Anime fans still lean left, right?
This is one of the few times I’ve commented on other anime writers. Zac Bertschy‘s reign as ANN‘s Answerman is over after he stepped down, which I’d say is for the best. As he said in his post, he’s burned out, and the signs of this burn out have been apparent for a number of months now. Most would agree it’s time for a fresh face; Bertschy‘s been putting up with the same questions for years and for the most part he’s been delivering the same answers which has probably become tiring for all involved. It goes without saying that Bertschy‘s not the most popular of anime commentators; find the right crowd of people and you can collect some pretty spirited vitriol about him. Personally, I’ve always had some time for him. I’ll never say I completely agree with him all the time, there’s a small but significant percentage of his opinions that I couldn’t disagree more on and he does have a knack for really underestimated certain subsets of the fandom and he does frequently come off as jaded. But, the majority of the time, I actually find myself agreeing with him, or, at the very least, understanding where he’s coming from.
In his send off column, while talking about the drastic shift in demographics in fandom over the last almost-decade, Bertschy made an interesting comment about the political leanings of anime fans right now.
After spending the better part of a decade working as a writer and an editor in the world of anime, and specifically, writing this column, there’s one observation I think I can make – anime fandom has changed drastically in the last 8 years. If you took someone from 2000 and transported them here I doubt they’d recognize it. It’s gone from being dominated by college-aged and older men to being pretty evenly split between genders – perhaps now leaning toward being predominantly female. It’s gotten way younger too. A decade ago the stereotypical anime fan would be in his late 20s or early 30s, likely have a beard, wearing a self-made Lum shirt and pride himself on his big laserdisc collection. Nowadays the stereotypical anime fan is in their mid to late teens; the fujoshi and moe crowd have pretty much taken over, with a million different varieties of fans in between. I’ve noticed a shift politically, too – nowadays the fans I meet are likely to be libertarian and conservative rather than liberal, which is something I find fascinating; I’d love to research that phenomenon.
I haven’t been an anime fan for this long, and my active involvement in the anime community obviously spans even less time, maybe half a decade. Nonetheless, I have noticed some, but not all, of the trends Bertschy‘s talking about. There’s even some rather straightforward explanations for these trends; anime fans have gotten younger since anime itself is much easier to get hold of now, the shift towards moe can be explained by its profitability, and the shift towards a more prominent female demographic can be explained a number of things, marketing and the decreasing stigma among them. But the political observation? I only have very limited anecdotal evidence to go on, but that’s certainly not what I’ve observed. Arguably there’s been a shift right in anime fans (it’s hard to know, since I don’t go around asking anime fans about their political philosophies), but I’d still say the majority of anime fans that I interact with lean left.
The problem with making a claim about the political leanings of anime fans is that until someone runs the surveys and crunches the numbers, all we have to go on is anecdotal evidence. Like all things to do with political polling, it all depends on who you talk to. I, myself, did a very quick and seriously shonky survey, and took a random sample of posts written in a political thread on the Animesuki forums, and found that the posts where the inclinations of the poster could be discerned, there were more than two left-leaning posts for every conservative-leaning post. Most of The anime fans I associate with IRL are university students as well, in fact I associate mostly with post-grads. You have to look seriously hard to find a conservative post-grad in science in this part of the world.
The point is that I hang with people that lean left. Seemingly, I go to internet forums that do the same. Maybe this isn’t the case with the places Bertschy goes. Do the ANN forums have a political tendency? I’ve never bothered to look it up. It could be a matter of geography as well. Bertschy goes to a lot of cons, but I don’t, maybe this could explain the discrepancy in observations. As he says, it’d be fascinating to research the phenomenon. Factors like age, demographics and geography are all obviously going to play a role in it. Common sense implies that, since anime fans are young and tech savvy, they’d lean left. But that may not be the case. It goes without saying that to answer the questions, we need hard data from a large sample. Which means that some sucker has to do the leg work. I suspect you’d see a difference in results between surveys taken online and surveys taken in an offline fashion, such as at a convention or on campus. I suspect such differences could have some startling implications.
I remember a friend of mine saying that the best thing about anime fans is that it’s the most diverse demographic (at my high school). A good deal of anime fans were indeed female, and they ranged from the unnoticed guy at the corner of the room to the rich cheerleader. If the normal anime fan was a male in his 30s way back when, then the perceived “average” anime fan sure has changed. However, I’m unconvinced that anything can be said about political affiliations.
