The Washington Post (11/22/23) insists that young people’s political “mismatch means that someone will need to compromise”—and it’s not hard to figure out who that “someone” is supposed to be.
The Washington Post editorial board (11/22/23) has its knickers in a twist over marriage. “If Attitudes Don’t Shift, a Political Dating Mismatch Will Threaten Marriage,” it recently warned. The Post lamented the increase in political polarization because it portends “the collapse of American marriage.”
You see, the Post has identified a “growing ideological divide” between single young men and women, with far more women identifying as liberal—a gap that’s “particularly pronounced among Gen Z white people,” the Post board takes care to point out.
When you add this to a 2021 survey of college students that found “71% of Democrats would not date someone with opposing views,” the Post says, you find yourself with a “mismatch [that] means that someone will need to compromise.” And since it’s the Democrats who say they won’t date Republicans, that would mean the young liberal women are the ones who need to do the compromising.
Oh sure, they could just decide not to marry—but then they’ll be even unhappier than those in politically mixed couples, the Post warns, hyperlinking to the Institute for Family Studies as its source for that statement.
In fact, the right-wing Institute for Family Studies lurks throughout the editorial, along with its senior fellow Brad Wilcox, who was involved in discredited anti-same-sex marriage research that was influential in that political battle a decade ago. Together, the Post references or links to them three separate times in its editorial. (The IFS argument about marriage happiness is flawed too, by the way.)
Ginning up a story
When you look at the Post‘s chart (11/22/23), every time either of the darker lines crosses its lighter counterpart, that’s young men and women switching places as the gender with more conservatives or liberals in it—a frequent phenomenon that disproves the thesis of the editorial it accompanies.
Looking at the chart in the article, you see the political identification numbers the Post is so worried about bounce around a great deal. If you look at the data from the 2021 survey of political identification instead of 2022, you find that young men and women were much more closely aligned that year—with a 5-point gender gap in identifying as either liberal or conservative, as opposed to a 9-point gap the following year.
The editorial notes that “since Mr. Trump’s election in 2016,” the percentage of young women identifying as liberal “has shot up,” while “young men have not followed suit. If anything, they have grown more conservative.” But two years ago—after Trump had been out of office for a year—young men were much readier to identify as liberal than they were in either 2016 or 2022. The real lesson seems to be not that there are “Trump-era divisions between single men and women,” but that young people’s political beliefs—at least as expressed to pollsters—tend to fluctuate quite a bit.
In fact, the editorial’s assumption that liberal women are going to have trouble matching up with conservative men doesn’t hold up to a quick glance at the chart. In five of the last 11 times the survey has been taken—going back to 2002—the percentage of young liberal men either matched or exceeded the number of young liberal women, and young conservative women outnumbered or equaled their male counterparts the same number of times. So unless the Post has a crystal ball that tells them that 2022 marked the start of a new era, it’s ginning up a story out of nothing.
‘Culture of seeking sameness’
The Post (11/10/23) urged universities to keep silent about issues like “institutional and structural racism” and reproductive freedom—as if such things had no bearing on the ability of students to take part in education.
But the number-fudging has a purpose: to chastise people—primarily young, female liberals—for being so political and uncompromising. The Post writes:
Unfortunately, Americans have not equipped themselves to discuss, debate and reason across these divides. Americans have increasingly sorted themselves according to ideological orientation.
“Americans” are a diverse lot, though. The reason that “Americans” can’t “reason across these divides” is because one side of the divide has firmly committed itself to a different reality that permits no reasoning, even criminalizing the expression of ideas it disagrees with. The board makes clear, though, that those are not the Americans it’s most worried about:
They are working, living and socializing with people who think the same things they do. Particularly on college campuses, a culture of seeking sameness has set up young Americans for disappointment.
This is the academic version of corporate media’s perennial “move to the right” advice. (Tellingly, the hyperlink goes to another Post editorial—11/10/23—advising universities to shut up about issues like “institutional and structural racism” and reproductive freedom.) Yet it’s “particularly on college campuses”—and not, say, evangelical churches or the military—where young people have a “culture of seeking sameness,” and need to open themselves to other, more right-wing ideas:
They expect people to share their own convictions and commitments. But people’s insight and understanding about the world often come from considering alternative perspectives that may at first seem odd or offensive.
What’s “odd or offensive” to a young liberal woman surely includes things like the “outright misogyny” the Post acknowledges is popular among some “boys and young men.” Yet instead of centering its solutions on things like combating such misogyny in our culture, the Post would rather ask women to suck it up and kindly consider those perspectives.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com.
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The post WaPo Tells Women: If You Want Marriage, Compromise With Misogyny appeared first on FAIR.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julie Hollar.
Julie Hollar | Radio Free (2023-11-30T22:12:50+00:00) WaPo Tells Women: If You Want Marriage, Compromise With Misogyny . Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2023/11/30/wapo-tells-women-if-you-want-marriage-compromise-with-misogyny/
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