How the Great Awokening Has Ruined Liberal Women’s Happiness

There’s a price to pay for hating Western society

A majority of young liberal women are depressed. This is at least what studies reveal, such as that of Pew Research carried out in March 2020 with a cohort of 12,000 subjects. To the question, “Has a doctor or other healthcare provider ever told you that you have a mental health condition?”, 56% of young white liberal women answered “yes”, while only 27% of their conservative peers did the same. Among young men, 34% of white liberals answered “yes” and so did 16% of white conservatives.

The fact that the study was conducted at the start of the pandemic may have had an upward impact on the numbers. But another study, this one released by Gimbrone, Bates, Prins, & Keyes in 2022, confirmed the trend. According to Gimbrone et al., “[d]epressive affect [increased] for all adolescents after 2010, but increases were most pronounced for female liberal adolescents.”

An American Family Survey from YouGov and Deseret News obtained similar results. The survey found that only 15% of liberal women were “completely satisfied” with their lives, compared to 31% of conservative women.

How do we explain these numbers?

The Event That Sparked the Storm

The increase in “depressive affect” among teenagers after 2010 that Gimbrone, Bates, Prins, & Keyes noted was also observed by others, among them Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), said that starting in late 2013, he saw more and more students pushing to ban certain categories of speakers from campuses.

This period from 2010 to 2013 coincides with the birth of what was dubbed the “Great Awokening”, which The Economist called “America’s threat from the illiberal left.” During the first phases of the Great Awokening, the concepts of identity politics and social justice spread from universities to the media and the chambers of legislatures, even making their way into town halls and schools.

And one of the platforms that made it possible to witness the phenomenon was the social network Tumblr. Angela Nagle, the author of Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, explained how the pattern emerged: “There was a culture that was encouraged on Tumblr, which was to be able to describe your unique non-normative self […]”, she said. “People began to describe this as the snowflake [referring to the idea that each snowflake is unique], the person who constructs a […] kind of boutique identity for themselves, and then guards that identity in a very, very sensitive way and reacts in an enraged way when anyone does not respect the uniqueness of their identity.”

That community involved in gender activism on Tumblr was mostly made up of young liberal women who got into some sort of open conflict with conservative young men from 4chan. As Jonathan Haidt explains: “The two communities supercharged each other with their mutual hatred, as often happens in a culture war. The young identity activists on Tumblr embraced their new notions of identity, fragility, and trauma all the more tightly, increasingly saying that words are a form of violence, while the young men on 4chan moved in the opposite direction: they brandished a rough and rude masculinity in which status was gained by using words more insensitively than the next guy.”

Needless to say, the school of Tumblr won its battle against that of 4chan, imposing its cancel culture all over the place. And this cancel culture has become global since the day it moved from Tumblr to Twitter.

But Why Are Liberal Women So Depressed?

We now know where and when young “progressives”, future members of what would become the “woke” movement, started to voice their rage in order to champion radical causes. We must now explore the depths of the phenomenon to ask the following question: why are young liberal women more likely to be depressed than their conservative equals?

A few authors have attempted to provide some answers, among them Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist who helped us “understand the well-being gap between liberals and conservatives” in a lengthy article in American Affairs.

Al-Gharbi first points out the cultural differences between liberals and conservatives. Since the latter tend to be more patriotic and religious than the former, he says, they are more likely to be happily married. Moreover, “religiosity […] correlates with greater subjective and objective well-being.”

On the other hand, liberals would be more “troubled not just by the state of their own nation and community, but by the plight of animals and nature, of people and events in other countries, by hypothetical and projected future trends as well as historical injustices”, all concerns that can be a source of depression and anxiety.

Then there’s the question of sensibility: since liberals, according to surveys, have more politically homogenous communities and social networks, they are more prone to breaking off relationships due to political differences.

The irony is that in the belief system promoted by wokeness, affluent whites are the source of virtually all the world’s problems, which means that white liberals, who are the most likely to embrace the said belief system, hate themselves as much as they hate their peers. As Musa al-Gharbi so well put it, “[t]here is no other combination of ideology and race or ethnicity that produces a similar pattern.”

In fact, part of the woke movement hates Western society for all that it represents. In these muddy waters, young “progressives”, especially women, accept no opposition to their ideas because it could trigger what they call “microaggressions”.

With this attitude, wokes give the impression that they are constantly pissed off or depressed, and, as studies show, young liberal women more than their male colleagues, possibly because they are more emotional and more sensitive.

There is, it seems, a price to pay for hating Western society.

Sources

AEI, After Babel, American Affairs, ScienceDirect, Tablet, The Atlantic, The Economist, The Guardian, WBCK