I just thought I'd start with a cute animal video. Will we return to that cute, aquatic fowl? Perhaps. (My goal by the end of this post is a "Mallard Fillmore" joke...)
Some political attitudes are more difficult than others to measure. Social science time! If we conduct a survey and ask people about their opinions on abortion, we will get a diverse array of positions. Abortion is a divisive issue about which people hold widely divergent opinions. However, people have no reason to lie about their abortion opinions.
On the other hand, I spent this past week talking about voter turnout in my Intro American Politics course. Ask people whether or not they voted, and... they lie. Liars! Filthy liars! Why? There is what we call a "socially desirable response" to the question, "did you vote?" People don't like to admit when they didn't vote, so survey questions that ask people whether or not they voted will overestimate turnout. LIARS!!! I hate liars!
Lots of attitudes are difficult to measure because they provoke socially desirable responses when we ask about them. Questions attempting to measure racial attitudes do that. You can't just ask people, "so, um, are you, like, a racist?" I suppose you can, but you can't trust that responses will tell you much. Donald Trump's favorite refrain, aside from "NO COLLUSION!" is to claim, "I am the least racist person you'll ever meet." I suppose if you limit your social interactions to klan meetings, that might be true, but I wouldn't recommend doing that.
Since we can't do that, in order to measure racial attitudes, what we usually do in surveys is to ask questions that indirectly assess attitudes about race. In the American National Election Studies survey, we ask a battery of questions about things like whether or not respondents believe that slavery still has a legacy today, whether or not African-Americans just need to "try harder," and other questions with varying degrees of subtlety to see if respondents will make statements that aren't exactly full-on klan, but are more socially acceptable ways to express attitudes on race that aren't exactly sympathetic to the history or current problems of racism. The idea is, the statements aren't necessarily, directly, full-on klan, but they are statements that a racist would make.
Quack, quack.
Waddle, waddle.
Oh, so cute!
Yeah, there are some things that might walk and talk like ducks that aren't actually ducks. You will make coding errors with this methodology. But, you'll get a lot right in terms of overall patterns.
Of course, we would be remiss to point out that some people do make blatantly racist statements. And some people do make blatantly anti-semitic statements. In the 2016 ANES survey, we asked the old "feeling thermometer" about jews. On the 0 to 100 scale, with a sample of 4271, 26 people (not percent, but people) put jews at 0, with a smattering of others at numbers near 0. Yeah, there are some people who admit that they just hate jews (not everyone, Mr. Lehrer). I suppose in some social circles, that's the socially desirable response, but I don't want to interact with those people. They probably smell bad...
Anyway, for the most part, people don't just come out and say they hate jews. There's that whole world history and repeated attempts at genocide thing. That doesn't mean the bigotry isn't there, though. When we measure attitudes about African-Americans, we measure it with questions like the ANES question assessing whether or not respondents believe that African-Americans just need to "try harder." Why that? The point of the question is to see if we can get people to admit that they think that racial disparities in America are there because they believe the racist stereotypes about African-Americans being lazy. It is a question aimed at the underlying stereotype, posed in such a way that the racists might feel like they can get away with agreeing without looking like racists. That's the point.
What about anti-semitic attitudes? The most common, insidious anti-semitic trope is that jews control the world in some conspiracy based on money. That's what it has been for a long, long time. However, because that one is so over-the-top, put in those terms, how can you code it, just ever-so-slightly, to get away with it?
Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer gave the world the most famous, pseudo-scholarly version of the trope. I won't link to it, because fuck those pseudo-scholarly bigots. Basically, take a screed that says, "the jews control the world, with their filthy, filthy money," do a global search-and-replace of "jews" with "Israel lobby," and call it a work of "scholarship," and you've got the shittiest book ever written on interest groups in American politics written by two jackasses too lazy to read anything on interest groups because that wasn't even their subfield. In other words, in addition to reading like an anti-semitic screed, it was lazy and incompetent.
But, it also followed the same pattern as how we assess attitudes towards African-Americans. We can't just ask people "do you think black people are lazy," and hope to get an honest answer. We have to twist our survey questions. Walt & Mearsheimer wrote a book that... let's put it this way. It's exactly the kind of book that David Duke loves, when he isn't burning books, and given the constraints in modern political dialog, it's about as far as you can go in expressing anti-semitic attitudes and still have plausible deniability, which is the whole point. Plausible deniability is vital for the expression of bigoted attitudes in modern dialog, and only the dumbest people around just go full-klan. That doesn't mean the only bigots are the ones who do go full-klan.
Quack, quack!
And this is our observational, social science question. What would an anti-semite say, constrained by modern political norms? Not just what Jerry Seinfeld's Uncle Leo would call an anti-semite, but a real one. They'd say exactly what Walt & Mearsheimer wrote.
Which is exactly what Ilhan Omar keeps saying, over, and over again. Just variations on "the jews and their filthy, filthy money."
Quack, quack!
Every attempt I have seen to defend Omar has been something about how there needs to be room to criticize Netanyahu.
Two words. First word: Bull. Second word: Shit. OK, that's supposed to be one word. Bullshit. Love that word. I even teach a course on it! I have formal approval by CWRU to say naughty words! Anyway, saying that either jewish lobbyists, or the Israel lobby controls US policy has nothing whatsoever to do with Netanyahu nor his policies. Bullshit, and anyone pulling this dodge needs to be called out on it, and that includes people like... Kamala Harris.
So here's the thing about Omar. Everything she says is exactly what you would expect from someone, constrained by modern political requirements, who believes conspiracy theories about jews controlling the world with money.
If it walks like that thing Chuck Berry imitated when he wasn't transporting underage girls across state lines… (Oh, have we forgotten about that again? Stop being shocked by famous musicians and their vileness. If I were still doing daily posts, I'd probably write more about musicians and stuff...)
So what's going on in the Democratic Party? One of the basic values of modern liberalism is multiculturalism, which creates some tensions when cultures come into conflict. That's happening now. The Democratic Party used to have African-Americans and segregationists in the party by refusing to address civil rights, thank you very much FDR, or... something. However, that happened by refusing to address the division. Right now, the Democratic Party takes multiculturalism as a value. Omar hates jews. I'm just gonna say it because I don't care. Her phony, forced apologies don't impress me, as phony, forced apologies never do. There are subcultures in the Democratic Party that take support of Palestinians to the point of embracing anti-semitic conspiracy theories, and for Omar, this is connected to other stuff. With a party that takes multiculturalism as a value, that becomes conceptually harder to manage than with the New Deal Coalition, which explains part of why the House vote was such a mess. Omar very much does not believe in multiculturalism. Bigots who fall back on conspiratorial tropes, by definition, cannot, so appealing to multiculturalism as a defense of Omar gets tangled. I demand that you tolerate my intolerance!
Then, let's be blunt about why some Democrats rushed to Omar's defense. It's easier for some Democrats to criticize Walt and Mearsheimer because they're white men. Omar is a muslim, black woman. That invokes another aspect of identity, turning the Democratic Party into knots of its own identity politics, even though the left just went through another thing about Farrakhan, and that dude really hates jews.
Anyway, that was a bit more rambling than I had intended, but what a bunch of stupidity, and in honor of stupidity, I will leave you with the ultimate stupid question: Are you tolerant of intolerance?
What a stupid question!
(I apologize for my failure to make a "Mallard Fillmore" joke happen)