More Secession: Not Your Grandfather's America
11/18/2018
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An overarching reason political dissolution seems likely is how starkly generational feelings about it are. Among Jews, for example, while just 6.8% of those aged fifty and older favor peaceful secession, 35.6% of those under fifty years old do. Those are the buckets I had to use to get statistical significant sample sizes, but the Jewish trend follows the general age trend all the way up and down the spectrum.

More than partisan affiliation, political orientation, educational attainment, income, race, sex, or geography, the best predictor for support is age. Boomers and the remaining Silents are strongly opposed, Xers less stridently so, millennials and Zs far more open to it. Support for secession strictly by age range:

 
Why? The short answer must be that not only is the US not working now, we've never seen it work and there are no reasons for us to believe that will change with the course we're currently on. As long as we've been cognizant of politics and current events, the story has been one of perpetual national decline and increasing disunity--with a brief reprieve for a year or two following 9/11--coupled with a continuous drop in trust in all the major institutions in society and also of social trust between individuals. Income stagnation, pointless and unwinnable wars, family breakdown, unaffordable housing and education, population replacement, and a ruling class that is at best annoyed by our existence.
 
Parenthetically, snorlax (commenting here) attributes the apparent age gap to the way the poll is worded, arguing that a lot of younger people don't know what the word "withdraw" means. It seems unlikely to me as I explained here. Building on that, support for it among those under the age of 40 with advanced degrees is a staggering 54.8%, with an actual majority supporting in absolute terms even with "don't know" responses counted. And that's a sample size of 3,323! Among those under 40 with less education, the corresponding figure is 42.7%. 
 
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