The Greatest Divergence

I can’t think of another moment in history in any civilization where men and women were each other’s primary competitor.

I’d originally planned for The Next 12 Months series to conclude by the end of January. It’s definitely not happening at this point and the last thing I want to do is take another detour before closing out the series. However, a topic has flashed onto my radar in the last few days and I feel like it needs to be addressed, if for no other reason than the fact it relates to what I’m going to talk about in the sixth and final installment of The Next 12 Months.

I want to reiterate, at the outset, that We’re Not At The End, But You Can See It From Here isn’t a culture blog. To the extent I talk about culture, it is only in the most practical of terms. If I talk about a culture war issue, you can best believe it’s because there’s a hard, tangible impact it’s going to have on our lives and soon. We’ve been conditioned to think the culture wars are a distraction from so-called “bigger problems,” but that’s not true. Culture gets at the most important questions for any society to contemplate: Who are we? Why are we here?

So, let’s get to it.

Men Turn Right, Women Turn Left

To quote cultural commentator Rod Dreher, I think this is a much bigger story than most people think:

This is unprecedented. How so? John Burn-Murdoch of the British newspaper Financial Times explained in a must-read X thread analyzing the data:

Historically the views of men and women in the same generations have been very similar. This is still true for older age-groups, but a gap has opened between today’s young men and women.

Even as men and women have held differing political persuasions throughout history, we’ve never seen an instance where the two sexes have diverged so wildly. At a time when women are more often than not the driving force in socio-political trends, there’s no way this isn’t going to have revolutionary implications for society moving forward, especially as Generation Z (the ‘Zoomers’) come of age and Generation Y (the ‘Millennials’) becomes the “anchor” cohort. Nobody wants to admit it, but the fact the older generations, specifically the Baby Boomers, have been running things for so long is a big reason why our system has proven so stable over time, alongside the stagnation it’s wrought. Now the Boomers are on the verge of exiting stage left rapidly, Millennials are going to take over alongside the relatively powerless Generation X., and Zoomers are already making waves.

But as good preppers, let’s take one thing at a time. What does a society look like when men and women diverge so wildly politically?

We already have a real-world example in South Korea:

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Burn-Murdoch makes reference to an article authored by Anna Louie Sussman in The Atlantic last year. In it, Sussman reports:

“I try to have faith in guys and not to be like, ‘Kill all men,’” she says. “But I’m sorry, I am a little bit on that side—that is, on the extreme side.”

As a side-note, I’ll never cease to be amazed at what kinds of sentiments can be reported in such a matter-of-fact manner and what can’t. Try printing “Kill all women” in a publication like The Atlantic. You can’t. Not without an outcry.

But anyway:

Lee is part of a boycott movement in South Korea—women who are actively choosing single life. Their movement—possibly tens of thousands strong, though it’s impossible to say for sure—is called “4B,” or “The 4 No’s.” Adherents say no to dating, no to sex with men, no to marriage, and no to childbirth. (“B” refers to the Korean prefix bi-, which means “no”.)

They are the extreme edge of a broader trend away from marriage. By one estimate, more than a third of Korean men and a quarter of Korean women who are now in their mid-to-late 30s will never marry. Even more will never have children. In 1960, Korean women had, on average, six children. In 2022, the average Korean woman could expect to have just 0.78 children in her lifetime. In Seoul, the average is 0.59. If this downward drift continues, it will not be long before one out of every two women in the capital never becomes a parent.

In the U.S., you often hear leftists attempt to score “gotcha” points by claiming a lack of free stuff is the reason nobody want to get married and have babies. But if South Korea is any example, all the money spent on pro-natal policies aren’t just a sunk cost; they’re totally rejected by women themselves:

The government has tried expanding maternity leave, offering couples bigger and bigger bonuses for having babies, and subsidizing housing in Seoul for newlyweds. The mayor there has proposed easing visa restrictions to import more cheap foreign nannies, while some rural governments fund bachelors seeking foreign brides. In 2016, the government published a “birth map” online showing how many women of reproductive age lived in different regions—a clumsy attempt to encourage towns and cities to produce more babies. It prompted a feminist protest with women holding banners that read my womb is not a national public good and baby vending machine. The map was taken down.

