I've thought a lot about the Simpsons political voting, mainly because I wonder whether it could be made today or if these archetypes cause too much partisan dislike.
Lisa would obviously grow up to be a pretty woke Democrat, with a humanities degree of some sort, Bart would presumably be in a semi-skilled profession and vote Republican. Anecdotally I've heard of many American families where a pro-Trump and highly educated Democrat sister have fallen out.
Marge would vote Republican but her two sisters Democrat, as there is a huge partisan difference of 25 points between single and married women.
Smithers would vote Democrat but if he lived in Europe it's not inconceivable he'd vote for the AfD or Le Pen.
So interesting. You should write something on this. I agree the cultural/political gulf is too big for it to work nowadays. I can't imagine metropolitan liberal comedy writers coming up with the Simpsons characters and it not feeling patronising.
The show worked because it was made before the sorting was complete. Now we all know which zip code each archetype belongs to, which podcasts they listen to, which opinions they're allowed to hold. Springfield was a town where everyone still had to live together. Now it would be two towns, each watching different shows, convinced the other one doesn't really exist.
I've also thought about this for a long time too. This was my attempt to try and place the characters on a political compass back in 2024. Turns out I was wrong about Mr Burns!
I think you're right. older plutocrats are still right-wing and manufacturing/energy is less into woke capital than tech companies, although it was amusing to learn that Dow Chemicals of Agent Orange fame were at one point one of wokest.
No, Lisa is actually, canonically intelligent. She’d get a real job that exposed her to people and the world in ways that round out one’s opinions. The person you’re describing is a midwit who identifies as intelligent because they have a bachelors. There’s a big difference but only intelligent people can see it.
Lots of very intelligent people are woke tbf. The big question is, would Lisa Simpson, now in her 40s and living in exclusive political bubble, and dreading listening to her dad's pro-Trump ravings at family get-togethers, be a gender-critical feminist?
Possibly, but she also craved approval, recognition of her intellect and a tribe to belong to. I doubt that Lisa would have stuck her hand up in her Harvard English seminar to say 'Is it just me, or is Judith Butler talking incomprehensible bollocks here?'
Reeeeeally? Lisa the people pleaser? The character must have changed a LOT if that’s the case. In the early seasons she was a beleaguered truth teller who was often upset by the rejection her honesty incurred, but that didn’t usually stop her…
Not a people pleaser but someone who values their intellect and wants it to be recognised and validated by others - like when she had to take a test that made no sense and had a meltdown, or when she got advanced a grade and couldn't handle not being the cleverest kid in the room.
This resonated with me. I’m not an anthropologist either, but when I lived with a Maasai tribe I saw something that complicates the familiar “male provider” story in a similar way.
I spent my time almost entirely with the women, cooking, cleaning, repairing huts, milking, fetching water, washing clothes, keeping daily life going. The men largely stood around talking, while the children were the ones actually out with the animals. Food, water, shelter, continuity, all of that rested with the women’s labour.
What struck me was that male status didn’t seem to come from provisioning so much as from visibility, presence, and social standing. Having multiple wives increased a man’s status, but it also meant more women doing the work. He moved between households, while the infrastructure of life was quietly sustained without him.
So Miller’s idea that certain male behaviours function less as practical provisioning and more as signalling doesn’t feel abstract to me. Seeing how much of survival and continuity was handled by women, while men occupied a more performative social role, made me question how deeply ingrained our assumptions about “who provides” really are.
Very interesting. I’ve read similar accounts. This is exactly what Joyce Benenson describes in her book Warriors and Worriers. The more evolutionary psychology I read the more terrible men seem…
I recognise whatyou are pointing to. When I lived with the Maasai, I was struck by how much daily survival was organised by women and children, while men occupied more visible, physical, symbolic, and status-based roles.
It also wasn’t a sealed-off or “ancestral” world. There were schools, teachers, and people moving between rural life and Nairobi. In that context, many male roles felt as much ceremonial or social as practical. What stayed with me was how easily visibility and status get confused with provision, while the quieter work of continuity carries on in the background
Fair point! When men of another tribe tire of standing around talking and indulge their need for aggression/violence by making war, the men of the first tribe will become needed and will, in fact, enthusiastically engage in said war. (Enthusiastically at least at first.)
To be honest I saw exactly the same thing as a teenager in a Baptist Church in the West of Scotland. The women kept everything running, the men stood around and talked.
