Are young men really trending to the right? By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

Are young men really trending to the right?

Matthew Yglesias

13 - 16 minutes

This week we’re joined by our new Slow Boring intern, Maya. A little about her:

    Hi everyone! I’m Maya Bodnick (@mayabodnick on Twitter). This summer, I’m interning for Slow Boring in D.C. I grew up in Atherton, California and am a rising sophomore at Harvard College studying Government. Outside of class, I call basketball games for the student radio station and debate with the Harvard Political Union. I’m a total politics and economics junkie, and I also love rap music, HBO dramas, and modern literature and art. I’m really excited to contribute to Slow Boring this summer and join the community!

Feel free to say hi in the comments! On to today’s post…

Last week, Richard Reeves noted polling data that shows “fewer than half of Gen Z men think that ‘feminism has made the world a better place,’” a finding that he says “we should all take pretty seriously.” Brad Wilcox of the Institute for Family Studies called it “striking new evidence young men in America are moving Right.”

It’s certainly an interesting finding. At the same time, one difficulty with polling interesting or novel questions is that it can be difficult to contextualize the results. Here, it’s not really clear what people mean by “feminism” or to what extent different people mean different things. I doubt someone like Nikki Haley would describe herself as a feminist. But from the vantage point of the “Mad Men” era, I think the idea of a married mother running for state legislature, winning, becoming governor, becoming UN Ambassador, and then running for president would very much seem like a feminist success story. A 25-year-old and a 75-year-old are likely to have very different perspectives, not so much on whether women should be able to have successful careers in politics as on whether this is what “feminism” means.

Drilling down into more specific questions about attitudes toward gender roles, the youngest cohort of men actually looks like it’s the most egalitarian.

And if you look at broader measures of partisanship and ideology, I think the youngest cohort of men is also the most left-wing. The whole Bernie Bro Discourse feels like it happened in the Stone Age at this point, but the perception that Sanders’ supporters were very young on average was correct. Many of those supporters, as it happens, were women, and the idea that it was all “bros” was nonsense. But it’s also not true that left-wing politics is all young women — we weren’t hallucinating the young male leftists. In the contemporary United States, women are (on average) to the left of men, and younger people are (on average) to the left of older people. This is all pretty clear in the data and pretty unsurprising.

What I am surprised by is the prevalence of the misperception that there’s some bloc of young male rightists red-pilled by social media. One reason for that is that it does look like the gender gap may be largest in the youth cohort. In other words, it’s not that young men are more conservative than older men, but that they are further right relative to young women than older men are relative to their peers. But another is the fascination with a newish cohort of male influencers and digital media personalities that I think tends to lack relevant context in terms of overall social trends.

As I’ve said before, the best source of information on how demographic groups actually vote is Catalist’s “What Happened” series that comes out months after Election Day. From a pure discourse standpoint, this is much worse than an insta-analysis based on exit polls. But from an accuracy standpoint, taking the time to match results with voter file information gets much closer to the truth. Their “What Happened in 2022?” article doesn’t offer age-by-gender splits, but they were kind enough to share that information with Slow Boring.

As you can see, the youngest group of men, though less liberal than young women, is well to the left not only of older men but of older women as well.

Among under-30 men, House Democrats got 58% of the two-party vote.

Back in 2008, House Democrats won 55% of the national two-party vote, which was good enough for a 257-178 majority. In 2022, the national average for Democrats was 48% of the vote. So young men are 10 points more Democratic than the national average — they voted on a landslide scale for House Democrats.

The obverse of this is that older women are fairly conservative, albeit less conservative than men. It’s not like the 51-49 GOP tilt of female senior citizens reveals a massively rightwing voter bloc, but seniors are much more numerous in the electorate than under-30s, so even a narrow GOP win with that group carries a lot of weight. It’s also contrary to the rhetorical aspirations of the modern-day Democratic Party, which argues that it is defending women’s rights and protecting senior citizens’ economic interests.

Of course people are aware that conservative women exist. But the political world always manifests too little interest in what old people think relative to their objective scale in the electorate, and older women in particular tend to be overlooked in all kinds of contexts. The digital disruption of the news media has created a big blind spot here. Back when I worked at Vox, there were stretches when I was the oldest person on the editorial team. And even though I no longer flatter myself by thinking I’m even slightly young, the fact is that I am younger than the median voter. A lot of what happens in the media is middle-aged people reacting to youth trends and young people reacting to middle-aged people, with the thoughts and ideas of older folks just kept off-stage. In terms of political trends, though, really the most neglected topic has been the rightward shift of senior citizens over the past several cycles. That’s the reason the influx of very left-wing young voters hasn’t delivered consistent majorities for Democrats. But it’s also transformed the policy debate since Republicans now count on landslide margins among retirees to win races.

Back to young men, though — this is a liberal group of people. But I think people’s social lives are pretty age-stratified, so young men appear conservative to young women because young women are the most politically lopsided group of all.

That said, there are lots of issues in politics. One reason the youngest cohort is so Democratic-leaning is that young people in the U.S. are much more ethnically diverse than senior citizens. Perhaps young men have very progressive views on racial justice or economics that offset supposedly anti-feminist opinions?

The poll result that got Reeves talking was this chart from Equimundo’s “State of American Men” survey, which slices people into very small cohorts. He was showing that it’s the very youngest men — those under the age of 24 — who are least likely to specifically endorse feminism.

