Why Are Young White Women So Angry?
Sixteen years ago, the journalist Aaron Renn wrote an article for my old website, New Geography, identifying a curious fact about some of America’s most progressive cities: they were disproportionately white.
He found that the dominant characteristic unifying cities such as Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis and Boston was the relatively small size of their African American populations and their comparatively large numbers of white residents.
Their demographics will have shifted somewhat in the decade and a half since thanks to immigration, but they remain predominantly white at a time when most big cities – New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston – are roughly two-thirds non-white. White people represent 60pc of the populations of Minneapolis and Seattle, while in Portland the figure is nearly 70pc.
Yet these very cities are also where some of the most disruptive, and even violent, protests against the ICE deportation push have been taking place. Look at the demonstrations and they aren’t dominated by “people of colour”. Instead, the crowds are made up to a considerable extent by white people, especially women. This also seemed to be the case with the recent No Kings protests, according to research from American University scholars. Psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert described these demonstrations as “a kind of group therapy playing out in the streets”.
Ironically, the very organisation these people have been protesting against – ICE – is heavily Latino in many parts of the US and around 30pc staffed by Latinos at a national level. Inconveniently for the progressive narrative, both shooters in the tragic death of Alex Pretti appear to have been Hispanic.
None of this is to say that the actions of ICE in Minneapolis, particularly the killings, were justified. Yet there’s also reason to believe that the nature of the protests helped set the stage for these confrontations. Agents who are spat on, insulted and doxed are surely more likely to overreact to harassment than to the peaceful protests that exist largely in the the progressive media’s imagination.
Who are these hyper-agitated people? They tend to represent a distinct sub-set of urban, educated whites, contemporary facsimiles of the 60s and 70s radicals, some of whom also embraced violent tactics. They cluster in favoured hipster cities where they increasingly elect anti-law enforcement socialist candidates, as they did in New York.
On a national basis, the progressive Left is estimated to represent roughly 8pc of the total US population. But these are not what we used to call liberals, who were open to change but sought to do it through elections, and the courts, not disruption.
The illiberality of these folks was revealed in a recent study in the Left-leaning Atlantic, which dubbed them “the most politically intolerant Americans”. It found that the most intolerant county in America, for example, is located not in rural Alabama but in Massachusetts (Suffolk county). This is an area dominated by universities and is home to diversity-obsessed mayor Michelle Wu.
Indeed, progressive white people are now perhaps the most radical and agitated section of US society. Gen-Z women, in particular, are more likely to take radical positions than their male counterparts. These include the “fangirls” rallying to the cause of Luigi Mangione, who is on trial for murdering health care executive Brian Thompson in broad daylight. This female dominated cult seems determined to elevate him into an almost Christ-like martyr.
Read the rest of this piece at Yahoo News.
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; find him on Substack and Twitter @joelkotkin.
