Good post. In general we need more Plutarch's Lives type short bios, only the interesting bits of someone's life, and with the moral of the story--- his good points and bad.
And we need it to emphasize that the past is diffrent-- people held slaves, and could either good or bad masters-- people were loyal to King George nad not necessarily evil, etc.
Also, for evangelicals-- there were pious mainliners, and mainliners used to be real Christians.
I think that among the UMC class in general (whether state school UMC or fancy private UMC), a significant part of the political orientation is directly related to their average educational attainment. Almost all of this group has college degrees (which has been consistently associated with more left leaning political opinions for at least 50 years at this point; this trend has only continued to strengthen in more recent times). Many in this group hold graduate or professional degrees as well, which are even more strongly associated with left leaning political positions. This phenomenon isn't even restricted to the US; it's been noted in many other western democracies as well. I guess when it comes down to it, I'm not that surprised that this group is the way it is, politically and socially. I'm likewise not surprised that their rates of divorce tend to be lower, their financial solvency better, their lifespans longer, and the educational attainment of their children higher than the US population in aggregate, and certainly when compared to the downwardly mobile former middle class.
Anecdotally, almost all of my immediate social peer group in this social bucket leans left to some degree. Almost all of us also have right-leaning parents (baby boomer generation or older gen x). My wife and I have wondered about that for ourselves; our parents lean right (both groups), and both she and I, as well as both sets of siblings and their spouses (all of them) lean left to various degrees. It certainly wasn't anything our parents taught us.
I also think that, beyond education, social circle has a lot to do with it. Most people who stayed in the town I grew up in (small farming community hours from any major city) also stayed republican. Social and political views tend to rub off on people; and I think that besides education one of the other big divides in this country is how right leaning people have self-segregated more and more into exurbs and rural areas while left leaning people have self-segregated into cities or close-in suburbs. These effects are self-reinforcing since people rarely buck the trend of their peers at work and in daily life. People find their tribe and stick to it more or less.
My wife and I fit in this cohort for state school grads. We are in Columbus and the type of folks described are in suburban areas all around here. There are times we feel out of place among our own friends in a cultural sense.
The writer of that article is right that these folks, largely millennial, lean left due to cultural issues. There is a large libertarian streak with this cohort. You have an open anti-religious streak among some, ironic because this group became exactly like the Religious Right they grew up hating. Donald Trump got a lot of votes largely to tick off this cohort.
There is a big, silent concern amongst this cohort about status. Yes, this is a professional or managerial group. Try forcing this group to do a blue collar occupation and you will get a reaction. There is a good bit of groupthink and snobbiness among many.
I could write on and on about this cohort. I imagine many will in the coming years.
When I read the quotes from the State School Upper Middle Class post, I was trying to figure out why the young adults in the UMC group are left of center and dislike the republican party. Yes, they were exposed to leftists in college and the culture has turned liberal, but the UMC group is living what is arguably the conservative, middle-class dream. So why the shift in politics? The members of my family who are 60+, and most of our friends, belong to the UMC group, and we are red, not blue. We are mostly conservative and religious. (This is probably not the norm nationwide for the UMC since I live in a small town. Our 60+ counterparts in large suburbs are almost certainly more liberal, probably light blue.) Yet, I do notice that our children and the children of our friends are more liberal than we are, and as mentioned in the post, are at least somewhat put off by republicans. Some vote split ticket, something I rarely do, and most vote for democrats. This younger UMC group can hardly claim that the republican party has become radical. If anything, it has drifted slowly to the left. It is the democrats who propose untenable, crazy, and often immoral positions.
It may be that this younger UMC group really thinks that the republicans are radical since they don't have any historical perspective, but one thing that stands out to me is their sensitivity to personality. They prefer soft, banal people who may not be effectual in office but at least don't disturb the peace. Trump, with his non-stop offensive comments, is beyond the pale for them. How a politician acts seems more important to them than his positions, or least as important. Personally, I wouldn't mind if a president sucked lemons and spit seeds at people so long as he pushed the right buttons in office. But not so with the younger UMCs. I believe this represents the influence of women, especially feminists, in our culture. Women are very sensitive to personality and typically are more liberal than men. Most of the women in this UMC group exert significant influence on the viewpoints of their husbands. The bluish color of the younger UMC group may well be due to the influence of the wives in the group.
