Charles Fain Lehman, John Ketcham, Jesse Arm, and Rob Henderson discuss Chicago’s pension system and Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker’s presidential aspirations, the rising political divide between men and women, and the news that Sydney Sweeney is a registered Republican.
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Audio Transcript
Charles Fain Lehman: Welcome back to the City Journal Podcast. I’m your host, Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, senior editor of City Journal. Joining me on the panel today are John Ketcham, responsible for all things cities at the Manhattan Institute, Jesse Arm, whose ever-changing title includes an increasing number of external affairs at the Manhattan Institute, and Rob Henderson, who regales us with his cultural wisdom at the Manhattan Institute. Gentlemen, thank you for joining us on the show.
I want to bring us into… I want to draw attention to sort of a little discussed story. It got dropped in the Friday news dump. Nobody was going to pay attention to it. We want to pay attention to it at City Journal. Over, you know, this is a little policy wonk in the weeds, but I think it’s an important one. On Friday, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker signed a deal to add $11 billion to Chicago’s fire and police pensions. He previously said he was evaluating the deal. Now he’s added new pension liabilities to what is arguably the most dysfunctional pension system in the nation. It will slap down on Chicago taxpayers and Illinois taxpayers. It’s also an interesting move given Pritzker’s aspirations for the White House. It’s also an interesting move given again, just like how deeply in debt Illinois is. So I want to talk about this story. A, as sort of a story about what it looks like when public sector unions control an entire state and then B, how this fits into the politics of the moment and sort of the Pritzker lane in the 2028 primary. If there’s a Pritzker lane in 2028 primary, what the heck that stands for? We’ll get into all that. So let me let me throw it to the panel. What did you make of this story?
Jesse Arm: I think it’s basically what political surrender looks like. It’s, you know, a stroke of a pen and J.B. Pritzker suddenly adds $11 billion in unfunded liabilities to the worst funded pension system in the country in Chicago’s police and fire. So you’ve got these funds that are now projected, I think, to fall below 20 percent funded. That means the city is facing a $1.2 billion deficit while its schools are teetering on insolvency and the transit system is circling the drain and the governor’s response is to dig the hole deeper. So I don’t know, I see the short-term beneficiaries of a move like that as obviously the public sector unions, which of course make no inherent sense to begin with. If we’re being honest, they’re a political machine embedded within the state itself and the long-term losers are obviously going to be the Chicago taxpayers.
John Ketcham: So if we put it in perspective, Chicago’s pension debt is about $37 billion. Now that’s more than 43 states and seven out of the ten worst-funded pension systems in the nation are in Chicago.
Big picture problem here is also that Illinois is in a much weaker fiscal position than New York State. And New York spends a lot less than Illinois on its public pensions for state employees. So Illinois spends about 10.5 percent of the state operating budget on pension expenditures. That’s a lot higher than New York’s roughly 3.5 percent. So Illinois’s per capita debt burden is about $19,500 and New York’s is only about $12,000. That means that Chicago is going to have a much harder time getting itself out of this mess with state assistance. It’s making a bad problem way worse.
Charles Fain Lehman: Part of what’s interesting to me, I want to zoom out from this, it’s just sort of like, Chicago is always fascinating to me because it’s a great example of a city whose problems appear to be like largely self-imposed, where it’s the third largest city in United States, I forget whether it’s second or third largest city in the United States. I forget. It’s like tussling with Los Angeles. I think it’s the third largest city in the United States that has a great deal of productive capital.
There are businesses there. Sure, it’s like major business dried up when we stopped using canals, but like, okay, you can still get a great deal just from the concentration of human capital there. And they’ve just like squandered it in every available opportunity. They’ve hiked taxes, they’ve gone after their businesses, those have fled. And they instead say, okay, how can we put more money into the pockets of the public sector unions? How can we like take, you know, take from the rich and give to entrenched interests and like the clients who run the political machine? Which again, you know, I mean, I always think of things in the context of like the sort of root causes critique. It’s like, is Chicago’s problem, I don’t know, racism, poverty, or deprivation? Like, no, Chicago’s fundamental problem is that they choose poor governance and they’re sort of stuck in this destructive, self-destructive cycle of we’re going to continue to funnel money to like our entrenched interests and away from what we think is good governance. Or what I would think of as good governance.
