The new class war is over identity
Dominic Green
A study by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology finds that 38% of students at liberal arts colleges identify as LGBTQ. At Ivy League colleges, the figure is 27%. The national figure, according to Gallup, is 7.1%, and even that has doubled since Gallup first asked in 2012. We are witnessing a change in human biology more rapid and consequential than any in the history of our species.
Either that or the future leaders of America are lying. The CSPI report uses data from FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. FIRE surveyed 57,000 students across 159 of America’s top universities. These students, FIRE says, are the “elite fifth of undergraduates.” They will “supply most of the nation’s future leaders” and are “an important leading indicator of emerging social and political trends.”
The CSPI’s findings suggest a correlation between status and identity fetishism. The higher the status of the institution, the higher the degree of alphabetized identities. At state research universities, only 22% of students are LGBTQ. This accords with Gen Z’s generational figure, 21%. Meanwhile, at Wellesley College, it’s 61%. At Smith College, which has historically been for sapphists what safari parks are to the white rhino, it’s 70%.
The sexuality data also correlate with political affiliation. Fifty-three percent of students in the FIRE survey call themselves Democrats. Unlike their claims of rococo sexuality, I think they’re telling the truth here. The 2020 exit polls found that 65% of Gen Z voters picked President Joe Biden. This is not just because he purports to believe that giving sex-change hormones and surgery to children represents a brave new frontier of civil rights. The young pay no taxes and are used to getting stuff for free, so they always lean left. What’s striking is that the “elite fifth” are more liberal (53%) and less conservative (21%) than the rest of their generation (40% liberal, 34% conservative).
Further correlations are with biological sex (should that still be an admissible category), religiosity, and the most symbolic category of all, race. Women students went from 25% liberal in the mid-1980s to 42% in 2016. In the FIRE data, “elite fifth” men lean liberal by 44% to 28%, but “elite fifth” women lean liberal by 61% to 16%. The ideological gap in the general population is “a negligible 3 points.” Among “elite fifth” female students, it’s 45 points.
The umbrella term for this ideological cluster is “wokeness.” Its component ideologies of “anti-racism” and gender plasticity complement each other. Anti-racism posits hereditary guilt and the thought crime of “unconscious bias” for the majority and hereditary victimhood for the minority. The gender ideology offers absolution for all because it offers hereditary victimhood for all. We are told that sexuality is, like race, innate and biological. To adopt a new sexual persona is to align yourself with a purported inner truth, just as adopting a certain kind of politics is held to align racial minorities with whatever mystical essence their melanin confers.
If this sounds like a racialized degeneration of Christianity, it’s because it is. FIRE finds that Christian faith is the “most important sociodemographic predictor of a student’s political ideology and party identity.” Christian students skew white, right, and male. Behind the pretense of plastic sexual identity, the battle of the sexes is intensifying.
We should take the woke at the word of their neo-Marxist teachers. Ideology serves class interests. The middle class contracted from 61% of Americans in 1971 to 50% in 2021. In the same 50 years, the upper-income class grew from 14% to 21%. This class is the real “elite fifth.” The ideological pretensions of “elite fifth” students are strategies for ensuring they will retain or obtain upper-class status in their working lives.
When the state apportions rewards by victimhood, it creates an incentive structure. A constellation of forces is teaching the young how to forge a false identity and how to maximize its rewards. The young are responding in kind. Social media teaches the rules of the gender charade. Actual teachers demand that 6-year-olds self-identify their race and pick a pronoun. Big Pharma makes big profits from the confusion, doping Gen Z with hormones as it dosed it in childhood with Ritalin. Colleges select students as tokens of victimhood, not talent. Corporations and government offices hire on the basis of identity, not competence.
Conservatives are right when they accuse teachers and TikTok of “grooming” children, but the grooming is not primarily sexual. The real perversion is political. The Democratic Party is the master of the spoils system and the legitimizer of race and gender ideology. Donations from Big Tech and Big Pharma run the Democrats. The vectors of ideological conformity are a constellation of economic and political power. When the smoke of the battles of race and gender clears, the lines of the old class war emerge. My name is Dominic. I’m a trans woman, and my pronouns are me, me, me.