I’m on the right and I only flirt with those on the right | The weekly country

In the United States, Republicans and conservatives can avoid the “common people” with ease. They have their own bars, their exclusive golf and country clubs. And, for some time now, also their private websites to find a partner. The Right Stuff, which will be released this month and is only accessible by invitation, is the latest of these creations that was born with the aim of putting an end to the years of “bad dates and wasting time with people who do not sees the world our way, the right way”, as announced in a promotional video Ryan McEnany, sister of Kayleigh McEnany, who was the White House Press Secretary under the Trump Administration.

With a pristine white background and dressed in a dress of the same color, McEnany describes that the application will be free for women to use. They may have accounts premium free if they invite their friends. Gentlemen will have to pay to be premium. Only those who identify themselves as “man” and “woman” are invited to the feast: pronouns, according to ultraconservatives, are inventions of culture woke up and they are not welcome. To describe oneself in the profile, other platforms open to all such as Hinge present indications such as “what surprises people about me is that…”. In The Right Stuff, possible sentences to complete are: “My favorite liberal lie is…” or “Alexa, change the…” (in the promotional video a person completes the sentence with “president”).

The authors of this apps They are John McEntee, a former adviser to Trump, and Daniel Huff, placed by Trump at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Huff commented to the conservative newspaper The Hill So far no one has done anything like it. However, conservative matchmaker technology is now almost a sector in itself. Righter was created in 2018 as an alternative for Trump supporters who felt rejected in apps What Tinder either bumble. And in Patrio, the options to describe yourself politically are “conservative”, “classical liberal”, “centre-right”, “libertarian” or “other”.

Exclusivity in love is not the sole property of conservatives. There are other open applications in ideology, but for which you have to measure up. So much Stripe like Lox Club they have teams that review the profiles of those who knock on Cupid’s door: the first is for celebrities, the second for Jews with “ridiculously high standards”, according to their website.

In 2020, the platform OkCupid asked more than two million people: “Would you rather your partner share your political views?” 64% of those surveyed said yes. “Cross-party dating doesn’t work in modern relationships,” the survey authors note. In that line, a 2017 study signed by the political scientists Gregory A. Huber and Neil Malhotra already showed that people evaluate more favorably -and are more likely to approach- their potential partners on dating applications when they have similar political characteristics (not only in terms of position on certain issues, but also in relation to commitment to politics). Greater political uniformity in relationships, they note, has “the potential to amplify polarization by creating homogeneous social networks and households.”

It is the whiting that bites its tail: sectarianism feeds the urgency to create these applications at the same time as apps who live by homogeneity nurture polarization. It is the clash of civilizations —understood as value systems— realized in the name of love.