I don’t see how you can have a common purpose in a multi-racial, multi-religious country unless your country is under assault. I’m thinking about America after 9/11. Neighbors started talking to each other, flags began flying, and there was a fleeting sense of shared American identity. But that didn’t last long.
It’s not just that different groups see the world differently, but that they experience the world differently because they have different gifts, different values, different histories, and different genetics. Israel is a Jewish state and Judaism is its official religion. About 80% of its population is Jewish. Thus it can have more of a shared experience than a diverse society like America.
Haaretz: “Jill Max is the Director of the Baltimore Hebrew Institute of Towson University. She has a 23-year history of professional and volunteer leadership in the Baltimore Jewish community.”
She writes:
Last month, during another visit to Israel, I had the privilege of experiencing Israel’s Memorial Day at Mount Herzl. Our group entered the national cemetery early in the morning, before it was closed to outside visitors. We made our way through the cemetery, ultimately arriving at the section where the casualties of the most recent conflict are laid to rest. One could barely move, as every inch of ground was packed with uniformed soldiers, huddled together in group embraces, sobbing and swaying. Mothers sat on plastic stools adjacent to their sons’ graves as mourners paid their respects. Pictures of smiling young men atop marble slabs told the stories of lives cut short. Cigarette smoke filled the air; tears blurred my vision. And all I could think about were the young men I encountered last summer. Had they all returned unharmed? I was haunted by the fear that they had not.
I am ashamed to admit that in my own country, I have never really marked Memorial Day in any kind of meaningful way. I have no personal connections to military service or loss, and our culture does not support the ideals of collective mourning on that day. We are much more comfortable with retail sales and celebrating the unofficial commencement of summer at the pool or a barbeque.
I live in Baltimore, Maryland, only an hour’s drive from Washington, D.C. Every year, when Memorial Day approaches, I remember that I would like to visit Arlington National Cemetery, the sacred ground where many of our country’s war dead are buried. I’ve had the unexpected experience (by pure chance while at the airport) of greeting a flight of WWII heroes as they arrived for a once-in-a-lifetime visit to the memorial in Washington that was erected in their honor. And when U.S. military personnel are on my flight, I always feel both humbled and indebted to them.
In our country, military service largely divides us by class and privilege. I know only one person whose son serves in our military, and this is not uncommon. Since the tragic events of 9/11, so many young men have given their lives, or returned home with catastrophic injuries to defend my country, and I have never found a way to honor that sacrifice, even on the one day each year when that might be a real possibility. As I write this, I understand how profoundly different my life would be if my own son had been obligated to serve in the military, rather than remaining safe within the confines of an elite college campus.
Collective responsibility is a fundamental principle of Israeli society. Culturally, it is almost entirely different in the United States. Here, people are much more interested in protecting their own – their families, their religious groups, their political interests – that they rarely come together around any one ideal that relates to or unites the society as a whole. Although we have set aside a day to remember and honor those men and women who sacrificed their lives to defend this country that we all profess to love, most of us squander that opportunity.
In Israel, the idea that we are all responsible for each other permeates every aspect of life. It is particularly evident on Memorial Day, because everyone has experienced a personal loss, the country shuts down and people use the day to grieve and reflect. Yet the concept of collective responsibility extends beyond that day, being exhibited in large and small ways throughout the year.
The stronger your in-group identity, be it Jewish or Muslim or black or Christian, the more likely you are to have negative feelings about out-groups. For example, the stronger your Jewish identity, the more likely you are to care about other Jews and to not care so much about non-Jews, even when they are your fellow Americans.
When America was a 90% plus white Christian country, there was more of a sense of collective responsibility. There was high social trust. In a diverse society, people close down, distrust strangers, watch a ton of TV, and to the extent they socialize, they generally do it with people like themselves.
When Jill writes the following, I think she is mainly talking about herself and her peer group: “I am ashamed to admit that in my own country, I have never really marked Memorial Day in any kind of meaningful way. I have no personal connections to military service or loss, and our culture does not support the ideals of collective mourning on that day. We are much more comfortable with retail sales and celebrating the unofficial commencement of summer at the pool or a barbeque.”
Plenty of Americans take Memorial Day seriously. They are usually white Christians, the core of the country, the people who built the United States of America. Jews in America tend to identify as part of the Coalition of the Fringe (Democrats) who are frequently opposed to the white Christian core (Republicans).
