BREAKING: Sullivan cites depressing new survey!

MONDAY, JULY 2, 2018

Suggests reason for its results: Last Friday, in his weekly piece for New York magazine, Andrew Sullivan cited a depressing new survey.

He said that, according to several surveys, millennials have been moving away from support for the Democrats in the time since Trump's election. One large survey said this:

SULLIVAN (6/29/18): [W]hat to make of another huge survey—16,000 millennial respondents—that found that [millennials] were not as hostile to the GOP as a party as they are to Trump? It also found a significant group of millennials who had not become Republican, but who had lost their Democratic affiliation. Support for the Dems went from 55 percent to 46 percent from 2016 to 2018. Home in further and look at white millennials, and the drop is 47 percent to 39, which is dead even with the 39 percent who back the Republicans.

Then look at white millennial men. They’ve gone from 48 percent to 37 percent Democratic support. More striking in their case is that they haven’t just moved away from the Democrats, but have now become Republicans. Their support for the GOP in the last two years has gone from 36 percent to 46. Which means that for white men between the ages of 18 and 34, the GOP now has a ten-point lead. It has achieved that swing in the last two years.

The survey was done by Reuters/Ipsos. You can peruse it here.

Why would so many millennials—in particular, so many white millennial men—be moving way from Dems?

We can't answer that question. We can't even vouch for the accuracy of the very large Reuters/Ipsos survey.

That said, Sullivan took a stab at an answer. We think his suggestion is well worth considering, unless we refuse to wonder about the way our nation actually got here:

SULLIVAN (continuing directly): We don’t know why this has happened. It may be the economy, lower unemployment, and marginally lower taxes. But that doesn’t explain the yawning and growing gender gap. So here’s a guess: When the Democratic party and its mainstream spokespersons use the term “white male” as an insult, when they describe vast swathes of white men in America as “problematic,” when they call struggling, working-class white men “privileged,” when they ask in their media if it’s okay just to hate men, and white men in particular, maybe white men hear it. Maybe the outright sexism, racism, and misandry that is now regarded as inextricable from progressivism makes the young white men less likely to vote for a party that openly advocates its disdain of them.

I don’t know for sure, of course. All I know is that, to my mind, bigotry is still bigotry, whoever expresses it. And those routinely dismissed as bigots might decide to leave a party that so openly expresses its disdain for them.

We liberals! We love to toss our S-, R- and B-bombs around. All of a sudden, there was Sully, lobbing a B-bomb at us!

Are young white men abandoning Dems for the reason Sullivan suggests? We have no ultimate way of saying.

That said, we've been repulsed by this sort of pseudo-liberal non-bigotry bigotry for years, if not for decades. And yes, our knee-jerk attacks on various groups have been reaching clownish proportions.

Are we liberals "asking, in [our] media, if it's okay to just hate men?" Really? Has anyone actually done that?

Sullivan links to a recent essay in the Washington Post's high-profile Outlook section. The piece appeared on Sunday, June 10. We think it was one of the dumbest, most depressing essays we have ever read.

The essay was written by Suzanna Danuta Walters. Horrifically, she isn't simply a professor of sociology at Northeastern University. She's "director of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program."

In her essay, Walters basically said that women really should "hate men."

She didn't say that women should hate men who commit sexual assaults. She didn't say that women should hate men who engage in harassment.

She plainly suggested that women should just go ahead and hate men in general, full stop. Ever since the piece appeared, we've been trying to tame our depression long enough to comment.

Luckily, Sullivan cited the essay last Friday. He provisionally linked the sentiments expressed in the piece to falling support for Democrats among young millennial men.

Does this sort of thing explain why that survey turned out as it did? We have no idea, but we do know this:

By any normal, post Enlightenment standard, that essay was just dumbfoundingly dumb. It's astounding that a major professor could compose such dumbfounding work. It's even more astounding to think that the Washington Post chose to publish it, in high-profile Outlook no less.

Our team is extremely dumb. We're also filled with tribal loathing and poorly disguised group hatreds.

As a general matter, we're too dumb, too tribal, and too self-impressed to see these things about ourselves. Much as Sullivan suggests in his piece, The Others aren't always similarly blinded by the brilliant pure self-evident glory of lazy dumb farkwads like Us.

Did Walters help elect Donald J. Trump? Is it possible that her work is going to help re-elect him?