In all this time, the country has spent more than $150 billion hoping to coax more babies into the world. None of its efforts are working. Many Korean metro systems have hot-pink seats designated for pregnant women, but when I visited Seoul in November, six months pregnant myself and easily tired, I was rarely able to snag a seat; they were filled with dozing elderly people.

It all points to a country that’s not only on track for literal extinction a few centuries from now, but has already lost all will to live:

I asked many people whether they thought South Korea was losing anything in its spurning of reproduction. Some had trouble grasping the question. A few mentioned something about having to pay higher taxes in the future. One woman, a 4B adherent, said she jokes with her friends that the solution to South Korea’s problems is for the whole country to simply disappear. Thanos, the villain in The Avengers who eliminates half the Earth’s population with a snap of his fingers, didn’t do anything wrong, she told me. Meera Choi, the doctoral student researching gender inequality and fertility, told me she’s heard other Korean feminists make the exact same joke about Thanos. Underneath the joke, I sensed a hopelessness that bordered on nihilism.

What a happy country South Korea is! Regardless of why people feel the way they do, there’s no way to spin any of this as a good thing. And nobody, not the Left nor the Right, has an answer for this. People need to reproduce or we all die. It’s that simple. Many have already concluded that’s exactly what needs to happen - our societies must be destroyed, conquered, or some combination of the two - but these people also seem to think they’re going to be young and free forever, the lights will always stay on, the shelves will always be full, and Amazon will eventually deliver all orders.

South Korea is an extreme example and what’s happening there doesn’t necessarily represent what’s happening here. It still serves as a warning of what happens when a society not only loses its will to survive, but men and women diverge so wildly in terms of how they view the world. Right at the top, cohesiveness becomes impossible. Cohesiveness is needed for trust; without trust, societies become dangerous and socially Darwinistic, where predators dominate and the weak are effectively slaves. That doesn’t sound a world that’d be safe for women, does it? Yet that’s exactly where we’re headed if these trends are maintained.

Who Is Driving The Divergence?

Let’s return to this graph:

In South Korea, men aged 18 to 29 have become very conservative, while men of the same age group in the U.S. and the UK (especially the UK) are still more liberal than not. Germany is an exception, though they’re still nowhere near as conservative as their South Korean counterparts.

What we have are different dynamics at play in each society. In South Korea, the political divergence between the sexes is driven by young men turning hard right, while in the U.S. and UK, the linchpins of the Anglosphere, the divergence is driven by young women turning hard left. At the same time, young men in the Anglosphere continue to lean liberal, though they’re being outpaced by women in that regard.

In fact, at least in the Anglospheric West, the divergence is being driven entirely by women. It’s not just about gender roles, either:

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It took me a few glances to notice, but I was astonished to see that as recently as 10 years ago, young women were more likely than men to hold conservative views on immigration! Since then, women have shifted far to the left, while men have remained consistent. It’d seem to be that the complaint here on our side of the world is that men aren’t keeping up with the times, not so much that men are becoming more conservative, even if that may be true on an issue-by-issue basis.

Across the pond, the divergence between young men and women in the U.S. is very much driven by the latter.

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You had a fairly steady state for each gender up until 2013, when young women turned sharply left and looked back maybe once. Men had their fluctuations, but the percentage who identified as “liberal” has consistently remained above and below 20 and 30 percent, respectively. It’s worth noting, since around 2021, the percentage of women who identify as liberal has leveled out, suggesting much of the left-shift was a reaction to the Donald Trump presidency. But even that doesn’t fully explain it: the left turn for women began in 2014, a year before Trump ever announced his candidacy for office. Young men appear to have been more directly impacted by Trump’s presidency, given the abrupt shift that occurred in 2016, after a two year net increase in their percentage of liberals.

What’s going on here? We’ve already mentioned the influence of Trump and others have brought up the influence of #MeToo. But we’re about the practical here, so let’s talk about some practical explanations.

