Zionism and Future America
In America, public support for Zionism has been weakening with each generation. This was already apparent by 2014. In 2023 the decline had become so pronounced that ADL leader Jonathan Greenblatt cited it as a major future problem.
It has multiple causes:
the Holocaust (and World War II generally) receding in time
4chan
the rise of 1st generation social media and then, after it turned censorious, the rise of 2nd generation (mostly uncensored) social media - Tiktok, Substack and X (Twitter)
the drift away from mainstream media which kept 99% of people “on the same page”
the progressive obsession with supporting “the underdog”
“Jews are White” + “Whites are bad” = “Israel is bad”
Israel’s behaviour
the Jewish lobby’s increasingly clumsy messaging
I won’t detail each of these - they are self-explanatory - but will touch on all of them.
The Holocaust was the armour that shielded Jews as a group, and especially Zionism, from criticism. It could always be invoked, no matter how tenuously or disingenuously. Everyone knew: it’s a slippery slope from noticing this or that to carting them all into the gas chamber. Everyone understood that it was the lowest point of Western civilisation, something in the past that we must avoid in the future and atone for - nigh constantly - in the present. However, Gen X were less strident about all of this than the Baby Boomers. The Millennials less so (I’ve never even seen Schindler’s List). The Zoomers, less again. As the Holocaust drifted into the temporal distance, its rhetorical power dwindled.
I think that simple, unfixable problem is the primary factor behind declining support for Zionism. It enables the secondary factors.
Among “normies”, opinions are not so much arrived-at as picked up, unthinkingly, “from the ether”. The ether used to be defined by the mainstream media but that is now in steep decline. The average ages of viewers of American mainstream TV are sobering: ABC (61), CBS (64), CNN (67), Fox (68), MSNBC (71). This decline is happening even with the online versions of these outlets:
These TV channels artificially kept the Holocaust prominent in people’s thinking despite it being fifty, sixty, seventy years in the past. As the mainstream media loses traction, so does the Holocaust. We are returning to the natural state of man: being concerned about one’s own country, culture, family and life prospects instead of something that happened to a foreign people in a foreign country eighty years ago.
With “legacy” media dethroned, social media becomes important. The ether must be defined somehow, after all. The controllers of legacy media were acutely aware of this and tried to colonise the online space, astroturfing gatekeepers like Breadtube, Jordan Peterson and Lex Fridman, and lobbying for everyone else to be deplatformed or deboosted. But Tiktok was never quite onboard with that censorship, neither was Substack, neither was Elon Musk. Old memes and greentexts from 4chan found new life. The ether was re-defined.
To be clear, I don’t think that most young Americans today are “anti-Semitic”. They just have a much more skeptical, ambivalent attitude towards Jewishness and Zionism than their grandparents had. And they are increasingly aware of concerns in their own lives, things that make it hard to care about what (to them) are mere abstractions, or “other people’s problems”. The idea that they should put such things ahead of their own concerns feels like an imposition.
