Why are young men abandoning the political left?

Why is it that young men seem to be abandoning the political left in a big, big way? This massive gap between men and women has started to emerge politically. And so much so that some recent data which will, if you're watching on YouTube, we'll put up on the screen here for you. So much so that there has become a 20% spread or gap between Gen Z men and women in terms of how they vote. So that's men and women between the ages of 18 to 29. So there's a 20% gap in men voting more and more conservative and women voting more and more democratic. And if you can't see this chart, what you'll know or what I'll tell you now is that this is not just happening in the United States. This is happening in the uk this is happening in Germany. This is happening in South Korea. This is happening in countries like China. This is. This is a global phenomenon that has started to emerge over the last several years and has become more and more pronounced. Now. There are a number of things that we can get into that are playing into this. College institutions being largely attended by women, I think is a big part of it, which I'll get into. The fact that more and more young men are single while young women are not. They are dating, right? Like 60%, 60 to 60% of young men are single, while only 30 to 33% of young women are single because they are dating more financially secure older men, men that have a little bit more life experience, men that are maybe a little bit more emotionally stable or psychologically stable, and they're not actually dating men in their age to find those men or to incentivize those men who would normally want to work hard to have a relationship with women their age. And this leads to all kinds of issues. But. But I'm actually gonna front load my thoughts on this instead of laying out the data. My thoughts on this are as follows. I think one of the biggest problems that is contributing to this are actually the narratives and the stories that each political party are telling men. So if you look at the progressives, if you look at the liberals, there is this large and very strong story that men are toxic. And there's some progressives, there are some liberals that go so far as to say that, that boys, that young men, that young boys are born with toxic behaviors baked into them, that masculinity has these inherent toxic things that you have to look for and flush out and kill off within you. And for me, this is wildly unhealthy and it's unhealthy because it's akin to the Christian notion of original sin, that you are born with this fundamental flaw in you, that you are born and because you exist, you are innately sinful. And so if you are a man in the Western world today, if you are born a boy and a man, you are inherently sinful. There is something inherently sinful within you that you have to go and be a detective for and root out and systematically try and kill off within society and within yourself. And for a lot of guys, this pushes them away from the political left because the sort of progressive movement, wherever it is most dominant, makes it very clear that men aren't really wanted there, that men aren't really valued in those systems and in those spaces. And if they're going to show up there, they have to show up how they've been told. And I get why that's happening. I understand that. I don't think we need to go into it in depth. But this notion and this narrative also pushes men away from the compassion and the empathy that they are often looking for, which come as a part of progressive values. Right? Part of progressivism and part of progressive values is that it tells people that you should have compassion for yourself, that it's okay for you to not need to fit into this tight, rigid, conformed bodies box. Which brings me to the other side. On the other hand, you have conservatives who are very quick to tell young men that they need to fit into this very rigid box and that if they don't, they are somehow a beta cuck or a fem soy boy or whatever else, whatever other name gets slung at them because they don't fit into the very specific four dimensional square that is expected in some more traditional conservative spheres. And so for a lot of young men, when they weigh the options between these two things, right, when they look out and they see the hyper political left, right, the more sort of very liberal and progressive left and the narrative that they're espouting that there's something fundamentally wrong with you. You know, to be a man is to be toxic and to have toxicity baked into you. And you got to hunt down that toxicity. And you constantly have to be aware of it. And if you step over any line, you're going to be deleted from every, you know, social media platform on the planet and you will have angry keyboard warriors destroying your life indefinitely. And they look at that side and they look at the other side that says, you know, bring order to your life, don't be chaotic. You know, there's A certain way to live, have structure, you know, don't, you know, don't do this, don't do that, or you'll be a beta cocker, you'll be a, you know, soy boy or whatever. Most guys are going to take the conservative values. Most guys are going to take that more conservative orientation because it's not saying, hey, because you're a man, there's something wrong with you. There's actually a celebration of, of masculinity, of being a man. There's a celebration of what men bring to the table. And by the way, this is not me advocating for the conservative party. I just want to make that super freaking clear. This is not me saying that I've even ever voted conservative. I am simply saying that as a young man in today's world, I get why so many are, you know, flipping the bird to the progressive end of the spectrum and moving more towards the conservative. And because at the very least they're not being shamed and diminished for who they are fundamentally. And I think there's a whole bunch of other pieces that we could go into there, but I think that's one of the biggest pieces that progressives need to stop telling men that they are fundamentally flawed, broken or toxic. And conservatives need to stop telling men that they need to fit into some hyper rigid box Other otherwise you are flawed or broken. Right? It's like if you step out of the box, you're flawed or broken. And then on the other side, it's like if you step into the box, there's something inherently wrong with you. So those are the main things that I wanted to say. Some of the things that I think contribute to this, the big one, is, you know, the single greatest predictor of whether you vote Democratic or, you know, vote liberal or vote conservative, is whether or not you have a four year college degree. And that is an interesting thing because as you will have known, if you've tuned in some of my past content or you know, read the news over the last year or two, colleges are being overrun by women. They're being dominated by women. Again, I'm not saying that that's a bad thing or wrong or