For decades, we’ve seen a so-called gender gap in American politics. On average, men lean more conservative than women on a host of economic and social issues. As a result, marginally more men have tended to vote Republican and marginally more women have tended to vote Democrat.
Among younger Americans today, it seems that this erstwhile gap is quickly becoming a chasm.
More young men are skewing rightward, and further rightward compared to the rest of the electorate than was true for older generations. Meanwhile, more young women are skewing leftward, and much further to the left compared to the rest of the electorate than ever before.
Men are not from Mars and women are not from Venus, but the deepening gender divide reflects the fact that partisan Republicans and partisan Democrats do increasingly inhabit what might as well be different planets. This polarization, and its correlation with sex, is constitutive of three problems in our politics that are creating even deeper crises in our broader culture.
First, although American politics includes an ever-increasing number of independents, partisan political affiliation is now a much more strongly held aspect of identity. As New York Times columnist Ezra Klein discusses in his 2020 book, “Why We’re Polarized,” our two major political parties have over the past 40 years become ever more strongly associated with various beliefs and markers of class, culture and education.
As late as the 1980s, for example, there were many pro-choice Republicans and pro-life Democrats in Congress. Today, abortion is a near-ubiquitous litmus test for politicians in both parties, at least at the national level. When deeply held, culturally and religiously salient views on a hot-button issues like this one acquire near-synonymity with political affiliation, that political affiliation itself inevitably takes on a deeper significance in people’s self-conception and identity.
Second, as each of our two dominant political camps develops an increasingly monistic attitude and culture, those identified with each have more trouble than they once did empathizing and cooperating with one another.
As late as 2016, a minority of partisans deemed those in the opposite political party more dishonest, immoral, and unintelligent than other Americans. By 2022, majorities of those identified with each political party viewed those in the other party in these unfavorable terms. Moreover, the cultural gulf between today’s Republicans and Democrats continues to widen. One can predict with a high degree of accuracy, for example, whether a given area is predominantly Democrat or Republican by observing its density of Whole Foods as compared to Cracker Barrels.
Third and finally, the disproportionate percentage of men in one of these increasingly insular and extreme camps and the disproportionate percentage of women in the other contributes to a landscape in which heterosexual Americans may find it more difficult to meet romantic partners who share their political and cultural values. This, in turn, furthers an already concerning decline in long-term partnership, marriage, fertility and child-rearing that negatively impacts the nation as a whole.
As economist Melissa Kearney argues in “The Two Parent Privilege” (2023), and as social science research has shown for decades, children do better across a number of indicators of well-being when they are raised in a home with two married parents. Moreover, married Americans are healthier and happier than unmarried ones in a host of ways.
Despite these realities, marriage in America has become ever more of a luxury good over the past decade. The far rightward drift of a substantial portion of young men in thrall to a crude social media version of misogyny exacerbates the perennial problem that a good man is hard to find. Meanwhile, hostility to marriage is axiomatic within feminism and the mainstream media it disproportionately influences. Although this anti-marriage rhetoric is belied by high marriage rates among left-leaning college graduates, it finds unfortunate expression in the rising rates of single motherhood among those without college degrees.
In all, partisan polarization is bad for the nation; but partisan polarization that correlates ever more with sex is likely to prove even worse.
Elizabeth Grace Matthew is a visiting fellow at Independent Women’s Forum and a Young Voices contributor. Her work has appeared in USA Today, America Magazine, Law and Liberty, Deseret News, Fairer Disputations, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.