Alexander Bowen is an MPP-MIA student at SciencesPo Paris and St Gallen specialising in public health, and a policy fellow at a British think tank.
Of the most prominent terror attacks in the last decade, each has led to a misdirected moral panic.
In 2017 and the Manchester Arena bombing the big concern was around funding cuts to the police despite an abundance of police being present. In the murder of David Amess it was MPs being abused on social media despite it being a clear case of Islamic terror. Now with Axel Rudakubana and the Southport killings the focus is young men using the internet.
It is a sort of polite equivalent to the 1990s moral panic about violent video games – emotionally appealing in a sense but ultimately unsubstantiated by any evidence and used whether knowingly or not to obscure actual policy solutions.
That it is so duplicative is not surprising.
Centrist dads George Osborne and Ed Balls, who dedicated a whole episode of their recent podcast to young male extremism, entered politics in that prior moral panic and you could argue adopted its attitudes. They go on to do what so many have done before and attempt to document the radicalisation of young men – the New York Times writing that young men have radicalised away from the left whilst the Guardian ascribes the same gender divide to angry white guys.
That the moral panic as embraced by Starmer in seeking to redefine terrorism is so obviously wrong, which Osborne seemingly acknowledges himself, that it need not merit much consideration despite leaked Home Office reports.
The moral panickers have all been right in one sense however – there has been an asymmetric gender based radicalisation in the political views of “the youth”, but the evidence shows that its direction is entirely opposite to what has been presupposed. Gender polarisation exists certainly, but the group being polarised is not young men.
Look at the data.
What that data shows is not men doing the polarising, but rather their sisters. Men have, and fairly evenly across the west, maintained the same political identification as their parents whilst it was young women who ran away from the political centre. Indeed, in doing so young men are actually reducing polarisation – maintaining the same identification as their parents, and having increasingly similar voting patterns in several countries, is closing the age based polarisation that dominated in the 2010s.
Indeed, it is uncomfortable but it must be accepted that the face of gender based polarisation looks far more like Phoebe Plummer than Andrew Tate or some other idiotic bro-fluencer.
For every barely post-pubescent man watching an “SJW EPICLY OWNED” compilation, there are two or three female equivalents watching its inverse and indeed watching things that are supportive of actual substantive terrorism. The 2023 TikTok trend of reading Osama Bin Laden’s Letter to America and nodding in agreement was not some ‘manosphere’ construction – nor were the outbreaks of domestic quasi-terrorism in the form of Just Stop Oil or the pro-Hamas student riots of 2024 or the outburst of support for Luigi Mangione.
Where there has been male polarisation it is discursive and it is reactive.
The Overton window, the idea of a space in which certain views are politically palatable has been proactively shifted leftwards in the last decade or so. Neo-Marxist scholars like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in any number of works, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, the Return of the Political, and On the Political, understood that breaking down consensus would not merely operate in one direction. Yet what their followers seemed to believe is that the window would just be shifted, rather it has served as a pendulum or – if you enjoy window metaphors – shutters. In opening the left flank of political discourse it has opened the right.
A distinction must be drawn too between what could be termed lifestyle-polarisation and policy-polarisation for these polarisations are not equivalent.
Lifestyle polarisation, when factors like race, religion, and region accumulate in reinforcing cleavages and where political parties are essentially extensions of lifestyles (“the personal is political” taken to its maximum extent) is in no way equivalent to polarisation on policy.
Even the doyen of America’s wonkish liberal-left, Ezra Klein, can acknowledge that. In his work, Why We’re Polarised, there is near-praise for policy polarisation as he describes how party sorting (parties forming stable ideological groupings) has improved ‘democracy’ in its broadest sense with clear choices, sincere representation, and effective majorities.
If we are to take turnout as a measure of democratic health then the depoliticisation, at least in stated if not implemented policy priorities, as seen at the 2024 UK election, makes this case clearly.
Voters were presented with what George Galloway termed “two cheeks of the same backside” and whilst disliking one far more than the other still opted for neither with a government elected with 20% of the electorate’s support and in the democratic world’s second most disproportionate contest. Was sub-60% turnout driven by policy depolarisation really a sign of a healthy democracy?
That the big two parties, what ought to be the poles, are now taking in only 45% of the vote between them and being outpolled by Reform despite the political climate being essentially ‘normal’ ought be enough evidence that it isn’t.
The problem too is that in depolarising policy, something else was left to take the gap and that something else was lifestyle.
Compare Britain and America’s elections. Britain shorn of sincere policy disagreement (or at least shorn of conflicting policy ‘vibes’) was left to polarise on lifestyle – most notably along ethno-religious lines. America, and though there were moments of lifestyle polarisation, was in the strictest sense depolarised by Trump. The most notable fact of their election was that cleavages like race and age had ceased to reinforce with Trump owing his victory to “black men, latinos, and young people”.
There is, I would suggest, an inevitably to polarisation.
In political science there’s this decades old paper where people are shown two near identical paintings, a Kandinsky and a Klee, and from there assigned a group before being left to distribute rewards and penalties between themselves. Each group, having been composed essentially arbitrarily, then seemed not only to favour their own group but sought to maximise the relative gap between groups, even when it was to their own disadvantage.
If it is that easy and that arbitrary to polarise, then we will frankly be polarised regardless. Let it at least be about policy.
The politics of lifestyle is where real conflict lies yet it is the only politics that has been left possible by the homogeneity of the centrist dad.
If you want to defeat that polarisation, the sincerely harmful polarisation, the solution is not in converting panic into action through the Online Safety Act as one Labour MP has suggested but in re-politicising genuine issues. Though coming from the wrong place, the aforementioned Chantal Mouffe and her democratic antagonism, the need for things to be contested, is essentially correct.
Polarisation won’t stop until contestation begins.
