Joy Pullmann of the Federalist targets a major electoral advantage for Democrats.
It is by now well-established that Democrats benefit from increasing women’s misery through increased family chaos. That’s the flip side of yet another election showing that single women are among the most reliable of Democrat voters.
Given that historically unprecedented percentages of young Americans are likely to remain single for their entire lives — more than one-third, according to Brad Wilcox — this dynamic is only accelerating. UnHerd’s Mary Harrington relates the phenomenon partly to the Information Age’s dramatically increased remuneration for work that doesn’t involve hard physical labor:
“…very simply, technological advancements have delivered new opportunities for well-qualified knowledge workers of both sexes, even as the same changes have automated and de-industrialised away the physically more arduous work previously performed mostly by working-class men. This virtualization of work has, overall, benefited women much more than men.”
This is true, but it misses something important, too. Like woke institutions, the bureaucratization of work is in large part a product of political choices, not just technological change. That means it can be altered.
It’s government policies that force companies to siphon off money from making legitimately useful things and solving concrete human problems to parasitic forms of “knowledge work” that are also culturally destructive. These nonproductive forms of non-physical and mentally menial work are often grouped under the heading of “administrative bloat” in academia, and they aren’t exclusive to so-called education institutions at all. They are now endemic to society.
Many, many so-called “knowledge work” jobs are anti-productive. That is, they actually destroy productivity rather than aid, improve, and refine it.
Not coincidentally, either, women do most of these jobs. They comprise the vast army of woke state clerks, which is to say the cultural revolution foot soldiers. It’s not a coincidence that women overwhelmingly populate the government jobs that replace the social responsibilities women used to fulfill out of love instead of for a government paycheck.