How boycotts can backfire
Georgians who are being punished for voting Republican in 2018 - even though they voted Democrat in 2020.
If you’ve been following the controversy over Georgia’s new laws governing voting, you likely fall into one of three camps:
it’s absolutely no big deal, and the fact that Republicans just happen to be ramming it through after the Orange God-King declared his election loss tainted by fraud is pure coincidence.
it’s Jim Crow 2.0 and the state of Georgia and every company headquartered there should be boycotted until the law is repealed and maybe we need another Sherman to burn Atlanta to the ground again.
the law is very questionable, but not so bad that a boycott is justified.
I am firmly in the third camp, which feels like a very lonely place these days. The Washington Post has a pretty balanced summary of what the law does and doesn’t do. Many of the most egregious provisions didn’t make it into the final bill, and it actually leaves Georgia with more lenient voting restrictions than some deep-blue states. But the shadows of Trump’s Big Lie about the election, and Georgia’s history of suppressing African-American votes, hang over the whole thing.
Now Major League Baseball has moved its All-Star Game from Atlanta, and major companies like Delta Airlines and Coca-Cola find themselves caught in the middle of boycott campaigns from both sides for either not speaking out loudly enough, or speaking out against the law too loudly.
(Note: Nikita Mazepin will become Formula One World Drivers’ Champion before Trump gives up his beloved Diet Coke.)
The thing is, I might be persuaded that a boycott campaign is justified had the 2020 election in Georgia turned out differently. As this debate plays out over social media, I’m seeing many people say that the people of Georgia elected this Republican governor and legislature, and should be forced to face the consequences.
It is true that Georgians narrowly went for the GOP in 2018. And they narrowly went the other way in 2020.
Both parties have their hardcore partisans, but in a purple state like Georgia, there is a large population of swing voters who can be persuaded to vote one way or the other. That’s how you get the focus group results Sarah Longwell revealed on a recent Bulwark podcast, with the participants split about equally between Trump and Biden voters, but all of whom supported Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in the Senate race and QAnon Queen Marjorie Taylor Greene as their Congresswoman.
Actual footage of JVL after hearing the results:
The only thing the GOP has going for it these days is the ongoing culture war, and Democrats boycotting Georgia - over the objections of Stacey Abrams and other Democrats in that state - have given Republicans exactly what they wanted. In 2022 they can go to Georgia voters who switched to the Democrats last time around, and ask them how their new party is treating them.
Nothing would make me support the Trumpublicans these days. But if I were a swing voter in Georgia, would I be a little ticked off by what the Dems are doing to my state? Absolutely.
The conventional wisdom has it that education is a vaccine against prejudice. The more people learn about the world, the more they learn that harmful stereotypes about other religious and ethnic groups simply aren’t true.
That’s what we’d like to think, anyway. A new study discussed in Tablet suggests that, when it comes to the persistent scourge of antisemitism, the exact opposite may be true:
To test this hypothesis, we developed a new survey measure based on what the human rights activist and former Soviet refusenik Natan Sharansky identifies as a defining feature of anti-Semitism: the double standard. We drafted two versions of the same question, one asking respondents to apply a principle to a Jewish example, and another to apply the same principle to a non-Jewish example. Subjects were randomly assigned to see one version or another so that no respondent would see both versions of the question. Since no one would see both versions of the question, sophisticated respondents would have no way of knowing that we were measuring their sentiment toward Jews, and no cue to game their answers.
When we administered these double-standard measures in a nationally representative survey of over 1,800 people, our results differed widely from the conventional view about the relationship between education and anti-Semitism. In fact, we found that more highly educated people were more likely to apply principles more harshly to Jewish examples. By preventing subjects from knowing that they were being asked about their feelings toward Jews, we discovered that more-highly educated people in the United States tend to have greater antipathy toward Jews than less-educated people do.
Contrary to previous claims, education appears to provide no protection against anti-Semitism, and may in fact serve to license it—in part by providing people with more sophisticated and socially acceptable ways to couch it.
[…]
We found that respondents with higher education levels are markedly more likely than those with lower education levels to apply a double standard unfavorable toward Jews. Across the four items in which the Jewish and non-Jewish versions of questions seemed the most similar, and which the overall sample answered roughly in the same way, subjects with college degrees were 5 percentage points more likely to apply a principle harshly to Jews than to non-Jews. Among those with advanced degrees, subjects were 15 percentage points more unfavorable toward Jewish than non-Jewish examples.
Looking at these four items separately, we observe respondents with higher education levels answer more unfavorably toward Jews for three questions and no difference for one. On the question of regulating the content of private schools, people with higher education levels favor more government regulation, but do not appear to apply that principle very differently if the illustrating example is an Orthodox Jewish or Montessori school.
When asked whether “attachment to another country creates a conflict of interest,” respondents with a four-year degree and those with advanced degrees were respectively 7 and 13 percentage points more likely to express this concern when the attachment in question was to Israel rather than Mexico. People with advanced degrees were 12 percentage points more likely to support the military in prohibiting a Jewish yarmulke than in prohibiting a Sikh turban as part of the uniform. Those with four-year college degrees answer this question the same whether the example is Jewish or Sikh.
The overall sample was fairly concerned about public gatherings during the pandemic, with 61% supporting the prohibition of public gatherings, whether for an Orthodox Jewish funeral or for BLM protests. Those with a four-year degree were 11 percentage points more likely to oppose these public gatherings for Jewish funerals than for BLM protests. People with advanced degrees were 36 percentage points more likely to want Orthodox Jewish funerals prohibited than BLM protests.
It’s kind of comforting, in a way, to imagine that antisemitism is more prevalent on the margins of society than among the elites. In practice, there’s no shortage of university professors teaching antisimetic hatred - sometimes unconvincingly disguised as “anti-Zionism,” “social justice” or “anti-imperialism” - in their classrooms and on their social media accounts. And maybe we’re starting to see the results.
Seeing this one making the rounds on Facebook:
“It was actually Republicans who invented this so-called ‘cancel culture.’”
“Okay, but how does that justify me losing my job because of tweets I posted when I was in high school?”
“It’s not my job to educate you.”