When most people think of youth and politics, they assume young people will tend to be liberal because they are often more wide-eyed and idealistic. But a surprising new study is showing that high school boys are starting to trend toward the conservative end of the political spectrum.
According to a recent report by The Hill, the study shows that “Twelfth-grade boys are nearly twice as likely to identify as conservative versus liberal, according to a respected federal survey of American youth.”
Indeed, the survey finds that the numbers have really jumped:
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.
The figures represent a striking shift in the political views of boys. As recently as the late 2000s, liberal boys occasionally outnumbered conservatives. Back in the Carter era, both boys and girls leaned liberal.
Nowadays, it is girls who are drifting to the left. The share of 12th-grade girls who identified as liberal rose from 19 percent in 2012 to 30 percent in 2022. Only 12 percent of girls identified as conservative in last year’s survey, administered by the University of Michigan.
The survey also found that younger men have also been steadily identifying more as conservatives or moderates than they have as “liberal.”
But the striking part is that until the last few years, the shift happed quickly for men just out of high school. Now, more are already identifying as conservative even while still in high school.
This does not necessarily mean that younger and younger men are claiming to be Republicans though.
Still the shift is remarkable.
But, it might not be too surprising considering that the political left in America has branded young men as “bad,” and “toxic” and have tried to turn them into girls! Boys are instinctively… and correctly… realizing that liberals hate them. And so, their reaction is to begin accepting conservative principles of manly, active, independent men who don’t have to apologize for being men.
You can only be told you are evil for so long before you either kill yourself because you agree, or you rebel and tell the attackers to go pound sand. And most people — not just men — choose the latter.
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