The Source of Illiberalism No One Talks About

A great number of electrons have been spent fretting over the rise of post-liberalism on the right. This is a good thing to worry about, in my view, even if the influence and reach of various post-liberal thinkers are often overstated. While some of them are undoubtedly shaping the highest levels of Republican politics, including the current vice presidency, the issue remains largely one fought out among intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals rather than the masses.

But there’s a far more pervasive source of illiberalism in America, one that is already reshaping social norms that have been the bedrock of liberal society for decades. It’s college-educated women, particularly younger ones.

Specifically, there is growing evidence that women are significantly more willing to favor limits on speech they find offensive and to treat disagreement as a harm to be prevented and recompensed. These are illiberal impulses, and, insofar as their influence grows inside the civil societal institutions that compose the republic, they should concern us all.

Consider a disquieting analysis by Chapin Lenthall-Cleary of data from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) 2025 annual survey of college students, which included more than 68,000 respondents. Men were substantially more tolerant of controversial speakers than women, and the difference persisted across political and ideological affiliations. Indeed, male Democrats were more willing to tolerate controversial right-wing speakers than female Republicans. Among students identifying with the same ideology, men consistently displayed greater tolerance toward speakers on both sides.

And at the extremes, 6.4 percent of men were perfectly tolerant, meaning they would permit all six controversial speakers tested, compared with just 1.8 percent of women. The finding cuts against the easy account of campus censorship as a pathology of the progressive left: Conservative women also proved more censorious than conservative men. So while political affiliation largely determined whose speech respondents wanted to suppress, gender was a better predictor of their overall willingness to suppress it.

Nor is this finding confined to one survey. A 2017 Cato Institute study found that 57 percent of women, versus 36 percent of men, supported making it illegal to say offensive or insulting things about African Americans in public. Sixty-four percent of women believed that colleges should protect students from offensive ideas, compared with 44 percent of men. A narrow majority of women even regarded defending someone’s right to express racist views as tantamount to endorsing those views, a proposition that 65 percent of men rejected. And Knight Foundation research published just this month found that young women remain more likely than young men to equate some forms of speech with physical violence.

The underlying disposition is especially worrisome. When exposure to objectionable ideas is treated as an injury in and of itself, censorship can be recast as protection, a move that works particularly well when the target of offense is a member of a historically protected group that already enjoys special legal status. This is arguably the story of contemporary progressivism, under which a corpus of civil rights law has morphed into a norm of supporting different liberalisms for different groups. The cohort of which these younger college-educated women are a statistically dominant constituent views this not as special pleading or the exercise of raw coalitional power but as simple social justice.

The findings would be discomfiting in their own right, but demographic and institutional trajectories mean the effects are likely to get more acute. Gallup finds that the share of women aged 18 to 29 identifying as politically liberal rose from 28 percent in 2001–2007 to 40 percent in 2017–2024. Among young men, the corresponding figure remained at 25 percent. This is not merely a matter of political brand affiliation. Gallup tested a large basket of issues and found that young women’s positions had moved substantially leftward, while young men’s views changed comparatively little. A 2025 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute likewise found a 15-point gap in liberal identification between young women and men. This is a story of asymmetric polarization — of women moving leftward while men largely stay in place.

This shape of things matters more when one considers that women are likely to exercise more of society’s political, economic, and cultural power in coming decades — that the future really does look female. Women now earn roughly 60 percent of bachelor’s degrees and an even larger share of master’s degrees. As Richard Reeves, founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men, has extensively documented, the educational divergence begins much earlier. Girls outpace boys in reading, graduate high school at higher rates, and are more likely to go to college and complete degrees. Reeves’s analysis found 2.4 million more women than men pursuing bachelor’s and associate’s degrees, with the male share falling from 57 percent in 1970 to 42 percent in 2021. And now, in every state red and blue, young women are more likely than young men to hold a college degree. This is an enormous redistribution of educational credentials and the social and professional spoils that come with them.

As these women ascend in the halls of education, journalism, corporate management, and other institutions that regulate, formally and informally, what Americans may say, there will be consequences.

You may have seen the provocative argument from my old friend Helen Andrews about the “Great Feminization” of American institutions. Andrews advances a sweeping theory about how the growing presence of women in positions of institutional authority has changed the rules governing professional and public life in illiberal, unrepublican, and generally deleterious ways. There are parts of her argument I’m not prepared to accept, insofar as they rely on the premise that these moves are driven by something essentially feminine, or essential to femininity. But you need not swallow her whole thesis on the why of it all to recognize that the empirical facts described above nevertheless obtain.

Besides, there is at least one good reason not to view these tendencies as immutable features of female psychology, and it’s the one all the foregoing data support: These are changes over time, not the straightforward consequence of women arriving to various loci of power in numbers. If they can move in the one direction, surely they can move back in the other.

All that’s left is the small matter of figuring out how.