My wife read this piece and immediately said of the photo: "I think that conservative chick hooked up with someone the night before and took the wrong name tag in the morning hungover scramble to get conference ready."
I would also say that the socially-stifled, buttoned-up feel of many liberals often (inadvertently) undercuts their strongest points for no other reason than the fact that persusasion is tightly tied to likability.
This is spot on! I am a woman who left the US and was an expat from 2017-2024, moved back to Texas and like... wtf is happening
You can tell immediately if a man is conservative or liberal by if he wants to hug or shake hands
Millennial men have lost the ability to talk shop with a woman (I am in the energy industry) – Gen X is still ok
If you don’t dress feminine enough in certain social settings you are ostracized by other women (not sending my second kid to the same posh mother’s day out my first went to because of this)
Social dynamics are still the same 1:1 or with one other couple – it’s group dynamics that have shifted
The moment somebody realizes they can have an authentic conversation with you the walls come down incredible fast – I think there is a lot of loneliness out there, across the political spectrum?
I find it interesting that conservative women, who I will guess are also likely to claim to be Christians, are the ones flirting and flaunting their bodies. That is so not Christian. Conservatives, men and women, are also the ones often against sex education and against abortion. They are so contrary.
Modern conservatives are generally quite irreligious. The influence of traditional Christianity on their behavior is very weak. They only (ab)use Christianity as a component of American nationalism. It is commonly joked that conservatives are the liberals of a generation prior. In this case it is absolutely correct. Today's conservatives have fully internalized the Sexual Revolution and celebrate it.
I wouldn't take people in DC power circles as indicative of the broader population.
I'm an evangelical, and in evangelical circles in the real world, it's often cited as a common problem that women raised in the church are TOO demure compared to worldly women; they don't flirt or otherwise offer any indication of interest to men that they're interested in, which leads to those men passing them over.
From Richard's writing, I think this is a mostly younger cohort that he's describing, so they are less likely to be Christian than prior conservatives, or at least less likely to actually attend church.
Conservatives who go to conferences like this aren't religious at all. At most, they give lip service to religious conservatives. Religious conservatives have their own culture and their own conferences.
The union of movement conservatives and religious conservatives is purely a marriage of convenience at this point.
It all makes sense when you realize that some folks are simply more hypocritical than others. Especially those who grew up in more socially restrictive environments. I'm not Christian and never went to church, but a good friend of mine who isn't religious now but had religious parents said church was always a great place to hook up with some of the freakiest gals.
Conservatives rightfully complain about liberal sexual degeneracy but conservative women are the ones dressing like sluts at professional events. Quite ironic.
Both sides are hypocrites just in opposite directions. Red Families V. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture by Cahn Naomi and June Carbone (2010) had already identified the phenomenon 15 years ago.
Not really when you accept that some people are simply more hypocritical than others (just like some people are more honest than others, some people are smarter than others, etc.)
There's an implicit hint of ethnogenesis in your anthropological observations. In your AI generated image, the liberal woman looks more *European*, as in German, or Czech, or French. The women on the right looks more British or Irish. This is reflected in voting data: Anglo Americans are more conservative than continentally-descended Americans. There's a sense in which liberal American women feel closer to a European than to a conservative American. These political performances are transnational.
Likely because a heavy percent of Anglo-Americans are Scots-Irish/Northern Brits who's culture originated in the tribal lawless borderlands of Scotland and England. They have a lot in common with other socially conservative honor-based tribal societies that formed in lawless areas (Sicilians, Saudis, etc.) New England descendents of Puritans are as or more liberal as those who descended from cultures from more civilized areas (most of continental Europe).
Three generations ago, the kind of norms you're saying liberals have would've been characteristic of traditional churchgoing conservatives instead. Of course, back then all the PMCs (professional and managerial classes) would've been regularly churchgoing mainline Protestants. Today, they're all liberals. So the liberal behaviors are in reality merely how PMCs behave. The only change is that the PMCs abandoned mainline Protestantism and adopted the Church of Woke as their new religion.
