|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
America’s political parties are the oldest and third-oldest in the world, and they have competed for votes among a population that has been diverse since colonial times. If you have any doubts about that, consult David Hackett Fischer’s 1989 classic “Albion’s Seed” on how settlers from different parts of the British Isles brought distinctive “folkways” to the different seaboard colonies and the Appalachian backwoods.
Since none of these groups has ever come close to constituting a majority of Americans, the partisan competition has usually been fierce and (except for the brief and misnamed “era of good feelings”) unending. And fluctuating.
Regional differences have long been obvious: Differences between North and South produced the Civil War. But in recent elections, the Midwest has voted more like the South than like the Northeast or the West.
Racial and ethnic differences have often been critical. Black Americans voted almost unanimously Republican, when they were allowed to vote, from the 1860s to the 1930s. Since the 1960s, they have voted almost unanimously Democratic — though that may be changing lately.
And “whites,” treated as a uniform group by many analysts these days, used to have sharp divisions. New England politics for most of the 20th century was a battle, at the ballot box and in birth rates, between Yankee Protestant Republicans and Irish Catholic Democrats.
By the 1990s, evangelical Protestants emerged as a heavily Republican group, and in the 2010s, white college graduates (especially those with post-graduate degrees) as a heavily Democratic group.
And then there is the gender gap, the difference between male and female voters, which became statistically significant in 1980. In the years since, and despite the quip attributed to Henry Kissinger that “there’s too much fraternizing with the enemy,” it has grown wider.
But not uniformly. As American Enterprise Institute’s ace polling expert Karlyn Bowman together with Ruy Teixeira have pointed out, it’s more of a marriage gap.
The exit poll in the almost even 2022 House (Republicans won the popular vote 50% to 47%) shows that married men voted 59% to 39% Republican, and unmarried men also went Republican by a smaller but significant 52% to 45% margin.
Married women, however, also voted Republican by a landslide 56% to 42% margin. So, why was the election so close? Because unmarried women favored Democrats 68% to 31%.
Note that married men and married women both made up 30% of the electorate. But there are a lot more unmarried women voters, 23% of the electorate, than unmarried men, 16%.
That reflects not only longer female lifespans but also female dominance in higher education, with women making up 60% of college and university students these days, and the trend toward later first marriages.
The upshot is that about one-third of Democratic voters are single women, which helps explain, as the Washington Examiner’s Conn Carroll points out, the 2012 Obama “Life of Julia” cartoons, which showed government helping unattached women through life.
In general, women are more risk-averse than men, and thus more supportive of welfare state measures and more reluctant to support military action. They are also, as we have seen on female-dominated campuses, more willing to suppress speech that is seen as irritating or hurtful. “Highly educated women,” as Australian educator Lorenzo Warby writes, “are proving all too willing to trash other people’s freedoms to protect their emotions.”
Surveys show that, after 50 years of feminism, American women are increasingly likely to report themselves as unhappy, a characteristic especially marked in unmarried young liberal women with no religious connection.
Of course, happiness is a subjective condition, perhaps subject to change in definition over time. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion of economist Tyler Cowen that “current political debate in America cannot be understood without the concept of neuroticism — as a formal concept from personality psychology — front and center.”
This finds reflection in Biden-era Democrats’ disguised but firm support for abortion up to the moment of birth (for reasons of “mental health”) and for their eagerness to suppress speech that ran contrary to extreme risk-averseness during the COVID pandemic.
Those with memories ranging back to the 1970s and 1980s will recognize these attitudes as contrary to the positions of liberal Democrats then, including Joe Biden himself, who supported restrictions on late-term abortions and opposed government suppression of dissenting speech.
All of which undercuts the crude feminist view that everything would be better if women’s views prevailed and provides support for the view that engagement, sometimes respectful and sometimes abrasive, between diverse segments — blacks and whites, North and South, Yankees and Irish, married people and single women — provides a better route to sensible policy and a successful nation.
My father and his family are now dead, my mother’s family is down to a male 1st cousin and myself. The cousin is a total push-over cuckold with his long separated wife, and his three daughters. My mother would have been divorced, but her day was the day her husband (my father) died. This was clearly in the cards, but she decided this was the time to end the marriage. My sister dumped her husband for the best gain, and after about twenty years her live-in boyfriend. His money run-out – and so did she.
Yes. the claims of feminism still run deep in these women. It never ends for these types.
I was told that ‘women never lie’ about rape or sexual harassment. Well, I have seen cases of this in my life – but that certainly wasn’t heard. When my sister long-term relationship ended – I was asked what I thought about it, and I said the money ran out – and so did she. All other complains were the same as when the thing had began. Naturally, I am considered wrong. After all – I am a toxic male, and must know that is all I can be. This especially around this bee-hive.
After seeing that my mother was planning her end with me pushed to the bottom of the list (but Not to pay for it), I walked and know the women will be unhappy. It never ends being an victim, and that has been the chief gift to our world with modern feminism.
