James Carville, Bill Clinton’s famed pollster and political strategist, did not mince words last month when he, not for the first time, fired off a salvo at the ailing body of the Democratic Party. In an interview with Jonathan Capehart of The Washington Post, Carville offered an indictment of “NPR-sounding” “female preachiness”: “We know what’s best for you, don’t eat hamburgers, don’t watch football, don’t drink beer. Guess where our young male number is going? In the toilet, alright? Because Democratic messaging, I’m sorry, is too feminine, it just is.”
Not even a reminder from Capehart to be mindful that we are living in the 21st century made any impression on the Ragin’ Cajun, whose Southern drawl makes speaking and understanding postmodernese too difficult. In national elections, only binary sex matters.
Now that Kamala Harris has been elevated to the position of Democratic Party standard-bearer, the problem with “female preachiness” can only become magnified.
According to The Economist, in many countries across multiple continents, young women and men do not see ideologically eye to eye. The under-thirties are living through an ideological gender divergence. “Gen Z is two generations, not one”, says the Financial Times.
American Gallup data shows that after decades where the sexes divided roughly across liberal and conservative worldviews, women aged 18 to 29 are now 15 percent more liberal than their male contemporaries. And all of this happened in the last six years.
But this story is longer than the last six years. When Pew Research began polling party support in the U.S. in 1994, women were 37 percent Democratic, 31 percent Republican, and 27 percent independent. By 2023, women aged 18 to 29 were Democratic by 63 percent, to males’ 50 percent.
“We have a huge male problem all across the board, but particularly, I hate this term, but I’ll use it, ‘communities of colour…,’” Carville added. He knows whereof he speaks. A recent New York Times/Siena poll showed that “Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden are essentially tied among 18-to-29-year-olds and Hispanic voters, even though each group gave Mr. Biden more than 60 percent of their vote in 2020.”
The economist Tyler Cowen recently summarized the issue of gender divergence on his blog thusly: “The ongoing feminization of society has driven more and more men, including black and Latino men, into the Republican camp. The Democratic Party became too much the party of unmarried women.” (I presume that in the unmarried he includes women who are no longer married.)
Going even further back, Chris Matthews, the canceled host of the MSNBC political talk show “Hardball,” popularized the notion in the early 1990s that the Democratic Party was the “Mommy Party” and the Republicans were the “Daddy Party.” As he explained it then, “Democrats want to hug you and kiss you and tell you everything will be alright. Republicans want to spank you and send you to bed without your supper to toughen you up.”
Today the gap manifests itself differently. As Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have argued in The Coddling of the American Mind, much of the conflict between men and women has to do with the idea of safetyism. Not surprisingly, women want the state to be more generous with guarantees of safety, both physical and emotional.
It’s also interesting to consider the difference between how differently men and women respond to abstraction. In a recent Abacus poll, more men pegged “the economy’ as a source of concern, while more women were preoccupied with “housing affordability.” It’s roughly the same thing, but the gap also suggests a different linguistic prism of looking at the world.
Thirty years on, the Democratic Moms are separated from Republican Dads. It’s no longer about how to raise kids when still living together under one roof. Now they hate each other and try to inflict as much pain on the other party as possible, while claiming that no forgiveness or understanding of the former mate is possible.
The political splintering between young men and women shows up in other countries. Germany has a 30-point gap between increasingly conservative young men and their progressive female contemporaries. In the UK, the gap is 25 points. In Poland last year, almost half of men aged 18-21 supported the libertarian-right, nationalist, antisemitic Konfederacja, compared to just a sixth of young women of the same age.
In Canada, the gender gap among under-35 women last year couldn’t be more pronounced. According to a 2023 Angus Reid poll, 44 percent intended to vote for the NDP, 21 percent wanted to stay with the Liberals and 20 percent wanted the Conservatives.
A year later, the measure of progressivity among women became more confusing, as their view of Justin Trudeau took a beating. According to Abacus, Trudeau now stands at negative 29 percent with female voters, and a whopping negative 42 percent with male voters. This, of course, does not suggest that women are less progressive because of that. It’s just a case that Justin Trudeau and his party overstayed their welcome even with voters who could not be happier to vote for the “because it’s 2015” Liberal candidate.
Farmer Jeff Dinning, of Strathroy, who is hauling corn to an elevator parks his tractor trailer to cast his ballot at the polling station in the village of Kerwood, Ont., Monday, Oct. 19, 2015. Dave Chidley/The Canadian Press.
A year ago, I met a woman in her late thirties, a reporter working for a small newspaper in Ontario, who seemed quite ill at ease with the possibility that Justin Trudeau might lose the next federal election to Pierre Poilievre.
“How’s that possible? Trudeau is so much better looking than Poilievre,” she said. This was just around the time when Poilievre changed his look by dropping his glasses and appearing increasingly tieless. Poilievre said his wife, Anaida, thinks he “looks better without glasses so I have to keep her happy first and foremost.” Let’s be honest, had Anaida wanted her husband to look cooler, she could’ve accomplished that a long time ago. The new look, however, only materialized shortly after the party narrowly held the Conservative stronghold, London-area riding of Oxford, Ontario, while putting up a poor showing in a potentially winnable suburban seat, Winnipeg South Centre, in the 2023 June byelections.
Of course, this does not mean that only female voters react to a politician’s physical attributes. A group of Dutch scientists analyzing American elections found that taller candidates received more votes than shorter ones roughly two-thirds of the time.
The above-mentioned Abacus poll shows that the gender gap in voting intentions is quite slim compared to the U.S. Liberals enjoy a 1 percentage point advantage among female voters (22 percent versus 23 percent), while Conservatives have at this point a 3 point advantage among males (44 percent versus 41 percent). And there is also a 3 percentage point gap among NDP voters in favour of women (20 percent versus 17 percent).
The “war of the sexes,” as it used to be called, is certainly documented but an insufficiently discussed undercurrent in political life across the globe. According to a PEW poll, 38 percent of men who identify as Republican say “women’s gains have come at the expense of men.” According to a Brookings study, 45 percent of men aged 18 to 29 say they face gender-based discrimination.
Not surprisingly, a significant share of a generation of men who grew up surrounded by the discourse about the importance of gender equality do not feel that it is inclusive of them. This would be a most useful reason for feminists, who cannot conceive of female advances that are anything but good for everyone involved, to reconsider the universal applicability of the “happy wife, happy life” truism. Instead they should take seriously the idea of how young men, especially, are shaped by their lived experience, and not only focus on women’s purity of intent.
More than any time in the recent past, politics is pushing men and women apart. Young men and women are less connected and committed to each other. The younger they are, the more separate their virtual universes. The well-documented fact that Gen Z are having less sex with each other than any previously studied generation completes the picture of the contemporary alienation of genders from each other.
Pollster Daniel Cox aptly suggested that “politics did not create the current gender rift, but it is making things worse. Men and women who have ever been hurt or mistreated by the opposite sex more readily make their pain public, and their personal grievances become politicized. The consequences will not be pretty.”
Women can sense when they are being trivialized by men. But similarly, men can sense —perhaps not as acutely—that they are perceived as punching bags for standing in women’s way towards a more perfect existence. They are then making political choices with this top of mind.