I’ve observed very much the same (from a much shorter and shallower set of interactions). Almost all the time the role of the men in the small village appeared to be exclusively confined to sitting under a tree, smoking, drinking and shooting the shit.
What wasn’t apparent was why the women put up with it.
That question stayed with me too. What I noticed, talking with the women, was that they experienced themselves less as isolated wives and more as a strong community of women. They worked together, supported each other, and shared the load.
Interestingly, several women said they didn’t mind their husbands taking another wife because it reduced pressure on any one household and meant less day-to-day emotional and practical demand from the men. Marriage felt more about livestock, lineage, and security than companionship in the way we might frame it.
It wasn’t that the labour was invisible to them, but that it was normalised and buffered by collective female support.
Re Trump: It’s like when everyone was diagnosing Putin as being at death’s door five years ago. I remember being solemnly assured by Helena Kennedy’s husband, a doctor, that he had “the look of death I see on cancer patients.” All wishful thinking.
Valery Solovei appears to be the primary source of these recurring predictions about Putin, which he has been making with remarkable consistency since around 2020. As a Russian, I would love to believe them, but by now they sound absolutely implausible to everyone, I think.
I was a WaPo subscriber from around 2018, grandfathered in at about 20 quid a year. I cancelled last year, even at that price.
I want to support good journalism, I want to hear opposing voices, but Bezos stance was too much. Nothing to do with freedom of speech, everything to do with fear of Trump.
Thanks for the LeGuin recommendation. I'm reading Sanora Babb's 'The Lost Traveler'. The writing is sublime. The protagonist is a father of two girls and distains 'work' and tries to make a living as a gambler. This is boom or bust and his wife gets a steady job to feed the family.
This relates to the hunter-gatherers you mention above.
Blessed be the high spending, wealthy liberal! May they continue to line our pockets:)
Reading wise, this month I've re-read Austen for a project I'm working on: Pride, Sense (which I'd read before) but Persuasion which i hadn't, which I now think is my favourite.
Also because the project is a romantic comedy, I've read a reasonable amount of contemporary romantic comedy writing, and realised It's _incredibly_ hard to do well; you basically have to make the audience feel the butterflies for it to work.
If you're ever in the mood for a really good modern romantic comedy book, IF I NEVER MET YOU by Mhairi Macfarlane is a strong recommend from me.
There’s a great article in The Atlantic from 2020 about how the life portrayed in The Simpsons is no longer attainable.
Sole breadwinner, homeownership, three kids etc. It really is remarkable how the show has accidentally tracked the decline of the middle class over the last four decades.
I genuinely think a lot of male instincts are designed to cull the herd, and female instincts tuned towards self preservation, because society requires more women and ideally as few men as possible, as you are an expensive waste of calories in Darwinian terms.
I don’t really mean this judgementally, (though your suicidal dominance/thrill addiction does make some of you a fucking chore to deal with as a woman) just in purely practical terms- it is the number of uteruses that determines the size of the next generation. You only need enough men around to maintain diversity.
Men are a fancy luxury. Natures hardest challenges- cold, famine- are ones women are designed to survive.
Your excessive calorie consumption! Women are designed for calorie efficiency; not only because we are more necessary for the survival of the species but because we also have to share our calories with our offspring directly- women have to be able to spare enough energy for growing the infant, and then breast feeding it which consumes about 500 calories a day.
Being warm is a facet of muscle mass and basal metabolic rate. Women don’t die of feeling a bit cold, and actually due to our higher body fat at baseline, tolerate true cold better.
Of course we are. That’s why men are disposable and women are kept safe in the home in almost every developed society in human history, and it’s only changed in a time of relative world safety. That’s why men go kill themselves and each other en masse in absolutely pointless conflicts over the colour of bits of cloth throughout history. Programmed self destruction to preserve calories for women and offspring, like lemmings. This pointless adversarial instinct is prevalent among many animal populations.
This applies more to older societies, but those constitute almost all of human history. Think of it this way- you are a small society on the Serengeti of 100 men and women. Lions attack! If all but one man is killed but all women survive, within two generations there will still be a society there (though inbred).
If all but one woman is killed but the men survive, that society will be gone in a few decades- even if the woman never dies in childbirth and all her children survive, the chances of successfully sustaining the civilisation are remote.
I’m surprised by the lack of scepticism of the Washington Post criticism. It may once have been a close rival to the New York Times, but by the time Bezos bought it, it had fallen well behind and become as hysterical as the Guardian is in the UK.
