It’s been conventional wisdom that younger generations emerge more progressive than their predecessors. “The young people will save us,” has been a sentiment often shared by elders, albeit problematically, as they’ve watched new movements build power. But this summer, we’ve reached a breaking point: that is not true anymore for Gen Z men.
MAGA has captured older men, especially older white men: according to recent polling data, about half of its movement is over the age of sixty-five, and more than 60 percent is white, Christian, and male. More surprising is the stark gender divide that has emerged among American youth: over the past twenty-five years, the partisan gap between young women and young men has nearly doubled, and Gen Z women are today a whopping twenty-three points more liberal than their generation’s men. It’s a regressive trend, with Gen Z men proving to be more conservative than millennial men.
It’s also an apparently rapid trend, at least when it comes to Gen Z men’s views on gender: 49 percent of Gen Z men said the United States had become “too soft and feminine” in 2022; just one year later, that number jumped to 60 percent. And all of these trends are only exacerbated when lasering in on white Gen Z men in particular.
Some of this political divide is attributable to the growing popularity of cultural figures such as Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate. The “manosphere” targets young men struggling with the emotional and psychological impacts of contemporary American culture — changing social norms surrounding identity and purpose, for example — and promotes a particularly noxious and regressive form of masculinity. At the same time, and with great success, manosphere influencers weaponize the popularity of the term “toxic masculinity” as an example of how men are actually victims of a changing society that wants to malign them, sideline them, and replace them.
These guys — Jordan Peterson,…
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Auteur: Katie Kirchner