Jesse Arm: All of that sounds right, except I would only take quibble with the taking from the rich part, because you’re actually just taking from the public coffers, which end up disproportionately benefiting the pool. I mean, yeah, like people’s buses aren’t going to run on time. I don’t know. I think this decision, you have to think of it as something that was driven pretty much exclusively by politics from Pritzker’s perspective. Even a far left progressive like the rotund Illinois governor understands the calamitous policy implications of what he’s just done. Pritzker is auditioning for something different though, and that’s a 2028 presidential run. And this was a love letter to organized labor. He wants to do something that he knows can better position himself for union endorsements and leave Chicago holding the bag. And the next round of me too demands that are going to come from the teachers’ unions, from the state university workers and various other local public employee bargaining units, that’ll come. That’ll come fast and hard. And I don’t know, I view this as basically a preemptive surrender to this wave of copycat demands that will, or very well could, drive his state, Illinois, into fiscal collapse.
John Ketcham: I should note that these pressures are, you know, they disincentivize good government across the United States, right? So elected leaders in big cities have similar pressures from public sector workers. They always want to spend more money on things that will make them look good, right? They have a strong incentive to promise more generous pensions instead of higher pay now, because the pensions are deferred compensation. So they can promise more later without having to make the hard trade-offs today. But then, of course, those pensions are rarely funded adequately, especially given the lower-than-expected birth rate. So these systems are just chronically underfunded and then they’ll eventually just become insolvent. But the ones who are overseeing the pension, the pension boards are also partly to blame here because they are using pension funds for reasons other than ensuring that retirees get a good return sufficient for their pensions. For example, in New York City, the comptroller, Brad Lander, who oversees the pension system here, he’s put pension money into things like affordable housing developments, which by definition, they are not viable investments from a market perspective, right? So essentially, that means that you are subsidizing housing developments for some group of people at the expense of pensioners. And eventually, the taxpayer has to make up any shortfall. The taxpayer in New York is constitutionally guaranteed to backfill any public pension liabilities for government workers. And so that creates a moral hazard on the behalf of those who are managing these pension systems to score political points, ultimately at the expense of the pensioners and the taxpayers.
Charles Fain Lehman: I want to, and A, I should plug, we had a great piece from Allison Schrager, I think last week or the week before about Brad Lander’s management of his, New York City and his capacity as a comptroller, which is obviously, he may end up first deputy mayor of New York, so that was highly timely how he’s done. But point B, I want to return to Jesse’s point about Pritzker wants to be president, he wants to run for in 2028. This has been obvious for long time.
I think, you know, if there had been a real primary in ‘24, he might have run in that rather than the field being cleared for Kamala Harris. So he clearly has aspirations. I think it’s an interesting question of like, you know, is this kind of strategy? I’m sure we get Rob in here. I’m curious at John’s take as well on the on politics side of this. Just, know, is one of the major themes we’ve come back to over and over again on the show is the sort of like DSA-ification of democratic politics and the shift in that direction. Pritzker is sort of weird. He is, as Jesse alluded to, a progressive, but he doesn’t sort of like wear his class war on his sleeve, which would be hard because he’s from an extremely wealthy family. He can’t really fit into the DSA lane. So, you know, I’m curious more broadly, is there room in the party for somebody like an ultra-wealthy sort of technocratic, sort of kleptocratic governor of Illinois to run for president or is that a complete non-starter? I mean, state governors, of all of the… you know, the two thirds of the Democratic presidents since Lyndon Johnson have been state governors, but they’re both weird. So I’m not sure that can generalize. This is a small sample. No, sorry, half of that. I forgot Joe Biden was president. Sorry, was, yeah, J.B. Pritzker running for president. Thoughts? Jesse?
Jesse Arm: Well, I was going to give other folks an opportunity to jump in, but I’ll say, yeah, of course. I mean, Pritzker… I disagree with you. Pritzker is from the same radical part of the Democratic Party as all of the other people that were frequently kind of freaking out about the AOC wing. You’re only saying he’s not because he’s wealthy and white and like large physically. And in terms of kind of personality and reputation. But if you look down the kind of checkbox of all of the policies he’s endorsed and the people he’s aligned himself with, he is a fan of the far left and that is the lane that he will play for in 2028. But for the fact that you still kind of qualify him and you’re getting onto something here as something less than the farthest left wing, and that I think will be his hangup, right? Because he’s playing for far-left votes, but he’s doing so as, you know, a kind of billionaire white guy. It’s not going to play. It’s not going to work. He doesn’t have much of a record to run on. The metrics on Illinois don’t suggest a clear record of success under the Pritzker tenure. So I’m skeptical that he takes this 2028 presidential run past Iowa or any or I don’t even know what the Democrats are having their first primary contest in anymore. They’ve played so many hijinks with that but I’m very skeptical of a Pritzker run because of precisely that reason.
