Are we in the middle of a major cultural shift?
Statistics from a survey group that has been gauging the political views of American youth for decades reveal an interesting development: Young women in the United States have made a notable move to the left, while young men have moved to the right, albeit by a more subtle proportion.
Since the 1970s, the group Monitoring the Future has kept track of where young people fit on the political spectrum. Over the last three years, their survey results have shown that approximately one-fourth of high school senior boys identify as “conservative” or “very conservative.” By contrast, 13 percent of boys surveyed identified as “liberal” or “very liberal.”
In other words, nearly twice as many boys in their senior year are conservative than are liberal.
This has not always been the case. In past eras, such as the early 2000s, liberal high school boys outnumbered conservatives in Monitoring the Future’s surveys. And during the days of the Jimmy Carter administration, both boys and girls swung left.
But the shift of young men to the right is more notable in light of the much more dramatic shift of young women to the left. Per Monitoring the Future’s polling, the percentage of high school senior girls who identify as “liberal” or “very liberal” rose from 19 percent in 2012 to 30 percent in 2022.
In last year’s survey, only 12 percent of girls said they were conservative — half the percentage of boys. This suggests a growing ideological gap between the sexes, with men becoming increasingly conservative and women increasingly liberal.
As The Hill reports, other surveyors have come to similar conclusions. According to Gallup, women ages 18 to 29 are more likely to be liberal nowadays than they have been at any point in the last 20 years. The migration of young women to the left is what is primarily driving the statistical leftward shift of Generation Z, as seen in NBC polling from 2022, which says Gen Z prefers liberalism to conservatism by a 48-to-33 margin. This stands in contrast to a decade ago, when young adults were essentially evenly divided between liberal and conservative.
As The Hill notes:
The rightward drift of high school boys is comparatively subtle. Indeed, when it comes to politics, most boys seem reluctant to pick a side. In the 2022 Monitoring the Future survey, the largest group of senior boys, more than two-fifths, claimed no politics at all, answering the liberal-conservative question with “none of the above” or “I don’t know.” Nearly one-fifth identified as moderate. Only 36 percent selected liberal or conservative as an ideology, and only there did the trend emerge.
Liberal politicians, of course, are just as eager to win the vote of young men. Yet, the progressive agenda seeks equality in gender and race, a platform that costs them some male support, especially among white people. In the 2020 election, Black and Hispanic men voted for Joe Biden at much higher rates than non-Hispanic white people, according to Pew Research data.
Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, used the data from Monitoring the Future to make a chart that gained traction on social media, although her graph painted the gender divide more starkly by omitting those of both sexes who identified as moderates or were undecided.
“Among liberals, the future is female. And among conservatives, the future is male,” wrote Twenge in her book Generations.
Is it any wonder that the Left is alienating men, with its repeated attacks on “patriarchy” and “toxic masculinity?”
Leftists are quite open about their disdain for manhood, and vehemently discourage masculinity as well as traditional male-female romantic relationships. In 2021, lesbian University of California, Riverside professor Jane Ward said that “heterosexual relationships are so bad for us” because of their “inherent inequality.”
But the numbers contradict Ward’s opinion; according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, which reports on the lifetime prevalence of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner, the most victimized group were bisexual women (61.1 percent), followed by lesbian women (43.8 percent), heterosexual women (35 percent), heterosexual men (29 percent), and homosexual men (26 percent).
Moreover, writing at the homosexual magazine The Advocate in 2014, J.D. Glass reported that the “National Violence Against Women survey found that 21.5 percent of men and 35.4 percent of women living with a same-sex partner experienced intimate-partner physical violence in their lifetimes, compared with 7.1 percent and 20.4 percent for men and women, respectively, with a history of only opposite-sex cohabitation.”
The ideological gap between young men and women certainly has important ramifications for those involved in politics. But it also raises questions about how the relations between the sexes will be affected by such a steep political divide.
