The boy-girl axis
Hypothesis: the political realignment underway across the west isn't ideological.
American political allegiances have obviously been realigning over the past fifteen or twenty years. They’re always evolving, but this particular shift seems more significant than anything since the 1960s.
No one’s figured out exactly what’s happening, why, or what it means. The first ones to figure it out will probably cement their grip on power for a generation, so these aren’t purely academic questions.
I’ve frequently wondered aloud on this Substack, and on the blog that preceded it, whether the left-right, liberal-conservative ideological spectrum was still viable—not just in America, but across the west.
What does it really mean to be a Republican or a Democrat, a liberal or a conservative, blue or red, left or right?
I’ve tried interpreting the increasing political polarity on other axes. Individualism versus collectivism, globalism versus localism, and even doggism versus cattism seem more helpful in understanding the contemporary political landscape than the old liberal-conservative axis. The old framework is still there, we still call ourselves and each other Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, left- and right-wingers, but the terms no longer accurately describe the things they’re supposed to. They’re the scaffolding around a building that’s ceased to exist.
A lot of little news stories that have caught my eye lately, however, suggest an even simpler axis: male-female.
Here in Scandinavia, and in much of western and central Europe, young women are moving increasingly toward what we used to call the left, leaving young men increasingly alone on what we used to call the right.
The impact of this movement seems to be making the left more womanly (by which I only mean more attractive and receptive to women) and the right more manly (more attractive and receptive to men). The resulting increase in femininity or masculinity of the old parties then makes them even more attractive to just one sex, reinforcing the cycle.
The stats are so consistent on this—and I’m so lazy on Friday afternoons—that I don’t even want to bother backing it up with any particular study or article. To reassure you that I’m not just making the whole thing up, however, I’ll cite a few paragraphs from a January article in the Financial Times entitled “A new global gender divide is emerging”:
In countries on every continent, an ideological gap has opened up between young men and women. Tens of millions of people who occupy the same cities, workplaces, classrooms and even homes no longer see eye-to-eye.
In the US, Gallup data shows that after decades where the sexes were each spread roughly equally across liberal and conservative world views, women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries. That gap took just six years to open up.
I’ll interrupt to pick one nit here: are they really more liberal, or just identifying more with parties that used to be liberal? Few popular movements afoot in the world today are more illiberal than progressivism.
Moving on (but keeping that picked nit in mind):
Germany also now shows a 30-point gap between increasingly conservative young men and progressive female contemporaries, and in the UK the gap is 25 points. In Poland last year, almost half of men aged 18-21 backed the hard-right Confederation party, compared to just a sixth of young women of the same age.
And so on.
So this is an actual thing that’s actually happening in actuality.
Why is it happening? No one knows. There are theories out there—the consequences of feminism, the polarizing impact of social media, the machinations of the illuminati, Mercury going retrograde, climate change, bigfoot, menstrual cramps—but none of them are very convincing.
What does it mean? That’s a good question, but more to the point it’s an interesting question, because it only invites more questions, meaning we can go spelunking through the whole crazy labyrinth of ambiguities at our leisure.
For one thing, if women are more drawn to one set of policies and men to another—or, as a more rigid interpretation of the data suggests, women are drawn to a set of policies that men are either not drawn to or are repulsed from—then we have to conclude that, very generally speaking, women and men see the world differently. That’s awfully ironic given that one of the big dividers in American politics right now is whether men and women are even different at all.
Another thing: how does this trend relate to the contemporaneous phenomenon of younger Americans being less willing to get romantically involved with people whose politics differ from their own? Because that’s also actually an actual thing that’s been actualized. (Although, as that article’s headline notes, this trend, too, is mostly driven by women.)
The sudden and wildly anomalous increase in the number of young American women who call themselves lesbian or bisexual makes a lot more sense when we can see that vast numbers of young women are rushing to the (ostensible) political left and refusing to date people whose politics differ from their own.