Charles Fain Lehman: Carolina. It’s South Carolina.
John Ketcham: He’s trying to position himself as a business leader and an anti-Trump political leader, but if you look at his actual record on both, he comes up pretty short. He did not create the Hyatt Hotel Company himself. He inherited it from his grandparents. So, you know, it’s largely a matter of inherited wealth. And I don’t have any problem with that. But if you’re trying to craft this aura around you of business success, well, you know, people I hope would get privy to that and scrutinize the substance.
And then just on the political leadership, as Jesse mentioned, Chicago public schools are among the best funded in the nation and they are among the worst performing in many cases in the nation. Illinois has an incredible fiscal challenge ahead of it. In many cases, it’s a paradigmatic example of governing failure than anything else. And you ultimately have to answer for that unless the political dynamic is such that you can oppose Trump and whoever does so the loudest and the most stridently gets the best chance of winning.
Charles Fain Lehman: I want to take this out. I’m going to start the exit question with Rob because before he was like, you bring me out to talk to these wonky things and I feel like I’m not a wonk. So sorry. But no, so I want to ask the question for the panel before we go is what, I mean, going back to the pensions issue, is there a way to get voters to care about this? Is there a way to get the American public to care about this? Because it’s like intrinsically wonky topic. It’s hard to get people to sort of be invested in like pension solvency, like John and I care about it. But you know, normal people don’t. So like, is there a way to highlight the seriousness of this as an issue or are we stuck to sort of like pointing to the numbers and hoping that somebody cares? That’s a question I’m going to be able to start with Rob.
Rob Henderson: Well, what immediately comes to mind as someone who studied psychology is many of the listeners I’m sure are familiar with Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Laureate. He tells this anecdote about how no one cares about numbers. A number is just scribbling on a piece of paper or some pixels on a screen. People care about stories and so I’m wondering if you could tell a story, if high profile politicians tell a story of what happens when someone loses their pension or if we become insolvent. And that might get people thinking, but if we just talk about numbers, I don’t think anyone is really going to take much interest in it.
Charles Fain Lehman: Fair. John?
John Ketcham: The pension debt bomb has a fuse that’s lit and it’s somewhere in the future it’ll catch up to the charge but nobody really knows when exactly that is. I mean it could be as soon as the next recession. But if you look at Detroit, Detroit underwent a bankruptcy. The court had to step in and restructure the city’s obligations. Pensioners had to take a haircut. But the city right now is on a much firmer footing. It is experiencing something of a comeback. And so does it have to get to the point of municipal bankruptcy for people to care? It might, but at least there is a silver lining in a real-life case study of a major city that did go belly up and it’s coming back.
Charles Fain Lehman: You can look for Detroit as an exemplar of a.. No, we actually should…We had a mag piece from Judy Miller, which I think ran last weekend about the turnaround of Detroit, which is notable.
Jesse Arm: No Detroit slander. Detroit is cool. Detroit is my hometown and anybody who wants to go can ask for recommendations and I’ll point you in the right direction. Can we get people…
Charles Fain Lehman: Okay. Do you believe in the weird pizza? We’ve talked about this, it’s depressing.
Jesse Arm: Oh yeah, we’ve already done, I feel like we’ve done a podcast segment on Detroit style pizza. It’s objectively the best. Although it didn’t really take off until more recent years and then like, I don’t remember growing up and Detroit pizza being definitively a thing. Then it just became like a trendy thing when I was living in New York, I was like, that’s just good pizza, square pizza.
Rob Henderson: I’ve never heard of Detroit pizza before this podcast, seriously. Is it?
Charles Fain Lehman: You do it in like a square. You do it like a baking tin basically. It’s weird.
Rob Henderson: What? So is it a thick crust?
Jesse Arm: You ever been to Emmy Squared in New York, Rob?
Rob Henderson: No I haven’t. It’s a thick crust. I’m not a huge fan of the thick crust. I think I’m out. I’ll try it, but I’m…
Charles Fain Lehman: Like Chicago style, weirder.