It never ends. In fact, it grows ever worse. I have watched the women of my family become ever more entitled, and ever more crude and selfish. This to the point of near mindlessness. But, not on my time or on the back of my life.
(A strange thing – we are related to quite of number of 19th century feminists, but – at that time they were able to keep the male-basting somewhat under control. Base on what I have heard of 3rd cousin Lucretia Coffin Mott – at least generally in public.)
Thanks David, very interesting!
Thanks. There are always an human face behind our society’s issues. I am glad I posted this, but almost didn’t as it might seem too personal. However, there it is. The strange thing is – this is same woman who voted twice for Nixon. Not, that she would now own it. I remember a lot of things. No, she has changed a lot over the years, and none it for the better. And I do think her husband being now so out of the picture is an core reason for this. None of it good.
(Oh – just for giggles – we are also related to Nixon as we share an common ancestor. But, I will say this – my living family believe they are ‘special’ because of all this heritage of ours. I, on the other hand, see it as privilege that comes with being a good citizen (and so on) – not thinking myself better.)
That fact that women are the majority in “higher education” is the issue! With the LEFT’s total control over “higher education” all these women are getting is anti-America, anti-humanity doctrines! The LEFT is a religion of MISERABLE! That’s it! They are MISERABLE people and their goal is to make EVERYONE MISERABLE! I avoid them like I would a rabid hideous dog! And the issue with women and unhappiness? Well, GOD created WOMAN for a purpose – to be the PARTNER of a MAN! Why are unmarried women so unhappy? There’s your answer – UNMARRIED!!! I’ve often said “women don’t know what women want – if they did then why so many unhappy lesbians”!!
Equally inferior and equally miserable–true social justice.
I live in a deep red state with high marriage and birth rates. Along with strong religious beliefs most of the women in my neighborhood seem happy. But down the road..in the big city where the college is, exists the one true Democrat area. Lock downs and masked mandates were more severe. Where every little problem seems to call for a government response. And that city is run by an unmarried female leftist Democrat. The arts are left, The poorly attended and short lived BLM and post-Roe “protests“ all occurred there. I believe that pattern is repeated throughout the US.. Gentlemen, we need to save our souls and our women from toxic Marxism.
So do women want to datea real man or some sissy who hides behind her whataa mugger confronts them
The best proxy for the Miserable Feminist is my older sister. She’s a ”late” Boomer (born 1959, the last year before the pill was introduced) and is now in her mid-60’s. She swallowed the Feminist narrative hook, line, and sinker. And her life is now an absolute train wreck.
That narrative taught to young women of that generation dictated that under NO CIRCUMSTANCES were they allowed to ever subordinate themselves to a male. Ever. They were told to seek higher education and advanced/professional degrees, avoid marriage, especially avoid children, and focus on their career development. That same ideology also advocated Secularism, free sexual expression (as in, casual hookups w/ no commitment) and of course, abortion for any reason/circumstance.
Women who followed that ended up missing those windows of opportunity for both a desirable spouse and for children. By the time most of these women ‘got around’ to these long-neglected aspects of life, all the best men (i.e., the ‘toxic’ males who were successful breadwinners and providers) were already married off and raising families, and the prime child-bearing years were at that point a
good decade in their rear-view mirror.
“You can have it all, baby!” turned out to be the lie of the latter half of the 20th Century. These women got to age 35/40, and suddenly realized it was too late. The worst reality for them was when they come to the realization that the career they chased up to that point – regardless of how successful it was – turned out to be not that rewarding after all.
My older sister now has outright contempt for any of her any woman who has children (or at this point grandchildren), because she has to watch from the cold outside as they relish their life and families, knowing she will never experience that joy and reward. Everything they were taught by the Feminist movement turned out to be a complete lie.
And yes, they vote like Liberals. Because they have no one to take care of them, no one to help them meet their needs, support them in their retirement, or provide nurturing and care when they’re in failing health. And the absence of children (and ultimately grandkids) is the deepest wound. That’s why they have so much contempt for nuclear families, traditional male and female roles, and religious faith. The government has become their husband, children, provider, and Diety.
And abortion is their Sacrament.
I’m also from 1959 and although highly educated and 31 when I married, I was rescued from the feminist movement lies because God called me to become a christian. The many lies in our culture can thrive because we put the Truth aside.
Well said, Stay away from American women.!
I also was born in 1959. The description of the lies we were fed is 100% accurate – everything was pushing career, career and specific careers at that. He left out the part about the married men at the pinnacles of those careers hitting on all the women working their way up, but that’s another story.
Not everyone fell for it the way his sister did. I was married at 33 and widowed at 37 to unexpected cancer. Boy that can screw up your life. I hope my voice of quiet wisdom made an impression on some of my friends and colleagues as I tried to redirect attention into the beauty of marriage and life. Even when you get poorer instead of richer and sickness instead of health the beauty and meaning of marriage is so wonderful it can last a lifetime.
Through multiple miracles I had the opportunity to become a mother later in life, and it is the greatest blessing ever.
Get the young people in your life reading threads like these