Picking Sides Is A Survival Mechanism

First, women are generally less conservative than men. I’m not going to get into why that is, as I’m not entirely sure myself, nor is it relevant to what I’m talking about here. For the purposes of this discussion, it suffices to say that of the two genders, women tend to be more liberal.

As of 2024, the Left is in complete command of Western civilization. They either control or have infiltrated all institutions in society, major and minor, including traditionally right-wing institutions like the military and churches. With the Left at such commanding heights, it’s had an amplification effect, where anyone who leans left entrenches themselves on the Left. Anyone who might’ve been on the fence may end up signing on with the Left - they’re the winning team and who wants to be a loser?

Women often fashion themselves as counter-cultural, as the rebels against the prevailing order. In reality, women as a group are often the biggest conformists, molding their behavior to be consistent with the norms and values of the time. What we may be seeing in the increasing progressivism of women is simply signalling to the establishment that they’re on the “right” side of the line. Picking the right side of the culture wars leads to gains in status and economic well-being. Increasingly, political identity has become critical to achieving the American Dream, an immensely troubling development.

Strong evidence it’s all more about signalling to secure status can be seen in this graph, which shows, on the issues themselves, young men and women aren’t all that divergent:

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Does this look like an ideological rift? For the same reason socially conservative immigrants will vote for the socially liberal Democratic Party, women are adopting a political identity as liberals because they benefit from doing so, a concept called “patronage.”

Meanwhile, those who stand opposed to the dominant powers are likely going to dig their heels in and amplify their own identity as dissidents. As leftism has ascended to the top as our prevailing ideology, so has the feminism associated with it. Whatever upsides feminism has, it also has tremendous downsides, as evidenced by the effect it’s had on young men.

Researcher Daniel Cox, writing for Business Insider, explained last year:

But while women were rallying together, many Gen Z men began to feel like society was turning against them. As recently as 2019, less than one-third of young men said that they faced discrimination, according to Pew, but today, close to half of young men believe they face at least some discrimination. In a 2020 survey by the research organization PRRI, half of men agreed with the statement: “These days society seems to punish men just for acting like men.”

This leads to the second cause of the divergence: the broader West’s leftward lurch, coupled with feminism, has in fact created a zero-sum environment where women’s gains are increasingly men’s losses. This may not have always been the case, but as women being part of the workforce has become normalized, our population continues to grow, and economic growth has exceeded the point of diminishing returns, there may not be enough to go around, forcing men and women to fight for benefits and resources like never before. I can’t think of another moment in history in any civilization where men and women were each other’s primary competitor. The historical norm is one group of men and women versus another group of men and women. Unprecedented, indeed.

Cox wrote about how men find it difficult to relate with women’s problems because men are struggling too, in some ways more than women [bold mine]:

The lack of interest could be because Gen Z men have their own issues. Richard Reeves, the founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men, has meticulously documented the challenges facing young men in America: They are struggling more in school, are less likely than women to go to and graduate from college, have fewer close friends than previous generations, and are four times as likely to commit suicide than women. Reeves argues that this state of affairs requires that we hold two seemingly contradictory ideas at once: Men at the highest rungs of the economic ladder are still advantaged by a system that perpetuates gender inequality, while men on the lower rungs of society face unique challenges because they are men.

The two ideas aren’t entirely contradictory. It can absolutely be the case that society has at the very top a relatively small number of well-to-do men (think Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerburg), while at the same time most men are struggling and facing dwindling prospects for prosperity and thriving. That’s been the norm throughout history.

At the same time, Richard Reeves is correct: it cannot be both true that gender inequality exists to the detriment of women and also that women are the winners in a supposedly oppressive social order. If this is a patriarchy, it’s either very bad at being one or it’s a sweet deal for women in practice. Whatever the case may be, men are more and more coming out on the losing end in a game said to be rigged decisively in their favor.

As women keep gaining, they solidify their support for the people in charge. It’s only rational for them to do so. Unfortunately, this means the status quo is likely to not change for quite some time; people’s politics are “stickier” than conventional wisdom suggests, as John Burn-Murdoch put it. Due to inevitable changes in the political, economic, and social environment, I don’t think men and women will continue diverging indefinitely, but the divergence as it exists today could very well prove enduring for at least another generation.