The vector of influence here is that State School UMC is only the bottom half of a larger, more coherent UMC that many sociologists have written about (as have I, if the journal publishers would give me a print date). SSUMC are looking directly upwards at their supervisors and executives, the Ivy League UMC, for direction and inspiration in terms of aesthetics, lifestyle, taste, aspirations, and ultimately politics. Our SSUMC are not radicals because they have nothing to gain from it. Unlike the ILUMC, they can't get their VP cancelled and expect to take over that job. It's going to another Ivy Leaguer.
Our Tyler and Megyn are never going to get beyond Senior Manager, Department Director, or Associate Professor and they're fine with that. They're going to have their comfortable life and a good enough retirement to take two Carnival Cruises a year until they need assisted living which will be covered by their plan. Because of this, politics is not an existential value for these people. It's about self-expression that can be put back in the box whenever it becomes uncomfortable. Aspirational politics means adopting the tastes and values of high-status people, and the high-status people the SSUMC interacts with are the Ivy League strivers. But it's about appearing, not being, like high status folks, so they're not going to actually trans their kids or rock the boat at work by making false sexual harassment claims.
I do think that this article is a little dated in its descriptions. Tyler and Megyn are probably pushing 50 by now. They're late Gen X, maybe at latest a Reagan Baby like me. My cohort and the ones just younger than me are not having 2.5 kids. I'm a freak among my colleagues for having three children. Half the women in my generation are never married and the birth rate for Millennial UMC women is nowhere near 2.5. The socioeconomic and cultural descriptions are spot-on. They're sheltered. They're hiding behind an invisible fortress of barriers between themselves and the social dysfunction of the rest of society so that they can pretend it's not real.
When I lived in Atlanta, in the "nice" suburbs, there was a stabbing in the local middle school in my son's PE class. Every parent that we knew personally either pulled their kids out of that school or planned to do it in the next school cycle. My daughter's friend's parents sold their house and moved one town further out from Atlanta, then enrolled the child in the public school there. This is the pattern of the SSUMC - they're going to continue burying their heads in the sand and moving one more suburb out so long as this remains a possibility. Only then, maybe, will they begin to challenge their ideas about politics.
Re: politics is not an existential value for these people.
Politics should not be an existential matter for anyone. Apart from the danger of nuclear war (which has loomed longer than I have been alive) what exactly in politics is a realistic threat to anyone's existence?
If the local school secretly trans-ed your daughter, and a judge took custody away because you wouldn't call her "he/him" at home, then I guess you could comfort yourself with the fact that you haven't been nuked. Not an existential issue, right?
I don't have a daughter. Or any children. And even that scenario has nothing to do with my existence. It's also rare as hen's teeth-- and maybe in politics we should be be more concerned with things that happen commonly not about highly confected situations that are seldom if ever encountered. Far too much energy is wasted on the whole trans business-- and yes, by both Left and Right. All in all I'm more worried about corruption destroying effective governance, about feckless foreign policy wrecking our nation, about young (and not so young) people being unable to find work, about an economy that shovels loot and lucre on the haves and resents even the bare survival of the have-nots. Such things affect tens of millions of us.
I think DR hits the point: culture. Since around 1990, there's been a great fragmentation of the American common culture. The UMC and regular Joe's both drank the same coffee and beer in the 1970s, etc. Today, they have completely different folkways. Charles Murray gets at this with his "bubble quiz." Also, this group went from only partially college educated (even with the Boomer generation) to essentially 100% college educated. And college and the status signals of our society inculcated a lot of center-left ideas.
If a survey showed that 21% of men under 30 had a negative view of women, vs. only 7% of women the same age, it would be reported as a national crisis: "Explosion of misogyny!" "How can women and girls even feel safe leaving their homes with all the seething hatred out there!" When the numbers are reversed, it's reported in a very matter-of-fact way, with no hint of alarm, and often with a subtle undertone of "Good, men are finally getting the hatred they deserve!" And this seems to be true whether the author of the article is male or female.
It would be interesting to try to parse out where that negative view comes from. Is this a consequence of too many absent fathers? Too many rude jerks and awkward dates in their teens? Boys mature more slowly than girls so I can some frustration rooting in during adolescence. Still, that's always been there.
