The Conservative Lifestyle Is Suddenly in Fashion

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, February 27, 2025

 

Much has been made of the so-called “vibe shift” that followed Donald Trump’s reelection. To the extent that it is a measurable phenomenon, it is gauged by the degree to which the formerly permissive center-left institutions and individuals who grudgingly tolerated the progressive cultural revolution have withdrawn that indulgence and sloughed off their chains. Of course, the underlying conditions that created a seismic social upheaval to which those individuals and institutions are responding did not materialize overnight. They were, however, poorly understood because they were insufficiently studied.

 

The earthquake some recent studies of evolving American cultural attitudes have produced is illustrative of that general blindness. Taken together, those surveys suggest traditional conservative prescriptions for a functioning society experiencing a revival. Indeed, that revival has been underway for a while, and all under the noses of America’s elite cultural arbiters.

 

In a Thursday New York Times op-ed, three political scientists analyzing survey data compiled late last year found something that apparently surprised them. Led by Republicans, the public is increasingly inclined to embrace a “traditional view of gender roles,” but that attitude has not been accompanied by a newfound comfort with “gender discrimination.” Imagine that!

 

Sure, Americans still believe that women face undue prejudice in the workplace and society. They resent the extent to which American society discourages what they call “stereotypically feminine qualities” in men, “like being affectionate and caring.” They still “reject stereotypically masculine behaviors like fighting, getting drunk, sleeping around, and talking about women in a sexual way.” And they don’t think the measure of a man is the size of the brood he sires. What Americans are disinclined toward are hostile cultural attitudes toward conventional masculine virtues.

 

“It is possible, then, that any growing gender traditionalism may be a reaction to societal trends and not a cause of these trends,” the authors conclude. That’s a reasonable inference, particularly given the degree to which the backlash against the popular culture the authors identify seems even more pronounced among women.

 

Citing another study conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, the authors note that those who identify as Republicans are vastly more likely to say that “society as a whole has become too soft and feminine” than they were 15 years ago. Sixty-seven percent of men said as much in 2011. Today, nearly 80 percent say the same. But the rise is sharper among Republican-identifying women, growing from just 41 percent at the outset of the last decade to fully two-thirds of GOP-leaning women today. The authors turn to the Pew Research Center, synthesizing their data with PRRI’s findings, and they correctly note that the public — including Republicans — believe American society has either gotten the balance right when it comes to “men taking on roles typically associated with women” or isn’t “accepting enough.” But far more say that America has gotten that balance wrong than did so in 2017.

 

Some intrepid researchers, like the American Enterprise Institute’s Daniel Cox, saw this coming. He chronicled an emerging intramural dispute in which the Democratic pollsters argued over whether their party should be a welcoming place for Americans who subscribe to traditional gender dynamics. James Carville suggested that would be prudent, but his fellow Democratic pollsters disagreed. “Carville may not like it, but the Democratic Party is the women’s party,” Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg wrote. “Sixty percent of self-identified Democrats are women.”

 

That’s not an argument but a restatement of the problem Carville identified. And as Cox noted, Democrats made themselves deaf to the concerns of young men who increasingly identify as victims of misandrist prejudice. Those young men were gravitating rightward because Democrats didn’t see them as people with problems but as people who are the problem. Deliberately alienating men is the sort of politically suicidal act that only makes sense if you assume the women making up your self-inflicted electoral deficit are contemptuous of the men in their lives.

 

The Times op-ed should be read as a companion to another piece in the paper of record on some recent Pew Research Center data, which found that a decades-long trend toward secularization in the United States has abruptly reversed course.

 

“After years of decline, the Christian population in the United States has been stable for several years, a shift fueled in part by young adults,” Times religion reporter Ruth Graham observed. Those who report having no religious affiliation — once a growing demographic — has “leveled off.” Graham observes that the data depart from historical patterns in which women reliably describe themselves as more religious than men. Among the young people who are driving this new trend, “the gender gap is small or nonexistent in measures of whether they pray daily, identify with a particular religion, and believe in God.”

 

University of Notre Dame political scientist David Campbell said the shift was significant but brushed it off as more cultural than spiritual. “If you’re a young white male these days and you think of yourself as conservative, then being religious is a part of that,” he said. That possibility cannot be dismissed. Long ago, political affiliation became a substitute for identity among those without deeper attachments to their communities. Young people’s pursuit of identifying characteristics and tribal associations may be the foremost factor behind this emergent Great Awakening. But Campbell’s diagnosis is too dismissive of ongoing trends to attribute this phenomenon to young people’s desire for a costume that helps them integrate into society.

 

As I detailed in my last book, The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives’ War on Fun, the old virtues have been making a comeback among those who were assumed to be the most hostile toward them for years. Although it was festooned with the incomprehensible jargon native to progressive academe, the movement that concealed itself with “woke” shibboleths had committed itself to re-moralizing American society.

 

It rediscovered the virtue of abnegation. It saw the value in hard work and self-sacrifice. It was contemptuous of earthly comforts if they detract from spiritual fulfillment. It rediscovered ancient truths, like the fact that socially destabilizing things can happen when men and women are encouraged to socialize in libertine environments that are also bathed in alcohol. And it applied all these lessons with a convert’s zeal to their surroundings, often to excess and in ways that persecuted and oppressed their compatriots. But at the root of the movement was disdain for their permissive elders’ licentiousness.

 

When the book was published, the youngish activist class resented the suggestion that they were resurrecting a small-“c” conservative theory of social organization. They seem much more comfortable with that reality today. Maybe Dr. Campbell is right, and the young adults who have gravitated toward Trump’s movement are merely adorning a disguise they think will help them navigate their environs. But he risks confusing a symptom of a larger social convulsion for its cause.

 

Regardless of the contributing factors, it’s hard to overlook the conclusion to which they lead: Conservatism as a lifestyle choice is increasingly en vogue.