So, in light of the Andrew Yang controversy blowing up the internet, I decided to look up polling on how many people support Israel and how many people support palestine.
According to Gallup, 58% of people support Israel, compared to 25% supporting Palestine. So most people actually support Israel over Palestine. Why am I pointing this out? Well, because I'm tired of seeing Yang being raked over hot coals over this. As someone who is relatively neutral on the conflict, and quite frankly doesn't care (it influences literally 1/1000th of my voting behavior, if that), I keep feeling like the response to Yang is overdone and seems overly obnoxious and virtue signally. And looking at polling, it is. Only a quarter are strongly in support of Palestine. To be fair, most of the right, and a good chunk of the mainstream democratic left support Israel, and support is more split within the democratic party where Yang is running, but still, most people seem to prefer Israel to Palestine overall, or have mixed and nuanced views like mine.
It seems to be mostly the far left encouraging this controversy, and in my opinion their obnoxious and self righteous behavior toward Yang alienates me more than Yang's comments. Yes, the left has a point, and Yang was very tone deaf with his own comments, but it's more the tone. Yang's comments seem to be fairly mainstream. Maybe they didn't capture the true nuance of the situation, but he had a fairly commonly accepted opinion in American politics. The left is a minority, and while I would argue they are more morally correct, their shrill approach to it, and basically trying to cancel Yang is very offputting. Really getting tired of the left ripping peoples' heads off over minor disagreements on issues. I mean, the way i look at it, UBI makes up around 25-30% of how I vote. Israel makes up 0.1%. You think I'm gonna drop Yang because I disagree with him over Israel? No. Healthcare maybe. Climate change maybe. Education maybe. Israel? No. Even more so in a mayoral race where foreign policy isn't even relevant.
There's just this segment of the left that hates Yang for not being a true leftie and passing all of the purity tests and whenever he says something wrong that alienates them, they try to smear him and show them he's not a "true leftist". Yeah, I get it, Yang is a pretty mediocre democrat without UBI. If he didn't support UBI he would basically be in roughly the same category for me as Joe Biden (very flawed centrist democrat). But given UBI really is such a big deal to me, I support him. And even then I feel like I have more in common with a moderate democrat on foreign policy than the left anyway. The left has all of these moral issues with the way we do foreign policy but their blind idealism would actually make us far worse off on the international stage. They would weaken our standing in the world and leave us open to attack, and leave the world a power vacuum that would be occupied by Russia and China. Pax Americana has its flaws but I believe its benefits outweigh its costs. I mean, I just want someone who is competent and doesn't get us involved with wars. I may not always agree with Biden or Obama on foreign policy, and do understand the moral issues the left has, but as long as we're not getting into another Iraq or Afghanistan or trying to get out of NATO or the UN, I can live with that. So, yeah.
No comments:
Post a Comment