These women are under 25; they're zoomers. Most of them didn't date in high school and many of them didn't date in college either. They may disproportionately come from broken homes but I don't think that necessarily leads to a general resentment for men.
I think the cause is more social contagion than anything else. These girls were addicted to the Hunger Games books in middle school and still watch the movies on repeat. They spent too much time on Instagram in middle school and then added TikTok on top of it when they went to college during COVID. They're Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter fanatics. The common factor here is that they develop neurosis about things that ultimately do not matter (unless you're a middle school girl) and then discharge these neuroses onto men in the pattern given to them by these pieces of media and by the women in their own lives to obtain absolution.
The most "metal" thing Katniss does in Hunger Games is when she shocks the (male) Gamemakers in the pre-games skills showcase by shooting an apple into the wall. (I'm regurgitating TLP at this point.) I can't say for sure if there's a direct connection, but I do know that there is a large contingent of zoomer women who have dedicated their lives to having as many of these moments as possible: owning men or "the patriarchy" while showing off in front of the camera. It doesn't prevent some of these women from falling in love and getting married -- Katniss did that too -- but it does mean that they fall in love and get married in spite of this programming. They are more neurotic and controlling, and many of them keep a tally of rights vs wrongs.
Median man looks like he’s on probation or a drug dealer, makes no money, can’t hold a conversation, and is emotionally incontinent. Then if you go up the scale and they’re basically all gay even if they don’t have sex with men. The women are equivalently bad but in different ways.
For what it is worth, I live in China, and the women here are quite pessimistic about their men as well, though their men would be outstanding on quite a few metrics compared to the lads in the UK and USA.
Re: Then if you go up the scale and they’re basically all gay even if they don’t have sex with men.
I have trouble classifying anyone as gay unless they have (or want to have) sex with people of the same sex. Yes, gay religious celibates do exist, but even they experience the desire but they say No to it.
There certainly are lowlifes who do not engage in regular gainful employment (whether on or off the books). Understandable that women would not find such men attractive. However, excluding trust funds drones, that type is mainly to be found in the lowest class ranking, certainly not in the middle class region. And any definition of "working class" which excludes "working" as a norm is an oxymoron from the start.
Good post. In general we need more Plutarch's Lives type short bios, only the interesting bits of someone's life, and with the moral of the story--- his good points and bad.
And we need it to emphasize that the past is diffrent-- people held slaves, and could either good or bad masters-- people were loyal to King George nad not necessarily evil, etc.
Also, for evangelicals-- there were pious mainliners, and mainliners used to be real Christians.
I think that among the UMC class in general (whether state school UMC or fancy private UMC), a significant part of the political orientation is directly related to their average educational attainment. Almost all of this group has college degrees (which has been consistently associated with more left leaning political opinions for at least 50 years at this point; this trend has only continued to strengthen in more recent times). Many in this group hold graduate or professional degrees as well, which are even more strongly associated with left leaning political positions. This phenomenon isn't even restricted to the US; it's been noted in many other western democracies as well. I guess when it comes down to it, I'm not that surprised that this group is the way it is, politically and socially. I'm likewise not surprised that their rates of divorce tend to be lower, their financial solvency better, their lifespans longer, and the educational attainment of their children higher than the US population in aggregate, and certainly when compared to the downwardly mobile former middle class.
Anecdotally, almost all of my immediate social peer group in this social bucket leans left to some degree. Almost all of us also have right-leaning parents (baby boomer generation or older gen x). My wife and I have wondered about that for ourselves; our parents lean right (both groups), and both she and I, as well as both sets of siblings and their spouses (all of them) lean left to various degrees. It certainly wasn't anything our parents taught us.
I also think that, beyond education, social circle has a lot to do with it. Most people who stayed in the town I grew up in (small farming community hours from any major city) also stayed republican. Social and political views tend to rub off on people; and I think that besides education one of the other big divides in this country is how right leaning people have self-segregated more and more into exurbs and rural areas while left leaning people have self-segregated into cities or close-in suburbs. These effects are self-reinforcing since people rarely buck the trend of their peers at work and in daily life. People find their tribe and stick to it more or less.
My wife and I fit in this cohort for state school grads. We are in Columbus and the type of folks described are in suburban areas all around here. There are times we feel out of place among our own friends in a cultural sense.
