Democratic student in Charlottesville, Virginia. Republicans, by contrast, “have the ability to say out loud what a lot of young men [would say] behind closed doors”. A majority of Americans (54%) think anti-male bias is a problem in the Democratic Party, finds an Economist/YouGov poll. Another poll finds that Democrats are five times likelier than Republicans (26% to 5%) to admit to having an unfavourable view of men in general. Young men have become swing voters. In the Harvard/IOP poll, 33% say they will back a Democrat in November, 25% will back a Republican and a whopping 38% say they don’t know or won’t vote. Neither party strikes the right note with them, says Richard Reeves of the American Institute for Boys and Men, an NGO. Republicans speak as if there is only one valid life path: get a job, get married, have kids. Democrats sometimes dismiss young men who aspire to these traditional markers of adulthood as reactionaries who “just want tradwives”. But “I don’t see the evidence for that,” says Mr Reeves. “Most young men don’t want to go back the 1950s. They don’t expect to be the patriarch. But they recognise that fatherhood gives them a purpose, and they want to be needed.” Several Democrats, including some with presidential aspirations, are explicitly trying to win over young men. This usually involves two steps. First, acknowledge that men have problems. “It’s glaringly clear that we have ignored young men and boys in our society,” says Wes Moore, the governor of Maryland. Then, try to help. Last year Governor Gavin Newsom in California launched an initiative to grapple with young male difficulties in school, mental health and job-seeking. In October Virginia unveiled plans for a commission for boys and men, pushed by Mr Thomas. In December Mr Moore announced a push to help boys do better in school. A hefty Afghanistan veteran, Mr Moore plays up the perils of his own boyhood: “I was raised by an immigrant single mother, you know; I had handcuffs on my wrist by the time I was 11.” (He was arrested for spraying graffiti.) He argues that male role models matter. “My mom was an angel,
but she couldn’t teach me how to be a man,” he says. So he is hiring more male teachers, of whom there are far too few. Rahm Emanuel, a former mayor of Chicago, has linked male despondency to high housing costs. He has a point, argues Gabrielle Penrose of Boston College. The scarcity of homes raises the “price of independence”. It prompts young men (and a smaller number of young women) to live with their parents, rather than where the jobs are. Ms Penrose found that a 10% increase in local rents increases the likelihood that non-college-educated men live with their parents by about 1.1 percentage points—and was associated with a 0.5 percentage-point decline in labour force participation. She estimates that higher housing costs could explain a third of the fall in employment among non-college-educated men since 2000. Homes are expensive partly because of red tape. In many cities, most land is zoned for single-family homes. That is, you cannot build flats on it. Other rules mandate large backyards, off-street parking and countless other things that drive up costs. If zoning rules all over America were like those in the least stringent quarter of cities, two-thirds of the national housing shortfall would disappear, estimates Goldman Sachs, a bank. Thus, housing deregulation could help unblock the path to adulthood. It might even win the gratitude of young male voters, who are more likely than young women to see housing as an “urgent crisis”. However, it is routinely stymied by the old, who are far likelier to vote than the young. In February a bill to allow more “housing near jobs” passed Virginia’s legislature, but died before reaching the governor’s desk. For young men who remain stuck in their parents’ basements, at least there is plenty of masculine entertainment. In June, Mr Trump will celebrate 250 years of America and his own 80th birthday with cage fighting on the White House lawn. ■ Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily newsletter with fast analysis of the most important political news, and Checks and
Balance, a weekly note that examines the state of American democracy and the issues that matter to voters. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//united-states/2026/05/03/young-men-are-souring-on- donald-trump
The Supreme Court has become a great place to build your brand On the left and the right, justices are becoming more preoccupied with their own ideas than the court’s institutional legitimacy May 7th 2026 As Justice Clarence Thomas is wont to do from time to time, he recently provoked howls from the left. In a speech last month celebrating the Declaration of Independence, he described progressivism as a power-mad international movement, rooted in its American form in the racism and elitism of Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, and responsible not just for the ills of America but for the excesses of Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Mao. His critics were outraged by the elisions and confusions in his potted history, though his account of progressive influence is fairly conventional on the otherwise fractious intellectual right.
