The Battle of the Sexes Is Now the Battle of Idiocracies

How the culture war has become a fight between male and female versions of idiocracy

In the great cinematic masterpiece Idiocracy, the distant future is populated entirely by low-IQ dummies—literal idiots. A decade after its release, the film is more relevant than ever. It’s actually incredible. Our country is led by a reality TV star whose main passions include WWE, pornstars, gaudy mansions, crypto scams, and political bribes. We’re hosting a UFC fight at the White House. A Fox News host leads the newly re-named Department of War. A former WWE executive heads the Department of Education. Our Secretary of Health and Human Services is a former heroin addict with pathologic skepticism of the medical community.

How did this happen? A recent survey found that 42% of Lay’s customers didn’t realize their potato chips were made from potatoes. That’s how. We’re a nation of morons.

But it didn’t have to turn out this way. The film Idiocracy only depicts one version of an idiot-ruled future. Namely: the male version. The film isn’t subtle about this. The Idiocracy future is all about violent sports, guns, booze, and boobs. Starbucks in this future has turned into a strip club franchise. It’s a dopy male fantasy.

The alternate idiocracy of the future would be a corrupted depiction of the female fantasy. Sadly there is no Idiocracy-style film depicting this version, but that doesn’t mean we can’t imagine it. In fact, just like with the male version, the real world has a female idiocracy that’s well in the works.

I’m referring, of course, to the woke movement. Wokeness is the polar opposite of a culture defined by violent sports, guns, booze, and boobs. And yet, at its extreme, it’s equally as mind-numbingly immature. It results in something like an unthinking glorification of safe spaces, superficial diversity, mental fragility, and I-hate-my-dad rebelliousness. Whatever its defining characteristics are exactly, one thing is sure: wokeness is female coded through and through.

This was brought home by a recent article by Helen Andrews, “The Great Feminization.” Andrews argues that the Great Awokening of the past decade was largely a result of women becoming disproportionately represented in the workforce. She writes:

Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently.

Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.

A few tipping points Andrews observes: Women became the majority of law students in 2016, the majority of medical students in 2018, and the majority of the staff at The New York Times in 2018. And according to Andrews, “When an institution tips into becoming majority female, it becomes hostile to men. And it frankly becomes hostile to those women who flourished under the old rules.”

I don’t fully agree with Andrews. She makes certain claims that, as David French points out in the NYT, seem more than a little overblown. For example, Andrews makes quite a leap to assert that women pose a “potential threat to civilization” simply by virtue of being overrepresented in government and education. Even if she’s right, she doesn’t make a strong argument to support this claim. Also, David French notes that men are fully capable of woke-style behaviors, such as the Trump administration requiring ideological purity under threat of cancellation. (Don’t trust David French? See James Lindsay’s beginner’s guide to the woke right).

But let’s be real. If Mike Judge, the co-writer and director of Idiocracy, had depicted a female-centric low-IQ future, it would look like a fever dream of the ultra-woke. Everyone would have degrees in gender studies, queer literature, or social justice. White people would be permanent second-class citizens to compensate for the sins of their ancestors. Among the elites, social status would depend entirely upon the number of mental illnesses one proclaimed to have. News channels would feature endless debates about which LGBTQ+ flag was most inclusive. Police would all be replaced with public safety specialists, leading to the total collapse of order in cities. Jails would be entirely emptied of traditional criminals to make space for the moral monsters who uttered taboo phrases such as “transwomen are biological men” and “it’s unhealthy to be obese.”

Many people have proclaimed that this type of lefty woke excess is already over. The title of Piers Morgan’s new book expresses this view confidently: “Woke Is Dead: How common sense triumphed in an age of total madness.” Indeed, if you look at who holds real power in America today, it’s all characters straight out of Mike Judge’s Idiocracy—it’s all, as Richard Hanania says, right-leaning “low human capital.”

But if Helen Andrews is correct, and if the lefty excess is driven simply by “feminine patterns of behavior,” then it’s premature to call the woke movement dead. As women continue to become ever more deeply entrenched in government and in industry, lefty wokeism is sure to rise again. And when it does, we may yet live to see Idiocracy Part Two—not just in theaters, but in the real world.

The battle of the idiocracies has become a high stakes version of the battle of the sexes. It’s woke right vs. woke left. Guns and beer vs. DEI and pronouns-in-bio. Podcast bros vs. crazy cat ladies. Authoritarian father vs. nurturing mother.

To quote Jane Austen, “One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.” And to quote Leonard Cohen, in a song about the ageless battle of the sexes, “Come on back to the war. It’s just beginning.”