how woke are jews?
Are Liberals Crazy? part VII: ethnicity and wokism.
The finding that “conservatives are less mentally deviant” only holds true for whites. For non-whites, there is little difference between conservatives and moderates in terms of mental deviance. “Wokism as mental deviance” is a racially mediated phenomenon, not a purely ideological one.
There is a difference between “demographic Democrats,” who are mostly non-white, and “ideological leftists,” who are mostly white.1
While whites and Jews are a minority of Democrats, they make up a majority of self described “liberal Democrats,” and a super-majority (74.8%) of self-described DMI/ELD. Wokism is white. As of the 2024 election, wokism is almost as white as the Republican Party.
This is a strange result, since Republicans are supposedly “racist” against non-whites, while wokes are supposedly “anti-racist.” How can it be possible that Republicans and wokes have approximately the same racial composition, despite having supposedly opposite views on diversity, equity, and inclusion?
A very small percentage of Republicans are Jewish; less than 1% of Republicans overall identify as Jewish. Among wokes, the number is 7x higher:
“Woke” (diagnosed mentally ill extremely liberal Democrat, “DMI/ELD”) people are approximately 2% of the population. Woke people are 68% white, 7% Jewish, 9% black, 12% Hispanic, and 4% “other.” This “other” includes Asians, Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, and mixed-race individuals.
In contrast to the wokes are the demographic or identitarian Democrats. These Democrats “vote blue no matter who” as an expression of ethnocentrism, or because of their minority religious or sexual identity:
They have mixed race kids, so they vote Democrat.
They are black, so they vote Democrat.
They are gay, so they vote Democrat.
This is not to say that these groups cannot be ideological liberals, or have diagnosed mental illnesses, but that a larger percentage of these groups have ideologically dissonant opinions, whereas whites tend to be more ideological consistent in their liberalism.
Wokeness and Jewishness.
Emil Kirkegaard replied to my article on intelligence, and cited research that:
Ashkenazis have more frequent diagnoses of: 1) eating disorder (a high IQ diagnoses), 2) OCD, 3) anxiety, phobic and dissociative disorders, 4) psychogenic disorder.
Jews are only 2.4% of the American population, while “extreme liberals” are 5% of the population. What percent of Jews are “extreme liberals?” Since I don’t have direct data on this, I will make a number of inferences and assumptions to come up with a rough estimate. In the future, Jews should be directly surveyed to see how accurate these assumptions are. Some of my data on income is already 25 years old, so this is in need of an update. But let’s cast caution to the wind and see what we come up with.
First of all, let’s assume that whites and Jewish Democrats equally likely to identify as extreme liberals. This isn’t entirely accurate, because extreme liberals tend to be more intelligent than average, which suggests that Jews will be overrepresented among them, so I am underestimating here.
According to Pew, 15% of Democrat voters identify as “extremely liberal” out of a total of 47% of Democrats who identified as liberal.2 Let’s assume that approximately 1/3 of Democrats who identify as liberal will also identify as “extremely liberal;” this is a slight underestimation.
55% of white Democrats describe themselves as liberal, as opposed to 37% of Hispanic Democrats, and 29% of black Democrats. Let’s assume that liberal identification within Democrats is broadly correlated with education, SES, or IQ. This is based on the fact (see below charts) that white Democrats are more liberal than Hispanic and black Democrats; more educated Democrats are more liberal than less educated Democrats.
Jewish Americans had a median annual household income of $72,000 in 2000. I was surprised that I had to go all the way back to 2000 to find a direct answer to this question3 — most discussions of Jewish income by Pew refuse to provide medians.
In the year 2000, $45,904 was the the median income of non-Hispanic whites; $33,447 for Hispanics; and $30,439 for blacks. These income ratios closely reflect liberal identification ratios within the Democratic Party.
Assume that proportionately speaking, the wealth gaps between blacks, Hispanics, whites, and Jews have remained stagnant since 2000. This is another underestimate, because according to the federal reserve, racial wealth gaps have actually widened since 2000.
Assume a linear relationship between income and intensity of liberalism. A $3,008 difference between blacks and Hispanics in 2000 was followed by an 8% liberalism gap between blacks and Hispanics in 2019. A $12,457 difference between blacks and Hispanics in 2000 was followed by an 18% gap in liberalism between whites and Hispanics in 2019. The Jewish-white income gap was $26,096 in 2000. Assume that this would cause at least a 26% liberalism gap, if the trend holds linearly. This is also assuming that the white-Jewish income gap hasn’t narrowed since 2000.
If this is the case, and we assume a linear relationship between income and the liberalism of Democrats, then Jewish Democrats are 81% liberal. Since 1/3 of liberals identify as “extremely liberal,” then 27% of Jewish Democrats are extremely liberal, or woke.
After doing all this, I decided to check this estimate against Ryan Burge’s data on religion and gender identity.
