The Two Americas
The late Charlie Kirk may have been best known for his conservative politics, but those politics also resonated with traditional values, religious faith, and family life — one side of a critical divide in our society. Life and value choices, even more than ideology, increasingly define how people vote, what they believe, and where they live.
For years, the United States has been evolving into two different countries. One is dominated by often childless, urban renters, many of them college graduates or poor minorities. This America is concentrated in core cities and college towns.
The other America exists in an almost parallel universe—largely suburban, exurban, small town, and rural — but where family, faith, and children constitute the common threads of everyday life. This America was receptive to Kirk’s traditionalist message.
The first America has become a haven for a significant number of postmodernist progressives who largely reject the customary pillars of society such as religion, marriage, and family. Theirs is not a rebellion of peasants and laborers, as occurred from medieval times and on through the early progressive era, but instead an uprising mostly of the urban professional classes. Rather than the mundane concerns of traditional liberals or “sewer socialists,” the postmodernists focus more on environmental catastrophism, gender identity, and radical racial politics. AEI scholar Sam Abrams and I have been following this political trend for years, but new polling shows that it has intensified, particularly among younger single women.
Though economic pressures might eventually make the postmodernists’ cause a broader movement, today’s radical activists seem to respond more to their own inner cultural angst and troubled psychology. Modern progressivism sells best among people who reject traditional notions about families and gender. Today over 28 percent of all Gen Z women, notes Gallup, identify as LGBTQ — more than twice the rate for millennial women and almost three times that for Gen Z men. Over 5 percent of U.S. high school students struggle with gender identity, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Some have learned their gender politics at the feet of their teachers. As one USA Today correspondent wrote in 2017, “the number of women’s and gender studies degrees in the United States has increased by more than 300 percent since 1990, and in 2015, there were more than 2,000 degrees conferred.” Even certain nominally Catholic colleges reject the idea of the sex binary and encourage students to select their own pronouns.
Within this population, political anxiety can lead to violence, or at least acceptance of violence. Nearly 38 percent of respondents and over half of progressives would see the assassination of Donald Trump as “justified,” notes one study. It’s a mindset that predates the Kirk assassination. Many progressives — notably women — celebrated Luigi Mangione’s alleged premeditated murder of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson. In California, a particularly strident center of such views, there’s even a pending proposition on health-care reform named after Mangione.
The postmodernists tend to be highly secular and are likely beneficiaries of America’s long-running “unchurching.” At least until recently, the country has witnessed a steady decline in Christian identification—most notably among mainstream Protestants. Only about 46 percent of Americans born in the 1990s currently identify as Christian. Younger Americans may still embrace of the notion of a spiritual power, but they are leaving religious institutions at a rate four times that of their counterparts three decades ago; almost 40 percent of people aged 18–29 have no religious affiliation.
Read the rest of this piece at: City Journal.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: composite of images by RDNE Stock project and Jackson Howes.
