Trump won because college-educated Americans are out of touch

Washington Post article

Imma grab the whole thing because the WaPo tried to hijack the US election to stop Trump.

Trump won because college-educated Americans are out of touch

Higher education is isolated, insular and liberal. Average voters aren't.

As the reality of President-elect Donald Trump settled in very early Wednesday morning, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes summed up an explanation common to many on the left: The Republican nominee pulled ahead thanks to old-fashioned American racism.

But the attempt to make Trump’s victory about racism appears to be at odds with what actually happened on Election Day. Consider the following facts.

Twenty-nine percent of Latinos voted for Trump, per exit polls. Remarkably, despite the near-ubiquitous narrative that Trump would have deep problems with this demographic given his comments and position on immigration, this was a higher percentage of those who voted for GOP nominee Mitt Romney in 2012. Meanwhile, African Americans did not turn out to vote against Trump. In fact, Trump received a higher percentage of African American votes than Romney did.

And while many white voters deeply disliked Trump, they disliked Democrat Hillary Clinton even more. Of those who had negative feelings about both Trump and Clinton, Trump got their votes by a margin of 2 to 1. Votes for Trump seemed to signal a rejection of the norms and values for which Clinton stood more than an outright embrace of Trump. He was viewed unfavorably, for instance, by 61 percent of Wisconsinites, but 1 in 5 in that group voted for him anyway.

The most important divide in this election was not between whites and non-whites. It was between those who are often referred to as “educated” voters and those who are described as “working class” voters.

The reality is that six in 10 Americans do not have a college degree, and they elected Donald Trump. College-educated people didn’t just fail to see this coming — they have struggled to display even a rudimentary understanding of the worldviews of those who voted for Trump. This is an indictment of the monolithic, insulated political culture in the vast majority our colleges and universities.

As a college professor, I know that there are many ways in which college graduates simply know more about the world than those who do not have such degrees. This is especially true — with some exceptions, of course — when it comes to “hard facts” learned in science, history and sociology courses.

But I also know that that those with college degrees — again, with some significant exceptions — don’t necessarily know philosophy or theology. And they have especially paltry knowledge about the foundational role that different philosophical or theological claims play in public thought compared with what is common to college campuses. In my experience, many professors and college students don’t even realize that their views on political issues rely on a particular philosophical or theological stance.

Higher education in the United States, after all, is woefully monolithic in its range of worldviews. In 2014, some 60 percent of college professors identified as either “liberal” or “far-left,” an increase from 42 percent identifying as such in 1990. And while liberal college professors outnumber conservatives 5-to-1, conservatives are considerably more common within the general public. The world of academia is, therefore, different in terms of political temperature than the rest of society, and what is common knowledge and conventional wisdom among America’s campus dwellers can’t be taken for granted outside the campus gates.

While some of the political differences between educated and working-class voters is based on a dispute over hard facts, the much broader and more foundational disagreements are about norms and values. They turn on first principles grounded in the very different intuitions and stories which animate very different political cultures. Such disagreements cannot be explained by the fact that college-educated voters know some facts which non-college educated voters do not. They are about something far more fundamental.

Think about the sets of issues that are often at the core of the identity of the working-class folks who elected Trump: religion, personal liberty’s relationship with government, gender, marriage, sexuality, prenatal life and gun rights. Intuition and stories guide most working-class communities on these issues. With some exceptions, those professorial sorts who form the cultures of our colleges and universities have very different intuition and stories. And the result of this divide has been to produce an educated class with an isolated, insular political culture.

Religion in most secular institutions, for instance, is at best thought of as an important sociological phenomenon to understand — but is very often criticized as an inherently violent, backward force in our culture, akin to belief in fairies and dragons. Professors are less religious than the population as a whole. Most campus cultures have strictly (if not formally) enforced dogmatic views about the nature of gender, sexual orientation, a woman’s right to choose abortion, guns and the role of the state as primary agent of social change. If anyone disagrees with these dogmatic positions they risk being marginalized as ignorant, bigoted, fanatical or some other dismissive label.

Sometimes the college-educated find themselves so unable to understand a particular working-class point of view that they will respond to those perspectives with shocking condescension. Recall that President Obama, in the midst of the 2012 election cycle, suggested thatjob losses were the reason working-class voters were bitterly clinging “to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” The religious themselves, meanwhile, likely do not chalk their faith up to unhappy economic prospects, and they probably find it hard to connect with politicians who seem to assume such.