Jesse Arm: It’s good though, it’s got the buttery crust. It’s got the buttery crust, it’s very good. And you put a little ranch dressing on there and it’s just perfect. That’s the real Midwestern embrace. Can we get people to care about pensions? Back to get a…
John Ketcham: I got to say, it’s pretty interesting that our cultural critic, our man of culture, doesn’t know about Detroit pizza. It just goes to show you that Detroit pizza is
Charles Fain Lehman: We teach him new things everyday.
Rob Henderson: No, no, no. I knew it, yeah, you were going to say Chicago. I know Chicago pizza, but never heard of Detroit pizza. Yeah. Okay, Detroit pizza, I mean, because Detroit now has such a horrible reputation, that almost sounds like it could be like a meme or a neologism, Detroit pizza. Like, are getting so bad, this is like Detroit pizza. Yeah.
John Ketcham: You got to settle for Detroit pizza like the bankruptcy situation.
Charles Fain Lehman: Pensions!
Rob Henderson: Yeah. yeah, pensions.
Charles Fain Lehman: That’s no, it’s okay. I started it.
Jesse Arm: I’ll get to the pension, but it does sound like something a marketing or PR firm in Woodward Avenue, Royal Oak, Michigan, just outside of town might’ve come up with as a way to sell Detroit possibly. But yes, can we get people to care about pensions? I would say probably not. I’m certain if we’re referring to it as pension reform. The best bet though for how you get people to care about an issue like this, I think is if you explain it in the terms of the implications of not doing anything about it, right? It’s why your taxes are going up. It’s why the buses aren’t running. It’s why your kids’ schools are failing. Yeah, maybe then you get voters to start to care. There’s a reason, I think, that voters tend to trust the GOP more than Democrats on the economy and fiscal responsibility, even if voters can’t necessarily perfectly articulate why that is themselves. They live it.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I mean, think the answer is that it’s hard to get people to care about pensions, but it is easy to get people to care about municipal bankruptcy when it actually happens. That is a very scary, disciplining event. It is possible to tell people stories about what it looks like when a city goes bankrupt. It’s not pretty. So I think that is some point of leverage, although you do have to have the experience to remember it to happen. All right.
Let’s move on, let’s talk a little bit, let’s move away from pensions and talk about sex, which is a much better topic for you listeners… We should have started with sex. Um, sex always sells. Uh, we have, we have Rob on the show. Um, I said to him when we started, like, I’m not just bringing in the show to talk about your mag article, but I really liked his article in the magazine. So I wanted to talk with this cause it’s a bigger theme that we’ve touched on a couple of different times, uh, which is sort of the rising political divide between men and women and its underlying causes in what you refer to as persistent psychological and behavioral sex differences that continue to shape how each group sees the world. And then much of the article is dedicated to reviewing the literature on those persistent differences. So I wanted to start the conversation with Rob, but then draw everyone into sort of discussion of like, what is driving these rising sex differences? And Rob, wonder if you could talk very briefly about sort of how you see underlying evolved capacities driving the current split that we’re seeing in the sexes.
Rob Henderson: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, yeah, I wrote this long-form piece in an attempt to explore and understand what’s happening here. So many people are aware that there’s been this growing gender divide in politics where women are veering very sharply to the left, men are going slightly to the right. So I’m not talking necessarily about voting patterns. So the voting patterns were clear that young men turned out for Trump and even young women. mean, they overwhelmingly went for Harris, but there was a slight shift from relative to 2020 and 2024, even young women, a larger percentage of them went for Trump, although they did go overwhelmingly for Harris overall. So what explains this in terms of self-identification where, you know, think the most recent statistic shows that 44 percent of women under 30 identify as liberal compared with only 25 percent of young men. And this is the largest gender gap on record in terms of sort self-identified political orientation. And it’s sort of at odds with what we’re seeing in the broader culture, other statistics showing that women have surpassed men in education. Women are the majority of bachelor’s, master’s, and now PhDs. In many metropolitan cities women are rivaling or even out earning male their male peers specifically people under 30 And so as they achieve educational parody income parody people might expect well Then their political views will become more aligned their self-interest will be more similar men and women’s self-interest, and this is not what we see. Instead, it’s growing.