I'm a conservative, but I was briefly in the oil business in Texas, and I recognize the "DC conservative" type of woman you describe here as the sort of saleswoman that vendors would try to use to get business from me. I never cared for it. I remember trying to use various techniques to make sure they kept their distance from me at conferences.
I get the impression that these associations are more transient than they seem at any moment, rather than reflective of an enduring stratification. I think of Ernest Hemingway as a prototypical ‘macho leftist’ of the mid 20th century, not at all uncommon back then. Even as recently as the 1990s, liberal movies depicted liberal men as very masculine - eg Tom Cruise and Denzel Washington in A Few Good Men and Crimson Tide, respectively - mainly differentiated from their conservative antagonists not by being less manly but by being coolly rational while conservatives were just hotheads. Maybe some old timers can comment on how much or little these gender differences between tribes have actually changed in the last 50 years, seems fairly recent to me though.
> While not engaging in ostentatious displays of femininity, liberal women will sometimes drop these hints that subtly remind you they are still women. She might have a pixie haircut and thick glasses on, but will find a way to mention that she likes baking or the color pink. I’ve noticed that liberal women like to discuss how their sons are more aggressive than their daughters, which is the opposite of what must go on in the imaginations of many conservatives who probably picture them all bragging about their children being trans. I think that this stuff is a way to create a little room for gender expression in an environment in which feminist norms and HR culture push towards androgyny.
That sounds like it may be less purposeful, and more just that the lives of women are the lives of women. Women often spend a lot of time baking or enjoying interior decorating with a colour theme or other things that are female stereotypes for a reason. When you make small talk, you talk about things you do a lot, unless for some reason you're purposefully trying to downplay those things for some reason.
If the conservative women didn't talk about baking or loving the colour pink, my guess is that it's them purposefully not bringing it up instead of liberals purposefully bringing it up. Maybe the conservative women expected the conservative men to especially not care about stereotypical female hobbies, or felt that presenting as *too* feminine would make them not be taken seriously.
But I wasn't there, this is fairly unfounded speculation extrapolating from my own life.
I renewed my paid subscription basically so that I could comment on how spot-on this post is. I especially appreciated the following:
"Conservatives fundamentally get human nature and are more in tune with it, but tend to indulge in their instincts and act like idiots. Liberals are thoughtful and polite but place a high priority on emotional safety and avoiding dangerous or uncomfortable situations . . . ."
This morning I was surprised to read that one factor in the decision to withdraw the nomination of E.J. Antoni is that he once mentioned the the hypothesis that male IQ scores are more variable than female IQ scores. As always in science, the hypothesis has been debated, but it is a serious hypothesis backed by data, and, in my opinion, probably correct. This looks like another example of some people not getting (male and female) human nature, if they are indeed rejecting Antoni for holding this view.
Was there a difference in general attractiveness between the women and men? I don't mean this in a "liberal/conservative <gender> are hotter" I mean it in the sense that I have literally never seen an ugly woman in a leadership position outside of government. On the other hand, I have called plenty of ugly guys boss before...
Having recently read the Psmiths on Fussell's book on class (see here: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/joint-review-class-by-paul-fussell), I think I finally get your point about Elite Human Capital. By EHC, you really just mean "upper-middle-class", and the whole schtick is a point about social class differences. *That* actually makes sense. By the way, if you disagree with this, you should modify your thesis to make it about this, since it better models reality.
This is a really insightful commentary, but ironically, it affirms the value of the 'project' of gender studies etc. that remains (as far as I know) one of your main contentions with 'the left'.
The topic is worth a blog post. An entire field of scholarship? Probably not, especially if it’s politicized and draws people with blank slatist commitments.
My wife read this piece and immediately said of the photo: "I think that conservative chick hooked up with someone the night before and took the wrong name tag in the morning hungover scramble to get conference ready."
I would also say that the socially-stifled, buttoned-up feel of many liberals often (inadvertently) undercuts their strongest points for no other reason than the fact that persusasion is tightly tied to likability.