To counter the power of the Fringe, Samuel Francis argued that whites must “reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites… The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people.”
Jill Marx writes: “In our country, military service largely divides us by class and privilege.”
A more profound division may be by region, race and religion. America’s officer corp has long been dominated by Southern white Christians.
Jill: “I know only one person whose son serves in our military, and this is not uncommon.”
That is not uncommon in Jill’s Jewish social circle, but in a white Christian group, that would be uncommon. America’s white Protestants tend to take their civic duties seriously. They serve proudly. They pay their taxes honestly. They do jury duty. They pick up trash. They work to keep America safe and beautiful.
Many American Jews (700-1000 a year) serve in Israel’s army rather than in America’s.
Los Angeles Times, 2014:
Can an American become a citizen of a different country without giving up U.S. citizenship?
Yes. “In order to lose U.S. nationality, the law requires that the person must apply for the foreign nationality voluntarily, by free choice and with the intention to give up U.S. nationality,” the State Department says.
Does the U.S. let its people join the Israel Defense Forces?
Yes. “Service with the IDF is something that many Americans do proudly, and we have no issues,” U.S. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said Monday in a briefing.
Why would an American join the Israeli military rather than the U.S. military?
The answer varies from person to person, but Edward “Ori” Getz of Houston, who joined the IDF in 2011 when he was 26 years old, talked to The Times this week about his own reasoning.
Getz said he had planned to join the U.S. military and was in the ROTC for five years but then changed his mind. “I did not want to go to Iraq and Afghanistan. I did not feel that was a reason to get killed,” he said. Israel, on the other hand, “actually needs protection from the countries around it,” he said. “It’s actually fighting for its existence. America is going to be fine without my help.”
Getz, who grew up attending Jewish day school in Texas, said Israel has always been important to him. “It’s the one place in the world that the Jews can always defend and protect themselves and not always have to run away,” he said.
He said he’d never felt any conflict between his allegiances to the United States and to Israel: “America pretty much has Israel’s back.” Getz moved back to Houston after his time in the IDF.
Daniel Flesch writes for Commentary magazine Feb 1, 2015:
Slandering Americans Who Fight for Israel
This past July, two young Americans, Max Steinberg of California and Sean Carmeli of Texas, were killed while fighting Hamas. They were serving in the Israel Defense Forces during Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s five-week war in Gaza. In the American media, their deaths became an occasion for raising the issue of lone soldiers—men and women who serve in the IDF but have no immediate family in Israel. Why, journalists asked, would Americans fight for Israel? And what does their service for the Jewish state say about their allegiance to America? As with most Israel-related matters that enter public debate these days, the discussion was grossly distorted and ultimately appropriated by those who sought to indict Israel and its American supporters. And as with many conversations concerning Israel, this one gave off more than a whiff of anti-Semitism.
The repeated charge against lone soldiers is that their sacrifice for Israel is proof of compromised or nonexistent loyalty to the United States. As a proud Jew, a proud American, and a former lone soldier who completed his IDF service in 2012, I am in a position to recognize this slander for what it is. The calumny against American Jews who fight for Israel is, in the end, a fashionable manifestation of a timeworn lie about the character of the Jewish people as a whole. And like all such lies, it makes its way into polite conversation in the guise of considered opinion.
My time in the IDF did not contradict or weaken my loyalty to America. It, in fact, affirmed and strengthened my deep belief in the United States and its founding principles. But before I explain my reasons for joining the IDF, let us briefly consider some examples of the criticisms heaped upon lone soldiers.
Days after the 24-year-old Steinberg was killed, Slate’s Allison Benedikt wrote an article blaming his death partially on Birthright, the organization founded by Charles Bronfman and Michael Steinhardt that has enabled hundreds of thousands of young American Jews to visit Israel. It was on a Birthright trip that Steinberg decided to join the IDF. For Benedikt, the very effort to get Jews interested in Israel is suspect. “You spend hundreds of millions of dollars to convince young Jews that they are deeply connected to a country that desperately needs their support?” she asked rhetorically. “This is what you get.” She was even more pointed in her assessment of lone-soldiering. Once an American Jew joins the IDF, she wrote, his “fundamental identity” becomes Israeli. That is an inescapably shabby way of speaking about a young Californian recently killed by Hamas.
