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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29426 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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I think the degree of gender polarization in the United States is quite overstated. According to Pew, from April 2024, there's a 5-8 percentage point gap between men and women in terms of party identification (men are 46D-52R compared to women's 51D-44R). Compare this to the 20 point gap in your example. The Pew article also provides a historical graph of this identification going back to 1994. It's hard to look at the graph and see a consistent trend of gender polarization. Instead it seems to me the electorate as a whole tends to move as one, men and women becoming more Democrat or more Republican in tandem. There are also periods where voters have been even more polarized by gender than they are today. That 5-8 point gap today was 10 points in 1994, mostly due to men being even more Republican then.

ETA:

Lest people think this is a young-person phenomenon the data Pew has shows precisely the opposite. Men and women under 50 are united in being majority Democrats, while men and women over 50 are the ones polarized by gender.

Here ya go:

https://www.axios.com/2024/02/16/gen-z-gender-gap-political-left-women

Limit it to 18-29 year olds (the ones who will be defining politics over the next couple decades) and there is in fact a sizeable gap that emerged in the last decade.

Here's the data source:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/609914/women-become-liberal-men-mostly-stable.aspx

It gets worse if you selected out unmarried women from the Pew study you cite.

Women who have never been married are three times as likely to associate with the Democratic Party as with the Republican Party (72% vs. 24%).

WSJ did an article on it.

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/men-women-vote-republican-democrat-election-7f5f726c

We discussed the whole issue about a month ago.

https://www.themotte.org/post/1100/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/235167?context=8#context

THERE'S your gender polarization.

Notice that fewer people are getting married.

Notice that the median age of first marriage is rising

There's a couple different ways to interpret all this, but I doubt this supports your argument that things aren't getting more polarized, and it surely suggests that this gets worse in the next 10 years.

This is basically the thread ended right? The imagined scenario doesn't even exist as the gender politics gap hasn't changed and has deceased if anything, age is apparently where the big gap is actually.

Admittedly, the stated scenario of:

Imagine that the electorate of a democratic country (call it Exemplavania) comprises two political groups, A and B, constituting 40% and 60% of the electorate respectively. As a result, Exemplavania's government is run largely in accordance with the interests of group B. However, group A is significantly more powerful than group B in terms of its capacity for violence. Under what circumstances is this arrangement sustainable?

seems to apply about as well to a country divided politically along age lines as along gender lines. And if the US continues to have an aging population with declining fertility, the %s might not be that far off, either.

Interestingly partisan stratification by age is also (according to Pew's data) a pretty recent phenomenon. According to their partisanship of generational cohorts it basically didn't matter what age range you were in during the 90's, the distribution of Democrats and Republicans was very close. By 2009 the 20-29 cohort was significantly more Democrat but the others were still pretty even. Then by 2023 the 24-33 cohort was even more Democrat and all the 54+ demographics were significantly more Republican (proportional with age).

seems to apply about as well to a country divided politically along age lines as along gender lines.

I mean if that's the case then the age thing applies as much as the gender thing as far as being a proxy for war goes. A 63+ year-old American man is not going to be any more useful in a war than the average woman.

Wrong. The numbers are only that even because of old people. 80 percent of Gen Z women are liberal and 70 percent of Gen-Z men are conservative.

Do you have a citation for that? According to Gallup men in the 18-29 age range as of 2023 (not quite entirely GenZ) break down their identification as 29/44/25 between Conservative/Moderate/Liberal. This is compared to women's 21/37/40 split of the same. A PRRI report purporting to be specifically of GenZ also has GenZ men as quite liberal (38% identify as liberal compared to 31% who identify as conservative) though not as liberal as GenZ women (47% liberal to 24% conservative).

I will point out that self-identification is not an amazing barometer of political division, because "what counts as moderate" is highly subjective.

A bunch of people confuse "The vast majority of young conservatives are male" with "the vast majority of young men are conservatives."

It’s also probably true that a significant majority of loud young conservatives are men, and loud young liberals are women, but groups analogous to the “silent majority” are silent for a reason.

I am reminded for example of a recent poll on X/Twitter about presidential preference Elon posted which Trump won handily. This tells you quite a lot about Twitter users that follow and engage with Elon’s posts and not much about the United States’ actual voting population, which people in the comments crowing about “sample size” seem to have completely missed.

As I've said before, a lot of of the overreaction about young men turning right is from two sources -

1.) Right-leaning people hoping that they're not doomed in the long run 2.) Left-leaning people shocked there are still young right-wing people.

The other thing is 14-17 year old boys are pretty terrible for somewhat sympathetic reasons (ie. they're horny with no real outlet), and the vast majority of them that get girlfriends (which most still do) calm down the first time their girlfriend makes fun of them.

Also, I think a lot of 'redpill' content is being consumed by non-American male audiences, which also shift things.

Exactly, polling is hard. Random sampling is hard.

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