This is spot on! I am a woman who left the US and was an expat from 2017-2024, moved back to Texas and like... wtf is happening
You can tell immediately if a man is conservative or liberal by if he wants to hug or shake hands
Millennial men have lost the ability to talk shop with a woman (I am in the energy industry) – Gen X is still ok
If you don’t dress feminine enough in certain social settings you are ostracized by other women (not sending my second kid to the same posh mother’s day out my first went to because of this)
Social dynamics are still the same 1:1 or with one other couple – it’s group dynamics that have shifted
The moment somebody realizes they can have an authentic conversation with you the walls come down incredible fast – I think there is a lot of loneliness out there, across the political spectrum?
I find it interesting that conservative women, who I will guess are also likely to claim to be Christians, are the ones flirting and flaunting their bodies. That is so not Christian. Conservatives, men and women, are also the ones often against sex education and against abortion. They are so contrary.
Modern conservatives are generally quite irreligious. The influence of traditional Christianity on their behavior is very weak. They only (ab)use Christianity as a component of American nationalism. It is commonly joked that conservatives are the liberals of a generation prior. In this case it is absolutely correct. Today's conservatives have fully internalized the Sexual Revolution and celebrate it.
I wouldn't take people in DC power circles as indicative of the broader population.
I'm an evangelical, and in evangelical circles in the real world, it's often cited as a common problem that women raised in the church are TOO demure compared to worldly women; they don't flirt or otherwise offer any indication of interest to men that they're interested in, which leads to those men passing them over.
But shouldn’t it be easier for evangelical women to date in the church because there are more young men compared to young women that are evangelical?
From Richard's writing, I think this is a mostly younger cohort that he's describing, so they are less likely to be Christian than prior conservatives, or at least less likely to actually attend church.
Conservatives who go to conferences like this aren't religious at all. At most, they give lip service to religious conservatives. Religious conservatives have their own culture and their own conferences.
The union of movement conservatives and religious conservatives is purely a marriage of convenience at this point.
It all makes sense when you realize that some folks are simply more hypocritical than others. Especially those who grew up in more socially restrictive environments. I'm not Christian and never went to church, but a good friend of mine who isn't religious now but had religious parents said church was always a great place to hook up with some of the freakiest gals.
Conservatives rightfully complain about liberal sexual degeneracy but conservative women are the ones dressing like sluts at professional events. Quite ironic.
Almost makes you wonder if the liberals aren't actually that degenerate
Both sides are hypocrites just in opposite directions. Red Families V. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture by Cahn Naomi and June Carbone (2010) had already identified the phenomenon 15 years ago.
Not really when you accept that some people are simply more hypocritical than others (just like some people are more honest than others, some people are smarter than others, etc.)
There's an implicit hint of ethnogenesis in your anthropological observations. In your AI generated image, the liberal woman looks more *European*, as in German, or Czech, or French. The women on the right looks more British or Irish. This is reflected in voting data: Anglo Americans are more conservative than continentally-descended Americans. There's a sense in which liberal American women feel closer to a European than to a conservative American. These political performances are transnational.
Likely because a heavy percent of Anglo-Americans are Scots-Irish/Northern Brits who's culture originated in the tribal lawless borderlands of Scotland and England. They have a lot in common with other socially conservative honor-based tribal societies that formed in lawless areas (Sicilians, Saudis, etc.) New England descendents of Puritans are as or more liberal as those who descended from cultures from more civilized areas (most of continental Europe).
Three generations ago, the kind of norms you're saying liberals have would've been characteristic of traditional churchgoing conservatives instead. Of course, back then all the PMCs (professional and managerial classes) would've been regularly churchgoing mainline Protestants. Today, they're all liberals. So the liberal behaviors are in reality merely how PMCs behave. The only change is that the PMCs abandoned mainline Protestantism and adopted the Church of Woke as their new religion.