If some stats major with too much time on his/her hands somehow managed to collect enough data to model a stereotypical anime fan, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a near zero correlation between anime fandom and a specific political affiliation. Since I am not crazy enough to waste my time on the data gathering, I argue this sentiment on the basis that anime fans hail from such a diverse pool of demographics that have been tied to a multitude of unique political affiliations that no truly meaningful correlation can be made (Note: I’m defining an “anime fan” as a person who watches or reads one or more anime or manga).
If a liberal is taken as the baseline, then it’s probably not hard to argue that a typical anime fan has become more conservative or libertarian simply because there is a larger pool of fans now than in the past. However, if a moderate is taken as the baseline, then this sentiment is far harder to argue.
Bertschy says that “fans I meet are likely to be libertarian and conservative rather than liberal.” However, I wonder if this sentiment has more to do with memory than with actual experience. For instance, if Bertschy has not been physically tallying people’s political affiliations, it’s possible that he simply remembers people who claim to be libertarian and conservative better than people who claim to be liberal because they are novel; thus, he skews his perceptions of how many conservatives, liberals and libertarians there are.
Personally, I’m inclined to believe that anime fans lean more toward liberal stances. However, I do not believe this is caused by the virtue of being an anime fan. I believe this is caused more by the fact that the typical anime fan is young, and because he/she is young, he/she will more likely be liberal. Oh yeah, and let’s assume that typical anime fan is young.
As a libertarian myself, I would say that my political philosophy developed independent of any influence of the people around me – though I’m sure some sort of subconscious mechanism is at play here, I decided on libertarianism through my own research, my dad being conservative, my mom being liberal, and most of my friends being politically apathetic (a sentiment I share insofar as actual politics are concerned; I’m more of a political philosopher).
That being said (to spell out my biases from the start), I’ve noticed a trend overall in terms of libertarianism that’s emerging from teenagers. Liberals are supporting the free market a lot more now, and conservatives are shying away from social conservatism a bit more from what I’ve seen. Even at my own college, which is pretty damn liberal, a libertarian movement has emerged. This is a very recent phenomenon, and I’m not quite sure what exactly caused it, but 5 years ago, let alone 10, you would definitely have not seen libertarianism as a serious political philosophy, especially around the time when Nozick was greatly criticized for his own work in libertarianism.
Given that I don’t quite buy that anime fans are of a specific political climate (this is largely anecdotal, but I agree with what SM is saying in this regard), I wouldn’t be surprised to simply see a shift overall in teenagers shying towards a libertarian flavor. To be sure, the amount of people who have identified as libertarian in the 17-30 age demographics (I’m eschewing younger people because by and large I don’t think that they’ve fully developed stable political opinions… maybe I’m wrong in this, but whatever) has increased from about 1% in the early 90′s to approximately 23% as of 2008 (this isn’t reflected in voting records, however, so third parties still don’t stand a chance). Given this, I wouldn’t be surprised to simply find that more people are shying libertarian, and libertarianism is often taken as conservative by bystanders. So I don’t think that anime fans are becoming more liberal all else equal, I simply think they are representing the political opinions of those in the given age range of 17-30, which is pretty much where most anime fans will end up falling into.
Of course this is speculation, but so is pretty much any stance on this topic. That being said, I wouldn’t be surprised to simply see anime fans representing a sample of a bigger picture at play here.
I was wondering about this, too, and I thought I was weird and that I was the only one thinking about it. Many of the anime fans I know are conservatives who hate Obama. I wonder why that is.
The funny thing is, as Executive Editor of the single largest anime community site on the web, Bertschy is one of the few people that could host a poll and actually collect semi-credible data to explore phenomenon and inform the anime fan community.
Sadly it seems he’s more interested in flamebaiting people on ANN’s forums like a 4chan kiddie and getting totally blitzed on cheap Mexican beer and engaging in mutual-verbal masterbation sessions with his buddy Justin Sevakis on their ridiculous self-aggrandizing little podcast show.
I am a fan of yuri(just the hentai kind), yaoi(only when the two guys look like lesbians or the when the uke is a trap). I love futanari.
IMPEACH OBAMA!
NRA 4 LIFE NO FAG MARRIAGE!
GLOBAL WARMING IS JUST A NATURAL EARTH CYCLE HUMANS ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE!
Zac Bertschy is trash of the worst kind. People should stop making articles about that dumbass. It’s simply giving him free publicity.