“People Are Designed To Breed First And Be Rational Later.”

The fact that young men remain mostly liberal in the U.S. still suggests a South Korea-like hard right turn is still yet to come. I think it’ll be more gradual than what South Korea saw, honestly, but my point is that if anyone thinks men are too conservative today, they could be in for a rude awakening.

Back to Cox:

While women have turned to the left for answers to their problems, men are finding support on the right. Trump helped redefine conservatism as a distinctly masculine ideology, stoking grievances and directing young men's frustration toward liberals and feminists. There are signs the message is resonating: Republican affiliation among white men aged 18 to 24 jumped from 28% in 2019 to 41% in 2023, according to a Harvard Youth Poll. Outside politics, right-leaning figures such as Andrew Tate, Elon Musk, and Jordan Peterson are attracting young men looking for an ideological home.

Most young men are probably not interested in making America great again, but they do feel acutely the need to secure a place for themselves in a culture that readily identifies male advantage but ignores the challenges young men face. Out of a sense of increased insecurity, more young men are adopting a zero-sum view of gender equality — if women gain, men will inevitably lose. It’s an outlook that makes them defensive, encourages them to ignore or overlook enduring challenges women face in society, and can even spur misogyny. As one 35-year-old man told Pew in 2022 about #MeToo: "Too many people are taking advantage of a serious situation because it's trendy or they are greedy or just want attention." And this attitude has real-world consequences: In the online gaming world, 75% of Gen Z women have reported experiencing harassment.

I think the Right suffers from a serious lack of leadership. Despite being seemingly unstoppable, I think the Trump Train is going to reach the end of its line either this year or within the next four years. He’s too old, too unpopular, and, most important, too un-substantive. This lack of leadership will contribute to two concurrent responses among young men: greater, if gradual, right-wing radicalization, and the increasing “crisis” among them. Only someone who both recognizes the problem young men are experiencing and possesses the political currency to do something about it can ultimately act to their benefit.

That moment seems a long way’s off from now. At the same time, we seem to be accelerating towards something. What that is will be the topic of my next post, but there’s just no way you can have such a vast political gulf between the genders (even if it doesn’t translate to big differences of opinion), coupled with glaring disparities in outcomes, for there not to be some calamity that emerges from it. Many would argue we’ve already hit the crisis stage; what inevitably comes next is some kind of disaster.

Cox summarized the stakes well [bold mine]:

But both genders are feeling increasingly precarious — and it's causing them to drift further apart. A recent Washington Post editorial lamented what this growing political divide means for dating and marriage: If Gen Z men and women can't agree on politics, it's going to get harder for them to find a partner. But if anything, that understates the problem. Based on our interviews, there appears to be a growing eagerness among both young men and women to blame their problems on each other. And a society in which men and women see their interests as irrevocably opposed is not one that can last.

If men and women are in constant conflict, then they’re going to have difficulty coming together to form unquestionably the foundation of any civilization: families Without families, there’s no reproduction. Without reproduction, there’s no continuity. We’ve become too decadent, too nihilistic to care at this point, so if nothing else, Americans should care because this state of affairs will create conflict and tumult that’ll shake the foundations of our order.

Rudyard “Whatifalthist” Lynch, one of the most important thinkers of our time, speaks constantly on this dating, loneliness, sexless crisis, making it the core component of his thesis. Watch the whole video if you can, but since it’s a long one, just watch the tail end of it for now (I’ve already set the video to begin there):

Bottom line: Society can blame men all they want, but having large numbers of lonely, sexless, underachieving young men is a recipe for destabilization. This is a fact backed by science: as Lynch likes to say, “People are designed to breed first and be rational later.” If a person cannot reproduce or at least participate in reproductive activities, including something as simple as dating, they can literally go crazy. The same goes for both men and women. In today’s high-tech world, we’ve come up with many ways of keeping people’s minds occupied, so this has mitigated the impact. But the consequences don’t go away. In the past, without all these distractions, we could’ve very well have seen a violent revolution by now.