My estimate via income as a determinant of “wokism” fits Ryan’s data very well, within 1% error. He found that 26% of self-described Jews “strongly believe that there are many genders,” making them even more “woke” than atheists.
The fact that Jews are overrepresented among wokes is a product of their intelligence, education, and income, which correlates with ideological coherence — it is not a result of the Talmud or a “blood curse” or a “group evolutionary strategy.”
I am not saying “wealth makes people more liberal,” as a “luxury belief.” There are very wealthy people who are conservatives. Instead, I am saying that, within self-described Democrats, wealth and education correlates with ideological consistency.
Poor Democrats are much more likely to identify as conservative or moderate, while people who are wealthy and Democrat are much more likely to identify as liberal. In other words, I am suggesting that:
Jews are the most ideologically consistent voting bloc in the country, and blacks have ideologically incoherent (tribal-nepotistic) political views.
The fact that Jews are so woke indicates that Jews are much lower in ethnocentric malevolence and antipathy (outgroup exclusion) than other Democratic-leaning groups, especially when compared with blacks. This coincides with higher levels of openness among Jews, which is inversely correlated with ethnocentrism.
There are roughly 7.5 million Jews in America. 71% of Jews lean Democrat, meaning that there are 5.3 million Jewish Democrats. Of those Jewish Democrats, 4.3 million are projected to be liberals, and 1.4 million are projected to be extremely liberal.
There are 192 million whites, and 41% of them are Democrats, meaning there are 78.7 million white Democrats in America. Of these, 43.3 million are liberals, and 14.4 are extremely liberal. Out of the Jewish+white extreme liberal group, 9.7% of them are Jewish.
However, this statistic assumes that whites are Jews are mutually exclusive groups, when that is not how they are counted statistically. We should subtract the number of Jewish extreme liberals from the number of white extreme liberals. This leaves 13 million white (non-Jewish) extreme liberals. As a result, 10.8% of white+Jewish extreme liberals are Jewish. Jews are 10x overrepresented among “wokes” when compared with the Republican Party.
One possible explanation is that Jews have a verbal tilt, which predicts leftism. Another explanation is that Jews fear racial conflict, and wokism is a pro-social signaling attempt to reduce racial conflict. These provide alternatives to the antisemitic theory that Jewish wokeness is motivated by Jewish ethnocentrism.
Jews and Mental Deviance
Kierkegaard’s OkCupid data shows that Jews are more likely to see a therapist than non-Jewish whites. The statement that “Jews are more mentally deviant” is controversial because mental deviance is considered morally bad. I don’t associate deviance with evil, especially in cases where deviance from the mean is excellent. If we are to assume its validity, then what does that mean about the statement that “liberals are more mentally deviant?”
According to Kierkegaard,
“historical geniuses… have elevated rates of mental illness, both in themselves and in their relatives.”
Maybe liberals have higher levels of mental illness, not because they are spiteful mutants or dysgenic freaks, but because they are a population which selects highly for genius, and this selection process has associated comorbidities.
Conclusion.
Rather than seeing extreme liberals as attracted to bad ideas (or seeing these bad ideas as inducing illness), extreme liberals can be modeled as a sub-Caucasian ethnic group with heritable political opinions. Extreme liberals pass on their political opinions to their family members, who are at risk of high rates of mental deviance. Extreme liberals exist within the same sort of culture and selective context as Jews: highly urban, educated, and distinct from or opposed to majoritarian ideologies like Christian Nationalism.
Blacks and Hispanics generally have lower levels of mental deviance, and Asians have the lowest levels, while multiracial individuals have the highest levels.4 This lines up neatly with the level of “wokeness” within these groups.
A question for future researchers is this: do extremely liberal Jews have higher rates of mental deviance than extremely liberal whites? If not, then perhaps hyper-urbanism, education, and wealth are ingredients which create the preconditions for certain elements of both Jewish culture and woke culture, which are now converging and intermixing.
In the next segment of this series, Part VIII, we will investigate qualitative claims that leftists are more sadistic than conservatives.
In this post, I am going to use “diagnosed mentally ill extremely liberal Democrats” (DMI/ELD) as a proxy for “woke.” There are some people who are “woke” who are not diagnosed; there are some people who are “woke” who do not identify as Democrats; there are some people who are “woke” who repudiate the label of liberalism as a “soft form of fascism.” The category isn’t 1:1, but I still think it is a good proxy for the overall ethnic and racial makeup of “wokes.”
2020, Liberals make up the largest share of Democratic voters, but their growth has slowed in recent years: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/01/17/liberals-make-up-largest-share-of-democratic-voters/
It is not clear whether the amplified levels of mental deviance among mixed-race individuals is due to outbreeding depression or sociological factors.
Excellent post!
Good post. At least in my experience many secular right wing jews have the same personality profile (neuroticism, obsessively analytic) as their left wing counterparts