A new poll on the political leanings of high schoolers is making the rounds. While the results are completely unsurprising, the corporate media pretends to be shocked that 12th grade boys are becoming more conservative. The media resorts to explaining it the only way they know how — racism, sexism and resentment. Perhaps that is itself an explanation of the phenomenon.
The University of Michigan survey shows that 12th grade boys are the most conservative they’ve ever been, while 12th grade girls are the most liberal. Boys were about twice as likely to identify as conservative than liberal, a recent trend to emerge in a survey tracking the political leanings of high schoolers since 1975.
While the girls express higher rates of liberalism (30 percent) than the boys do conservatism (23 percent), it is the latter that the media focuses on as some strange — potentially dangerous —anomaly warranting further study. After laying out the findings in a straightforward fashion, The Hill shifts gears to explain them.
Its explanation of girls’ liberalism is hard to argue with — Donald Trump’s rhetoric and sex scandals pushed “millions of women” to embrace “liberal politics in response.” However, it must be noted that there is a subtle difference between Trump mobilizing women himself versus women being mobilized by the media filter they consumed Trumpism through. Would women have had the same views if the media didn’t constantly reinforce the message that hating Trump was a prerequisite to certify one’s feminist bona fides? Likely not.
On the other hand, The Hill’s explanation of boys’ conservatism is either disingenuous, or at a minimum, self-deceiving. The analysis assumes that this could only be due to misogyny — Trump’s “overt hypermasculinity” brought young men into the conservative camp in opposition to women and minorities.
The real reason boys are drawn to conservatism, according to the Hill, is because the left “overreach[ed] in seeking redress for injustices involving race, gender and sexual orientation.” Young white men “especially” resent that the “progressive agenda seeks equality in gender and race.” This implies that young men are drawn into becoming “defenders of the patriarchy” because they want to reinforce their own superior privilege in the race-gender hierarchy that liberals imagine exists in modern America.
The Hill speaks to liberal young men at elite DC colleges to explain this theory and unpack the conservativism of their peers. Ethan Benn, a seemingly left-wing student at George Washington University, described the supposedly nefarious conspiracy. “You could be watching a video about the latest Star Wars movie, and then the next video would be, ‘Here’s how women are ruining Star Wars,'” he said. Even if they aren’t looking for it, he noted it’s easy for young men “to get sucked into a very conservative sphere of politics and media.”
The Hill fails to consider the much more neutral explanation that perhaps young men are drawn to conservative figures because they are the only ones addressing the very real problems that young men face under a feminist regime.
The wage gap, the dream gap, educational and healthcare gaps — immeasurable time, money and energy is poured into achieving gender equity in the U.S. The Biden administration even released a national strategy for it. While women overwhelmingly outperform men in educational attainment, countless initiatives exist for “Women in STEM” but little effort goes into figuring out why men are falling behind overall. Even on sexual ethics, feminism has called the shots for quite some time, with a cottage industry of administrators on campus and throughout corporate America employed to root out so-called toxic masculinity.
All of American society is geared toward telling young men that their natural instincts are bad, and they must be more like women. And then the media wonders why “Democrats have a man problem.” It is no surprise that young men are drawn to conservative figures like Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson — they all speak to the reality that young men experience but are told they must ignore. This has nothing to do with misogyny; insisting otherwise only reveals the left’s own bigotry.
However, for many Democrats, this is still easier than facing the issue head on, which would require re-evaluating their own policy and ideological preferences. For elite liberals committed to the “future is female” strain of feminism, admitting the downsides of their governing credo would suggest a more balanced approach. The truth is that they likely know the pitfalls but still don’t want to pivot. They would rather tie their electoral chances to more young women becoming liberal and continue to demonize the boys who resist.
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