Several weeks ago, an internet personality known as Clavicular overdosed on a live stream. Clavicular is known for advocating “looksmaxxing,” a trend, born out of incel culture, that teaches young men the only way to find a partner is to take radical steps to improve your physical appearance, including taking steroids, plastic surgery, and even attempting to change your facial structure. While it might be easy to write off Clavicular as just a bizarre internet personality, the reality is he generated a huge following among young men and is but one example from a broad network of radical male influencers. Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, and numerous others have peddled hypermasculinity, misogyny, and fascist-tinged fitness culture to amass tens of millions of followers and considerable personal fortunes.
As a married 40-something, I find their appeal bizarre. Why, of all the possible ways to think about masculinity, have so many young men settled on such a basal, stereotyped, vision of what it means to be a man? What is particularly revealing about this vision is the absence of so many of the traditional markers of success: marriage, career, children, family, and community. It is an isolated, lonely version of masculinity, one where a young man can write off his failures and anxieties on just not being masculine enough. If only they looked and felt more masculine, they would finally gain women’s approval.
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This battle over the definition of masculinity and gender roles is set against a backdrop of increasing social and economic divergence between educational groups. The difference in career earnings between people with a college degree and those without has never been larger. The college educated are experiencing the traditional markers of advancement, getting and remaining married, buying a house, starting families, and developing careers. For people without college educations, these milestones are increasingly out of reach. In fact, in many ways we have seen the bottom fall out. “Deaths of despair,” those from drug overdoses, chronic alcoholism, and suicide have all risen in recent years, and the burden disproportionately falls on men without college degrees. Sociologically, we now see two tracks, one for people with college educations, and another for those without.
“Politics is downstream from culture,” as Andrew Breitbart famously remarked, and thus it is unsurprising that sociological changes have political consequences, too. I’ve spent the last half-decade of my career thinking about how educational attainment shapes political attitudes and behaviors. What I have found is this: just like society at large, the political divide between people with college degrees and those without has never been larger. Over the past several decades, people with college degrees have moved steadily into the Democratic coalition, while people without degrees have become more likely to vote Republican. The divide between degree holders and those without has reshaped the entire political system. In contemporary politics, educational attainment rivals race as the key demographic cleavage that splits the electorate into competing groups. Among whites, education is the dominant cleavage. It’s also important among non-white groups: Asian Americans, African Americans, and Latinos were all increasingly polarized along educational lines in the 2024 presidential election. Minority voters without degrees shifted towards Trump to an unprecedented degree, men in particular.
In contemporary politics, whites without a degree vote as a bloc for Republicans at a level we typically associate with minority groups. About two thirds of whites without degrees, a group that makes up nearly 40% of the entire U.S. population, voted for Trump in each of his three presidential bids. To put this in context, whites without degrees are just as Republican as groups like Latinos are Democratic. In fact, in 2024, non-college whites were considerably more Republican than Latinos were Democratic. No matter how you slice the data, Democratic support among the less educated has cratered. Obama won nearly 75% of the two-party vote among people without a high school diploma in 2008. Harris won just 35%.
Yet educational polarization is a two-way street. While whites without a degree now vote with a level of uniformity we typically associate with minority groups, voters with graduate degrees do too. Graduate degree holders represent a relatively small percentage of the U.S. adult population (about 18%), but they exert an oversized influence on our politics. In some of my new research, I show that graduate degree holders of all races vote in an even more uniform fashion than whites without a degree. Kamala Harris carried nearly 70% of people with postgraduate degrees in 2024. One in four Democratic voters held a postgraduate degree in 2024—an all-time high.
The educational sorting of the American electorate has had all sorts of consequences. As people that have followed this spring’s smattering of local elections, special elections, and referenda can attest, Democrats have dominated off-cycle elections, extending a trend that dates to at least the beginning of the pandemic. It was once political folk wisdom that there were more Democrats in the country than Republicans, but Republicans were more likely to show up on election day. In contemporary American politics, this old aphorism fails to hold. Graduate degree holders are the most likely to vote in every election, and the disparity in educational group turnout increases as the salience of the election decreases. In other words, when turnout is low, only the most engaged voters show up at the polls, and these hyper-engaged voters are disproportionately the highly educated.
Educational polarization also explains some prominent macro political trends. Not that long ago, Iowa and Ohio, two states with middling, below-average levels of educational attainment, were presidential bellwethers, while highly educated states like Virginia and Colorado were solidly Republican. Over the past two decades, we have seen a reversal. In the 2024 presidential election, Ohio and Iowa were nearly as Republican as Texas, while Virginia and Colorado were reliably Democratic. Both states have gone for the Democratic presidential candidate in every election since 2008 and have all-Democratic governors and senators. Almost all the presidential election battleground states have populations whose level of educational attainment mirrors the national median. A state’s level of education does a remarkable job of explaining its partisan slant.