Silly girls! Think this one through, you adorable creatures: more and more women move to the left, leaving more and more men behind on the right. More men flee the hyperfeminized left for the sanctuary of the man-friendly right. The number of women on the left refusing to mate with men on the right means there’ll be intense competition among the increasing hordes of leftist women—however many are still heterosexual—for the decreasing pool of men who share their increasingly feminized politics. (And who probably, to paraphrase Eddie Murphy’s description of Michael Jackon in Delirious, ain’t the most masculine fellas in the world.)
Which will invariably lead to duplicitous heterosexual men posing as leftists just to take advantage of the situation. (Young men men will pretend just about anything for female companionship—yeah, we’ll call it companionship—and you probably didn’t need me to tell you that.) Those duplicitous men will eventually be found out and their female victims will become even more suspicious and resentful of men, accelerating all the other trends.
Meanwhile, on the masculine right, the diminishing pool of women willing to entangle themselves with (ostensible) right-wingers will create intense competition for them. Unlike the women of the feminized left, the men of the masculinized right aren’t going to want to explore homosexuality to maintain their ideological purity.
Suddenly we’ve got a polity dominated by a lot of very angry gay and bisexual women on one side, and very angry sexually frustrated straight men on the other.
Woo-wee!
That’s where we’d be headed if present trends were to continue, which is why they won’t. Not to that degree, anyway. No western nation is going to devolve into an insane dystopia where politics is just a steel cage death match between man-hating women and sexually frustrated men. (We’ll leave for another day the question of whether every human society already is.)
And yes, of course it would be entertaining as hell to watch such a country from afar.
But just because an unhealthy development won’t be seen through all the way to its insane logical conclusion doesn’t mean it might not wreak a whole hell of a lot of havoc before it’s finally reversed.
I’ve actually been wondering about the impact of the increasing feminization of our politics and societies for a while. In one such piece, from almost exactly a year ago, I think I got close to the nub of the problem: “There are billions of people alive today who would gladly trade their existential problems for your emotional discontent.” (If you want the full context of the nub, go on back and read the whole essay, which also includes all the necessary bows and scrapes to defend myself against charges of misogyny.)
The reason western politics is collapsing into a boy-girl thing is very simple: because it can. Westerners have more prosperity, health, luxury, and ease than they know what to do with. So much, in fact, that we’ve come to take it for granted. Our grandparents fought their way through the two world wars bookending the Great Depression: the world they left behind as they died off would have been utterly unimaginable to their parents. Unrecognizable. The kings and queens and industrial titans of the nineteenth century didn’t have it half so good as the average westerner alive today—even Americans living below the poverty line have luxuries Napoleon, Victoria, Franz Josef, and Kaiser Wilhelm would envy.
Life isn’t supposed to be so easy—it’s not supposed to be anything, but the human species survived as a species by evolving as problem solvers. When the livin’ is easy, we therefore have to invent our own obstacles, even if our daddy is rich and our mama’s good-lookin’. With no wild carnivores to fight off, no crop failures to concern us, no neighboring tribes making midnight raids to massacre us in our sleep, no worries about where our next meals are coming from, no risk of dying from the diseases that used to sweep us away by the millions, we lie awake in our warm, comfortable beds wondering what else might go wrong.
Hundreds of millions of people in non-western countries are still fighting the brutal realities of existence every day. That’s why they’re all trying to get into our countries.
So while the western world feminizes itself into a somnolent splendor, a lot of the non-western world is eyeing all our shiny, shiny things. . . and sharpening their spears.
(Metaphorically, of course. I’m not implying they don’t have guns, knives, or grenade launchers.)
I’ll clarify briefly here, as I did at length last year, that I don’t assume all women support feminine policies or that all men support masculine policies. I say that not just to clear myself of misogyny charges, but because e that the political divide we’re seeing isn’t actually between women and men but feminine and masculine. The gravitation of more young women to (what used to be) the left isn’t a cause but an effect of the increasing feminization of the political left. The effect then reinforces the cause.
What used to be the liberal left is rapidly becoming the feminine yin to the masculine yang of what used to be the conservative right.
Forget ideology: western politics is now about Venus and Mars.