At his Substack, Notes From the Middle Ground, Damon Linker examines some key takeaways from a new book by San Diego State University psychology professor Jean Twenge, which he culled by way of a Twitter thread by an account called True Discipline.
Linker provides a list of data points that will be fairly familiar to readers of LITD or my Substack, Precipice. Wet blanket that I am, I've enumerate stats like these on a few occasions:
The frequency of individualistic phrases in American books has surged since the early 1990s.
The percentage of people getting married is cratering.
The percentage of both men and women who have had same-sex experiences is surging from one generation to the next.
Around 2015, people between the ages of 26 and 34 began to experience a surge in major depression.
The amount of time people spend socializing has been trending downward since around 2010, and sharply downward since around 2015.
The share of Gen Zers who consider themselves either transgender or nonbinary is far higher than the share of previous generations.
This trend is taking place pretty equally in both red and blue states.
The share of high-school-aged people who feel lonely or left out has surged since around 2011.
Nearly one third of teenage girls are clinically depressed.
Emergency-room admissions for self-harm are rising.
The share of 12th graders who are pessimistic about the future is also rising.
Each successive generation (from the Silent Generation on through to Gen Z) is more inclined than the last to view the American Founders as “villains,” the country as fundamentally unfair, and to think significant changes are needed to address our problems.
But those are really just table-setters. What he wants us to contemplate is this set of trends:
First, and most obviously, there’s been a substantial rise in the share of 12th-grade boys self-identifying as conservative over the past two decades (from around 43 percent in the late 1990s to 65 percent in 2021).
Second, 10 percentage points out of this total 22-point increase took place quite recently, between 2016 and 2021—during a period when what it meant to be conservative was largely defined by Donald Trump.
Third, though 12th-grade girls have always been less likely than boys to self-identify as conservative, the two groups began to diverge sharply around 2012. Since then, the share of girls who self-identify as conservative has dropped by about 9 points (from 40 to 31 percent), but the surge for boys has been bigger (up by about 13 points).
Finally, the gender gap in 2021 was larger than ever at 34 percentage points.
What are the implications?
A country in which young men and women are increasingly polarized along ideological lines is one in which it will be increasingly difficult for them to find mates with whom to build romantic relationships that culminate in marriage and children. Instead, they will be likely to seek sexual satisfaction in individual acts of self-gratification—or perhaps in relationships with politically compatible members of their own sex.
This could certainly be one factor behind a number of the trends captured in the series of graphs in the tweet thread and in complementary studies: sharply declining marriage rates; an epidemic of loneliness and the mental-health problems that follow from it, including depression and self-harm; experimentation with same-sex relationships; pessimism about the future; and so forth.
Then there are the political implications. According to the most recent data summarized in the graph, around 31 percent of 12th-grade girls describe themselves as conservative while 65 percent of 12th-grade boys do the same. That isn’t a perfect equal-but-opposite balance, but it’s pretty close. If this proves to be enduring as these respondents move into adulthood, it would imply that young men and women over coming election cycles will be close to balancing each other out when it comes to voting patterns, with men strongly favoring the right and women much more likely to support the left.
This runs contrary to a narrative one often hears from Democrats, who often pin a decent share of their political hopes on support from young people. The challenge is to get them to show up to vote on Election Day, with the assumption being that if they do show up, they will strongly favor left-leaning candidates. But with Gen Z men breaking sharply for the right, the net result of the youth vote could soon end up being a wash.
This isn't likely to change, given that our educational system doesn't present young students - male or female - with the tools - that is, great literary and philosophical works recognized until last week as indispensable to the Western canon - for determining the validity of ideological perspectives, tools that are applicable regardless of sex, ethnicity or race.
It's true that at present most Americans still don't want kids getting puberty blockers or irreversible sexual surgeries, but how static is that finding likely to be, given the pretty much mainstreamed status of terms like "non-binary" and "two-spirit?"
It seems we're going to increasingly wear our worldviews like uniforms, and regard them as brands that validate us, much like we're increasingly doing with our sexual identities, which were, until fairly recently, regarded as givens bestowed on us by nature.
Nothing us immutable to the post-Westerner. Nothing about our universe was designed before we existed as individuals, according to the New Person.
We'll see no need to depend on each other for anything, and that slack will be taken up by a state that has no idea what it's based on, beyond ever-moving goalposts for "rights."
We might want to fully take in the profundity of the changes we're living through.
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