Unable, Unwilling, or Just Playing a Rigged Game?

In 1985, Samuel Alito was applying for a promotion in the Reagan Justice Department. He needed to demonstrate his conservative credentials, and he knew exactly what to reach for. On his application, he listed membership in the Concerned Alumni of Princeton — a group founded in 1972 specifically to oppose Princeton University's decision to admit women and minorities, and to mourn what its members considered the resulting decline of the institution they'd attended.

Alito had graduated from Princeton thirteen years earlier. The co-education he apparently found so objectionable had happened while he was a student there. And yet, a decade and a half later, he was still waving it around as a credential — proof of ideological seriousness, a signal to the Reagan administration that he was the right kind of conservative.

When this surfaced during his 2005 Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Alito claimed he had no recollection of the organization. No recollection. Of the group he'd listed by name on a federal job application as evidence of his values.

I want to sit with this for a moment, because it is a nearly perfect encapsulation of the argument this post is trying to make. Samuel Alito was not a man being left behind by the changing economy. He was not structurally stranded, economically marginalized, or falling out of the educational pipeline. He was a Princeton graduate who went to Yale Law School, clerked for a federal appeals court judge, and spent his career ascending through the most elite corridors of the American legal establishment.

His grievance was not about resources. It was about status. And that distinction — between resource competition and status competition — is the key to understanding why "men falling behind" is one of the most analytically abused phrases in contemporary American politics.

The First Problem: We're Not Talking About One Population

Every political conversation about male disengagement, male educational underperformance, and male economic dislocation tends to aggregate three distinct populations into a single category and then draw conclusions that apply accurately to none of them.

Elite men are fine. Professional class men are adjusting, unevenly, to a changed playing field. Working class men are genuinely, structurally stranded in ways that deserve serious attention and are receiving almost none from either political party.

Conflating these three populations produces analytical garbage. The policy prescription for the first group is nothing — they don't need help. The prescription for the second group is a complex conversation about institutional design and credential reform. The prescription for the third group is a genuine emergency response that we are nowhere near mounting.

And the political exploitation of male grievance — which is very much the Republican project right now — depends on keeping all three populations conflated, so that the status anxieties of the first group can be laundered into the moral urgency of the third group's genuine crisis, and the result can be sold as a unified political movement.

Let's disaggregate.

Tier One: Elite Men Are Fine (And Their Grievances Are About Something Else)

The Fortune 500 CEO suite remains heavily male. The senior partner track at major law firms remains heavily male. Congress, the judiciary, the executive branch, finance, technology leadership — all remain substantially male-dominated at the apex. The gender pay gap persists at every educational level. The concentration of wealth, power, and institutional authority in male hands has not been meaningfully disrupted.

What has changed for elite men is that the exclusive credential — the Ivy League degree, the prestigious firm clerkship, the private club network — no longer functions as a male monopoly. Women have access to the same credentialing pathways. They are present in the same institutions. They compete for the same positions.

This is what the Alito/CAP story is actually about. The men who joined Concerned Alumni of Princeton were not being impoverished by women's admission. They were not losing jobs, losing income, or losing access to the careers that Princeton had always prepared them for. What they were losing was the exclusivity of the credential. A Princeton degree meant something different when only men could hold it — it was a marker of belonging to a specific in-group with a specific set of social connections and a specific claim on the world's deference. Women's admission didn't diminish the material value of the degree. It diminished its value as a signal of exclusive male status.

That's a real loss, in the psychology of status competition. It is not a loss that deserves political sympathy or policy remedy. The correct response to "my exclusive club admitted women and now I feel less special" is not a movement. It is therapy.

The problem is that this elite status grievance is articulate, well-funded, institutionally connected, and politically organized. It produces the Samuel Alitos and the Leonard Leos and the Federalist Society project — a decades-long effort to reconstitute, through judicial appointment, a legal order that predates the expansions of rights that made those credentials feel less exclusive. This is what "originalism" often is, in practice: a jurisprudential framework that consistently produces outcomes resembling the legal landscape that existed before women and minorities gained meaningful access to the institutions elite men had claimed as their own.

It's a hell of a project to fund and staff on behalf of a status grievance. But here we are.

Tier Two: Professional Class Men — A Changed Playing Field

The second population is more complicated and more sympathetic.

The modern knowledge economy genuinely rewards traits and orientations that the educational and credentialing pipeline now serves women better than men, on average and in aggregate. This is measurable, contested in its causes, and real in its effects. Women now earn the majority of bachelor's degrees, master's degrees, and doctoral degrees. The gap is widening. In specific professional fields — medicine, law, veterinary medicine — that were heavily male twenty years ago, women are at or approaching parity or majority. This is not a minor statistical fluctuation. It is a substantial structural shift.

The honest question is whether this represents a leveled playing field producing equitable outcomes, a field tilted toward women, or a field that was designed for men and is now being navigated successfully by women who learned to operate within it while men who designed it are struggling to maintain their inherited advantage.

The answer, infuriatingly, is: all three, in different contexts, for different populations, in ways that are genuinely hard to disentangle.

What we can say with more confidence is that the K-12 pipeline increasingly disadvantages boys in ways that are not about girls gaining access but about institutional design. The research on this is not coming exclusively from conservatives or aggrieved men's rights advocates — it is coming from developmental psychologists and education researchers who span the ideological spectrum and are pointing at specific features of the modern classroom: extended sedentary learning, heavy verbal processing emphasis, emotional regulation demands, the narrowing of acceptable behavioral ranges, the near-elimination of unstructured physical activity. These features disadvantage the developmental profile that more boys present without being designed to do so. They're the accumulated result of policy decisions — standardized testing regimes, liability concerns about physical activity, the defunding of recess and physical education — that nobody designed as a war on boys but that function as one in practice.