That’s interesting, but as Alice Evans points out, this very same survey asks a bunch of questions about specific ideas related to gender roles and finds that the youngest cohort is the furthest left.

I think the small samples here and the lack of a long-term trend on this question make it hard to interpret.

If you look at long-term information from the General Social Survey, you get a clearer sense of change over time. Back in 1972, for example, only 38% of over-65 respondents said they approved of married women working outside the home, but it was already at 77% approval with under-35s. By 1998, those old hard-core traditionalists were mostly dead, and support was so high in all age cohorts (69% for the elderly, 84% for the young) that they stopped asking the question in 21st-century surveys. I think it’s perhaps challenging for younger people to understand that this was the subject of live social controversy once upon a time and that the “feminist” position back then was just the position everyone agrees with now.

Equimundo talks about how a large minority of today’s young men are influenced by “manosphere” internet figures. These men were obviously not influential in the lives of young men in the past because they didn’t exist. But it’s important to think about their emergence with a realistic image of the past in mind.

Some people seem to view the existence of an audience for this kind of content as evidence that fringe views are becoming more influential. But I mostly think it shows that certain kinds of raunchy and misogynistic tropes have become more marginal.

For example, some algorithmic demon at Warner Bros. Discovery recently suggested to me that I might enjoy an old police procedural, “Cold Case,” that premiered 20 years ago. It turns out I actually did like the show. It also made me a bit curious what, if any, contemporaneous coverage the show received.

Here’s Tom Shales’ 2003 review of the show for The Washington Post:

    Kathryn Morris warms the heart of “Cold Case” and should do the same for every human being who watches the show. It's hardly a heartwarming proposition, except for her presence -- another morbid drama about murder and torture and all the other horrible things that make prime time crime time. Though it's politically incorrect to use such a term, Morris is the Cold Case Cutie who takes the show to another, and better, level.

    Unusually violent and raw for a Sunday-night-at-8 network show, “Cold Case” premieres tomorrow on Channel 9 by borrowing a page from Dick Wolf's book. He's the “Law & Order” impresario who likes stories ripped, as it were, from the headlines. The first “cold case” that is re-opened on the CBS show is more than mildly reminiscent of the Michael Skakel case, a rich boy with prestige connections who seems to have killed a girl friend and gotten away with it.

    Morris plays Lilly Rush, a Philadelphia police detective who sort of stumbles onto this new beat, digging up old dirt in order to close unsolved murder cases, and finds she's very good at it. The investigation phase requires finesse and compassion, and Morris has no trouble at all conveying those qualities. She's the most beautiful of the new breed of female crime fighters on TV, but she departs from the dark-and-brooding stereotype.

We have way less front-and-center male sex brain in mainstream media than we did 20 years ago — this is a very paint-by-numbers police procedural in a world where Hollywood is casting good-looking women for all kinds of roles, but Shales thinks it’s really important to let us know that he particularly has the hots for Kathryn Morris.

That’s in large part because, over time, there was a real effort led by women working in digital media to shame this kind of horn-dog journalism that used to be very prevalent in profile writing. It’s also because the economics of the print magazine bundle worked differently than digital media. Sexy photos of attractive women are a good way to sell magazines, but the magazine business is about selling ads — ideally ads for high-end products — so it made sense for GQ and Esquire to bundle prurient content with more high-minded stuff to provide advertisers with the kind of adjacency that they like. But we also had a different political logic back in the 20th century, where the dominant view was that prudishness was a right-wing sentiment and anything non-prudish was ipso facto progressive. This has really flipped around in recent years, which I hear frequently lamented by Gen X men who feel alienated from the contemporary left.

But the cause of that realignment, as you can clearly see in this Public Religion Research Institute data on religious affiliation over time, is that the country has become dramatically more secular.

The online manosphere, with its brand of secular, lecherous anti-feminism, invokes a lot of concepts tied to evolutionary psychology, which can play as right-wing in a world where a majority of Americans now endorse the theory of evolution. But back in the Bush years, we were having big political arguments about whether evolution should be taught in schools.

While young men trending right looks like a fake trend to me, the youth cohort does have a large partisan gender gap, and it is maybe slightly bigger than the gender gap in older cohorts.

Meanwhile, the national political debate is growing more polarized — 70% of Democrats say they wouldn’t date a Trump voter. Women now have higher educational attainment than men, and the gender pay gap exists overwhelmingly among parents rather than childless young people. Notwithstanding those trends, women prefer to date educated men and men who earn more money than they do. This whole pattern of facts adds up to a rough romantic outlook for young conservative men, especially if they’re not rich.

And that sets up a combustible situation in which angry young right-wing men with anti-feminist grievances may be an increasingly significant part of the social and cultural landscape.

It’s an interesting situation and one that’s worth paying attention to — especially in terms of how we can generate partisan politics that’s less dominated by extremists and communicate more clearly to men the value of diligently pursuing training and job opportunities with upward mobility. But the actual situation is almost certainly not that younger men are, in the aggregate, more conservative than they used to be, more conservative than older men, or even more conservative than older women. In broad electoral terms, it’s the relatively conservative views of old people combined with their very heavy presence in the electorate that is the key driver of outcomes.