News/Commentary

‘The future looks bright’: Federal survey targeting teens signals big political shifts

August 1, 2023 | | Print Article

The trend of high school male teens being liberal may be shifting as a federal survey shows that 12th-grade boys are trending conservative.

(Video Credit: NewsNation)

It has just been assumed in American culture that teens and young adults trend liberal. But if this respected survey of American youth is to be believed, high school senior boys are nearly twice as likely to identify as conservative versus liberal.

It should be noted that in these studies, the majority of students are apolitical. Those that are identifying as being on the right or left though are noticeably shifting.

The Hill reported, “In annual surveys over the last three years, roughly one-quarter of high school seniors self-identified as conservative or ‘very conservative’ on the Monitoring the Future survey, a scholarly endeavor that dates to the 1970s. Only 13 percent of boys identified as liberal or very liberal in those years.”

If correct, that is a major shift in the demographic depicting the political views of boys. Liberal boys outnumber conservatives as recently as the late 2000s. In the disastrous political decade that spawned Jimmy Carter, both boys and girls leaned liberal. It appears that wokeism has boomeranged not just with adults but with teenagers as well.

Girls, however, for the most part, appear to be drifting even further to the left. The number of 12th-grade girls who identified as liberal rose from 19 percent in 2012 to 30 percent in 2022. During the survey that took place in 2022, only 12 percent of girls identified as conservative. The survey was conducted by the University of Michigan.

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Young women aged 18 to 19 are also more likely to identify as liberal than in the last two decades, according to Gallup surveys. They are almost twice as likely as young men to trend liberal according to The Hill. Some attribute that to an expanding feminist movement.

An analysis by the Survey Center on American Life has found that the political leanings of young men haven’t changed much over the last two decades. In 2022, 43 percent of young men identified as moderate, 31 percent as conservative, and 24 percent as liberal. Almost two decades earlier, the numbers were close to being the same.

What has changed is the dramatic leftward drift of young women toward the liberal side of politics.

According to The Hill, “Generation Z favors liberalism over conservatism by a 48-to-33 margin, according to NBC News polling from 2022. Ten years earlier, young adults split evenly between the two political camps.”

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“The rightward drift of high school boys is comparatively subtle. Indeed, when it comes to politics, most boys seem reluctant to pick a side. In the 2022 Monitoring the Future survey, the largest group of senior boys, more than two-fifths, claimed no politics at all, answering the liberal-conservative question with ‘none of the above’ or ‘I don’t know.’ Nearly one-fifth identified as moderate. Only 36 percent selected liberal or conservative as an ideology, and only there did the trend emerge,” The Hill noted.

Jean Twenge, an author and professor of psychology at San Diego State University, highlighted the data in her new book, “Generations.” She presented the numbers in a chart that split boys and girls along ideological lines, but omitted moderates and the undecided.

“Among liberals, the future is female,” she asserted. “And among conservatives, the future is male.”

The Hill went on to explain that the chart at first appears to portray two-thirds of 12th-grade boys as being conservative, but Twenge stated that she had left out moderates which skews the results.

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“The full story is messier and murkier. High school seniors, boys and girls alike, are more likely to claim no political identity than to throw in with either liberals or conservatives,” the media outlet stated.

“Much has been written about the liberal drift of young women. The Donald Trump presidency mobilized millions of women, outraged over words and alleged deeds that, to Trump’s critics, suggested an unrepentant misogyny. More women embraced liberal politics in response to the conservative drift of the U.S. Supreme Court, a movement emblemized by a 2022 ruling that struck down the constitutional right to abortion,” The Hill continued.

But not much has been written about the leanings of boys. The left evidently sees former President Trump as some kind of unhealthy masculine influence on boys.

“Trump himself may be a key to the conservative trend in that group. The 45th president energized male voters with his rhetoric: his ‘overt hypermasculinity,’ as one NPR analysis put it, and his frequent use of language one might overhear in a high school cafeteria,” the outlet contended.

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The Hill is falsely positing that the Republican Party is appealing to disaffected men of all ages.

“Trump, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and other conservative beacons have derided ‘woke’ ideology, accusing the left of overreach in seeking redress for injustices involving race, gender and sexual orientation,” the media outlet added.

It goes on to laud the left for seeking equality in gender and race. Most conservatives would say they do the exact opposite and it is the Republicans who are striving for equality in gender and race.

“I believe that traditional notions of masculinity are much more accepted within conservativism,” while feminist values “are clearly one of the driving forces of liberalism,” Delano Squires, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, remarked according to The Hill. “I could see male and female students saying, ‘I’m choosing sides.’ Do you want matriarchy, or do you want patriarchy?”

It’s interesting who the outlet picks out among conservative men that wield unduly masculine influence on boys. They chose conservatives such as Dennis Prager, Ben Shapiro, and Steven Crowder.

The article starts out one way, alluding to the conservative shift by boys, and ends sounding more like a predictable hit piece against the right.

Response to the numbers and the article were telling by conservatives:

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