Are we soon at risk of living in the same society but no longer in the same world? It is a question that is not illegitimate to ask as, on many subjects, the divide already seems to have started. So, those who believe that the Earth is flat coexist in the same society as others, but do they really live in the same mental world? The example is trivial, one might object. What then can we say about those in the United States who still believe today that it was Donald Trump who won the elections in 2020 and not Joe Biden? A minority ? Not entirely since two thirds of Republican supporters think that the November 3 vote gave rise to so many irregularities that the Democratic president is not legitimate. In this powerful country, there is therefore a disagreement so significant that it results in totally irreconcilable forms of political representation.
Another divide, even more worrying, because it divides societies into two equal parts, is emerging and in a relatively unprecedented way: an ideological gap is widening between men and women in the younger generations since around ten years, as a recent article in the Financial Times. Studies on this subject have long indicated differences in political sensitivity between men and women, but nothing that has ever seemed exceptional. Today, longitudinal analyzes of opinions in many countries reveal an unprecedented, sudden phenomenon which foreshadows an ideological conflict between genders. Men and women had never experienced such disagreements. Thus, in the United States, according to the Gallup Institute, boys aged 18 to 30 are much more conservative than girls (+ 30%) whereas at the beginning of the 2000s it was difficult to clearly distinguish them from one another. others.
This intersex war of opinions is felt everywhere: we observe the same gap in Germany and the United Kingdom. These are preferences concerning subjects as diverse as abortion, immigration or the #MeToo movement… but not only that. This difference is also reflected in electoral terms. Thus, one in two young Polish men (aged 18 to 21) supported, through their vote, the hard right during the last election when only 16% of women of the same age did so. Similar phenomena are observed both in China and in Tunisia.
Emotional misery
Previously, this type of divide was rather generational: there were disagreements between young people and elders but, aging being a universal disease, things ended up getting better. Here, tensions arise within the same generation and these young people are therefore forced to coexist with each other in their daily lives while nurturing a radically different worldview. How to love yourself in these conditions? This is undoubtedly too rapid a conjecture but all this is perhaps not unrelated to the results of a recent Ifop survey which reveals that the French are making love less and less and, in particular , 18-24 year olds. Likewise, surveys show an increase in singleness almost everywhere in the world.
It is perilous to establish a clear link between the ideological divide which is widening between the sexes and the emotional misery which accompanies it, however, the example of South Korea should invite us to reflection. In this country, we observe the same political divide between young women and young men who, during the 2022 election, supported the very right-wing party, People Power. It turns out that this war of genres takes a more radical turn there than anywhere else and we fear that what is happening there will foreshadow what awaits us. There, the marriage rate is in free fall and the birth rate – 0.78 births per woman in 2022 – is quite simply the lowest in the world. We can therefore wonder if love is indeed in danger, according to the question posed by Noémie Halioua in her latest book Terror right under our sheets. Or, conversely, if feelings will not end up reconciling those whom ideas have separated…
*Gérald Bronner is a sociologist and professor at La Sorbonne University.
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