It has long been the case that American women are generally more liberal than American men. But among young Americans, this gender gap has widened into an enormous rift: According to recent Gallup polling, there is a 30-point difference between the number of women age 18–30 who self-identify as liberal and the number of men in that demographic who do the same.

That’s largely because young women have gotten much more liberal, while young men have stayed ideologically more consistent—or, according to other analyses, become more conservative and anti-feminist. (Of course, not every person identifies as a man or woman. But gender roles still play a big part in shaping our lives and politics, and in the context of this column, I am focusing mostly on the vast majority of Americans who identify as one or the other.) It’s not happening just here either; the political divide between the sexes is a trend that researchers are observing in some other countries too.

One possible cause of the growing gender gap in the United States: Donald Trump. The former president is a notorious misogynist, and his election in 2016 fueled a massive Women’s March, then the #MeToo movement, a great outpouring of rage coupled with demands for accountability. Women were livid that a man accused of sexual predation many times over was in the White House. They couldn’t take Trump down. But they could certainly start to change the culture of impunity that helped to elevate him.

This newly invigorated feminist movement spurred, as feminist movements inevitably do, a right-wing backlash. A cohort of profoundly misogynistic male influencers, one of whom is currently facing criminal charges in Romania for rape and human trafficking, rose to prominence and captured the attention of young men the world over. Actor Johnny Depp sued his ex-wife Amber Heard after she wrote a #MeToo op-ed in the Washington Post; even though the piece didn’t name him, Depp argued that it was defamatory, and legions of his fans (including plenty of women) engaged in a monthslong campaign of vicious harassment, threats, and vilification of Heard and anyone who might stand up for her. A number of Republicans at the national and state levels began to imitate Trump’s unapologetic sexism, with one congressman calling Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a “fucking bitch” within earshot of a reporter. (Another tweeted an anime-style video that showed him killing her.) J.D. Vance, now a U.S. senator from Ohio, complained during his campaign, “We’re effectively run in this country, via the........

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