Or, that same data could be use to show that women have stayed relatively around the center and men of skewed far to the right. After all, "the center" is not an absolute objectively defined concept.

>> The data for the US shows young men in the US staying relatively around the center after a brief left shift in '08, but young women have skewed far to the left. So the gap shouldn't have much to do with the material conditions of men, in the US at least.

> Or, that same data could be use to show that women have stayed relatively around the center and men of skewed far to the right. After all, "the center" is not an absolute objectively defined concept.

I would assume any study of that data worth being called as such would have put all its measurements on some standard scale to determine who actually moved.

"The center" may not be an "objectively" defined concept, but "men stayed the same" and "women moved" can be quantified objectively.

No, but given two points in time, one can determine which are the center, left, and right views at each point, and see how much each group moved from those and at what direction.

That is, the center/left/right doesn't have to be an "absolute objectively defined concept".

That "what is center" can change over time is irrelevant. To see if people moved to the left or right compared to, say, the 90s, you just need to know what was the center baseline in the 90s. The comparison is relative.

The left is defined as moving. That's what "progressive" means.

For 100 years there was a clear pattern where the center adopted the views of the left about 20 years after the left did, and the right about 20 years after the center.

This pattern no longer holds.

It never held all that much. The 'progressive' movement used to support eugenics as far late as the 1960s in some places. And economic freedom used to be seen as a conservative value exclusively prior to the 1980s and 1990s, but today it has contributed to lifting billions of people out of poverty, and many on the "neo-liberal" left support it. More recently, the left is also slowly moving towards supporting a preference for skilled over unskilled immigration to protect vulnerable and marginalized citizens' jobs and reduce concerns over social frictions, something that used to only be a talking point for conservatives.

Economic freedom has always been a key Liberal value.

Protecting jobs has always been a key left value.

>The left is defined as moving. That's what "progressive" means

It's a little more complicated than that. Progressive and left can coincide in some cases, but they're not the same thing. Left ideas were often deemed "regressive", both in the economic and social domains.

In fact, according to Marx himself, capitalism (the essense of the "right" in European terms) is a revolutionary movement itself, which breaks down all established traditional order and social conventions.

And inversely, leftish causes, were often considered as anti-progress: the protection of workers from automation, environmental issues ("tree-huggers"), protesting against GMOs or nuclear power, celebrating native cultures, and of course protesting modernity and consumer society (a massive theme in the 60s and 70s leftist movements).

And of course in the 19th century, a huge number of leftist intellectuals were Romantics or close - against the rise of industry and alienation.

The reality is that the "progressivist" element, an inherently capitalistic dynamic (historically only partially shared with some parts of the left), has increasingly eaten up the folksy elements of the left, to the point that the modern left is mostly an upper middle class movement.

The studies are of partisan lean over a relatively small number of years. The parties aren't that different than they were in 2008, but in the US young women are far more likely to vote for democratic candidates and to be more strident in that choice than at any point in time since data has been collected. Young men are now slightly less likely to vote for the democratic party than 15 years ago.

Not sure that follows. Is there an underlying assumption that better material conditions == move to the right, all else being equal?

(Not criticising, trying to tease out your meaning).

BTW, in the conversation below I think y'all are talking about the Overton Window without actually mentioning it.

I’m not talking about the Overton Window. I mean specifically in the US based on survey data, young men vote about like they did 15 years ago, and women on average are much more likely to vote for the left leaning party. That’s all I mean.