A primer on The Ideology and Identity Wars

Ted Bauer
34 min readSep 23, 2022

Lot of ink has been spilled on polarization, division, culture wars, etc. — including periodically by me. Now you have two new articles in The New York Times. In one article, they talk to pro-life voters. In the next article, they talk to pro-choice voters. These people are, likely, as ideologically different as you may find across a swath of people. Now, the sample sizes on both groups are very small. That’s also necessary to note.

Here is what seems to concern the pro-choice contingent the most:

And here is what concerns the pro-life contingent the most:

So obviously the pro-life contingent is probably right-leaning. Maybe not far-right, but probably right of center. Almost everyone is saying “the economy,” which makes sense because we’ve had an assumption that conservatives care mostly about the economy for five decades now. Also “the right” isn’t generally in power at this moment, so saying “the economy” feels like a good default.

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Ted Bauer

I write about a lot of different topics, from work to masculinity to relationships and social dynamics, I.e. modern friendship. Pleasure to be here.