The professional class men who navigate this pipeline and make it to competitive colleges and graduate programs are then competing on a field where the historic tailwinds of male institutional preference are weaker than they were in 1975, without having been eliminated. The ones with elite family connections and legacy admissions still have structural advantages. The ones without them are competing on something closer to actual merit, which is, in principle, what the system always claimed to be doing. Some of them are losing competitions they would previously have won by default. That's not injustice. That's the removal of injustice, which feels like injustice if the default advantage was invisible to you.

Tier Three: Working Class Men — Actually Stranded

This is the population whose situation is a genuine emergency and who are receiving the least serious policy attention.

The deindustrialization of the American economy eliminated, over roughly thirty years, the category of work that most consistently provided working class men without college credentials a path to economic dignity: unionized manufacturing and skilled trades jobs that paid enough to sustain a family, provided community and identity, and asked for competence rather than credentials. These jobs are largely gone, and the political and economic forces that eliminated them — trade policy, automation, deliberate union-busting, the offshoring of industrial production — have faced essentially no accountability from either party.

The replacement economy is not neutral on gender. Service sector jobs, healthcare support work, education assistance — the largest categories of growing employment for non-college workers — are feminized in ways that carry real cultural weight for men whose sense of identity was built around a specific model of masculine work. This is not simply irrationality or fragility. Identity is bound up with work in ways that are deep and not easily legislated away. A 45-year-old man whose steel mill closed is not going to find equivalent meaning as a home health aide, and telling him he should is the kind of advice that gets delivered by people who have never needed work to tell them who they are.

The educational pipeline is failing this population before they ever reach the labor market. Boys from working class families are dropping out of high school at higher rates than girls. They're enrolling in college at lower rates. When they do enroll, they're completing at lower rates. The K-12 environment issues discussed in the professional class section are more acute for kids without the family resources to compensate for an institutional mismatch — tutoring, enrichment activities, the social capital to navigate systems that aren't working for them.

So: unable, unwilling, or playing a rigged game?

For this tier, the honest answer is that "unable" and "rigged game" are doing most of the work, and "unwilling" is partly a rational response to a system that keeps offering bad deals. A young man from a deindustrialized community looking at a $40,000 debt load for a credential that may not deliver the promised return, in an economy where the jobs that credential was supposed to unlock are saturated, is not being irrational when he hesitates. He's doing math that the college-for-all consensus doesn't want him to do.

The unwillingness that looks like pathology — the gaming, the isolation, the retreat from institutional participation — is downstream of the structural failure, not upstream of it. You don't fix it by telling young men to try harder. You fix it by rebuilding the institutional pathways that give effort somewhere to go.

MAGA As Affirmative Action For White Men

Here is the thing that nobody in the Republican coalition will say directly: the political project being sold as opposition to affirmative action is itself a form of affirmative action. It's just affirmative action for white men, running under different branding.

The anti-DEI crusade, the assault on diversity programs, the "merit-based" rhetoric — these are presented as restoring a neutral meritocracy that was corrupted by race-conscious preferences. The evidence does not support this framing.

Legacy admissions — which are overwhelmingly white and substantially male — were never targeted by the merit argument until very recently and only awkwardly. The old boy network, the fraternity connection, the golf course deal, the prep school pipeline — these are preference systems that advantaged white men for generations and were never described as affirmative action because they were the default. Making the default invisible is the trick. When the default is challenged by an explicit alternative system, the default suddenly becomes "merit" and the alternative becomes "discrimination."

What the project is actually demanding is the restoration of invisible affirmative action — the kind that doesn't call itself that because it's encoded in institutional culture, social networks, and default assumptions about who belongs in positions of power. The explicit DEI programs made the competition visible. The demand is to return the preference to its previous invisible state where it felt like nature rather than policy.

Here is the cruelest part: this project does nothing — literally nothing — for the working class men in Tier Three who are its most emotionally committed supporters. Eliminating DEI programs at elite universities does not help a 24-year-old in a deindustrialized Ohio town find a job that means something. Gutting affirmative action at Fortune 500 companies does not rebuild the vocational education pipeline that was defunded while his dad's plant was closing. Appointing originalist judges does not bring back the union jobs or fix the schools or address the loneliness crisis or provide the institutional pathway that his grandfather had and he doesn't.

What it does is give him a villain and a team. It tells him the reason his life hasn't worked out the way it was supposed to is that women and minorities took what was rightfully his. This is a lie. But it is a lie delivered with warmth, with community, with a sense of shared purpose and identity — and it is being delivered by the only political coalition that is speaking to him at all.

The Democratic Party's failure to contest this territory is not a mystery. We covered it in Post 1. But naming the failure doesn't make it less damaging.

Samuel Alito, from his seat on the Supreme Court, is systematically dismantling the legal architecture of the civil rights era on behalf of a status grievance he's been nursing since Princeton went co-ed in 1969. The working class men who are his most fervent supporters are getting the cultural validation of watching their enemies lose while their material conditions continue to deteriorate.

That's not a coalition with a solution. That's a coalition with a shared wound and a shared enemy and nothing else.

The wound is real. The enemy is wrong. And nobody in a position to offer something better is currently showing up.

Series Three will ask whether any of this closes — whether the loop that connects media fragmentation, male disengagement, institutional failure, and the resentment project can be broken, and what that would actually require. The honest answer is not encouraging. We'll get there anyway.

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