The late Charlie Kirk may have been best known for his conservative politics, but those politics also resonated with traditional values, religious faith, and family life—one side of a critical divide in our society. Life and value choices, even more than ideology, increasingly define how people vote, what they believe, and where they live.
For years, the United States has been evolving into two different countries. One is dominated by often childless, urban renters, many of them college graduates or poor minorities. This America is concentrated in core cities and college towns.
The other America exists in an almost parallel universe—largely suburban, exurban, small town, and rural—but where family, faith, and children constitute the common threads of everyday life. This America was receptive to Kirk’s traditionalist message.
The first America has become a haven for a significant number of postmodernist progressives who largely reject the customary pillars of society such as religion, marriage, and family. Theirs is not a rebellion of peasants and laborers, as occurred from medieval times and on through the early progressive era, but instead an uprising mostly of the urban professional classes. Rather than the mundane concerns of traditional liberals or “sewer socialists,” the postmodernists focus more on environmental catastrophism, gender identity, and radical racial politics. AEI scholar Sam Abrams and I have been following this political trend for years, but new polling shows that it has intensified, particularly among younger single women.
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