And so you know I dug into the to the research discussing this very interesting finding that came out when I was in grad school at the University of Cambridge. There were several papers on this, and by now it’s more or less an established fact. It’s called the gender equality paradox, which is this finding that in societies that are more prosperous and socio-politically equal, the gender gap in various traits actually grows rather than shrinks. So if you look at Scandinavian countries like Denmark and Sweden, you’ll find that men and women are actually more different from one another than in more traditional societies like Vietnam or Botswana. And this is true for physical traits, interestingly, where the height gap between men and women… So men tend to be taller on average than women, but that gap is actually larger and richer and more socio-politically equal societies. This is true for BMI. It’s true for blood pressure. So the physical findings are interesting on their own. But then there’s also a larger gap in more equal societies with regard to personality traits. what psychologists call the big five, openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, sometimes referred to as emotional stability. So in these traits, also,
Charles Fain Lehman: I was alarmed that it wasn’t neuroticism in the piece it was i was like it’s “OCEAN,” it’s “O.C.E.A.N.” Sorry, go ahead.
Rob Henderson: Yeah, well, there’s been this shift. I mean, it depends on the paper that you read. So sometimes psychologists will refer to that trait as neuroticism, but then other psychologists will reverse score it or reverse code it. And now it’s referred to as emotional stability, which is basically neuroticism, but the opposite. So the higher you score neuroticism, the more sensitive you are to negative emotion. And then emotional stability is basically how robust you are to setbacks in life, your emotional stability. And so across these traits, men and women differ.
Some of those traits higher than others. So for agreeableness, for example, which captures traits like compassion and empathy and regard for others, especially people who are perceived as vulnerable or disadvantaged, women score much higher than men on this trait, especially in more socio-politically equal, prosperous societies, places like Scandinavia, places like Western Europe, places like the United States. And I suggest that, you know, as societies actually become, as they achieve their goals, becoming richer, becoming more equal, treating people increasingly more fairly, men and women are actually growing further apart on these traits and that this fuels in part the growing political divide.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, we’ve talked with, I think, little bit before in the show, I’m a big believer in sort of this, political scientist Ron Inglehart, but lots of other people are talking about this this idea of post-materialism, is like, starting in 1970s, material constraints become less relevant to politics, and so we become more invested in effective issues and issues of justice, in things that are not just bread and butter issues, in the sense of making sure that we get enough calories, or our children get enough calories, and that men and women are going to vary on how they regard those issues in a way that they don’t necessarily on like core issues of how to get enough food to feed your family. And so that I think has explained a lot of that variation. Has explained a lot of variation in number of different traits. But I want to kick to the rest of the panel for thoughts and responses on the rising gender gap in politics. I mean, do you find the biological explanation persuasive? Do you think there are other factors that you think about? What do we make of it?
Rob Henderson: Well, OK, so just to be clear, it’s not entirely biological. So I’m saying that there are material conditions involved, right? Like as societies become more wealthy, then you’re going to see these biological traits diverge even further apart.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah.
Jesse Arm: One thing that really clicked for me when I was sort of reading Rob’s piece, it reminded me of a lot of stuff that I’ve picked up through Nate Silver, the pollster or polling aggregator, his recent writing about gender and politics. I think, you know, how personality traits like agreeableness and neuroticism, both of which skew higher in women, they don’t necessarily just shape political attitudes but they shape political tone. And Silver has made this point well. A lot of young men aren’t necessarily turned off by policies associated with the Democratic Party so much as like an overall vibe. The left feels very anxious, rules-obsessed, overly therapeutic. And it’s not that these guys, the young voters who are becoming more Republican. It’s not that they’re necessarily angry or broken, like the picture we see painted of a lot of them who are angry and broken and maybe are disproportionately representative on platforms like Twitter, it’s that they don’t see themselves in a culture that increasingly pathologizes risk and competition. So when Rob points out that psychological sex differences widen in freer societies, you start to understand why this divide is growing rather than shrinking. And if anything, more freedom just lets people lean harder into their default wiring. And politically, I do think that’s showing up as a sharp gender split.
Charles Fain Lehman: I had a conversation a couple months ago with a notable left-leaning commentator, let’s put it that way, who said to me something to the effect of, you know, look, this person is male and prone to disagreeableness and prone to argumentation. He was like, many people who look like me are just sort of alienated from a large portion of the Democratic Party. And that is a gendered thing. It’s just like I don’t argue like a woman and women don’t like it when I argue with them in Democratic spaces and Democratic spaces are increasingly run by women, which is hostile to somebody who makes arguments like me. I was like, yeah, I’m not a Democrat, so I don’t have that problem, but I understand your argument. Sorry, John, I cut you off.
