What do you get when the party of feminism joins up with the party of the upper-middle-class strivers?
You get today’s Democratic Party, where career achievement and material success become all-consuming goals in life.
NBC News asked nearly 3,000 Gen Zers for their top priorities in life. Specifically, it asked, “Which of the following is important to your personal definition of success?”
Respondents chose up to three from a menu of 12. Among Gen Zers who voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris, a majority of both men and women picked “fulfilling job/career” as important. No other answer got a majority from any group.
In contrast, less than one-third of Donald Trump voters, both men and women, chose “fulfilling job/career” as important to success.
“Having money to do the things you want” was the No. 2 pick for both Democratic men and women, chosen by more than 40%, while less than 30% of Republican men and women named that, putting it in fifth place.
Career and money — material, measurable, achievement. That’s what matters to young Democrats.
What did Republicans pick? The most common choice among Republican men was having children. Combined, 30% of Republican men and women named children as important to a successful life, about four times the proportion of Democrats who named children.
Likewise, about 25% of Trump voters named “being married” as important, compared to less than 10% of Harris voters.
How did the Democrats, formerly the home to hippies and derided as the party of welfare queens, become the party of materialist careerists?
There were a few steps to this transition.
First, the Left’s feminism saw that men and women were different, men more career-focused and women more family-focused, and decided that equality required women becoming company men rather than men becoming family guys. Author and mother Ruth Whippman mocked the attitude: “Women! Be more like men. Men, as you were.”
Along the same lines, the “my body, my choice” mentality expanded into a broad worship of individual autonomy as the sole good. Add in the increasingly uniform secularism of Democrats, and autonomy became a God.
Absent religion — that is, with less hope, without the commandments to sacrificial love, without a nonmaterial idea of the good to aspire to — it was inevitable that the Democrats and the Left would become more materialistic.
Then the college-educated upper-middle class steadily abandoned Republicans — and then quickly abandoned them when the gauche Trump entered the scene.
Perhaps Generation Z Democrats will wisen up when they get older. Hopefully, they’ll settle down, get married, have children, and value little Emma’s softball game over that promotion and raise.
If not, America’s future could be one party with all the money and the other with all the children.