The quashing of the Harris endorsement is used as Exhibit A in the case for Bezos’s partisan meddling in the paper. But what was to be gained from something that was as predictable as a Fox News endorsement of Trump? It was not intended to influence the voting intentions of its unanimously Democratic readers but instead be political branding for the paper at a time when all American institutions are expected to put their cards on the table. By pulling the editorial, the Washington Post was not endorsing Trump but signalling a renewed commitment to centrist politics - the very politics that would likely have averted Trump’s re-election.
The departure of editorial staff is in large part because they are stubbornly resisting the change. That is not evidence that the paper has moved to the other extreme.
As Marriott says, the principal consumers of broadsheet journalism are ‘liberal centrists’ - but European liberalism, not the radical progressivism that goes by that name in America. The NYT appears to have recognised that and shifted markedly towards the centre, most notably on the trans issue.
It’s inevitable when a paper changes direction that it will lose subscribers faster than it will gain them. But if the Washington Post can establish itself as a centrist paper that rejects Trump but pushes back against a decade of Woke overreach, it might reestablish itself as a genuine rival to the NYT and help heal American politics in the process.
Haven't read Geoffrey Miller's book specifically so it's possible he addresses this, but there are reasons from anthropology to be skeptical of the popular EvoPsych arguments about female sexual selection. That is, the evidence from hunter-gatherers shows they tended towards arranged marriage, with fathers making most of the decisions. Polygamy, which was also common, seems also to have been driven much more by male coercion and violence than female choice. William Buckner has some data on this on his Substack and Quillette articles.
I've thought a lot about the Simpsons political voting, mainly because I wonder whether it could be made today or if these archetypes cause too much partisan dislike.
Lisa would obviously grow up to be a pretty woke Democrat, with a humanities degree of some sort, Bart would presumably be in a semi-skilled profession and vote Republican. Anecdotally I've heard of many American families where a pro-Trump and highly educated Democrat sister have fallen out.
Marge would vote Republican but her two sisters Democrat, as there is a huge partisan difference of 25 points between single and married women.
Smithers would vote Democrat but if he lived in Europe it's not inconceivable he'd vote for the AfD or Le Pen.
So interesting. You should write something on this. I agree the cultural/political gulf is too big for it to work nowadays. I can't imagine metropolitan liberal comedy writers coming up with the Simpsons characters and it not feeling patronising.
The show worked because it was made before the sorting was complete. Now we all know which zip code each archetype belongs to, which podcasts they listen to, which opinions they're allowed to hold. Springfield was a town where everyone still had to live together. Now it would be two towns, each watching different shows, convinced the other one doesn't really exist.
I've also thought about this for a long time too. This was my attempt to try and place the characters on a political compass back in 2024. Turns out I was wrong about Mr Burns!
https://x.com/jamesbreckwoldt/status/1853735255749935259
I think you're right. older plutocrats are still right-wing and manufacturing/energy is less into woke capital than tech companies, although it was amusing to learn that Dow Chemicals of Agent Orange fame were at one point one of wokest.
‘I wonder whether it could be made today or if these archetypes cause too much partisan dislike‘
Not only that but you would be wondering what point the writers were trying to make with their choices.
No, Lisa is actually, canonically intelligent. She’d get a real job that exposed her to people and the world in ways that round out one’s opinions. The person you’re describing is a midwit who identifies as intelligent because they have a bachelors. There’s a big difference but only intelligent people can see it.
Lots of very intelligent people are woke tbf. The big question is, would Lisa Simpson, now in her 40s and living in exclusive political bubble, and dreading listening to her dad's pro-Trump ravings at family get-togethers, be a gender-critical feminist?
Depends on the decade. OG Lisa was very second wave, they’re mostly GC.
Possibly, but she also craved approval, recognition of her intellect and a tribe to belong to. I doubt that Lisa would have stuck her hand up in her Harvard English seminar to say 'Is it just me, or is Judith Butler talking incomprehensible bollocks here?'
Reeeeeally? Lisa the people pleaser? The character must have changed a LOT if that’s the case. In the early seasons she was a beleaguered truth teller who was often upset by the rejection her honesty incurred, but that didn’t usually stop her…
Not a people pleaser but someone who values their intellect and wants it to be recognised and validated by others - like when she had to take a test that made no sense and had a meltdown, or when she got advanced a grade and couldn't handle not being the cleverest kid in the room.