John Ketcham: No, so I agree with Rob’s evolutionary and biological assessment, but I started thinking a lot about culture while reading his piece. Culture is to a great extent the means by which groups of people channel these sexual differences, shifting reproductive success to traits other than those prized by natural selection. So instead of physical strength and size, for example, it becomes things like wealth and education. And it got me thinking about the differences in marriage.
In societies that allow for polygamy, there’s greater competition for females because a few relatively high-status males can have greater reproductive success with multiple females. So to limit this competition from spilling over into violence, women are often veiled or secluded because the males still have to get on with each other in society. Whereas monogamous marriage is a way of starting off with lower male versus male competition for females, because you create a more even distribution of mating opportunities for males. then they have, know, males essentially trade the preference that they have for more than one female partner for greater reproductive certainty, right? And it channels each man’s energies into his family rather than to search for a mate that’s in shorter supply than in a polygamous situation, and so it facilitates social stability and productivity. It also reminded me of the political process insofar as it replaces violence with institutions that make cooperation among people more durable and more assured. We give up being the judge in our own cause and using violence to advance our means in a political society in the same way or in a similar way as we do with monogamous marriage, we can take just one partner and we can have protection against the greater risk of a polygamous society.
So I think it’s not surprising that in a society where monogamous marriage has eroded and has weakened, you’re going to see more males losing from male-male competition. And I think that has some big implications to society. It’s not surprising that younger men are looking to reinforce marriage through socially conservative norms. They want to restore marriage because it does help them have a greater chance of being an integrated part of society. We need the institutions though to support marriage. We used to have a code of chivalry, now we have a code of consent, but Edmund Burke was very wise in saying that the restraints on our passion are to be counted on our liberties, are to be counted as our rights. So our restraints on our liberties and our passions are to be counted among our rights.
Charles Fain Lehman: There’s an interesting point there, because you have seen conversely to the point about young men wanting more marriage, have seen a rise of influencers who are influential over a certain sect of young men who are actively opposed to monogamy. I’m thinking of people like Andrew Tate or Myron Gaines, who have a number of loathsome opinions, among them being open hostility to monogamy. And it’s interesting that that goes hand in hand with… and you know, I think this is a word that some people throw out freely. I don’t throw out freely, but like just open misogyny, just like women are vile and terrible and deserve often physical abuse is their thesis. And you know, to John’s point but also Rob’s point, you can see a connection between these two things. It’s like, once you start from the premise of, we just need to accept that men and women are always going to be opposed to each other. And that the sort of the ways in which they view the world differently are a necessary source of conflict, rather than we can build institutions that resolve that conflict allow them to coexist you’re going to end up with like this fairly dysfunctional way of thinking about the world that you can then proselytize to other people. I’m curious about that sort of question about how do you deal with these you know intrinsic tensions
Rob Henderson: Yeah. Well, I mean, it is interesting that across multiple societies throughout history, they have independently developed the concept of marriage. You know, societies that have no contact with one another, you know, thousands of miles and centuries apart continue to sort of organically develop this idea of, maybe we should codify this relationship in order to promote societal stability and productivity and so on, to John’s earlier point.
And there’s a really interesting researcher, I think her name is Alice Evans, she talks about this. This may also be a contributing factor to the growing political divide is the fact that people are single now. When you spend a lot of time with the opposite sex, your views tend to de-radicalize over time because you start to see the other person’s perspective, what their concerns are, what they care about, what their priorities are, and you have a bit of empathy for them and then them for you, and this tends to soften people’s political views and prevent them from being into extremism. But if you are an angry young person and you spend a lot of time with other angry young persons of your own sex and you tend to reflect your ideas off of one another, they tend to polarize, they tend to harden and then sort of fuels these disagreements.
Charles Fain Lehman: Man-hating, woman-hating. All right. I want to… Right, I can talk about this all day, but we should try to stay on time. So I’ll take us out and ask the panel, do we think that there is a you know, do you think it is plausible this gap will close? You’ve seen this gap between the sexes open across all democracies. It’s more pronounced in some places than others. South Korea is really bad. We’re doing okay by comparison. But do we think that this is, you know, is this just the state of play or is there a way to get this gap to close again? Jesse, what’s your take?
