Progressives Are Starting to Come Around on the Importance of Marriage and Fatherhood

Progressives and conservatives rarely agree. But there’s a growing consensus about this one data point: America’s men are not OK.

This isn’t exactly a political phenomenon — although men are changing politically, too. Last summer, economist Tyler Cowen detected a “vibe shift” in American culture, noting people were drifting rightward. Among his 19 reasons for the shift, Cowen noted the falling fortunes of males were driving men, including Black and Latino men, “into the Republican camp.” His insight was prescient: President Donald Trump gained more Latino men’s votes and nearly double the share of Black male support in 2024 than he had in 2020.

Changing political preferences isn’t necessarily a sign of crisis. But the fact that a growing number of American men are clearly dissatisfied with the male status quo has forced some otherwise progressive thinkers to admit something’s changing. Recently on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” former Congressman Tim Ryan, a Democrat from Ohio, said his party has been “asleep at the switch” regarding the problems facing young men.

“What are we going to do with our young men and our boys that are struggling so much with depression … with suicide?” Ryan said. “I’m pro-women … [but] we need a national agenda for our boys, too.”

Another major Democrat turning his attention to the floundering fortunes of males is Maryland Gov. Wes Moore who recently committed his administration to “begin implementing targeted solutions to uplift our men and boys.” He did this because he’s seen the data indicating males are in trouble. “On every single indicator we care about,” Moore said to the Washingtonian, “young men and boys are falling off.”

Until very recently, it may have been considered sexist — or at least politically tone-deaf — to suggest American men are suffering. Particularly in the wake of the #MeToo movement, the progressive line has been that men are modernity’s winners: They’re hired for the best jobs (and with the highest pay), they control the cultural institutions and they’re never held responsible for breaking the rules.

But the data paint a different picture, and it’s getting much harder to ignore.

In his landmark 2022 book “Of Boys and Men,” Richard Reeves chronicled the falling fortunes of America’s young men. He found that men aren’t attending college at the same rate as women — higher ed is now about 60% female. In elementary and high school, boys make up two-thirds of the worst-performing students. And we know that 1 in 4 men without college degrees are not employed full-time.

Most importantly, men are between two and three times as likely as women to suffer “deaths of despair” — death by alcohol, drug use or suicide. Hundreds of thousands of men have died from deaths of despair in the past two decades.

Half a century ago, anthropologist Margaret Mead memorably argued that a healthy nation must have a place for its men. “The recurrent problem of civilization,” Mead wrote, “is to define the male role satisfactorily enough.” Men need a mission. When they can’t find it in family life, societies flounder.

This couldn’t be more visible for our kids. Our research at the Institute for Family Studies has demonstrated the catastrophic social consequences of absentee fatherhood and family breakdown. When children are raised outside of an intact family, those children are markedly more likely to struggle in school, to tangle with the law and to struggle in the workforce. The data show a clear “two-parent advantage” for kids, especially boys. Our most striking finding is that boys raised outside of an intact family with two biological parents are more likely to go to prison or jail than they are to graduate from college. By contrast, boys raised by their two married, biological parents are about twice as likely to graduate from college as they are to land in prison.

But there’s another surprising discovery in the data. Stable marriages don’t just benefit kids. Married fatherhood greatly benefits the men in those marriages, too.

First, the obligations of family life motivate men to work harder and smarter; fathers literally make more money when they have kids, provided that they are married to the mother of their children. But the benefits of marriage and family life transcend economics. The data suggest being a married family man also protects men from self-destruction. Deaths of despair, for instance, are markedly lower in places where more men (and women) are married, economist Jonathan Rothwell at Gallup recently found. Opioid overdose deaths for men are about six times higher among never-married and divorced men, according to the Social Capital Project analysis of CDC data. Suicide is also lower among men who are fathers.

Margaret Mead’s insight may help us explain the data: Marriage and fatherhood are the most profound mission on offer for most men. Maybe economist Tyler Cowen sensed this, too, when he wrote about the political “vibe shift” last summer. Economists, after all, are well-versed in what’s called the “perceived value” effect: We value something more highly when we pay more for it.

Protecting and providing for a wife and children exacts a high cost from men. When married dads rise to the occasion, they no doubt value their own lives more highly than they might otherwise. Men need to feel needed, and our country needs more men who know that they are on a mission to serve their families. In fact, the anthropologist Nicholas Townsend has observed that, for most men, “marriage, work, and fatherhood” go together as a “package deal.”

When Reeves wrote “Of Boys and Men” in 2022 as a center-left scholar, he did not connect the dots between the crisis in American masculinity and the distance too many boys and men have from married family life. In fact, he argued that we needed to develop a model of fatherhood apart from marriage. But like Cowen’s “vibe shift,” that may be changing. Here’s Reeves writing just a few weeks ago in Medium:

Without the positive pressures that come from being a father and husband, men are even less likely to really go for it on the work front. They are more likely to be unemployed. They become more vulnerable to addiction, more socially isolated. All of which makes them less attractive as potential spouses. Boys raised in single-mother households then struggle in school and in life, and they have difficulty finding a mate and forming a family, too. And so the cycle turns. The economic struggles of boys and men become entrenched across generations.

The masculinity crisis looms large, but the solution is remarkably clear: More American men need a shot at marriage, work, and fatherhood. And it looks like more progressives may just be coming around on the importance of reviving this package deal.

Brad Wilcox is the Distinguished University Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia and the author of “Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families and Save Civilization.” Maria Baer is a journalist and co-host of the “Breakpoint This Week” podcast with The Colson Center for Christian Worldview.

Editor's Note: This article appeared first at Deseret News. It is reprinted here with permission.