I’ve got a running theory — called D+37 — about culture and politics in America that started as idle speculation but is fast crystallizing into unshakable territory.

The theory goes like this: There are four numbers that control American society. Those numbers are as follows:

• Married men are R+20 when it comes to voting, meaning they vote Republican 20 percent more than they vote Democrat;
• Married women are R+14;
• Unmarried men are R+7; and
• Unmarried women are D+37.

As Andrew Breitbart said, politics is downstream from culture — so when you see a crazy stat like that D+37, you have to assume there is some cultural interplay that has a lot to do with it.

If not everything to do with it.

Yes, yes — you can plug racial factors into the equation, and you can look at statistics showing that a vast majority of black women vote Democrat and consider that, within that demographic, you’re going to see a high concentration of single women, and you’ll see some of that, though to a lesser degree, among Hispanic women.

But race isn’t the only issue here, because single white women also skew pretty Democrat as well.

Back in January, Samuel J. Abrams and Joel Kotkin had a piece on “Single Woke … Female[s]” and how they’re becoming the core of the Democrat Party:

There’s clearly far less stigma attached to being single and unpartnered. Single women today have many impressive role models of unattached, childless women who have succeeded on their own — like Taylor Swift and much of the U.S. women’s soccer team. This phenomenon is not confined to the United States. Marriage and birthrates have fallen in much of the world, including Europe and Japan. Writing in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, columnist Emma John observed that, “Singleness is no longer to be sneered at. Never marrying or taking a long-term partner is increasingly seen as a valid choice.”

Rise of Identity Politics

The rise of SWFs — a twist on the personal ad abbreviation for single white female — is one of the great untold stories of American politics. Distinct from divorced women or widows, these largely Gen Z and Millennial voters share a sense of collective identity and progressive ideology that sets them apart from older women. More likely to live in urban centers and to support progressive policies, they are a driving force in the Democratic party’s and the nation’s shift to the left. One paradox, however: Democrats depend ever more on women defined in the strict biological sense while much of the party’s progressive wing embraces the blurred and flexible gender boundaries of its identity politics.

Attitudes are what most distinguish single women from other voters. An American Enterprise Institute survey shows that married men and women are far more likely than unmarried females to think women are well-treated or equally treated. As they grow in numbers, these discontented younger single women are developing something of a group consciousness. Nearly two-thirds of women under 30, for example, see what happens to other women as critical to their own lives; among women over 50, this mindset shrinks to less than half.

Abrams and Kotkin note that unmarried men don’t operate on anything like that kind of solidarity principle — and of course they don’t, as all of the unifying institutions that formerly served to promote male bonding have been hounded out of existence as exclusionary, discriminatory, and misogynistic.

That’s what culture can do for you. Especially in the universities — and Abrams and Kotkin offer up a quote from someone named Bella DePaulo, professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and “singles advocate,” who says it’s perfectly awesome for women to eschew families in favor of a house full of cats:

[It’s] a tremendously positive thing! Once upon a time, just about everyone in the United States thought that they needed to squeeze themselves into the heterosexual nuclear family box, even if they weren’t heterosexual or weren’t interested in getting married or had no interest in raising kids. Now, people can create the lives and the families that allow them to live their best, most authentic, and most meaningful lives. They can choose to put friends at the center of their lives. Or they can assemble their very own combination of friends and family to be the social convoys that sail beside them as they navigate their lives. They can have kids in their lives without having children of their own.

DePaulo’s perspective doesn’t exactly resonate as good cultural policy in a country whose birth rate has fallen significantly below replacement, but it has two key features.

First, there’s that D+37. Women who forego husbands and children will find meaning somewhere in their lives — and if that meaning is in politics, particularly when it comes around something like the abortion debate, which is constantly sold as an attempt by men to control women’s bodies, then that’s a great way to lock in that number.

Particularly when the left-wing position on abortion plays to the worst instincts of men — namely, that for the small price of an occasional trip to an abortionist, a guy can have as sexually libertine a lifestyle as he wants, so there is no pressure whatsoever to make an honest woman of a female he sleeps with and perhaps knocks up.

Play in that life for a while as a female, and you’ll shortly come to the conclusion that the men are no good — so why bother with a relationship with one?

Especially when the men who aren’t satyrs and who are serious about having relationships almost universally reject women with high “body counts.” Survey any representative number of high-value men, and you will find that to be perhaps the single-most-prominent red flag they’ll identify in selecting a potential mate.

