Various countries’ intelligence services have started ringing alarm bells about this: disgruntled young men who feel like they don’t have a future is, well, a national security risk.
It’s a real shame, how we mortgage young people’s future for tax cuts for the old & rich today.
What’s a real shame is we’re not doing anything about it simply because young men are people.
Feminism didn’t arrive because women were “a source of trouble” or anything. It’s because women deserve a life of freedom of choice, independence, and inclusion in society.
Why aren’t we striving to provide young boys and men with the same sense of purpose and ideal? Shouldn’t be borne out of a sense that they’ll be a problem later but rather because it’s just right.
Feminism absolutely arrived because women made themselves a source of trouble.
I just came back from the National Park at Seneca Falls NY about women’s liberation. Women are even still today working for equal rights, and women’s right to vote came after 70 years of activism and fight.
We will get improvements to housing, wages, health care, and every other good action we need from our leaders and wealthy powerful society, when we make it more uncomfortable for them to keep helping themselves than to change and help the rest of us — and not one minute before.
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
–Frederick Douglass
The worst part is the guy they’ll vote for to “shake things up” will be taking even more from them. It’s a combined failure of education and success of social media disinformation and misinformation.
I don’t think that’s true (well, your second sentence; your first is absolutely correct).
This kind of thing has been happening before the advent of mass and social media: this is just basic human tribalism at play. The only difference is scale.
People want to feel like they belong, and the political Left has done a really bad job at talking to the anxieties of the poor, especially young, male poor. The populist Right, meanwhile, has had a plan and has welcomed these people with open arms.
The Left abandoned the poor because it’s political leaders fell in love with neoliberalism. And I don’t think I can blame them, because triangulation worked very well and made a lot of people very rich while also cutting the traditional right-wing parties off at the knees. The problem is that it left the Left vulnerable to being flanked by right-wing populists who were ready to give comfort and validation to disadvantaged people; answers that were simple, easy and appealing, and make them feel like they were being listened to.
I can see how the leadership of, eg, the US Democratic party, or the Liberals in Canada, might be shocked by this, but for anyone involved on the ground this has been brewing since at least 2000. The real warning signs should have been when people of colour and LGBTQ folk started getting nervous about how progressive governments were big on empty gestures but very quiet when money was on the line, but the loss of young, working-class men happened a couple decades before that.
It’s like we have an entire political class that slept through how the 1930s and 1940s happened. Which is of course, facetious, but it seems true, and the reason is because they didn’t, and still don’t, want to see it because they have been making too much money off of the problem.
The Left abandoned the poor because it’s political leaders fell in love with neoliberalism
Neoliberalism isn’t Left…
The current Left isn’t really Left, either. That’s my point.
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Its gotta be more like despair for totally idiotic men because I’m in despair and I would never vote for the people causing it.
The issue is that most people in despair are inclined to vote for a massive change. They just want anything different than the current status quo.
At the moment in the USA, only the right is offering substantial, systematic change. As awful as it sounds to centrists and the left (I.e. the majority of the population), they don’t offer any substantial alternative.
We’re basically at a point where the current status quo/political center WILL be replaced by something else. Centrists need to realise that the only alternative to right wing change is left wing change…
Those people don’t want “left wing change” because it helps the people that they hate as well as helping them. They’d rather shit their pants so we have to smell it.
Exactly, they’re not opposed to oppression and hierarchy they’re opposed to where they are finding themselves in that system.
They’d be just as happy if instead of receiving help instead “the others” visibly got things worse.
Don’t pay for my education, round up the homeless
I agree, they don’t currently. The problem is that most also don’t want right wing change, they just haven’t realised that one or the other is inevitable.
They’ll probably realise too late, but many would prefer left wing change to right wing change. The problem is, that there just isn’t any substantial left wing options being offered, so they’ll go with the right wing option by default.
Just so I’m reading this correctly, young women are almost at the turning point to becoming more right wing as well, right? With what appears to be only a .01 or .02 difference from young men.
Sounds like the article should be more focusing on why everyone in the world except the boomers are feeling more despair and the young are rapidly trending towards “control”.
The problem, for the likes of Reuters (who is owned by the Thompson family, who are the richest people in Canada) that the problem is the very system that’s enriched them and people like them over the last fifty or so years.
They’d need to admit they were wrong in their desires to dismantle the post-WW2 New Deal era, and that while neoliberalism has worked out just dandy for them, it’s been a net loss for a lot of people and is only getting worse. And that admission would mean they’d have to make do with less. Not that they’d be poor, but they’d need to be less obscenely rich.
And because this is such a hard admission to make, and because neoliberal technocracy has been working great for them so far, they’ll nibble at the edges of the problem, maybe scapegoat a group or two, or fret about culture wars or indulge in the macroeconomic version of bikeshedding instead of dealing with the core issue.
