Fast-talking national-treasure math vlogger Vi Hart (previously) takes a statistical look at the polling data from the 2016 presidential election and concludes that the most significant divide in the country is “old vs young,” which drives things like rural/urban (because young people leave failing rural areas for cities) and even racial divides.
America has changed. Younger voters are multicultural, we have a diverse range of identity, we’re adaptable, we’ve had 4 different jobs in multiple industries, we don’t expect job security or abundant natural resources or to have the world our parents had. We adapt, and we care for each other, not just in the USA but around the world, because we are connected, we are informed, we have the world at our fingertips. We worry about how we’re going to deal with the environmental issues that have been handed to us, how we’re going to end the wars that have been handed to us. Everyone wants to leave a better world for their children and it would be natural for older folks to be a little resentful that we find so many flaws with the world they’re handing to us, but this isn’t the story of two Americas, it’s a story of new Americas, about a country that has improved and changed many times over. There’s no sides to fight and win. This is a gap you bridge by being kind to each other, by asking older America not to reject America’s youth and younger America to respect our history and our elders and make sure they are not forgotten in a world of new technology. There’s a difference between the young angry neo-nazi Trump supporters that have been so emboldened by him, so encouraged by his administration, and the voters who are older and disconnected and who I think actually make up his base.
Dark forces in the white house would divide us, Steve Bannon is pretending Trump’s win was about a culture war between nationalists and liberals, pc culture and working-class middle America, rather than a generational difference. The same think pieces the media was writing about millennials years ago are now being rewritten as pieces about liberals, but we’re still the same people and we’re not going away. Legacy media is obsessed with the idea of identity politics while we’re already over it, we’re just trying to understand and respect each other in a changed world. And maybe with all these new changes we did forget to include older people’s struggles. Maybe we fell into the fallacy of valuing the lives of hypothetical future people more than the lives of those already here in our communities.
Older voters didn’t grow up with the idea of climate change, it’s not about liberals being smart and Republicans being science deniers, the numbers tell me it’s about age. Statistics tell us Trump voters are uneducated but remember education levels have increased with time and that’s a good thing, and also maybe we have some work to do in bringing education innovation to people who aren’t in school, and don’t come into contact much with more recently educated people.
A Mathematician’s Perspective on the Divide [Vi Hart]