The writer of that article is right that these folks, largely millennial, lean left due to cultural issues. There is a large libertarian streak with this cohort. You have an open anti-religious streak among some, ironic because this group became exactly like the Religious Right they grew up hating. Donald Trump got a lot of votes largely to tick off this cohort.
There is a big, silent concern amongst this cohort about status. Yes, this is a professional or managerial group. Try forcing this group to do a blue collar occupation and you will get a reaction. There is a good bit of groupthink and snobbiness among many.
I could write on and on about this cohort. I imagine many will in the coming years.
When I read the quotes from the State School Upper Middle Class post, I was trying to figure out why the young adults in the UMC group are left of center and dislike the republican party. Yes, they were exposed to leftists in college and the culture has turned liberal, but the UMC group is living what is arguably the conservative, middle-class dream. So why the shift in politics? The members of my family who are 60+, and most of our friends, belong to the UMC group, and we are red, not blue. We are mostly conservative and religious. (This is probably not the norm nationwide for the UMC since I live in a small town. Our 60+ counterparts in large suburbs are almost certainly more liberal, probably light blue.) Yet, I do notice that our children and the children of our friends are more liberal than we are, and as mentioned in the post, are at least somewhat put off by republicans. Some vote split ticket, something I rarely do, and most vote for democrats. This younger UMC group can hardly claim that the republican party has become radical. If anything, it has drifted slowly to the left. It is the democrats who propose untenable, crazy, and often immoral positions.
It may be that this younger UMC group really thinks that the republicans are radical since they don't have any historical perspective, but one thing that stands out to me is their sensitivity to personality. They prefer soft, banal people who may not be effectual in office but at least don't disturb the peace. Trump, with his non-stop offensive comments, is beyond the pale for them. How a politician acts seems more important to them than his positions, or least as important. Personally, I wouldn't mind if a president sucked lemons and spit seeds at people so long as he pushed the right buttons in office. But not so with the younger UMCs. I believe this represents the influence of women, especially feminists, in our culture. Women are very sensitive to personality and typically are more liberal than men. Most of the women in this UMC group exert significant influence on the viewpoints of their husbands. The bluish color of the younger UMC group may well be due to the influence of the wives in the group.
The vector of influence here is that State School UMC is only the bottom half of a larger, more coherent UMC that many sociologists have written about (as have I, if the journal publishers would give me a print date). SSUMC are looking directly upwards at their supervisors and executives, the Ivy League UMC, for direction and inspiration in terms of aesthetics, lifestyle, taste, aspirations, and ultimately politics. Our SSUMC are not radicals because they have nothing to gain from it. Unlike the ILUMC, they can't get their VP cancelled and expect to take over that job. It's going to another Ivy Leaguer.
Our Tyler and Megyn are never going to get beyond Senior Manager, Department Director, or Associate Professor and they're fine with that. They're going to have their comfortable life and a good enough retirement to take two Carnival Cruises a year until they need assisted living which will be covered by their plan. Because of this, politics is not an existential value for these people. It's about self-expression that can be put back in the box whenever it becomes uncomfortable. Aspirational politics means adopting the tastes and values of high-status people, and the high-status people the SSUMC interacts with are the Ivy League strivers. But it's about appearing, not being, like high status folks, so they're not going to actually trans their kids or rock the boat at work by making false sexual harassment claims.
I do think that this article is a little dated in its descriptions. Tyler and Megyn are probably pushing 50 by now. They're late Gen X, maybe at latest a Reagan Baby like me. My cohort and the ones just younger than me are not having 2.5 kids. I'm a freak among my colleagues for having three children. Half the women in my generation are never married and the birth rate for Millennial UMC women is nowhere near 2.5. The socioeconomic and cultural descriptions are spot-on. They're sheltered. They're hiding behind an invisible fortress of barriers between themselves and the social dysfunction of the rest of society so that they can pretend it's not real.
When I lived in Atlanta, in the "nice" suburbs, there was a stabbing in the local middle school in my son's PE class. Every parent that we knew personally either pulled their kids out of that school or planned to do it in the next school cycle. My daughter's friend's parents sold their house and moved one town further out from Atlanta, then enrolled the child in the public school there. This is the pattern of the SSUMC - they're going to continue burying their heads in the sand and moving one more suburb out so long as this remains a possibility. Only then, maybe, will they begin to challenge their ideas about politics.