Justice Thomas’s view of the left was more notable for its apocalypticism. “Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence,” he said, “and hence our form of government.” The speech also illuminated his understanding of the right’s great weakness. Too often, Justice Thomas said, people arrive in Washington claiming to care about such matters as “the original meaning of the constitution” but, fearing criticism, learn to temporise. “They recast themselves as institutionalists, pragmatists, or thoughtful moderates, all as a way of justifying their failures to themselves, their consciences and their country.” Was Justice Thomas sniping at the more institutionally minded conservatives on the Supreme Court? He and two other conservative justices, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, have hinted before that their fellow conservatives lack courage. Though Republican presidents appointed six of the nine justices, some court-watchers have come to divide the judges into groups of three. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett have shown more deference than the other conservatives to precedent and more interest in narrow rulings that can command more votes. These three vote most often in the majority. Among the three liberals, Justice Elena Kagan is the clear institutionalist, the most inclined to join some decisions and to stand by precedent. Justice Kavanaugh agreed more often last year with Justice Kagan than he did with Justice Gorsuch, though the two men not only were both appointed by Donald Trump but shared the same history teacher at the same Catholic high school in suburban Washington, according to “Last Branch Standing”, a new book by Sarah Isgur. Like the three conservative lone wolves, the other two liberals, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, show relatively more concern for their own legal philosophies than for the consensus or consistency of the court, Ms Isgur writes. Superficially, the institutionalists may seem still to hold sway: this court is upsetting precedent at a lower rate than under the two previous chief justices while delivering unanimous rulings at a similar clip. Yet on May 7th, as Justice Thomas became the second-longest-serving justice in history, at nearly 35 years, he could take satisfaction that the court has veered his way, ideologically and procedurally. His “originalist” orientation has become
central to the court’s jurisprudence, as have some of his long-argued positions. And the institutionalists are in the minority. One reason this court is overturning fewer precedents is that it is deciding far fewer cases. It is also finding ways to transform precedents without reversing them. At the same time it is setting records for the number of dissents and concurrences, opinions by justices who vote with the majority yet feel compelled to detail their own reasons for doing so. In other words, this court is speaking with a single institutional voice less than any court in history. The justices still follow rituals meant to instil collegiality, such as not talking about work when they dine together after oral arguments. But the court is becoming a pack of lone wolves. Ms Isgur, the host of a popular legal podcast, “Advisory Opinions”, is a member of the conservative Federalist Society in such good standing that Justice Kavanaugh presided at her wedding. She blames the decline in the court’s institutional cohesion mostly on the elimination of the filibuster in confirming justices. Aspiring justices no longer care about credibility with the opposing party but instead vie among the faithful “for who can be the most pure”. This influence reverberates down to ambitious law students. Calling the consequences devastating, Ms Isgur warns that the court risks becoming like Congress, where “the ideologues got promoted and moved both sides further to their extremes.” Other incentives prompt justices to pursue and popularise their own visions of the law. Maybe because, with salaries of about $300,000 a year, justices feel underpaid relative to the multimillionaire lawyers who argue before them, some judges now make millions from their own books. That sharpens an interest in building personal brands. Although the court has become more diverse by gender and race, it is homogenous in terms of academic and professional background. None of the current justices held elected office, but eight were federal circuit-court judges, eight went to Ivy League law schools and six were Supreme Court clerks. By contrast, the court that decided Brown v Board of Education in 1954 included five judges who had held elected office and one without a law degree—a group, perhaps, more inclined to balance zeal for legal abstraction with sensitivity to the reality of American life.
The role of principled loner on the court is the one most honoured by history. Every new justice signs a Bible donated by Justice John Marshall Harlan, the sole dissenter in Plessy v Ferguson, which in 1896 licensed discrimination against black Americans. Not until Brown did the majority endorse his position. Maybe one of this court’s loners will earn similar honour. But trust in the court is eroding, and Americans can be forgiven for thinking they have trouble enough with two branches of government dominated by people obsessed with their own fame and opinion. ■ Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//united-states/2026/05/07/the-supreme-court-has-become-a- great-place-to-build-your-brand
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