anything like that. You don't need a college education as a man to be successful or have value or have fulfillment in life. I have a degree in something that I will probably never use for the rest of my life. I don't regret going to college, but I certainly didn't need it in order to get to where I am today. To say all that is to say that colleges for a large part are producing more and more liberals, more and more progressives. And who's going to colleges are women, it's not men. And again, for a large part, if you talk to young men about why they're not going to college, they're going to tell you things like, well, logically it doesn't make sense because it's an absorb, an absorbent amount of money that I have to pay for to go and get a four year degree to then go get a job that's, you know, going to pay me 50 to $70,000 a year. I'm going to be paying off that $150,000 worth of debt forever. Or I can go get a job that makes me 50 to $70,000 a year right freaking now. And I don't need the college degree to have a track or a path in life. But on the other hand, I think what else men would say is that they do not feel welcome in those spaces because colleges have taken a turn towards pushing political ideologies, specifically of the extreme left. It is not uncommon and it's not uncommon for us to see headlines and you know, media outlets talking about how conservative voices are shut down and yelled down and yelled out of college spaces which are meant to be apolitical, right? They are meant to be non political places where you as a young person, a young individual, go to learn more social skills, right? You have some level of social polishing that is supposed to happen in a college institution, but you're also supposed to learn critical thinking, which means that you are supposed to learn the trait and the skill set of learning to be in relationship with people that you disagree with. And you're supposed to learn the ability to critically think about problems and issues regardless of whether you agree with the other person on the other side. It is not meant to be a censorship space and an echo chamber where you just go and hear your opinion repeated and, and getting a pat on the back for saying what you believe in, that's not what they're supposed to be. But they have become more and more and more institutions that reinforce this very, very extreme progressive ideology that a lot of young men do not feel a part of, that they do not want to be a part of. And so they move in other directions. So that's one of the big pieces is the amount of young men that are not even going to college any longer and the, the volume of going to college and graduating from colleges. And then lastly, when you couple this with the fact that most young men are Single. Right. That Same age demographic, 18 to 29, that same age demographic that is voting more and more and more conservative. Those young men are largely single, and the young women in that same age bracket are largely not single because those young women are dating predominantly older men, right? They're dating men that maybe are more financially secure or more stable in some capacity, or maybe they're dating some guy that is, you know, dating four or five women at a time, and she's in a situationship, and she thinks that she's in a relationship with him while she's really not. But regardless of that, you know, you have some of the data showing that by 2030, some of the predictive models are showing that upwards of 45% of women are predicted to be childless and single by 2030. Now, this is a problem societally. This is a systematic problem within our culture. And the reason why it's a problem is that you can see this massive gender war is pushing men and women apart. And so much so that you. You know, some of the data that's out there has shown that people refuse, large amounts of people, refuse to date anybody with an opposing political view. Right? So if I'm liberal and you're conservative, you know, a lot of people wouldn't do that. They wouldn't entertain the idea of being with somebody who has a different political affiliation because those political affiliations have become so far apart. And the dangerous part of all of this is that we have attached gender roles and gender expectations to political ideologies. And I think that those things need to be systematically unraveled. Right? It's like, you can be a man and you can be a great man on either side. You can be a great man and be progressive. You can be a great man and be conservative. You can be a great woman and be conservative or progressive. But there has become this notion that if you are a man and you are conservative and you're a woman that's on the left, that's like a red flag, right? It's like, what was the thing? It's like 52% of women said that listening to Joe Rogan is a red flag. It's like, if you're a woman and listen to my show, I. I listen to Joe Rogan. Is that a red flag? Does that make me somehow flawed all of a sudden? I mean, it's. It's insane to see where some of this rhetoric is getting us. You know, some of this rhetoric is so asinine and so charged and so emotional and so polarizing that it's just driving people apart who ultimately want and need to be together. And where this leads, one possible outcome is that we see two political parties full of single angry people. One will have single angry men, one will have single angry women, and both of them need one another. And so we have to start to come across the political divide. We have to start to find coherence and understanding. Regardless of whether or not you went and got a four year college degree, whether or not you want to work a 9 to 5 or you want to build your own business, whether you vote progressive or conservative, we have to find some commonalities across the border of our political affiliations. And if we're not able to do that, I mean, for some people, they are literally going to sacrifice relationships for this. They are literally going to choose loneliness and isolation over the opportunity to find somebody that they can love and do life with and maybe build a family, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Right? Part of the human experience is that we have to, we have to be able to critically think about things, to find compromises so that we can create coherence within our society. And that ability isn't just about doing that in our society, it's more specifically about being able to do that within our interpersonal relationships. So I know that's maybe a lot to, to digest and to take in, but I think one of the big things that I would encourage you to take away is what I said in the beginning, which is progressives need to stop telling men that they are inherently faulty and conservatives need to stop telling men that they are faulty for stepping outside of the rigid box that they have created and put men in. Curious to hear your thoughts. Comment below. Share this with somebody that you know has a perspective or opinion on it. And until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off.