Jesse Arm: Not unless the left becomes more comfortable with testosterone and less allergic to discomfort. I don’t, I don’t see it closing in the near term, because it will require sort of a major corrective on the left, which I think we’re further than four years away from.
Charles Fain Lehman: John?
John Ketcham: I don’t see it for some time at least. It’s going to take a while. It reminds me also that for the first time practically ever, young men are more religious than young women. And for similar reasons, I think, that Rob highlights. Traditional religion offers structure, it offers well-defined roles, and think young men find that quite reassuring and quite the juxtaposition in contrast against the far left. So I see these trends persisting.
Charles Fain Lehman: Fair.
Rob Henderson: That’s interesting, John, because I’ve seen that as well, that young men are tilting more towards the religious side, and this is relatively new. Women have always been more religious than men but I guess this this is supports the idea that politics has replaced religion for a lot of young people, because when you look at who’s the most politically involved in who’s who care the most and post the most politics, it’s actually young women more so than young men. So they’ve pivoted over to politics and away from religion. But yeah, as for the question, Charles, I would say same. Same answers as Jesse and John. Not anytime soon. You know, I worry about other technological advances, AI boyfriends, AI girlfriends, all this stuff. I think it’s, yeah, there’s not going to be this reconciliation, at least not anytime soon.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I mean, I think the argument in the other direction, I’m sure I buy it, is just that like, it is unsustainable to so aggressively alienate one sex and you know, this is the argument of Democrats, can make this argument of Republicans, you can make this argument across the developed world. But it is, you know, it’s hard to have a coalition that’s only composed of one sex. I mean, they do end up being half the population, so you can count to 50 percent with them. But like, it is relatively insignificant. So at some point, you have to moderate the other direction. I think that is the argument. I’m not sure I buy it, but that’s the argument.
Rob Henderson: I will say there’s a… maybe this this is a an optimistic view, is that we’re a multiethnic democracy but we’re polarized increasingly on gender lines, whereas in a lot of other multiethnic democracies their political parties are explicitly organized along sort of ethnic and racial affiliation and we’re kind of like South Korea, which is a homogenous society, where they’re polarized along gender lines too. So in a way, it kind of gives me hope that, all right, we’ll focus on gender and away from the kind of racial conflict we see in a lot of other societies.
Charles Fain Lehman: That’s a strange kind of hope.
John Ketcham: I just want to say to our listeners, you should read Rob’s piece. It really is an outstanding work of writing and of analysis, very well crafted.
Charles Fain Lehman: It’s on the website. It’s up. You can go check it out. It’s at city-journal.org. All right, before we go. Somehow, we can’t go a week without talking about Sydney Sweeney. I thought we were done with Sydney Sweeney last week, but we were not done with Sydney Sweeney. It turns out, I think Buzzfeed unearthed this first, and then our friends from the New York Post on page six picked it up. Everybody has it now. The president has been asked about it. Apparently she’s a registered Republican. So before we go, people’s responses to this, are you shocked, surprised, et cetera. Jesse’s had a pitch…
Jesse Arm: But wait, Charles, Charles, we’ve got… Charles, we have breaking news coming across the City Journal Podcast transom here. The president has weighed in further. I’m going to read his latest post to Truth Social. “Sidney Sweeney”—spelled incorrectly with an I—“Sidney Sweeney…”
Charles Fain Lehman: That’s how it’s spelled now! If he spells it that way, that’s how it’s spelled. He’s the president.
Jesse Arm: You’re right, you’re right, that was wrong of me. “Sidney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the HOTTEST”—all caps—”ad out there. It’s for American Eagle, and the jeans are ‘flying off the shelves.’ Go get them, Sidney. On the other…” Wow, there were just balloons that went on my screen. Did anybody see that? I don’t know how we did that.
Charles Fain Lehman: I did, yeah. I don’t know.
Rob Henderson: Yeah, those were helium filled.
Jesse Arm: I’m going to keep reading. “On the other side of the ledger, Jaguar did a stupid, woke advertisement that is a disaster. The CEO just resigned. The company is in turmoil. Shouldn’t they have learned a lesson from Bud Light, which went woke and essentially destroyed in a short but very woke campaign, the company? The market cap destruction has been unprecedented. Billions of dollars lost. Or just look at woke singer Taylor Swift. Ever since I alerted the world as to what she was by saying on Truth that I can’t stand her.”
