pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist faculty and students, quite a few of whom are Jewish, fear that without a definition, the antisemitism task force could be too sweeping in the speech and activity it seeks to regulate.

My intuition is that distinguishing between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is better than not distinguishing, but even that alone might not be sufficient for a definition. But since I am too ignorant of too much related to Israel and Palestine, leaving the definition up to experts seems to be reasonable. Let them fight it out.

Good grief, what a hopeless mess.