What we need to explain is the animus – animus so strong that how a person votes should change whom one will date or work for. For many young people, all they need to know about someone in deciding whether to associate with them is for whom they voted. Why would anyone want to relate to others in such a one-dimensional way? It’s almost as if the animus is part of the point.

To be fair, whom people vote for is now a decent heuristic for their other beliefs and values. A vote is a signal that indicates many other factors about a person. For young people who are less religious and more politically invested, the vote is enough for them to “swipe left,” as they say.

But I still find the price that Democratic college students are willing to pay too high for that to be the explanation. I think an older social dynamic has replicated itself without our realizing it: the reassertion of social hierarchy in a time when other hierarchies are flattening. Social dynamics are suppressing hierarchies based on race, gender, and class. But many college students, like people generally, need to feel superior to some other social group. In the past, college students drew their need for superiority from family connections, educational level, religion, wealth, or even race. Now that these factors matter less, the desire to be in the top of a hierarchy has reasserted itself.