But, then, American lone soldiers are often accused of harboring a shifty “dual loyalty,” with their affections divided between the United States and Israel. In some ways, this “dual loyalty” canard is more potent than an accusation of outright treason; its slightly weaker suggestion of duplicity allows for wider acceptance. In May 2014, two months before Operation Protective Edge began, the Anti-Defamation League released the findings of the “ADL Global 100,” an extensive survey of global anti-Semitic sentiment. Of 11 stereotypical anti-Semitic statements, the one concerning dual loyalty received the highest response. In the United States, 31 percent of those polled said that the statement “Jews are more loyal to Israel than [their native country]” was “probably true.” This number is more than three times higher than the 9 percent of American adults who claim to possess anti-Semitic views. Thus, the dual-loyalty charge allows anti-Zionists, anti-Semites, and those who simply don’t know any better to advance claims of Jewish deceit while they deny anti-Semitism outright…
Last September, the New York Times columnist David Brooks revealed in an interview with Haaretz that his son currently serves as a lone soldier. This made Brooks a suspect of dual loyalty by blood. His revelation prompted a debate in the media about whether he was obligated to disclose his son’s IDF service to Times readers, because he (very occasionally) writes about Israel. In a blog post from October, Margaret Sullivan, the Times’s public-opinion editor, concluded that Brooks did have such an obligation, stating that “many” of her readers were “outraged” to learn that Brooks’s son was, in the words of one, a “foreign mercenary.” It was shocking that Sullivan would even use this phrase, which suggests that its subject joined the Israeli military for the money—and Sullivan never bothered to question this vile imputation. She wrote finally: “I do think that a one-time acknowledgment [from Brooks] of this situation in print (not in an interview with another publication) is completely reasonable.”
Sullivan’s blog shifts the focus from Brooks, where it belongs, to his son, where it does not, which many readers use as a point of departure to blithely accuse lone soldiers of disloyalty. One commentator equates “choosing Israel’s military over America’s” with “choosing Israel over America,” while another states that the significant number of American Jews in the IDF “raises questions about where their loyalties lie.” More than 80 people agreed with these comments. In a separate piece, journalist Steve Sailer echoed this sentiment: “Nobody expects Jews like the Brookses [sic] to be more loyal to their fellow American citizens and less loyal to their foreign co-ethnics.”
What’s missing from the bad-faith speculation about the motives of lone soldiers are the views of lone soldiers themselves. We’re rarely asked about our motives. So here, then, is why I chose to serve in the Israel Defense Forces.
In the United States, the concept of national loyalty is different from what it is anywhere else in the world. America is exceptional because, unlike other countries, our national character is not defined by ethnicity, religion, or culture, but by our belief in liberty, representative government, and equality before the law. We are also unique in our willingness to defend these values. For any American, protecting these blessings is the noblest demonstration of patriotism. As a Jewish American who feels it incumbent on himself to defend the Jewish people, I am doubly fortunate. The Jewish state is the only Middle Eastern country that believes in and upholds the same principles. Defending the region’s only free, democratic, and pluralistic society against the forces of intolerance and extremism gave me the opportunity to safeguard the values that America holds dear, and to do so while protecting the Jewish homeland.
Just as important, my time in the IDF took me to the frontlines of the fight against the sworn enemies of both Israel and America. Indeed, American soldiers and veterans often tell me they admire my decision to join the IDF. They believe, as I do, that I fought the same ideological forces that they fought in Afghanistan and the Middle East. The primary struggle of our time is between Western, liberal democracies and radical, Islamic fundamentalism. Whether I was stationed on the Lebanese border or conducting internal-security missions in the West Bank, I defended innocent people against Islamist killers. I faced the same ideological enemy that attacked the United States on 9/11. With whom, after all, is Israel usually at war? Hamas, a terrorist organization whose leaders have said that “America is on its way to utter destruction” and that “God [has] declared war against America.” Then there’s Hezbollah, an Iranian-supported terrorist group whose leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said, “‘Death to America’ was, is, and will stay our slogan!” I joined the IDF in part to help ensure that Jews would never again face a Holocaust. But protecting the Jewish people also meant doing battle with those who live and die to see America perish. These two interests are complementary and require no reconciliation. Those who don’t readily see the compatibility of these interests are the ones whose motivations deserve rigorous questioning.
