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Civitas Outlook
Topic
Politics
Published on
Apr 24, 2025
Contributors
Joel Kotkin
Photo by Pea on Unsplash

The Dangers of the Political Gender Gap

Contributors
Joel Kotkin
Joel Kotkin
Senior Research Fellow
Joel Kotkin
Summary
Young women and men are gravitating towards opposite political extremes, with potentially explosive consequences.
Summary
Young women and men are gravitating towards opposite political extremes, with potentially explosive consequences.
Listen to this article

Throughout history, poverty, class and economic self-interest have driven radical political movements. The Bolsheviks harnessed the anger of impoverished workers and peasants to create a movement that controlled the world’s biggest country for seven decades. The Nazis came to power due to both the Great Depression and resentment towards a small but economically nimble Jewish community.

Today, extremist politics is not bubbling up primarily from the economically disaffected, as occurred both in medieval and modern times during periods of upheaval. The self-professed radicals of our age seem more driven by their own inner cultural angst and disturbed psychology.

This angst is now expressed increasingly with violence, from the well-funded campaign against weirdo-genius Elon Musk, which includes arson attacks on Teslas, to the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, the most destructive outbreak of civil disorder in US history, as well as the awful ‘January 6’ riots. Blood-curdling rhetoric now comes even from the once respectable political class. Democratic congresswoman Jasmine Crockett wants Musk ‘taken down’ and says that Democrats have to be ‘okay with punching’. One study suggests that nearly 38 per cent of respondents and over half of ‘progressives’ would see the assassination of Donald Trump as ‘justified’.

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