This resonated with me. I’m not an anthropologist either, but when I lived with a Maasai tribe I saw something that complicates the familiar “male provider” story in a similar way.
I spent my time almost entirely with the women, cooking, cleaning, repairing huts, milking, fetching water, washing clothes, keeping daily life going. The men largely stood around talking, while the children were the ones actually out with the animals. Food, water, shelter, continuity, all of that rested with the women’s labour.
What struck me was that male status didn’t seem to come from provisioning so much as from visibility, presence, and social standing. Having multiple wives increased a man’s status, but it also meant more women doing the work. He moved between households, while the infrastructure of life was quietly sustained without him.
So Miller’s idea that certain male behaviours function less as practical provisioning and more as signalling doesn’t feel abstract to me. Seeing how much of survival and continuity was handled by women, while men occupied a more performative social role, made me question how deeply ingrained our assumptions about “who provides” really are.
Very interesting. I’ve read similar accounts. This is exactly what Joyce Benenson describes in her book Warriors and Worriers. The more evolutionary psychology I read the more terrible men seem…
I recognise whatyou are pointing to. When I lived with the Maasai, I was struck by how much daily survival was organised by women and children, while men occupied more visible, physical, symbolic, and status-based roles.
It also wasn’t a sealed-off or “ancestral” world. There were schools, teachers, and people moving between rural life and Nairobi. In that context, many male roles felt as much ceremonial or social as practical. What stayed with me was how easily visibility and status get confused with provision, while the quieter work of continuity carries on in the background
What happens when another tribe attacks?
Fair point! When men of another tribe tire of standing around talking and indulge their need for aggression/violence by making war, the men of the first tribe will become needed and will, in fact, enthusiastically engage in said war. (Enthusiastically at least at first.)
To be honest I saw exactly the same thing as a teenager in a Baptist Church in the West of Scotland. The women kept everything running, the men stood around and talked.
I’ve observed very much the same (from a much shorter and shallower set of interactions). Almost all the time the role of the men in the small village appeared to be exclusively confined to sitting under a tree, smoking, drinking and shooting the shit.
What wasn’t apparent was why the women put up with it.
That question stayed with me too. What I noticed, talking with the women, was that they experienced themselves less as isolated wives and more as a strong community of women. They worked together, supported each other, and shared the load.
Interestingly, several women said they didn’t mind their husbands taking another wife because it reduced pressure on any one household and meant less day-to-day emotional and practical demand from the men. Marriage felt more about livestock, lineage, and security than companionship in the way we might frame it.
It wasn’t that the labour was invisible to them, but that it was normalised and buffered by collective female support.
Gosh, it’s almost as if societies have been designed to protect men’s fragile egos rather than for efficiency.
Re Trump: It’s like when everyone was diagnosing Putin as being at death’s door five years ago. I remember being solemnly assured by Helena Kennedy’s husband, a doctor, that he had “the look of death I see on cancer patients.” All wishful thinking.
Valery Solovei appears to be the primary source of these recurring predictions about Putin, which he has been making with remarkable consistency since around 2020. As a Russian, I would love to believe them, but by now they sound absolutely implausible to everyone, I think.
I was a WaPo subscriber from around 2018, grandfathered in at about 20 quid a year. I cancelled last year, even at that price.
I want to support good journalism, I want to hear opposing voices, but Bezos stance was too much. Nothing to do with freedom of speech, everything to do with fear of Trump.
The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes, on the Australian transport system. Possibly the most fascinating historical study I’ve yet read.
One of my all time favourite history books - the writing in the opening chapters is incredible
I'm reading The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
I love that book!
I'm loving it so far. I love books that take you to a world you don't know.
Thanks for the recommendation, James. Glad you enjoyed it!
thank you for writing the piece!
James. Do you watch TV? Listen to the radio?.
Thanks for the LeGuin recommendation. I'm reading Sanora Babb's 'The Lost Traveler'. The writing is sublime. The protagonist is a father of two girls and distains 'work' and tries to make a living as a gambler. This is boom or bust and his wife gets a steady job to feed the family.
This relates to the hunter-gatherers you mention above.
I read and really enjoyed The Word for World is Forest by ULG. I’m reading the Wheel of Time series and just finishing up the first book. It’s good.
Blessed be the high spending, wealthy liberal! May they continue to line our pockets:)
Reading wise, this month I've re-read Austen for a project I'm working on: Pride, Sense (which I'd read before) but Persuasion which i hadn't, which I now think is my favourite.
