Tyler Cowen offers it.

I am struck by a recent poll by the Pew Research Center. Millennial women, defined as the group born between 1981 and 1996, favor Democrats by an extraordinarily large 47 percentage points. Millennial men also lean Democratic, but the gap is much smaller, only 8 percentage points. Because the Democratic Party has not had huge national triumphs as of late, the obvious inference is that the Republican Party is doing something to turn off those millennial women.

Another obvious inference is that the Democratic Party must be doing something to turn off older voters, both male and female.

Let me try to flesh out the narrative. Once upon a time, (say, 1930), higher education in America was not for the masses. Harvard was a place for upper-class WASP males, who were not necessarily the cream of the crop intellectually, to firm up their social connections while studying the classics from Western civilization.

By the early 1960s, admission to higher education had become meritocratic, but many of the best colleges did not admit women. This was probably the peak period for “systemizers” to dominate the pool of undergraduates. The classics were still being taught, but many among this brighter cadre of students were gravitating toward the more mathematical and scientific disciplines. To be sure, pre-Med was an especially popular undergraduate choice because guys did not want to end up in Vietnam.

Two developments began in the 1960s that eventually created the state we are in today. One was the attempt to make higher education a mass-market phenomenon. The other was to ensure equal access to higher education for women.

To make a long story short, mass higher education for men was a failure, but for women it was a success. The result was that higher education came to be dominated by empathizers in a number of areas. In the humanities, the classics were displaced by “___ studies” courses, which required less systematic analysis. In these “_____ studies” courses and in psychology and sociology, objectivity gave way to the goal of raising the status of women and minorities.

In terms of voting behavior, we now have young, educated women who have bought into the cause of raising the status of women and minorities, a cause which is packaged with other left-wing causes, including socialism. But we have older Americans and younger less-educated men who have not bought into that cause. Hence, the gap noted by Tyler.

My sense is that, unfortunately, many of these young educated women have a strong streak of soft authoritarianism. If you want to know what it will feel like when they are in charge, read (the movie does not do it justice) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Today’s well-educated young women, and the men who affiliate with them, have a low tolerance for systemizers whose analysis does not lend support to the cause of raising the status of women and minorities.

In the end, I am not convinced that the gender-war narrative is sufficient to describe our current state. The urban-rural divide also matters. Think of a married couple living in a house on the edge of a small town. Then consider two roommates living on the sixth floor of an urban apartment building. These people will have different needs and expectations concerning government, and they are unlikely to vote the same way.

And then you have ethnic divides. And regional divides. I think that if we had an electoral system conducive to multiple parties, then we would have a situation like that in Germany or Italy today, with no coherent central majority.