If attitudes don’t shift, a political dating mismatch will threaten marriage

Ideological polarization is now a mainstay of American politics. Millions of young Americans will go home this Thanksgiving and find themselves in uncomfortable situations with relatives — especially uncles, apparently — who love former president Donald Trump, hate vaccination or think the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection had very fine people on both sides.

In some ways, polarization is exactly what one would expect in a large, unwieldy democracy such as the United States’. Americans no longer agree on many questions of how to live or what to live for. These differences can’t just be papered over through good-faith dialogue — because they are real.

The problem with polarization, though, is that it has effects well beyond the political realm, and these can be difficult to anticipate. One example is the collapse of American marriage. A growing number of young women are discovering that they can’t find suitable male partners. As a whole, men are increasingly struggling with, or suffering from, higher unemployment, lower rates of educational attainment, more drug addiction and deaths of despair, and generally less purpose and direction in their lives. But it’s not just that. There’s a growing ideological divide, too. Since Mr. Trump’s election in 2016, the percentage of single women ages 18-30 who identify as liberal has shot up from slightly over 20 percent to 32 percent. Young men have not followed suit. If anything, they have grown more conservative.

This ideology gap is particularly pronounced among Gen Z White people.

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