LIZ WOLFE: “Contra Matt Yglesias’ newsletter, I really don’t think it’s all that hard to understand why the kids are shifting rightward, or what cultural + policy preferences this amounts to.”
More:
When you’ve been fed an original sin gospel by nature of your status as a white male, you at a certain point grow disdainful and come to reject it. When you see your cities ransacked in the name of fighting police brutality––which the “experts” said was fine as a one-time exception to the otherwise-pervasive lockdowns to control a virus that minimally harms you––you begin to wonder whether this actually helps minorities, and whether this is actually the level of public order we seek to maintain, whether our laws mean nothing.
My hunch is that, by and large, young people who have voted for Trump want slightly better cost of living––rent prices, food prices, ability to get education without going deep into debt––and, mostly, to be left alone by the hectoring scolds in the expert class and the little lackeys they’ve bred via academia, who’ve gone forth into a hundred different industries and multiplied like hydra heads. To have cities where you can expect to have the police show up when someone has committed a crime against you. To have genuine choice––both actual ability to pursue the lives they want *and* the freedom that comes from these choices not being culturally deemed heretical––to pursue the things that will fulfill them without being looked down on by fourth-wave feminists or vast swaths of the other gender.
Maybe these are my own blinders, but I mostly believe that people want a touch more “live and let live”, that we’ve been in a cultural moment where the laws are, socially, quite permissive but where the culture is profoundly judgmental about any more “traditional” choice or path.
More at the link but don’t miss this from the replies:
You said “we’ve been in a cultural moment where the laws are, socially, quite permissive but where the culture is profoundly judgmental…” I would add, “and punitive” to this sentence.
In other words, we live in an increasingly anarcho-tyrannical society that the progressive-left managerialists have crafted. Everyone senses the rules are different for different groups & they are arbitrarily imposed often on the whims of the elites in charge.
Also, while, as you note, young white males in particular have a negative experience with all of this it the most for obvious reasons with the constant “anti racist” messaging of the uniquely evil nature of white males, males writ large experience this as well, as the suppsed purveyors of “toxic masculinity,” “rape culture,” & receivers of “male privilege.”
For young male US citizens of *any* racial background attempting to make a start in the world, this message is oppressive, dehumanizing, objectionable, insulting. Males are the enemy. This is the message.
Progressives believed that they could build a winning coalition by treating a huge group of voters as an enemy while failing everyone but the rich and/or well-connected at basic governance. And at Pacific Palisades earlier this month, even being rich and well-connected wasn’t a safeguard from Democrat malgovernance.
