Today I Learned

From the article:

The #MeToo movement was the key trigger, giving rise to fiercely feminist values among young women who felt empowered to speak out against long-running injustices. That spark found especially dry tinder in South Korea, where gender inequality remains stark, and outright misogyny is common.

In the country’s 2022 presidential election, while older men and women voted in lockstep, young men swung heavily behind the right-wing People Power party, and young women backed the liberal Democratic party in almost equal and opposite numbers.

Korea’s is an extreme situation, but it serves as a warning to other countries of what can happen when young men and women part ways. Its society is riven in two. Its marriage rate has plummeted, and birth rate has fallen precipitously, dropping to 0.78 births per woman in 2022, the lowest of any country in the world.

Seven years on from the initial #MeToo explosion, the gender divergence in attitudes has become self-sustaining. Survey data show that in many countries the ideological differences now extend beyond this issue. The clear progressive-vs-conservative divide on sexual harassment appears to have caused — or at least is part of — a broader realignment of young men and women into conservative and liberal camps respectively on other issues.

The flaws in their culture, where they're expected to be invaded by North Korea at anytime, and nearly all the males -- even pop stars -- are also expected to do military service. Of course the men have become deeply reactionary, what with anti-communist propaganda heavily embedded throughout, and they're not happy with South Korean women being more assertive now than 50 years ago.

It's not helping that South Korea is so much of a horrifyingly thinly-disguised corporate dystopia.

or more likely imo their inability to say what they want and have a compliant tradwife despite their shit behaviour

Centrism is not a fixed ideology, it is just the current status quo. Sadly, the graphics are dogshit because they don't explain what the y-axis means. Is that a value per country or should it be comparable? What is zero? A little bit of racism but worker rights?

\edited because I weirdly wrote in my native language in the middle

The death of the American dream is a big one. Speaking very generally, men want a better future for themselves and are willing to follow whoever promises it, while women are being specifically targeted by conservatives an don't want anything to do with that shit. The weakness of the American left means that the average person only sees establishment centrism and far-right fascism as options.

Pushing fake alpha male bullshit is my guess. See tate and the likes.

but how do you even go from ‘everyone should have rights’ to ‘maybe we should cripple ourselves, the rich deserves more’.

You compare ideal left versus bad consequences of right. They do the reverse. Both of you feel good about your choices.

Both of you don't see that it is divide and conquer and that the positions of the parties would shift if people started voting differently to allow the elite to choose their politicians.

To overcome this, you can learn to see the strong arguments of the right and the shortcomings of the left.

I spent over a decade thinking “God this sucks, but at least things will get better once the boomers die off.” The worst political blow of my life was realizing that the younger generation also lacked critical thinking skills.