I’m going to keep some of the powder dry for the next post, but ask yourself: have you seen someone, male or female, who’s lonely, sexless, and underachieving? What are these people like? Such people have been the butt of jokes, but now the joke is on society, because we have an entire generation full of such people. This is something we’ve never seen before in history. There’s no indication they’re going to grow up, get it figured out, and follow in the footsteps of their predecessors.

One last fact before moving on:

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A number of observers noted some of this can be attributed to divorces. It doesn’t matter how it happens, the fact it’s happening is what matters. What was I saying about property ownership or lack thereof being a key ingredient to social instability? Nobody wants to go as far as to say women shouldn’t own property, but if the idea was for women to have as much of an opportunity to own property as men, I think it’s safe to say we’ve gone way beyond that. If we can accept that an entire generation being priced out of capital (property) ownership is a disaster scenario, then it’s not a stretch to say women owning property at the expense of men is also a hugely destabilizing scenario.

This is all uncomfortable to talk about, so much of it offensive to what we’ve come to regard as gospel, sacrosanct values. But if you’re a believer of science, just look at it biologically. With nothing to fight for, nothing to build, nobody to look out for, men will either engage in self-destructive behavior - including suicide - or take out those impulses against others, becoming a threat to society. No amount of women’s empowerment can defend against that. Likewise, if women cannot fulfill their biologically-defined roles, they too will become self-destructive in other ways and engage in behavior that may not directly threaten society by their own hand, but will still manage to get others killed.

Does that sound like a promising future?

Will Young People Ever Find Love Again?

This isn’t Love Line With Max Remington; I’m in no position to give relationship advice to anyone. Still, we need to talk about this. This is our civilization at stake, as dramatic as it may sound. As I said earlier, a society survives through one way: reproduction. Immigration is no substitute; you can fill your ranks on the margins with newcomers, but if we are to be a cohesive society, with a culture, and a way of life, that can’t be sustained with immigration. The lack of cohesiveness, trust, shared culture, and way of life is already apparent; you’d think we’d have learned our lesson by now.

As preppers, we ought to know better than most: we can’t make it on our own. Even in the good times, family and social life isn’t just what makes life worth living; it’s what overcomes life’s challenges. Even the perpetually single life can only be sustained through the willing cooperation of others, namely a society which expects very little of you aside from paying taxes and not being a public nuisance. There’s nothing morally wrong with the perpetually single life - some of us are better off that way - but you cannot build society around singledom.

It’s important not to over-learn the lesson here: it’s not that having relationships and families has become impossible. It’s just that it’s all become more difficult. As living standards have risen, the farther apart we’ve drifted. But people are still having relationships, getting married, and having children, albeit at lower rates. With so much of what we do in life, there exists two seemingly contradictory mindsets we need to assume at once: the odds are stacked against us, but we must still overcome the odds.

How to do it? Conventional wisdom holds that it’s men who need to change their politics in order to bridge the gap. Of course they’re going to say that. After all, society can only become more progressive and telling women they need to change has become off-limits. At the same time, there’s room for nuance on the matter.

John Burn-Murdoch says:

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As we saw earlier, in the U.S. and UK, young men remain mostly liberal. Those trends aren’t going to reverse themselves overnight. South Korea saw a drastic change in young men’s political attitudes, but due to differences in culture, it serves as a poor example of what we can expect in our society. More critically, since it was women in the West who took such a radical left turn more than it was men who took a radical right turn, the onus is for women to ease off the gas pedal, not men, who’ve been driving at more or less the same speed the entire time.

So although I agree with Burn-Murdoch that men liberalizing may sound like the more practical solution, the fact it was women who shifted so drastically while men remained at a steady state says men cannot be expected to become more progressive than they already are. If anything, we can only expect them to become more conservative, if only in reaction to women driving left. More importantly, it was progressive values, not conservative ones, that ultimately led to today’s state of affairs. Without getting too sucked into the cultural commentary, it’s not controversial to state that progressive values, if not explicitly anti-family, undoubtedly de-emphasized the importance of it or radically re-defined it to mean anything and everything, eroding its vitality and position of importance in society. This relationship crisis is just a logical outcome.

