Conservatives have a gender problem. By Greg Sheridan.
Conservative men in particular are being badly outplayed on issues relating to gender. They have been deprived of the language of chivalry, which is how they once tried to express a deep regard for women as women. The language of chivalry has been outlawed by their political opponents. It is a forbidden dialect. But conservative men have not mastered the dominant language of wokeness, which in any event contains assumptions hostile to conservative beliefs.
A bizarre mutual gender gap has opened up in the Western world between men, trending right, and women, trending left. … The Australian National University’s Election Study for the 2019 election showed that 45 per cent of men were inclined to give their first preference vote to the Liberal-National Coalition, as opposed to 35 per cent of women. Greens are disproportionately supported by women. Pew Research Centre data shows similar trends in Western Europe and Canada. …
The big turning point in the US was the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980. The Republican Party became more explicitly socially conservative, especially on abortion, but also on government spending and gun control. Reagan won the election but actually closely lost among women. In 1984 Reagan won a huge landslide. He won women and men. But he won men by a much bigger margin, and the female pro-Democrat gender gap has been there ever since. …
Over a lifetime in journalism I have attended and reported on hundreds of seminars and conferences of every mainstream political hue. Looking back, I’d say that of all those gatherings that might be described as conservative, attendance was 60 per cent or more male. …
Reality is producing fewer conservatives because more people are avoiding it for longer:
Sociologists measure many “age effect” political and social attitudes. When young people get married, have kids and acquire mortgages, they become conservative. That’s an age effect and sustains conservatives.
One reason that mechanism doesn’t work so well now is that fewer and fewer young people are getting married at all. At the bottom of the income ladder, too many young men lack well-paid regular jobs that would make them husband material. And at the top of the income ladder, too many high-achieving women are worried about taking any substantial time away from their careers to establish marriage and parenthood. …
Demographics is destiny.
On the whole, almost all the cultural battles have been won, or are being won, by the left.
Conservatives win brilliant tactical victories as they retreat ever further. This allows them to win a lot of elections in the path of retreat. An orderly retreat is much better than a panicked flight. But an orderly retreat is still not victory. …
Feminism was the first big leftist identity politics issue, and it became their template for all the others.
Another huge factor is the ruthlessly effective, often dishonest, way the left plays gender politics. The rush to judgment against Christian Porter, the denial of due process and natural justice, the condemnation by accusation without any consideration for the personal cost, has been extremely ugly and unprincipled. …
The worst recent example of mad double standards and absurd politicisation is the criticism of Scott Morrison for saying he talked about Brittany Higgins’s experience with his wife, and he thought about it in relation to his daughters. …
This is not wicked sexism. The left has been gravely successful in demonising normal human reactions among conservatives, on the basis apparently that all conservatives are guilty by definition.
In trying to pre-emptively condemn an entire half of politics, the left cynically misuses human suffering. But for all that, the conservative failure with too many women is not entirely the left’s fault. It’s a failure by conservatives as well.
