Why Are Young Working-Class Men More ‘Conservative’?
Photograph Source: Michael Candelori – CC BY 2.0
It has been a safe assumption for generations that young people tend to be more liberal than their elders. However, in today’s United States, some of the conventional wisdom around age and ideology is being upended. Young women are moving farther to the left than expected while their male peers are disturbingly tending toward conservatism, even in comparison to older men. The reasons behind this cleaving, broadly speaking, stem from the twilight of patriarchy and the failure of capitalism.
Political allegiances in the 2024 Presidential race are a good indicator, very broadly speaking, of the new ideological gender divide. A recent poll of voting trends among 18–29-year-olds by the Institute of Politics at Harvard University found a “widening gender gap” between the two major-party presidential candidates. While majorities of young men and women back Vice President Kamala Harris, an ostensibly liberal Democrat, former President Donald Trump, an ultraconservative authoritarian, enjoys greater support from young men compared to young women. More than a third of young men polled say they would choose him for president, compared to just under a quarter of young women.
Other polls show a far bigger divide, with Trump garnering support from 58 percent of young men over the past three New York Times/Siena College polls. Meanwhile, Harris enjoys 67 percent popularity among young women.
The obvious reason why young women are moving sharply to the left is the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs ruling overturning the constitutionally protected right to an abortion. It would be a mistake to think that young women have suddenly become “single-issue” voters, focusing narrowly on access to a single medical procedure. The Dobbs decision not only led to abortion bans in nearly half of all states but highlighted a national debate about the most intimate aspects of women’s anatomy, including the potential tracking of menstrual cycles and pregnancy trimesters, access to contraception, and personal decision-making about critical life-changing issues such as pregnancy and childbirth versus the choice to remain childless.
Further, it has led to chaos amid medical staff fearing persecution within an already-broken healthcare system that is now contending with the rights of fetal cells over women’s lives. Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, the names of women who have died as a direct result of Dobbs, have become ubiquitous among rallying cries for reproductive justice.
In other words, it’s not just about abortion—it’s about women’s right to be seen as human. This political moment comes at a time when women who were raised with #GirlBoss aspirations, who continue to enroll in colleges and to graduate at higher rates than men, who watched titans of the entertainment industry fall in disgrace because the women they raped were finally validated by society, have come of age. In this scenario, modern-day conservatism is seen as fighting a last-ditch effort to keep patriarchy alive, and young women aren’t having it. That their most fundamental rights are being debated in this era is a blow so deep that the Republican political establishment is only now realizing its impact.
There is no such debate on the rights of men and their bodily autonomy. It’s no wonder there’s so little support among young women for Republicans and for their nominee Trump, who bragged about killing Roe v. Wade and who made Dobbs possible by appointing half of the six justices ruling against abortion rights. In fact, some analysts conclude that the current generation of young American women may be the most progressive in history.
But what about young men? A December 2023 survey conducted by the conservative American Heritage Foundation found that the percentage of men who identify as feminist rises with each generation, but peaks with millennial men, more than half of whom embrace feminism. Then, perplexingly, among men aged 18-29, those identifying as feminist drops to 43 percent.
This tracks with their attraction to Trump, a candidate who is actively wooing young men with frequent appearances on podcasts and shows catering to their demographic. Moreover, he is authentically patriarchal, a walking, talking, swaying ode to toxic masculinity and male hubris. Among his favored anthems are James Brown’s “It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” a song that credits men for most of society’s modern inventions and infantilizes women.
Trump is a stand-in for young men, particularly working-class Gen Z men who feel dislocated in a world where women feel increasingly financially independent, and are preferring to stay single than to settle for unworthy male partners. He is a bulwark against a demographic that is concluding men need women more than women need men.
It shouldn’t surprise us that the political cleaving between young men and women is mirrored by a religious divide. Young men are increasingly finding comfort in the Christian church. Although young people as a whole are less religious than ever, among those who are motivated by faith, young men are overrepresented, likely for the same reasons as the gender-based political divide: Abortion, traditional marriage, and other patriarchal norms that the church is desperate to preserve even as the rest of society moves on.
What’s fascinating is that this dichotomy between young men and women appears to be unique to the U.S., indicating that it’s about more than the waning of patriarchy. A study in April 2024 by an international research firm called Glocalities scouring hundreds of thousands of surveys in 20 countries, concluded that people, including younger populations, are largely embracing liberalism more so than conservatism—except in the U.S. According to a Reuters report on the study, “Young U.S. men were the only population group… to have become more conservative since 2014—or, in the poll’s terms, to favor more control rather than freedom.”
What many analyses of the political and social gender divide miss is that, in addition to women’s increasing power, the unique failures of American capitalism are likely pushing younger men to become even more conservative than their non-American male peers. The share of young American men without college degrees who are part of the labor force has declined significantly since the 1970s, as per Pew Research Center.
According to Pew’s analysis, this “may be due to several factors, including declining wages, the types of jobs available to this group becoming less desirable, rising incarceration rates, and the opioid epidemic.” Young men without college degrees are working more, earning less, and are more likely to be poor. Overall, their median earnings, even for those with college degrees, remain lower than inflation-adjusted levels in 1973.
Attending college or university is an expensive proposition in a nation where necessities remain out of reach at the altar of profit margins and deregulation. College education can leave graduates saddled with debt and no guarantee of higher earnings. Yet college education goes hand-in-hand with critical thinking skills.
If young men are eschewing expensive higher education and therefore being deprived of exposure to modern progressive values, they are increasingly trapped in a vicious cycle leading them into the arms of Trump and patriarchal authoritarianism. Republicans have successfully capitalized—pun intended—on the economic malaise that most Americans are suffering from, while at the same time fueling it.
Breaking the stranglehold of the deregulatory, profit-driven ethos on education, labor, wages, and basic necessities such as housing and healthcare, can help break the vicious cycle leading young men toward conservatism. The end of patriarchy is inevitable and necessary. But so is the end of capitalism.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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