While many believe young people are becoming more liberal, data shows that 12th grade boys are nearly twice as likely to identify as conservative compared to liberal. Around 25% of high school seniors identify as conservative while only 13% identify as liberal. In contrast, the share of 12th grade girls identifying as liberal has risen to 30%. Many factors may contribute to this trend, including the rhetoric of Donald Trump which appealed to disaffected young men, and the focus of progressive movements on issues of gender and racial equality which some young men perceive as a “matriarchy.” However, most high school seniors claim no political identity, and many boys in high school do not actively discuss
I read a great WaPo article on this recently. Basically on the left, no one can define healthy masculinity and it’s really opened up a spot for the right wing to swoop in and define it for us.
I think it’s because a progressive view on gender isn’t focused on defining what the “right” way to be masculine is. No one on the left tells women and girls what the right way to be feminine is either. That’s the whole concept; recognizing that strict gender norms are exclusionary and create marginilized men and women.
The issue is not the left not telling young men how to be a “real man”, it’s the right pushing toxic ideas of masculinity. From a left perspective, you are good man simply by not being toxic and just being who you are as an individual.
I think people here are falling into a trap of framing laid for them by the right; namely that the right deliberately fabricated a mental health crisis for young men by telling them they’re victims, and has also now gotten the left to blame themselves for it. Young men are only victims of right-wing toxicity.
The left side of politics has always struggled to bring people along for the journey, they can advocate for people but building a coherent argument and inspiring people to come along for the ride will always be their downfall. They cannot achieve progressive change if they fail to recognize the concerns of the right.
Shame that the concerns of the right are mostly just disguised misogyny, racism and classism.
You’re right. Nothing that’s truly valuable in legislation is simple. It’s hard to turn something complicated into a sound byte without making shit up, and the Left in most countries have to be careful alienating the intellectuals if they start making shit up. We don’t vote for bullshit.
The Right has no problem making shit up and those who vote for them are not really affected by it. When the Notch Baby bullshit was going on (a US thing… there was basically a big hoax about a generation being owed money, and a lot of politicians ran with it), I didn’t know a single right-leaning voter who would give the least bit of a shit that they were voting for people who were willfully taking advantage of the elderly. I guarantee a left-party candidate who pulled that shit would lose by a landslide.
So the Right can bad-faith point out a concern that “toxic masculinity” is just “masculinity” and a good thing. They know the Left can’t soundbyte their way out of it because it’s not a one-liner to say “it’s not about masculinity or feminity, it’s about not being a dick and all of us helping the underdog”. It’s VERY easy to sell people who aren’t the underdog on victim complexes.