So the culture — starting in the universities but not, by any means, ending there — tells women they don’t need a husband or a family, that they can embrace a hookup culture to satisfy whatever urges may come along, and that there are no good men anyway, and then it enforces and reinforces behaviors in women that make them less attractive to men — or, at least, to the men they’re then told are the only ones worth having.

Does this work? Studies show that unmarried women are far and away the least happy demographic of the four, and among the real target within that group — the SWF millennials and Zoomers who Abrams and Kotkin discuss — better than half have been diagnosed with mental or emotional problems. It’s clear something isn’t working, but you sure had better not try to point that out. Especially from a male perspective.

By the way, all of this is getting markedly worse. In 2016, a Gallup survey found that 61 percent of women said they were satisfied with how America treats its female population; this year’s Gallup survey found that number all the way down at 44 percent. It sits at 70 percent among Republican women but just 32 percent among female Democrats.

And Democrat politics follows the culture in gearing toward trashing masculinity as “toxic.” From the Obama-Biden regime’s establishment of Title IX “kangaroo courts” for sexual assault allegations on college campuses to the nonstop “pay gap” propaganda to the “Life of Julia” and “Life of Linda” messaging of the Obama and Biden campaigns, it’s a never-ending drumbeat assailing the male power structure — the patriarchy — as abusive.

With a corrective, intrusive, mommy-state government as the redeemer of society.

We know all this from a political standpoint. What’s so insidious is how it’s flowing downstream from the culture.

This column talked about Taylor Swift last week, and her songs are awfully good propaganda for the prospect that single women, no matter how miserable, ought to stay that way. Everybody has remarked on this, so we don’t need to harp on it. (READ THE PIECE: The Sinister Media Agenda Behind the Taylor Swift Flood)

And, frankly, we can forego the litany of other examples in movies and TV, from the nonstop portrayals of emotionally vacant female action heroes, capable of beating the tar out of men twice their size, to the hostile portrayals of husbands and fathers in everything from commercials to sitcoms and on down the line.

But until I saw Fair Play, which has spent the last few days as the top movie on Netflix, I had questions about the theory that the entertainment industry was truly invested in keeping single women single. I don’t have them anymore.

This show is a propaganda bomb dropped on marriage in America. I’m not sure why anybody would make such a movie if they weren’t trying to poison the well of heterosexual relationships in this country.

The basic plot of Fair Play is pretty simple. Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) are a pair of stock analysts for a Wall Street asset management firm, and they’re also a couple who get engaged at the beginning of the movie. Luke thinks he’s up for a promotion; there’s a rumor at the office that he’s getting a management job. Instead it goes to Emily, who we’re given to understand is less of a risk-taker and more of a nose-to-the-grindstone type.

Initially, Luke is very supportive of his fiancée’s new job, which results in his becoming her subordinate, though Emily doesn’t really buy it. And along the way, there are a few clues dropped — but not expanded upon, so the viewer is left to his or her own interpretation as to the facts — that maybe Emily’s new job is less the result of a great work product and more the product of her using her feminine wiles on Campbell (Eddie Marsan), the head of the firm.

And the relationship devolves very badly as Luke begins flailing at his job in an effort to recover from Emily’s having been promoted over him. Ultimately, trust breaks down between the two and everything goes wrong, to the point of felonious violence.

And all of this begins from a position of absolutely ridiculous implausibility, which is that the hedge fund the couple works for has a policy against fraternization among employees, and they’re hiding their relationship even though they’re living together and they’re engaged. Emily texts her mother about the engagement, and there’s an engagement party toward the end of the movie, but we’re supposed to believe nobody at the office knows about it.

And at the end, when Luke devolves into alcohol abuse and gets himself fired with a pathetic office-floor rant in front of clients, Emily claims he stalked her and the relationship was a figment of his imagination.

You could put this on a billboard: Single women, don’t get in a relationship with a guy, because it’ll bar your way to professional success and, if you do manage to move up at your job, your boyfriend/fiancé/husband will resent you and sabotage you. In an interview with Rolling Stone, director Chloe Domont comes right out and says it:  “I wanted to explore the dangers of male inferiority and male fragility, and men who refuse to be held accountable for their actions.”

There is nothing fun about Fair Play. It’s billed as a thriller, but it doesn’t really fit that bill. It’s a relationship drama, but it’s dour and it’s dark and the characters couldn’t be less sympathetic.

What Fair Play really amounts to is a message movie. And the message is that the D+37 crowd ought to stick together, regardless of how miserable they make each other and everybody else.