Analyzing a recent survey of attitudes toward the Jewish state within the U.S., Samuel J. Abrams and David L. Bernstein note two major trends: first, that American sympathy for Israel remains very high and, secondly, that the younger the respondent, the more likely he or she is to be indifferent or hostile to Israel. Abrams and Bernstein also detect a larger pattern relating to the changing face of American politics, and in particular to what they term “political sorting.”
Democrats are more uniformly left-leaning and Republicans are more uniformly right-leaning than they were decades ago. . . . Consider that in the 1990s there were many pro-choice and pro-immigration Republicans and pro-gun Democrats. These variations have disappeared with issues all lining up on the left or right such that if you are a Democrat, you [feel obligated to believe in] and promote a particular agenda wholesale; thus one can predict an individual’s political positions based on partisanship alone.
Turning to the . . . survey itself, support for Israel has become part of the larger political sort of the American public. Today, vast majorities of Republicans support Israel, while Democratic backing is much lower. To be on the left these days means that one cannot support Israel and be ideologically pure; backing Israel is a conservative value and that line cannot be crossed in the ideologically sorted world of today. . . . Attitudes toward Israel are now part of the liberal or conservative packages that partisans must uniformly adopt, constituting a new norm in American politics evident in the data here.
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