On my base every Fourth of July, we lone soldiers taught the Israelis “The Star-Spangled Banner.” And it’s no accident that the Israelis with whom I served admired the United States and were always keen to discuss American culture and politics. As the United States supplies the IDF with much of its equipment (to say nothing of political support), Israelis are acutely aware of America’s role in helping them defend Israel. My rifle was an American-issued M-4 with “Property of U.S. Government” etched on its side. Our gauze packages were, oddly enough, made near my hometown. The plane we jumped out of was a converted C-130 Hercules, with English instructions imprinted on the fuselage.
But for all the Israeli appreciation, there was a special camaraderie among lone soldiers. Contrary to Allison Benedikt’s foul suggestion, there was no possibility of forgetting that we were American. Most of us had no friends or family in Israel. Without the support network that our Israeli peers enjoyed, we relied on one another other for support. When on leave from base, the Israelis returned to their homes; lone soldiers returned to empty apartments. But we also knew we were goodwill ambassadors of a sort. Many members of my unit were shocked to learn that I chose to leave a comfortable life in America to serve in the IDF. But after I had explained my decision to serve, they were grateful to have me fighting by their side. Lone soldiers are highly motivated, and the Israeli soldiers and officers recognized our strength and determination. By our words and deeds, we fostered respect for America among Israelis.
My experience is borne out by the facts on lone-soldiering. For one thing, the U.S. government does not deem lone soldiers to be, in any sense, disloyal. It is not illegal for American Jews to serve in the IDF. In Wiborg v. U.S. (1896), the Supreme Court held that “it was not a crime under U.S. law for an individual to go abroad for the purpose of enlisting in a foreign army.” Americans constitute the single largest nationality among an estimated 2,500 to 4,000 non-Israelis in the IDF; in any given year, between 750 and 1,000 Americans serve as lone soldiers. This strong American presence is a testament to the compatibility of American and Israeli values and priorities.
Those who single out lone-soldiering in Israel universally ignore the long and well-established tradition of Americans fighting in the armies of many other foreign countries.
Everybody has conflicting loyalties, but it is rare country that is not bothered when you leave it to fight for another. That’s a bold statement that can’t be expected to go down well at home, even when it is argued for by high IQ Jews such as Daniel Flesch.
It is often not easy to see where one’s own loyalties lie, let alone to understand another’s hierarchy of allegiance. For example, is an American Christian or American Jew or American Muslim first an American and then his religious identity or the other way around? I am sure that varies by the individual. When I was growing up in Australia and California as a Seventh-Day Adventist, I think I was a Christian first. So I agree with Mr. Flesch that Jews aren’t the only Americans with multiple loyalties.
There’s one paragraph in the Daniel Flesch essay that most interests me. I will take excerpts and comment on them.
“In the United States, the concept of national loyalty is different from what it is anywhere else in the world.”
I doubt it. Which is more likely? That America is unique in its sense of national loyalty or that the author is confused?
“America is exceptional because, unlike other countries, our national character is not defined by ethnicity, religion, or culture, but by our belief in liberty, representative government, and equality before the law.”
Really? These beliefs are what makes us American? We are a proposition nation — affirm these propositions and you’re in! I don’t think that works. Ties of blood and soil are more powerful than ties of propositions. Does genetic similarity predict closer ties? For instance, "preschool children are 40 times more likely to be assaulted by a step parent — that is to say, a genetic stranger — than by a biological parent."
Dr. Phil Rushton found:
For Homo sapiens, inclusive fitness theory goes well beyond ‘kin’. As William Hamilton hypothesized, genes can increase the probability of their own survival by bringing about the reproduction of not only family members with whom they share copies, but also of any individuals with whom they share copies. Research with Hamilton’s theory on people is less well known and remains controversial. This review shows: (1) spouses and close friends assort on blood groups and that similarity predicts fertility; (2) twin and adoption studies find genes rather than upbringing cause people to positively assort; (3) phenotype matching is more pronounced on more heritable items within sets of homogeneous traits; (4) bereavement studies find grief is greater following the death of a more similar co-twin or child; (5) studies of face perception find people prefer and trust those who look like them; and (6) DNA variance within and between ethnic groups is equivalent to that within and between families.