It’s also absolutely not the case throughout history that society continues on a progressive trend. Yes, Burn-Murdoch is correct in the sense we’re probably not regressing to Middle Age values, but many of the progressive values we regard as sacrosanct today don’t survive in more feral environments, which is where we’re headed. Selco Begovic, survivor of the Bosnian War, was once asked what happened to gender roles during the conflict. His answer was that they returned to traditional roles. We may or may not be headed for civil war, but the point here is that some things just don’t survive first contact with harsh reality.

For now, we are where we are. How do we find relationships in today’s environment?

First, I think we all need to draw red lines. Let’s turn back to Rod Dreher to find out what I mean [bold mine]:

One problem is that our politics today have become so moralized and personal. I find myself in my late fifties facing the possibility that I will remarry. I would like to, but the thought of entering the dating scene again with things so ideologically fraught is extremely discouraging. Me, I wouldn’t care one bit if my potential wife believed in socialist economics, or was a foreign-policy pacifist, and so forth. Those are differences I can live with. But I probably could not live with a wife who was a progressive on social issues like abortion, sexual orientation, gender identity, and even race. I think it’s because those issues speak to what the human being is, and what humanity’s purpose is. On the race matter, I’m more or less a Martin Luther King liberal, but that puts me on the right today. As our political culture has basically come to be one big Borderline Personality Disorder cesspit, who has the internal wherewithal to put up with finding oneself condemned by one’s partner as evil incarnate because you don’t share her belief in this or that political or cultural issue?

You’ve got to find someone who shares your values. No, you’re not going to agree on everything and it’s silly to rule someone out over a single disagreement, no matter how spirited it may be. That’s childish. However, if someone violates your sense of right and wrong, that’s incredibly tough to overcome. For me, thinking children should be allowed to swap genders, even against parents’ wishes, would be a red line. So would be thinking defending life and property through violence is some crime against humanity. That’s a whole different level of disagreement. That’s a complete difference in the understanding of reality and of our underlying moral code. You cannot be in a relationship (a healthy one, anyway) with someone whose sense of right and wrong is in direct conflict with yours.

When finding love, you need to be open-minded, but you need to be discerning at the same time.

More from Dreher:

Mind you, I’m only getting one side of the story, but the Cluster B stuff that Chris Rufo talks about — the high-pitched emotionalism, the quickness to decide that the men are EVIL because they don’t agree on this or that issue, the whipping back and forth between clinginess to rejection — it’s all there. Listening to them talk, it seems that popular culture valorizes these traits in women, tells them that these are signs of feminine strength and identity. I was talking with a friend today about how the whole question of “my truth” makes it much harder to form emotional bonds between men and women, because it frames truth and the search for it in terms of personal identity. If a man disagrees with one of these “my truth” women about whatever, she may interpret it as a rejection of her as a person. Which is just bonkers … but that’s the world we have created.

Now, more than ever, getting to know the person fairly well before getting serious is important. Humans have always been complicated beings, but we’re probably more complicated than we’ve ever been, thanks to the multitude of influences in play today. Nobody wants to be alone, but the only thing worse than being alone is being with someone who’s incompatible with you. The saying “There’s someone for everyone” is probably less true now than ever, but the solution isn’t to be with anyone, either. In both good times and bad, you need to be able to handle them and they need to be able to handle you.

Though I’ve been writing primarily from a male perspective, we should never forget: women are suffering, too. The loneliness crisis is as bad for women as it is for men, just in different ways.

The prevalence of mental illness today is high, but not only is it higher among women, notice what kind of women it’s higher among:

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Prescription medication (specifically anti-depressants) usage is higher among women as well. Even as they’re now outperforming men and their economic prospects have improved tremendously, this hasn’t translated into greater life satisfaction. If anything, women are probably as miserable as they’ve ever been.

Back to Daniel Cox:

At the same time, women's dissatisfaction with the status quo has only intensified. In 2016, 61% of women said they were satisfied with the way women are treated in American society, according to a Gallup survey. Today, that has dropped to 44%.

