The right has a blind spot about young women

Massachusetts Democratic Gov. Maura Healey, a lesbian who claims to be Catholic, signed legislation this week liberalizing abortion while surrounded by progressive women celebrating the right to murder their healthy babies up till birth. To conservatives who rightly regard late-term abortion as the killing of a viable child, the scene was grotesque.

It also illustrated a political asymmetry conservatives rarely discuss.

A civilization where men and women are constantly at odds with each other is doomed.

Endless ink has been spilled and countless podcasts recorded about the radicalization of young men on the right. Almost nobody in conservative media wants to address the equally serious radicalization of young women toward the progressive left.

There has been plenty of controversy in conservative circles about young men embracing nihilistic or extremist politics online. Rod Dreher, among others, has warned about young conservative men drifting toward figures such as Nick Fuentes and adopting a politics of resentment and despair.

That’s fine as far as it goes, but it does not answer the larger question. Even if Dreher is right about one cohort of men, it does not follow that young men are uniquely radicalized, or even that they represent the larger political problem. Conservatives should be capable of noticing more than one trend at a time. And the trend among women is impossible to ignore.

Kamala Harris received 53% of the female vote in 2024, while Joe Biden received 54% in 2020. Women are substantially more supportive than men of legal abortion. They are also more likely to regard changing one’s gender as morally acceptable and more likely to say society has not done enough to accommodate transgender people.

The same divide appears on immigration. Women are more likely to support amnesty, oppose ICE deportations, and favor extending legal protections to illegal immigrants.

The divide extends beyond electoral politics. Young women are less likely than young men to say they want children and less likely to prioritize family over professional goals. They are also less likely to express a positive view of capitalism.

None of this means women are a political monolith. Marriage changes voting behavior dramatically. Married women are far more likely to vote Republican and hold traditional views on family and gender.

Race also plays a part.

Ripping on liberal white women is practically a conservative pastime, partly because “white” makes them culturally safe targets. But the voting data complicate the caricature. A majority of white women voted for Trump in 2024, while much smaller shares of Hispanic, Asian, Jewish, and black women did so.

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White women are hardly a uniformly conservative bloc. But they are not the most progressive female constituency either.

Despite the mountain of evidence that females are far more left wing, there will be no books about the dangerous trend of radicalization among young women. There will be plenty of cable-news segments about how social media is poisoning young men. There will be endless concern about podcasts, gaming culture, online masculinity, and the political temptations facing disaffected boys.

Much less energy will be spent asking what TikTok, universities, activist institutions, and elite media have done to the minds of young women.

The reason is simple: Young men are a safe target.

Anyone can denounce them with little institutional risk. A broad criticism of female political behavior, by contrast, can quickly become a career problem. That taboo exists on the right almost as surely as it does on a college campus.

It must be said that this is not an exercise in blanket condemnation of women. The conservative movement is filled with passionate, caring, godly mothers, wives, daughters, and single women who genuinely support the fight for the future of the United States.

A civilization where men and women are constantly at odds with each other is doomed. Breaking men and women out of loving families and turning them into political blocs to be catered to is disastrous for the health of the nation.

South Korea provides a warning about where gender war can lead. Its political divide between young men and women has grown exceptionally wide, with the sexes increasingly supporting very different parties and organizing around competing political identities.

South Korea also has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world. That does not prove the political gender divide caused the fertility collapse; housing costs, work culture, marriage patterns, and other factors have played a role. But a society in which men and women increasingly regard one another as political adversaries will have a harder time persuading them to marry, form families, and raise children together.

North Korea, despite being totalitarian and impoverished, has a higher fertility rate than the South. No sane person would therefore prefer living under a communist mad man. The comparison simply shows that prosperity alone cannot guarantee family formation. A wealthy society can still undermine itself if men and women cease to see one another as partners in a common project.

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The basic building block of society is not the individual but the family. In a democracy, when you separate men and women into different constituencies, you fundamentally undermine family formation and create a dangerous antagonism between the sexes.

This is not a call for further politicization. It is a call to recognize the dynamics already playing out in the conservative sphere.

Young men are easy targets, and they should be corrected when they embrace nihilism or extremism. But young women have also shifted sharply left with virtually no comparable attention from the conservative commentariat.

The asymmetry is especially strange because conservatives insist that adults are moral agents responsible for their choices. That principle cannot suddenly disappear when the subject is young women. If progressive politics encourages destructive beliefs about abortion, sex, marriage, family, borders, or economics, conservatives should be willing to say so plainly rather than treating female voters as a protected class.

If conservatives want to be honest about the cultural problems facing the country, they cannot provide moral correction and guidance only to their sons. Their daughters need it too.

We must end the gender wars and encourage unity and family formation in the United States. But doing that will require conservatives to tell some women a phrase they very rarely hear: No.