Can the NZ Left win back male voters?

Gender continues to be the defining political chasm as woke dogma and Incel paranoia fuelled by social media outrage olympics and hate algorithms generate an Identity Politics culture war…

1 big thing: Generation-defining split 

A flood of data reveals a little-discussed, future-defining trend: Men and women are going separate ways.

• • The split is clear in politics, religion, education and the labor market, Axios’ Erica Pandey reports.

Why it matters: For the next generation, gender is becoming the biggest predictor of how you think, act and vote.

“There’s a much broader story here,” says Daniel Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life. “Even after all the votes are tallied and we’ve moved on from the 2024 election, we’re not going to have resolved any of the cultural and relational tension between young men and young women.”

• • You see it in politics: Women are turning left. Men are turning right.
  • You see it in religion: For the first time ever recorded in the U.S., young men are more religious than young women.
  • You see it in education: There are 2.4 million more women on U.S. college campuses than men, the American Institute for Boys and Men (AIBM) notes. Those degrees are often resulting in higher-wage jobs for women in big cities.
  • You see it in the labor market: Wages and labor force participation have increased since the 1980s for college-educated men and women, and for working-class women. But they have stagnated for working-class men, who are also now significantly less likely to be employed than four decades ago, according to AIBM’s analysis.
  • You see it in visions for the future: Men are more likely than women to want marriage and kids, according to Pew Research Center.

What we’re watching: The polarization is even stronger among adults under 25, Cox notes. Social media content and algorithms may be one key reason.

• • Men are constantly fed social media content that’s negative toward women, and vice versa. Videos breaking down bad dates from the perspective of either the man or the woman are a viral example of that trend.
  • Gen Z-ers are 15 points more likely than other generations to say social media has negatively impacted their outlook on men, and 10 points more likely to say so for women, Morning Consult finds.

The bottom line: “We live in a very individualistic culture, and, for a lot of people, the primary relationship they have is with a partner or a spouse,” says Cox. For heterosexual couples, this polarization is making finding a partner trickier.

• • “This has tremendous implications for how men and women relate to one another in the dating space.”

Diving into the recent Roy Morgan polling numbers the issues are stark for the Left, the simple truth is that Identity Politics has driven men away from us as a movement…

The Holy Trinity of Woke Dogma are:

• ALL White people are irredeemable racists.
• B-E-L-I-E-V-E ALL Women that ALL Men are rapists
• Anyone supporting Free Speech is a uniform wearing Nazi who hates the Trans Community.

Pure Temple Politics demands you accept that Woke Dogma before you can join, using that Identity Filter drives male voters away from the movement.

This is a point I’ve been making for what, 5 years now?

Identity Politics is most dangerous when poor white people start seeing themselves as an identity.

Tell men they are the problem long enough and they become the problem.

Class binds us in solidarity, its pronouns are Us/We.

Middle Class activists posing for the ‘gram using hashtag politics, their pronouns are I/Me.

Alienating male voters is now accepted by actual students of politics and culture as a main problem for the Left.

Don’t believe me?

Here’s some of that evil Patriarchal Right Wing Rag, The Guardian for you..

Young men in the US used to lean left. Could they now hand Trump the presidency? | US elections 2024 | The Guardian

The ex-president is courting a demographic drifting away from the Democrats. What’s driving the widening gender gap among young people?

…young Men are suffering more mental health issues, education problems and self harm driven by a system that alienates them and then lectures them on privilege creating a deep resentment because identity is the only thing that matters now..

Richard Reeves – whose 2022 book, Of Boys and Men, has become a foundational text on what has gone wrong for young men in the country – is damning of framing that puts young men’s rightward turn in terms of UFC fights and incels, when he believes it’s about deep-seated inequalities of outcome in education, mental health and employment.

“I want to talk about why only 60% of Black boys graduate high school on time in Michigan, or the fact that the share of male teachers has gone from 33% to 23%. Or that we’ve lost more than half the men who work in social work and psychology,” he says. “I’d want to talk about that rather than, for example, whether the Barbie movie was unfair on Ken.”

He says people are misinterpreting the polling. “It’s not enthusiasm for the reactionary right, it’s a sense of being taken for granted by the left. There are more young men shrugging their shoulders than raising their fists.”

It’s true that there is now a growing gender gap in education; for every 100 bachelor’s degrees awarded to women, 74 are awarded to men. In many US cities, young women are earning more than young men and moving out of parents’ homes earlier than them.

Reeves is careful to say that improving conditions for men and boys should not mean slowing down similar efforts for women and girls. But he says that government institutions do have a tendency to purposefully avoid naming the problems young men face. Suicide is one of the clearest areas in which there is a huge gender divide – there’s a fourfold gender gap in rates for young people – and yet, says Reeves, “the CDC website breaks down suicide rates by every demographic except gender. Why? Why don’t the Democrats have a taskforce on male suicide when there are 40,000 deaths a year?”

He gives other compelling examples of how Democrats have failed to signpost their achievements to young men. Biden’s infrastructure bill – his key piece of legislative success – was a huge jobs creator for working-class men, “but the administration tied itself in knots not to say so”. Instead, it focused on the million women in construction initiative to ensure women got some of the funding. “That’s amazing. Now, er, where’s the million men into teaching initiative? … There are so many initiatives for women in Stem; why not one for men in teaching? Who is going to attack that?”

On the Democrats’ own website is a page titled “who we serve” that lists 14 different groups. Men are not among them.

…the article points out that young men are turning Right because they’ve been pushed out of the Left because Identity Politics states the worst human being in the world is a white male who must apologise every 90 minutes for having a Penis, and I’m talking the awful heteronormative penis, not the beautiful amazing non-binary penis so popular in Wellington these days.

The Middle Class Woke Activism may have not been the great tactic so many on the NZ Left thought it was.

The modern Woke Left are great at organising ‘Free-The-Nipple’ protests for vegan cycling mommy bloggers, not so good at deconstructing the Neoliberal Economic Hegemonic structure.

No poor family is sitting around the kitchen table cancelling one another for mis-using pronouns.

If the Left wants to win, it needs to win back male voters.

The true demarcation of power in a Capitalist Democracy is the 1% richest plus their 9% enablers vs the 90% rest of us.

Once you understand power in that framework, we can never lose an election!

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