Kin-selection theory predicts that animals increase their fitness by allocating more cooperation to kin than to non-kin. Hamilton (1964) showed that altruism (or, conversely, reduced aggression) is favored when rb – c > 0, where r is the genetic relatedness between two individuals, b is the (genetic) fitness benefit to the beneficiary, and c is the fitness cost to the altruist. However, to benefit kin over non-kin, altruists must be able to detect genetic relatedness. Mechanisms proposed for this to occur include familiarity, imprinting on self or others, and innate feature detectors that work in the absence of learning…
A study of 263 child bereavements found that: (1) spouses agreed 74% of the time on which side of the family a child ‘took after’ the most, their own or that of their spouse, and (2) the grief intensity reported by mothers, fathers, and grandparents was greater for children who resembled their side of the family than for children resembling the other side of the family…
Several studies have found that people rate faces as more attractive when they resemble their own. Platek et al. (2002) morphed people’s faces with those of toddlers and asked questions such as ‘Which one of these children would you like to spend time with?’ and ‘Which child would you adopt?’ People responded more positively toward children’s faces that had been morphed with their own. During debriefing, the participants expressed surprise that any morphing had occurred. DeBruine (2002) found people trusted a stranger’s face more when it had been morphed with their own than when it was left unchanged…
The pull of genetic similarity does not stop at family and friends. Malat & Hamilton (2006) found that people prefer same-race health providers and perceive them as more trustworthy. Putnam (2004) found that the more ethnically diverse a community, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust others, from nextdoor neighbours to local governments.
Inclusive fitness theory has been used to explain why members of ethnic groups move into the same neighbourhoods, join together in clubs and societies, and are prone to develop ethnocentric attitudes toward those who differ in dress, dialect, and other appearance…
In retrospect, it is not surprising that people are able to detect and prefer those who resemble themselves. Similarity, whether actual or perceived, is one of the most important factors in human relationships. It is more surprising to find just how fine-tuned the recognition process can be. The studies reviewed above show that the preference for similarity occurs within ethnic groups and within families and on the more heritable items from within sets of related traits.
In another paper, Rushton found:
Genetic Similarity Theory extends Anthony D. Smith’s theory of ethno-symbolism by anchoring ethnic nepotism in the evolutionary psychology of altruism. Altruism toward kin and similar others evolved in order to help replicate shared genes. Since ethnic groups are repositories of shared genes, xenophobia is the ‘dark side’ of human altruism. A review of the literature demonstrates the pull of genetic similarity in dyads such as marriage partners and friendships, and even large groups, both national and international. The evidence that genes incline people to prefer others who are genetically similar to themselves comes from studies of social assortment, differential heritabilities, the comparison of identical and fraternal twins, blood tests, and family bereavements. DNA sequencing studies confirm some origin myths and disconfirm others; they also show that in comparison to the total genetic variance around the world, random co-ethnics are related to each other on the order of first cousins.
Most theories of ethno-political conflict and nationalism focus on cultural, cognitive and economic factors, often with the assumption that modernisation will gradually reduce the effect of local antagonisms and promote the growth of more universalistic societies (Smith 1998). However, purely socio-economic explanations seem inadequate to account for the rapid rise of nationalism in the former Soviet Bloc and too weak to explain the lethality of the conflicts between Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs in the Indian subcontinent, and Croats, Serbs, Bosnians and Albanians in the former Yugoslavia, or even the level of animosity between Blacks, Whites and Hispanics in the US…
Patriotism is almost always seen as a virtue and extension of family loyalty and is typically preached using kinship terms. Countries are called the ‘motherland’ or the ‘fatherland’. Ethnic identity builds on real as well as putative similarity. At the core of human nature, people are genetically motivated to prefer others genetically similar to themselves…
In 1964, evolutionary biologist William Hamilton finally provided a generally accepted solution to the problem of altruism based on the concept of inclusive fitness, not just individual fitness. It is the genes that survive and are passed on. Some of the individual’s most distinctive genes will be found in siblings, nephews, cousins and grandchildren as well as in offspring. Siblings share fifty per cent, nephews and nieces twenty-five per cent, and cousins about twelve and a half per cent of their distinctive genes. So when an altruist sacrifices its life for its kin, it ensures the survival of these common genes. The vehicle has been sacrificed to preserve copies of its precious cargo. From an evolutionary point of view, an individual organism is only a vehicle, part of an elaborate device, which ensures the survival and reproduction of genes with the least possible biochemical alteration.