Remember that women are as desperate for love and relationships as men are. Alongside the anti-male, feminist vitriol that saturates much of social media, you also see videos like these: women who themselves are lonely and wish for the company of men:

In another video describing a singles event which had to be canceled due to a lack of male attendees, I came across a comment that I believe underscores the severity of the crisis better than the statistics ever could [bold mine]:

I went to one of these single events. The organizer called me asking if I wanted to attend. At first, I declined, but she paid for me because she said there were so few men attending. This was a 'progressive dinner'; where for every course of the meal you change tables and sit with 3 other people you haven't met. I put on my best suit and tie and went. There were 20 women and 4 men. None of the women treated me like a potential date/partner, but more like an imposition in their evening. I tried to blend into the wallpaper and be non-verbal. During the course of the meal, all these women bitched about their exes, their jobs, how life is so hard for them, blah, blah, blah. Not one asked anything about me or my life. It was all about them. I left immediately after coffee and dessert, thanked the host for my free meal and left. None of these women would I consider dating. What a joke. Never again. PS...I consider myself a good looking guy with a good job. Not overweight, but only 5’9” still played hockey, former police officer, and had no problem meeting and dating women.

I’m not sharing that comment to dunk on women. I hope nobody takes it that way. It’s to show the burden everyone, male and female, seems to be carrying around today. We all agree there’s a problem, but we can’t agree on a solution. In the end, we decide to just go our separate ways, only to find there’s nothing there, either. But we’ve made our choices and nobody wants to concede by turning around. Maybe turning around isn’t an option.

Last November, Regime mouthpiece The Washington Post published an op-ed on the issue, validating this as a mainstream matter. The authors said about the political divergence inhibiting marriages:

This mismatch means that someone will need to compromise. As the researchers Lyman Stone and Brad Wilcox have noted, about 1 in 5 young singles will have little choice but to marry someone outside their ideological tribe. The other option is that they decline to get married at all — not an ideal outcome considering the data showing that marriage is good for the health of societies and individuals alike.

And:

Gen Z is still relatively young, and the Trump-era divisions between single men and women might yet reverse themselves. But there’s a good chance they won’t, particularly if Mr. Trump manages to inject the body politic with his distinct brand of existential dread during and after the 2024 elections. It is worth thinking both ahead of and beyond Mr. Trump. A cultural shift might be necessary — one that views politics as a part of people’s identity but far from the most important part. Americans’ ability to live together, quite literally, might depend on it.

Except as the situation in the country deteriorates, politics will become more existential and personal. These attitudes are likely to harden, not soften, and political opinions are likely to become even more integral to one’s personal identity. This is what happens when politics becomes a matter of literal survival.

When the people in power think it’s a problem, it’s past time to pay attention.

So… How’s Your Love Life?

As I was writing this, news has come out that Biden is leading Trump in national polls. Once again, the divergence between men and women looms large:

The gender gap is widening.

Women 58 – 36 percent support Biden, up from December when it was 53 – 41 percent.

Men 53 – 42 percent support Trump, largely unchanged from December when it was 51 – 41 percent.

“The gender demographic tells a story to keep an eye on. Propelled by female voters in just the past few weeks, the head-to-head tie with Trump morphs into a modest lead for Biden,” said Quinnipiac University Polling Analyst Tim Malloy.

Even among Whites, who generally made up Trump’s base, women decisively support Biden:

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It’s important to note this poll actually says very little about who’s going to win the election in November. First, that’s still nine months away. Second, this poll is the only one out of many which shows Biden in the lead. Third, it doesn’t matter what the country thinks at-large; under the Electoral College system, state-by-state polls matter more.

But the poll proves the men-women political divergence is here, it’s now, and it’ll play a role when it’s time to cast ballots. In the future, it’s not just going to be votes at stake. It could be lives.

What about you? Have you or anyone you know been affected by the political divergence between the sexes? What relationship advice would you give people in this volatile environment? What do you think the future holds? Do you agree this crisis could lead to something like civil war or violent revolution?

I eagerly anticipate your comments.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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