Rob Henderson: Hmm. Wordsmith.
Charles Fain Lehman: Okay, discuss. Sydney Sweeney is a Republican. The President is on her side. What are we going make of this? Let me throw it to the, I guess I have to ask people to exit. Rob?
Rob Henderson: Well, I think people are unsurprised by this. It was reported months ago or last year that she has Republican family members. She doesn’t seem to be especially outspoken about politics. Someone dug up this tweet of hers from 2020 where she did something about hashtag Black Lives Matter. But everyone was doing that in 2020 or everyone who, you know, a lot of people anyway. Yeah. And so, yeah, yeah, except us. Well…
Charles Fain Lehman: It wasn’t a decision from my past.
Rob Henderson: And so, so yeah, unsurprising. And the fact that she did this ad, I heard a rumor, and I have not verified this, that she’s a listener of the Red Scare podcast. So when that news came out, I was not, not surprised.
Charles Fain Lehman: Fair. John?
John Ketcham: I think I know the reason why. Florida is obviously a Republican state, and it’s also a closed primary state. And so she wants to be registered with the party to participate in the only election that matters.
Charles Fain Lehman: It’s because she’s a savvy political consumer. Okay, Jesse?
Jesse Arm: Oh man, well I’ve wanted to talk about this for a while and I was sad I missed the podcast the other day where you guys discussed it at greater length. But I think this isn’t shocking at all and that’s exactly why it’s so triggering to people. Sydney Sweeney has always radiated this kind of effortless, unbothered, normie energy that makes today’s cultural scolds lose their minds. She’s hot in like a normal, not overwhelming way. She’s giving more girl next door than massive supermodel, and she’s not interested in moralizing and doesn’t need to apologize for any of it. And that’s, I believe, what drove the hysteria over the American Eagle ad, that it wasn’t the soft voice or the jeans-genes talk. It was that she’s been playing it completely straight with no woke hashtags or trauma monologues or lecturing with just beauty, charisma, and like this unapologetic mass appeal.
And then, yeah, now we see that she’s a registered Republican in Florida. No one I don’t think is so surprised. It’s more of a confirmation that Sydney Sweeney never really bought into the values of elite cultural progressivism, where being attractive is only fine if you’re also performatively ashamed of it, like you know, people like, EmRata, you know, Emily Ratajkowski have to get out there and campaign for Zohran in order to also be like hot Hollywood starlets. So yeah, I don’t think Sydney Sweeney’s MAGA, and she’s not bending the knee either. And that refusal to do the self-flagellation game combined with her massive success is what makes her feel dangerous to these woke people. She’s not playing their game and she’s winning without even acknowledging its existence. And in that sense, I don’t know. I think the point is that she’s part of this new generation of female stars. There are others who are part of it. There’s kind of like a Sydney Sweeney-equivalent that’s coded more for women in Sabrina Carpenter out there. I’m of that belief. And I think they all kind of refuse to attach their careers to social justice sermons like the other people that I mentioned, Emily Ratajkowski, Rachel Zegler, Olivia Rodrigo, they all fit into this. You know, I’m looking at them, but no, you got Sydney Sweeney on the good guy side that’s not trying to end wokeness, but also just kind of just being out there, just being unapologetically hot, normal, and commercially successful. They’re helping to bury wokeness by doing that. And the people who built their identities around this moral gatekeeping know it, and that’s why they’re mad.
Charles Fain Lehman: Hot, normal, and commercially successful is also my goal for the City Journal Podcast. On that note, that is about all the time that we have. Thank you as always to our panelists. Thank you to our producer, Isabella Redjai. Listeners, don’t forget to like, subscribe, ring the bell, click the buttons. On Thursday, I’ve been reminded to tell you, on Thursday, I’ll be doing a special one-on-one episode with my colleague, Douglas Murray. We’ll be talking about all things Douglas Murray, radicalism, the rise of extremism, domestic violence, et cetera.
I encourage you, particularly if you’re interested in that, to click whatever buttons you have to click to make sure that you know that it’s going to happen on YouTube or Spotify or wherever else you get your podcasts. Comments, questions, etc. down below. Until next time, you’ve been listening to the City Journal Podcast. We hope you’ll join us again soon.
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