Men Becoming Less Liberal Does Not Mean They Are Becoming More Conservative

Something stranger is happening

The male/ female cultural divergence, and the collapse in men’s support for left-liberal institutions, candidates and political is often portrayed as men becoming more conservative. This recent article on the left/ progressive website Counterpunch summarises this view nicely when it states that “young women(s) male peers are disturbingly tending toward conservatism, even in comparison to older men. The reasons behind this cleaving, broadly speaking, stem from the twilight of patriarchy and the failure of capitalism.” The article also describes Trump as an “ultraconservative authoritarian". 

Most of the charts you see on the subject of the recent divergence look like the above - with women being the ones doing the moving. However the undeniable maleness of right-wing political drift, and the fact that seems to be part of its success rather than purely incidental, indicates there is something going on with men’s political attitudes as well. One way of testing whether that is a shift toward conservatism is to look at the attitudes of men on a variety of issues of interest to conservatives, and see where they are and how they’re moving. I’m going to use a lot of American data because it’s the most abundant but these observations apply across the west.