Re: politics is not an existential value for these people.
Politics should not be an existential matter for anyone. Apart from the danger of nuclear war (which has loomed longer than I have been alive) what exactly in politics is a realistic threat to anyone's existence?
If the local school secretly trans-ed your daughter, and a judge took custody away because you wouldn't call her "he/him" at home, then I guess you could comfort yourself with the fact that you haven't been nuked. Not an existential issue, right?
I don't have a daughter. Or any children. And even that scenario has nothing to do with my existence. It's also rare as hen's teeth-- and maybe in politics we should be be more concerned with things that happen commonly not about highly confected situations that are seldom if ever encountered. Far too much energy is wasted on the whole trans business-- and yes, by both Left and Right. All in all I'm more worried about corruption destroying effective governance, about feckless foreign policy wrecking our nation, about young (and not so young) people being unable to find work, about an economy that shovels loot and lucre on the haves and resents even the bare survival of the have-nots. Such things affect tens of millions of us.
QED
I think DR hits the point: culture. Since around 1990, there's been a great fragmentation of the American common culture. The UMC and regular Joe's both drank the same coffee and beer in the 1970s, etc. Today, they have completely different folkways. Charles Murray gets at this with his "bubble quiz." Also, this group went from only partially college educated (even with the Boomer generation) to essentially 100% college educated. And college and the status signals of our society inculcated a lot of center-left ideas.
Maybe I'm beating a dead horse here, but -
If a survey showed that 21% of men under 30 had a negative view of women, vs. only 7% of women the same age, it would be reported as a national crisis: "Explosion of misogyny!" "How can women and girls even feel safe leaving their homes with all the seething hatred out there!" When the numbers are reversed, it's reported in a very matter-of-fact way, with no hint of alarm, and often with a subtle undertone of "Good, men are finally getting the hatred they deserve!" And this seems to be true whether the author of the article is male or female.
It would be interesting to try to parse out where that negative view comes from. Is this a consequence of too many absent fathers? Too many rude jerks and awkward dates in their teens? Boys mature more slowly than girls so I can some frustration rooting in during adolescence. Still, that's always been there.
These women are under 25; they're zoomers. Most of them didn't date in high school and many of them didn't date in college either. They may disproportionately come from broken homes but I don't think that necessarily leads to a general resentment for men.
I think the cause is more social contagion than anything else. These girls were addicted to the Hunger Games books in middle school and still watch the movies on repeat. They spent too much time on Instagram in middle school and then added TikTok on top of it when they went to college during COVID. They're Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter fanatics. The common factor here is that they develop neurosis about things that ultimately do not matter (unless you're a middle school girl) and then discharge these neuroses onto men in the pattern given to them by these pieces of media and by the women in their own lives to obtain absolution.
The most "metal" thing Katniss does in Hunger Games is when she shocks the (male) Gamemakers in the pre-games skills showcase by shooting an apple into the wall. (I'm regurgitating TLP at this point.) I can't say for sure if there's a direct connection, but I do know that there is a large contingent of zoomer women who have dedicated their lives to having as many of these moments as possible: owning men or "the patriarchy" while showing off in front of the camera. It doesn't prevent some of these women from falling in love and getting married -- Katniss did that too -- but it does mean that they fall in love and get married in spite of this programming. They are more neurotic and controlling, and many of them keep a tally of rights vs wrongs.
Median man looks like he’s on probation or a drug dealer, makes no money, can’t hold a conversation, and is emotionally incontinent. Then if you go up the scale and they’re basically all gay even if they don’t have sex with men. The women are equivalently bad but in different ways.
For what it is worth, I live in China, and the women here are quite pessimistic about their men as well, though their men would be outstanding on quite a few metrics compared to the lads in the UK and USA.
Re: Then if you go up the scale and they’re basically all gay even if they don’t have sex with men.
I have trouble classifying anyone as gay unless they have (or want to have) sex with people of the same sex. Yes, gay religious celibates do exist, but even they experience the desire but they say No to it.
There certainly are lowlifes who do not engage in regular gainful employment (whether on or off the books). Understandable that women would not find such men attractive. However, excluding trust funds drones, that type is mainly to be found in the lowest class ranking, certainly not in the middle class region. And any definition of "working class" which excludes "working" as a norm is an oxymoron from the start.