Upton Sinclair was bang on with “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
For anyone who read to the end of the comment above, The Jungle by Upton Sinclair is one of the most powerful books of the 20th century. It is credited with the formation of the FDA and the growth of labor movements throughout the United States. If you have not read it before, read it now.
He also ran as a socialist, and it was the first time in history when the Republicans and Democrats banded together publicly to defeat a 3rd party candidate. They didn’t care which of them won, as long as a socialist didn’t win. He still won something like 35% of the votes.
I don’t think you’re reading it correctly. Men 18-34 were the only group that trended towards the control axis compared to 2014. Both women and men 18-34 went much lower on the despair axis compared to 2014, but women still moved towards the freedom axis instead of the control axis.
I don’t think you read my post correctly.
Look at young women, they went from 3.69 to 3.70, a rapid slow down and only 0.02 point off from a complete reversal.
The next age of women went from 3.45 to 3.55, a much larger move to “freedom”, but they also barely grew despaired.
Young women are almost at the turning point of being more control oriented as well.
In a few more years young women will be more to the control side as well.
What’s alarming is that both young age groups have a massive increase in despair and both are trending towards control, with men leading the path by only a 0.02 difference.
‘Went towards freedom slower than other groups’ isn’t the same as ‘trending towards control’ 🤷♂️
Yes it bloody is.
If you extrapolate from that, it will be on the control side in short order. That is a trend, we can predict what will happen based on the observed changes.
Thats not how extraplation works…
Went toward freedom in any amount of time, extrapolated to any other time, will still be in the same direction, aka toward freedom. The direction cannot change when you have two data points and linearly extrapolate
If they went up 0.1 in 10 years, if you extrapolate 10 more years, they’ll go up 0.1. If you extrapolate 5 years, they’ll go up 0.05. They’ll always go up at the rate of 0.1/10 years
Yup, zero similarity in the trajectory of both age/gender demographics.
Thats not extrapolation, that’s interpretation.
Not if you look at the rate of change as well as the change. If it’s trending towards zero, it can be a curve rather than straight line. That can then trend negative.
Think of a car going fast, then applying the brakes. It slows down until it eventually stops.
Now think of a boat. It doesn’t have a brake. It has a reverse throttle. When you want to slow down, the motor goes backwards. When you hit zero, you start to then go backwards. That’s what they are extrapolating.
There’s only 2 points, not 3. You can’t look at the change of the change with only 2 points. For all we know, if they had done the survey in 2005, women would have been further towards freedom and moved towards control for 2014 and the change of the change would show they’re accelerating towards freedom.
You could also interpret those results as young women hitting a wall on how much towards freedom they will go. Every other group was much lower on the freedom scale, so they had more room to move.
. . . Because freedom is less of an issue for young American women these days eh?
I’m not sure I follow. Freedom is a huge issue for young American women, which is why we lean so much towards freedom on the scale. I would imagine the lack of hope would move young women to push for freedom, since a lot of this ‘control’ stuff involves controlling women. I think it’s just as likely if not more likely that the increase in despair didn’t change the political leanings because they are already so freedom leaning rather than the young women are a few bad days away from embracing fascism.
Note that the younger generations here (18-34) are primarily comprised of people who were not in that cohort the last time this survey was done. Only 18-24 from the first dot is still in that cohort.
Most of that cohort moved into the middle aged group already.
Well, of course. Conservatism (and authoritarianism) at least pays lip service to addressing their concerns. From their perspective, the Left have ignored and devalued them for years.
When a man is disadvantaged but is constantly told he is the beneficiary of the patriarchal system, he feels dismissed and unsupported, and his actual needs aren’t met.
From their perspective, the Left have ignored and devalued them for years.
This is a very important point: the current technocratic left (and I’m really reluctant to call them “the left” because, frankly, they’re right-centrists who don’t care what you ingest or who you fuck) has been absolutely terrible about talking to people’s fears and anxieties. At best they push concerns away with neoliberal knob-twiddling; at worst they demonize them, but in general they/we/the left have been extremely unwilling to be empathetic to working-class anxieties, either because no one wants to touch the status quo because it works well, or because playing to feelings is seen as crass and manipulative.
The reactionary right, on the other hand, as no such scruples: they’ve had this playbook ready since 1933 and are more than willing to talk about people’s fears and anxieties.
It says a lot that the most successful and engaging left-wing politicians (Sanders, Corbyn; even Obama, to a degree early in his term) have spoken to these feelings. It’s also telling that those politicians were ruthlessly attacked by their own party.
A system that demands infinite growth from a saturated market leaves no options other than making things consistently worse than they were in the previous quarter. Anyone who would drink Coca-Cola is already drinking it. So how do they produce growth? They do it by cutting wages, demanding more productivity during the same number of hours, cutting benefits, raising prices, decreasing the amount of product you get for the same price, stiffing distributors, using cheaper ingredients, moving jobs to third world countries, killing labor activists, and all sorts of other abhorrent behavior. This same concept is true for every other saturated market, which is almost every market this late in the game.
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