‘Hamilton’s Rule’ states that across all species, altruism (or, conversely, reduced aggression) is favoured when rbc40, where r is the genetic relatedness between two individuals, b is the (genetic) fitness benefit to the beneficiary, and c is the fitness cost to the altruist. Evolutionary biologists have used Hamilton’s ‘gene’s eye’ point of view to carry out research on a wide range of social interactions including altruism, aggression, selfishness and spite. The formulation was dubbed ‘kin selection theory’ by John Maynard Smith (1964) and became widely known through influential books such as The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (1976) and Sociobiology: the New Synthesis by Edward O. Wilson (1975).
“The Jewish state is the only Middle Eastern country that believes in and upholds the same principles. Defending the region’s only free, democratic, and pluralistic society against the forces of intolerance and extremism gave me the opportunity to safeguard the values that America holds dear, and to do so while protecting the Jewish homeland.”
The Jewish state is the Jewish state. It’s not a proposition nation. Israel exists primarily to protect the welfare of Jews. It is an ethno-state stuck with two million Arab citizens who hate it. America used to explicitly understand itself as a white Protestant nation. When it was founded, the nation was 85% Anglo. Since then, its founding stock has been steadily diluted by outsiders, and consequently social trust has plunged and corruption has risen. I don’t expect non-Englishmen to recognize and respect the rights of Englishmen.
Except for exceptional circumstances, I can’t think of any country where fighting for another country is honored. If you are an Australian, for example, it’s considered weird to go fight for another land. I doubt that Israelis honor their citizens who fight for foreign powers.
When there was a British commonwealth, however, fighting for fellow Anglos was honored because these were ties of blood and religion and monarchy.
If an American Jew joins the IDF, I don’t know that his primarily identity automatically becomes Israeli, but it would certainly tend in that direction.
According to the ADL survey, 31 percent of Americans agreed that “Jews are more loyal to Israel than [their native country].” Well, just as many American Christians and Muslims put their religion first, so too many Jews put Judaism and Jewish loyalties first. I don’t see anything anti-Semitic about noticing that. Since the 1960s, minorities in America, including Jews and blacks and latinos, have been encouraged to put their own identity first before their nation. Prior to the 1960s, I think those groups first identified as Americans. Their change in loyalty was a response to changing incentives. In America today, there’s little criticism of minorities who put their own race first. That may be good for those minorities, but I don’t see how that is good for America.
The way the world works is that most people don’t have the time and interest to think in complex ways about out-groups. American non-Jews will either see American Jews in general as fellow Americans or as a Fifth Column in their midst. American non-Muslims will either see American Muslims as fellow Americans or a Fifth Column in their midst. Jews will either see Christians as fellow monotheists who share a commitment to the Hebrew Bible and Western Civilization or as a persecuting enemy.
Right now, I suspect a secret survey would reveal that most Americans would prefer that their country be free of Muslims and blacks. Right now, I don’t think most Americans yearn for their country to be free of Jews, but that could change quickly.
Do America’s different races and religions have exactly the same attitudes to Memorial Day? Or to civic duties in general? Not that I have seen. America was built by white Protestants and the less white and Protestant the country becomes, the less American and the less civic-minded. By and large, WASPs make the best citizens.
Ron Guhname writes:
WASPs rule! I wrote in a recent post that I was getting the sense that Americans with Protestant European backgrounds were the best behaved. So I decided to sum all my prior post numbers that dealt with ethnicity and moral behavior to assess this idea systematically. I followed the simple strategy of assigning a rank for each behavior for each of the 8 ethnic groups with sufficiently large sample sizes. Jews were often ignored in previous posts since one must turn to the religion rather than the ethnicity variable to get estimates, but I wanted to include them, so I calculated numbers and then ranks for them.
I included all variables that I have posted on–here’s a list of them: okay to cheat on taxes; drinks too much; ethnocentric; dirty house; frequents prostitutes; promiscuous men over 30; feel that infidelity is not wrong; gay; lesbian; husbands and wives who cheat; fathers divorcing mom; women arrested; and promiscuity for men and women and under. I realized that I had not posted on drug abuse so I added that to the rest. I ranked group so high numbers indicate more bad behavior, then I simply summed the 16 rankings for each ethnic group. Here are the totals:
Bad Behavior Index
Blacks 106
Mexicans 85
American Indians 85
Italians 70
Irish 67
Jews 64
Germans 56
English/Welsh 47
My hunch was correct. This pattern coincides with that feeling that goes way back among nativists that the moral quality of the country was slipping with the mass immigration from Catholic, southern and eastern European countries, and more recently in concern over immigration from Mexico.
