Weekly Digest: The Gender Political Divide
Steep fall in white military recruitment, unstable childhoods, abusive mothers and more in this week's roundup.
Welcome to my weekly digest for January 26, 2024, with the best articles from around the web and a roundup of my recent writings and appearances.
My new book Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture, will be officially released on Tuesday.
For those of you who haven’t pre-ordered it already, there’s still time - and I still need your help in getting those pre-sale numbers up to help maximize the book’s impact.
If you aren’t yet sold, check out the first review of the book, which is out in Religion Unplugged.
It’s also your last chance to get some free bonus content for pre-ordering. You’ll also get a free ebook copy of my modern English translation and adaptation of John Owen’s Puritan classic The Mortification of Sin, and a one page chart summing up my three worlds model and more. To claim your free loot, click over to my publisher’s web site.
The Gender Political Divide
The Financial Times has a great piece today on the growing gender divide in politics among Gen Z and younger Millennials Here’s the money chart:
What’s interesting here is that while young men have become more conservative, except in South Korea, they are not really conservative on net. As I discussed in newsletter #75, South Korea has an extremely toxic gender divide. Other countries are moving in that direction, however.
From the FT:
In the US, Gallup data shows that after decades where the sexes were each spread roughly equally across liberal and conservative world views, women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries. That gap took just six years to open up.
Germany also now shows a 30-point gap between increasingly conservative young men and progressive female contemporaries, and in the UK the gap is 25 points. In Poland last year, almost half of men aged 18-21 backed the hard-right Confederation party, compared to just a sixth of young women of the same age.
Outside the west, there are even more stark divisions. In South Korea there is now a yawning chasm between young men and women, and it’s a similar situation in China. In Africa, Tunisia shows the same pattern. Notably, in every country this dramatic split is either exclusive to the younger generation or far more pronounced there than among men and women in their thirties and upwards.
White Americans Bailing Out of the Military
A Military.com article on the steep decline in white military recruitment generated a lot of discussion last week.
The Army's recruiting of white soldiers has dropped significantly in the last half decade, according to internal data reviewed by Military.com, a decline that accounts for much of the service's historic recruitment slump that has become the subject of increasing concern for Army leadership and Capitol Hill.
…
A total of 44,042 new Army recruits were categorized by the service as white in 2018, but that number has fallen consistently each year to a low of 25,070 in 2023, with a 6% dip from 2022 to 2023 being the most significant drop. No other demographic group has seen such a precipitous decline, though there have been ups and downs from year to year.
By my calculation, that’s a 43% decline in white enlistment since 2018.
If there’s one area where the system is still heavily dependent on human capital from red America, it’s the military. The US military still needs conservative white kids who are willing to die or get maimed in the service of the goals of elites who hate them and their values.
Presumably many of these folks avoiding the military are conservative evangelicals. Believe me, the word is out that the military is not what it used to be and a hostile space for conservatives. When I’ve raised this point at conferences in the last couple years, I’ve been amazed how many former service members told me they are recommending against the military. That even includes former special forces guys.
Back in November I noted an Army ad that featured traditional military values and an all white cast. They clearly know they have a huge problem and are trying to dupe young white men about what they are actually about these days.
Best of the Web
In a follow-up to last week’s digest, there were a slew of additional articles published about polyamory this week in the NY Post, USA Today, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal and probably other that I missed.
Richard Reeves: The case for male spaces - I was very pleased to see Reeves come out in favor of this.
Zach Goldberg at the Manhattan Institute posted this interesting chart of sex differences in “big five personality traits and their facets.”
WSJ: How Should We Treat Abusive Mothers?
That mothers sometimes harm or even kill their children is simply too shocking for many of us to bear. Yet we miss the chance to protect future victims when potential abusers pass unnoticed because they defy the stereotype. Opportunities for rehabilitation are also lost when abusive women are regarded as wicked villains who are beyond help. Women, of course, are too complicated to be pigeonholed as either selfless caregivers or heartless monsters. As the Gypsy Rose Blanchard story makes plain, our idealization of motherhood and reluctance to see women as abusers can harm both perpetrators and victims.
Rob Henderson: Being Poor Doesn't Have the Same Effect as Living in Chaos - Not only is this a great newsletter on its headline topic, it is really great in talking about the role of genes and the environment. There’s a big section of the online right that wants to reduce everything to genes. But even in a purely Darwinian context, genes are about fitness in a particular environment. Hence, even if genes are important, the environment can be ultimately determinant of many outcomes. He uses the great example of obesity, which is clearly heavily influenced by genes. But obesity soared at a rate that can’t be explained by changes in genes, showing that changes in the environment must be the primarily cause.
WSJ: Why Americans Have Lost Faith in the Value of College
NYT: When Public Health Loses the Public
American Mind: Jesus Christ, Jordan Peterson - What does Jordan Peterson actually believe?
American Reformer: What is education really for?
New Content and Media Mentions
I was a guest on the Two Mikes podcast this week, talking about all things Carmel, Indiana.
My podcast guest this week was Alexandra Hudson, talking about her new book The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves.
Paid subscribers can read the transcript.
You can subscribe to my podcast on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.
New this week:
I’m Not Worthy of This Woman (paid only) - Keeping telling your wife she was a chump for marrying you, and don’t be surprised if she starts believing it.
Christians Are Not Being Persecuted in America - But That Doesn't Mean All Is Well - Evangelicals need to understand the actual dynamics occurring in the United States
Post-Script
1. Relevant to the church, on the gender divide, Ryan Burge has stats suggesting that religiosity is becoming more gender-balanced among young people, as opposed to the long-running female skew. My pet theory is that young women are becoming so liberal that it's contributing to their apostasy by alienating them from the church and its values. I've said before that, in the context of conservative or Republican spaces, the church is going to remain in Neutral or even Positive World for quite a bit longer than in mainstream spaces.
In other words, if you need a title for your sequel, I suggest "Men are from Positive World, Women are from Negative World." Ha!
2. I had been skeptical that the decline in military recruiting was driven primarily by conservatives stepping aside for political reasons (and I still think things like lack of a mission are relevant), but I acknowledge the stats on white recruiting are enough to lend a lot more credence to the idea. It also undermines the claim that issues like obesity and drugs are primarily responsible.
I had pointed out before that recruiting is down a LOT from the Cold War, a 70% decline even from the dark days of 1976, but considering the Army in those days was 80%+ white compared to 44% of new enlistees in 2023, white recruitment over that period has now decreased by something like 80-85%.
The rate at which the gender divide is opening up along ideological lines in multiple countries hints at the possibility of a blow-up at some point. The Korean statistics are shocking. Perhaps the trend will run out of steam or change course, but if it continues to some critical extreme, the emotionally charged nature of the gender divide would likely lead to a massive social transformation.
If I had to put money down on the outcome -- that is, should the trend continue to that critical extreme -- I would bet on the overthrow of feminism. I would certainly celebrate the end of feminism which is bad for men and women alike, but one hopes its demise would be orderly.