• TokenBoomer@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    I’m afraid to ask, but I have to. If you extrapolate the data that is available to you, where does the general trend lead you? Riots? Civil War? Fascism?

    • WoahWoah@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      We can’t really extrapolate the data in that way for predictive models. I wish we could! The general consensus around the data set we currently have combining intergenerational data above youth cohorts indicates a higher probability for more authoritarian forms of government, and this seems to be a global trend.

      Youth cohorts are some of the most strongly correlated demographics that align with pro government stances. What that means is that while governments in the western hemisphere continue to exert more control over the social lives of the nations within which they hold sway, young people, for this data means younger than 35, tend to still feel that state governments should be in control and support the idea of state control.

      That’s generally normal, however there has been a big flip in young people that express anti-government stances, and that does tend to be overwhelmingly from political ideologies that we might typically think of as on the right.

      We have limited data for the past century, but most analysis done has shown that the general majority of anti-state positions held by youth in the western hemisphere were typically left-leaning after about 1918–to be sure, world wars tend to dramatically reorganize political thinking among youth.

      Nevertheless, anti-state youth sentiment generally decreased following major wars. That is not the case anymore, and that is actually a huge swing from even the 1990s to now. Most young people are extremely pro government and pro state. Historically we would call that reformist, so I would characterize the young “left” as reformist and the young “right” as radical, broadly speaking.

      In terms of riots and civil war, if you mean the United States or Canada, no… at least probably not how you’re thinking. The chance of civil disturbances continues to increase. But Civil War in North America won’t ever look like the history books. It will be asymmetric and non-continuous. If you’re waiting for the “beginning of the war,” there won’t be one.

      As we like to say, there will be no declaration of war. There will only be a recognition of when it ends.

        • WoahWoah@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Appreciate it. Data is always subject to change with more data, and we live in a time of dramatic shifting sentiment around political ideologies. A result, I think, of the climate crisis and the rise in social media since about 2013 or so. Obviously social media existed before that, but there is a pronounced shift between about 2013-2015 in the data sets for reasons that remain under discussion with our analysts.

            • WoahWoah@lemmy.world
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              9 months ago

              Indeed. And also after Facebook researchers posted their findings about manipulating both emotion and behavior of users with their feed in the 2014 Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

              Simpler time then, it would seem! Lol