Also because the project is a romantic comedy, I've read a reasonable amount of contemporary romantic comedy writing, and realised It's _incredibly_ hard to do well; you basically have to make the audience feel the butterflies for it to work.
If you're ever in the mood for a really good modern romantic comedy book, IF I NEVER MET YOU by Mhairi Macfarlane is a strong recommend from me.
There’s a great article in The Atlantic from 2020 about how the life portrayed in The Simpsons is no longer attainable.
Sole breadwinner, homeownership, three kids etc. It really is remarkable how the show has accidentally tracked the decline of the middle class over the last four decades.
I genuinely think a lot of male instincts are designed to cull the herd, and female instincts tuned towards self preservation, because society requires more women and ideally as few men as possible, as you are an expensive waste of calories in Darwinian terms.
I don’t really mean this judgementally, (though your suicidal dominance/thrill addiction does make some of you a fucking chore to deal with as a woman) just in purely practical terms- it is the number of uteruses that determines the size of the next generation. You only need enough men around to maintain diversity.
Men are a fancy luxury. Natures hardest challenges- cold, famine- are ones women are designed to survive.
So why is it that my wife complains when the house is cold (expecting me to do something about it) but I don’t?
Your excessive calorie consumption! Women are designed for calorie efficiency; not only because we are more necessary for the survival of the species but because we also have to share our calories with our offspring directly- women have to be able to spare enough energy for growing the infant, and then breast feeding it which consumes about 500 calories a day.
Being warm is a facet of muscle mass and basal metabolic rate. Women don’t die of feeling a bit cold, and actually due to our higher body fat at baseline, tolerate true cold better.
Stop complaining then 😉
No! 😂
women are more necessary than men for the survival of the species?
Of course we are. That’s why men are disposable and women are kept safe in the home in almost every developed society in human history, and it’s only changed in a time of relative world safety. That’s why men go kill themselves and each other en masse in absolutely pointless conflicts over the colour of bits of cloth throughout history. Programmed self destruction to preserve calories for women and offspring, like lemmings. This pointless adversarial instinct is prevalent among many animal populations.
This applies more to older societies, but those constitute almost all of human history. Think of it this way- you are a small society on the Serengeti of 100 men and women. Lions attack! If all but one man is killed but all women survive, within two generations there will still be a society there (though inbred).
If all but one woman is killed but the men survive, that society will be gone in a few decades- even if the woman never dies in childbirth and all her children survive, the chances of successfully sustaining the civilisation are remote.
It’s not a moral judgement, it’s mathematical.
I’m surprised by the lack of scepticism of the Washington Post criticism. It may once have been a close rival to the New York Times, but by the time Bezos bought it, it had fallen well behind and become as hysterical as the Guardian is in the UK.
The quashing of the Harris endorsement is used as Exhibit A in the case for Bezos’s partisan meddling in the paper. But what was to be gained from something that was as predictable as a Fox News endorsement of Trump? It was not intended to influence the voting intentions of its unanimously Democratic readers but instead be political branding for the paper at a time when all American institutions are expected to put their cards on the table. By pulling the editorial, the Washington Post was not endorsing Trump but signalling a renewed commitment to centrist politics - the very politics that would likely have averted Trump’s re-election.
The departure of editorial staff is in large part because they are stubbornly resisting the change. That is not evidence that the paper has moved to the other extreme.
As Marriott says, the principal consumers of broadsheet journalism are ‘liberal centrists’ - but European liberalism, not the radical progressivism that goes by that name in America. The NYT appears to have recognised that and shifted markedly towards the centre, most notably on the trans issue.
It’s inevitable when a paper changes direction that it will lose subscribers faster than it will gain them. But if the Washington Post can establish itself as a centrist paper that rejects Trump but pushes back against a decade of Woke overreach, it might reestablish itself as a genuine rival to the NYT and help heal American politics in the process.
Haven't read Geoffrey Miller's book specifically so it's possible he addresses this, but there are reasons from anthropology to be skeptical of the popular EvoPsych arguments about female sexual selection. That is, the evidence from hunter-gatherers shows they tended towards arranged marriage, with fathers making most of the decisions. Polygamy, which was also common, seems also to have been driven much more by male coercion and violence than female choice. William Buckner has some data on this on his Substack and Quillette articles.
Yes I've come across this idea - I think it caught on after Miller wrote his book. Would be interested to know what he makes of it.
Can’t beat a bit of Ursula le Guin.