This is exactly the dynamic I wrote about there: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/02/more-christian-than-the-christians/
I'm a conservative, but I was briefly in the oil business in Texas, and I recognize the "DC conservative" type of woman you describe here as the sort of saleswoman that vendors would try to use to get business from me. I never cared for it. I remember trying to use various techniques to make sure they kept their distance from me at conferences.
I get the impression that these associations are more transient than they seem at any moment, rather than reflective of an enduring stratification. I think of Ernest Hemingway as a prototypical ‘macho leftist’ of the mid 20th century, not at all uncommon back then. Even as recently as the 1990s, liberal movies depicted liberal men as very masculine - eg Tom Cruise and Denzel Washington in A Few Good Men and Crimson Tide, respectively - mainly differentiated from their conservative antagonists not by being less manly but by being coolly rational while conservatives were just hotheads. Maybe some old timers can comment on how much or little these gender differences between tribes have actually changed in the last 50 years, seems fairly recent to me though.
Fascinating observations. This is about what I'd expect given where the two sides are these days.
> While not engaging in ostentatious displays of femininity, liberal women will sometimes drop these hints that subtly remind you they are still women. She might have a pixie haircut and thick glasses on, but will find a way to mention that she likes baking or the color pink. I’ve noticed that liberal women like to discuss how their sons are more aggressive than their daughters, which is the opposite of what must go on in the imaginations of many conservatives who probably picture them all bragging about their children being trans. I think that this stuff is a way to create a little room for gender expression in an environment in which feminist norms and HR culture push towards androgyny.
That sounds like it may be less purposeful, and more just that the lives of women are the lives of women. Women often spend a lot of time baking or enjoying interior decorating with a colour theme or other things that are female stereotypes for a reason. When you make small talk, you talk about things you do a lot, unless for some reason you're purposefully trying to downplay those things for some reason.
If the conservative women didn't talk about baking or loving the colour pink, my guess is that it's them purposefully not bringing it up instead of liberals purposefully bringing it up. Maybe the conservative women expected the conservative men to especially not care about stereotypical female hobbies, or felt that presenting as *too* feminine would make them not be taken seriously.
But I wasn't there, this is fairly unfounded speculation extrapolating from my own life.
Growing up, I never imagined I'd read the phrase "would probably find liberal norms stifling."
That's where liberals went wrong. They went from being about social freedom to being the HR department.
I renewed my paid subscription basically so that I could comment on how spot-on this post is. I especially appreciated the following:
"Conservatives fundamentally get human nature and are more in tune with it, but tend to indulge in their instincts and act like idiots. Liberals are thoughtful and polite but place a high priority on emotional safety and avoiding dangerous or uncomfortable situations . . . ."
This morning I was surprised to read that one factor in the decision to withdraw the nomination of E.J. Antoni is that he once mentioned the the hypothesis that male IQ scores are more variable than female IQ scores. As always in science, the hypothesis has been debated, but it is a serious hypothesis backed by data, and, in my opinion, probably correct. This looks like another example of some people not getting (male and female) human nature, if they are indeed rejecting Antoni for holding this view.
From what I can gather, that's the least of Antoni's problems.
Was there a difference in general attractiveness between the women and men? I don't mean this in a "liberal/conservative <gender> are hotter" I mean it in the sense that I have literally never seen an ugly woman in a leadership position outside of government. On the other hand, I have called plenty of ugly guys boss before...
Having recently read the Psmiths on Fussell's book on class (see here: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/joint-review-class-by-paul-fussell), I think I finally get your point about Elite Human Capital. By EHC, you really just mean "upper-middle-class", and the whole schtick is a point about social class differences. *That* actually makes sense. By the way, if you disagree with this, you should modify your thesis to make it about this, since it better models reality.
This is a really insightful commentary, but ironically, it affirms the value of the 'project' of gender studies etc. that remains (as far as I know) one of your main contentions with 'the left'.
Sexual Personae made real in politics
The topic is worth a blog post. An entire field of scholarship? Probably not, especially if it’s politicized and draws people with blank slatist commitments.
This explains why liberals are struggling with men.