The reasons why the electorate is now “divided by degrees” are numerous. A quick survey of public opinion data reveals that there is a direct link between education and cultural liberalism. People with higher levels of education hold more liberal views on things like gay rights, abortion, immigration, gender roles, and civil liberties than people with less education. Education is also associated with dispositions like social and institutional trust. As Trump’s authoritarian second term makes clear, these issues have all come to the forefront.
Yet just noting an association between two traits, like education and political attitudes, is much different from saying one causes the other. As far as whether there is a causal relationship between educational attainment and political attitudes, there is considerable debate as to whether it exists in the first place and, if so, what form such a relationship would take. The reason why establishing a causal link between education and attitudes is so hard is because people have agency over how much education they choose to seek out. There are almost certainly selection effects at work here, where people with more liberal attitudes to start with are the ones who tend to seek out the most education. Likewise, going to college is often associated with moving away from home. Young adulthood is a time when individuals’ attitudes are the most apt to change, and so a change in environment, peer group, and the like can produce attitudinal changes as well, even absent the college education.
That said, there is a body of evidence that shows education itself can lead to more liberal attitudes down the line, though the extent to which choice of college, field of study, and ultimate career path influence attitudes over the long term remains debated. Far from indoctrination, it appears there is a complicated process involving self-selection, socialization, and lifecycle events that lead the college educated to adopt more liberal views than those with less education.
What is important to note is that none of these relationships between educational attainment and political and social values are new—we have known about them for a very long time. What is new is the rapid increase in educational attainment across all strata of society. For young men, who are falling behind their female classmates academically, the shifting educational and economic landscape has dramatically reshaped life prospects.
Academic success leads to financial independence, and women are now less financially dependent on men. A consequence of this financial independence is that women are less willing to settle when it comes to marital partners. We have decades of economic research that shows women are unlikely to marry men with less education than them. Given that women are vastly outperforming men educationally, we now have a dynamic where the demand for marriageable men far outstrips the supply. Men are also far more likely to die young, become incarcerated, and suffer from drug and alcohol dependency. Those factors, combined with the education gap, skew the math even further. According to Social Security actuarial data, for every 100,000 men and 100,000 women born, by the time this cohort hits 30, there are 1,400 more living women than men. Both the educational disparity and the sheer numbers differential help to explain why so many people in Gen Z are single, especially men. In fact, a record number of women in Gen Z, nearly 30%, identify as LGBTQ. It’s hard not to read this rapid uptick in the number of young women who identify as bisexual as an indictment of male dating pool.
In my view, young men used to enjoy a lot of privilege. Now that privilege is uneven. Millennials with college-educated parents are just as likely to own a home as their parents were a generation ago. Yet homeownership rates have collapsed for Millennials without college educated parents. Getting married and being a breadwinner is no longer a guarantee. Our economic and romantic fates are increasingly linked to our educational attainment, because college-educated couples are remarkably good at getting and remaining married. The collapse in marriage rates is a story about people without degrees, by and large.
A significant minority of young men who feel shut out of the marriage market have moved, not to reevaluate their expectations, but to embrace reactionary, misogynistic ideologies. As the examples at the beginning of this essay highlighted, there is no shortage of entrepreneurs who are more than willing to offload men’s failings onto women. Incel culture, the tradwife trend, and the “men’s rights” movement all stem from the same place: a sense of entitlement that no longer corresponds with educational and economic reality. Instead of self-reflection, far too many men have adopted a radical, misogynistic ideology that women understandably view as toxic.
No generation’s gender politics are as polarized as Gen Z, and this split over gender roles maps onto the educational divide. While the overall conservatism of Gen Z men is overstated, the liberalism of Gen Z women is understated. Gen Z women will be the most educated cohort in history, and they also were socialized in an era of retrenchment of women’s rights (see Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization) and a significant subset of their male counterparts adopting deeply misogynist ideologies. Given the confluence of these factors, Gen Z women’s progressivism is unsurprising.
Yet the educational and gender divides among our youngest adult generation are but a particularly pronounced example of what we see across the entire electorate. Our political battle lines fall increasingly along our growing educational cleavage, and this burgeoning divide has not only reshaped the electoral map and individual voting behavior, but gender relations as well.
Educational attainment is the dividing line in contemporary politics. The 2024 election saw the most educationally polarized electorate in history, and this divide looks poised to grow even further. The current administration’s attacks on universities, scientific institutions, and government bureaucracies will only push educational groups further apart, while the collateral damage leaves us all worse off. While a future administration might reverse some of the damage to our institutions, the long term dynamics all suggest educational polarization will be a persistent part of our politics in the coming decades.