Thus today’s college graduates are formed by a campus culture that leaves them unable to understand people with unfamiliar or heterodox views on guns, abortion, religion, marriage, gender and privilege. And that same culture leads such educated people to either label those with whom they disagree as bad people or reduce their stated views on these issues as actually being about something else, as in Obama’s case. Most college grads in this culture are simply never forced to engage with or seriously consider professors or texts which could provide a genuine, compelling alternative view.

For decades now, U.S. colleges and universities have quite rightly been trying to become more diverse when it comes to race and gender. But this election highlights the fact that our institutions of higher education should use similar methods to cultivate philosophical, theological and political diversity.

These institutions should consider using quotas in hiring that help faculties and administrations more accurately reflect the wide range of norms and values present in the American people. There should be systemwide attempts to have texts assigned in classes written by people from intellectually underrepresented groups. There should be concerted efforts to protect political minorities from discrimination and marginalization, even if their views are unpopular or uncomfortable to consider.

The goal of such changes would not be to convince students that their political approaches are either correct or incorrect. The goal would instead be educational: to identify and understand the norms, values, first principles, intuitions and stories which have been traditionally underrepresented in higher education. This would better equip college graduates to engage with the world as it is, including with their fellow citizens.

The alternative, a reduction of all disagreement to racism, bigotry and ignorance — in addition to being wrong about its primary source — will simply make the disagreement far more personal, entrenched and vitriolic. And it won’t make liberal values more persuasive to the less educated, as Trump victory demonstrates.

It is time to do the hard work of forging the kind of understanding that moves beyond mere dismissal to actual argument. Today’s election results indicate that our colleges and universities are places where this hard work is particularly necessary.​

Among all American adults, college students are the least knowledgeable and experienced. They think they know it all when they've only got four to eight years up on junior high kids. That would still be enough to navigate society except that instead of educating them in the traditional liberal sense, we've been infantalizing them. The result is that a lot of the junior high kids have more sense than the college kids.

Trump won because of American racism, sexism, and apathy.

He also won because of the failures of neoliberalism. The "non-college educated" are those who have been left behind.

I honestly figured it was more than that. I would have guessed 8 in 10. It's just so ridiculously expensive.

Ummmmmm... you either didn't read the article or you're seriously brain damaged.

I also highly recommend Chuppie read it. I think he will find it enlightening, if he can manage to open up his mind for a minute.

Oh shit, I wasn't paying attention, I actually thought it was a garamet post.

I mean.....c'mon man.

Why anyone with a college degree would think themselves something better or special is beyond ridiculous anyway.

It's ridiculously easy to get into college in the last couple of decades and all but impossible not to get a degree.

The thing is that educated white collar people did vote.

Not buying it. That would explain Jeb or Rand Paul winning the presidency, but it doesn't explain Americans lining up behind a rapey racist with little to no economic platform.

If the vote is pretty much 50/50, doesn't that mean the average voter is in the middle?

I take it you voted for the enabler of the notorious serial rapist who runs around with Bill Cosby, and who still can't articulate an economic plan other than "the rich will pay their fair share!" while telling the rich at Goldman Sachs that politics is just a kabuki dance to keep the morons back home from rising up.

'the average voter'

More of which voted for Hillary than Trump.

Until there is more analysis real hard to draw any sweeping conclusions from this election.

Nice avatar Anc.

Yeah, what's up with that? Did he lose a bet?

The same working class whites in Ohio and Pennsylvania who voted for Obama, now voted Trump. Bigotry certainly played its role, but the main failure here was that of the liberal elite to empathize with heartland values, and more importantly, to take care of them economically. I accept the OP's thesis as generally correct.

How would it explain Jeb or Rand Paul winning? Those guys back neoliberalism. Trump promises to end it - in crazy ill-tought out ways perhaps. But to say that he had "no economic platform" is wrong. He's promising to take the jobs back using protectionism.

That seems like an assumption not based in evidence, although it certainly fits a narrative a lot of people would like to true.

As I've said, we'll need both more data and more time to analyze it before any conclusions.

Keep in mind that Trump won the EC with less votes than McCain or Romney.

15000 people voted for Harambe, sooooo...

Why did the majority of white women vote Trump?

Because their husbands told them to



















(That's a joke, in case it wasn't obvious)

@Ancalagon, what's up? Did you lose a bet?

Yep.

The Trump shakeup has simply led Anc to find religion.

Yikes, I hope for your sake it wasn't too long.

Hey, that's honorable, bro.

Ramen made a surprisingly nice choice. I assumed it would be some sort of subways suck image or some other thing that would really bug Ancalagon.

Just promoting the brand.

And we're so ridiculously stupid.

Racism and sexism. Try to keep up.