Talkin' Education Polarization Blues
Democrats tend to graduate from college and trust experts. Republicans increasingly don't. What could go wrong?
I’ve been thinking for over a month about a nasty tweet by Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz.
Some of my fascination with the tweet no doubt derives from Gaetz’s effort to be as insulting as possible about an important, high-stakes issue (the imminent overturning of Roe v. Wade) without advancing any broader point. That makes the tweet very much a distillation of the brutalist, post-Trump Republican Party, which treats “owning the libs” (that is, being the biggest possible asshole to anyone who isn’t on the right) as a political end in itself.
But beyond that, I think the tweet is a perfect expression of the GOP’s current commitment to mocking people for being “overeducated.” Gaetz appears to be implying that this imagined woman, protesting the end of constitutionally protected reproductive rights and otherwise living a life of loneliness, has ended up sad and under-loved, with only a cat for company, in large part because she went to college.
Republicans tell themselves stories like this because they fit with their understanding of themselves and their political opponents. And that understanding isn’t entirely wrong.
Educational Polarization Is on the Rise
Educational polarization is real, it’s growing, and it’s having all kinds of negative consequences on our politics. And to a remarkable extent, the trend is self-reinforcing, producing greater polarization over time.
College graduates increasingly flock to the Democratic Party, and those without degrees increasingly gravitate to the GOP. That would be bad even if it were the end of the story, because it would mean that people who’ve graduated from college, acquired valuable skills, and therefore set themselves up for lucrative and high-status careers would be clustered together into one of our two parties, leaving the other party with less education and lower income and status.
But the imbalance doesn’t end there. Each tendency mixes with pride and political passion to become a kind of identity marker that each side positively affirms while denigrating opposing affirmations on the other side. And that intensifies and accelerates the trend.
So those with college degrees don’t just tend to end up voting for Democrats. They hear Republicans mocking their valorization of experts and become defensive. Now it becomes a point of pride to declare a commitment to “trusting the science,” by which many Dems mean trusting scientists and other experts to know how best to respond to a pandemic, or climate change, or any number of other highly technical, pressing issues in public policy.
Expertise is good. Scientists often know things that make their advice worth taking seriously. But, as philosopher Oliver Traldi has powerfully argued (and discussed at greater length here), they aren’t infallible. They make mistakes. Which is why deference and trust need to be balanced with the judicious application of skepticism to their pronouncements.
This is also why it’s good for scientific findings to inform policymaking but foolish to pretend we should be letting scientists and other experts make crucial decisions about how to negotiate the inevitable trade-offs involved in enacting one set of policies or regulations over another. Such decisions, hopefully informed by experts, need to be made by us—by the American electorate through our elected representatives and those they empower within administrative agencies to implement decisions.
The Republican Backlash
When Republicans hear Democrats praising expertise to the skies, they react negatively to it. But instead of settling on a skeptical but still affirmative position toward science, experts, and higher education, they swing to the opposite extreme, treating their own lack of college degrees as a virtue—as evidence that those who haven’t attended universities possess the common sense usually lacking in those who’ve pursued a more formal education.
Meanwhile, GOP pols and right-wing media rabblerousers weaponize every story of a far-left professor trying to indoctrinate a classroom full of undergraduates to claim that college as such is just a hugely expensive (and horribly wasteful) form of progressive or Marxist brainwashing. That makes higher education look either like a huge scam or a kind of left-wing spoils system in which those who have demonstrated loyalty to the official ideology of the ruling class get rewarded with money and power at the top of the American economic, cultural, and political hierarchy.
On the far side of the process, Republicans conclude they and their children should avoid a college education altogether and instead seek to acquire skills outside universities—through experience or mentorship in the mechanical arts or lower-skilled service work. It’s possible, though sometimes a challenge, to earn a decent living in this way. But leadership positions across the American economy and society will usually be foreclosed to people with such backgrounds, which just increases the sense that the system is rigged against them, with co-called experts running the show for their own benefit.
Ancient Wisdom About an Old Problem
It’s bad for a large political party and a significant faction of the population to be motivated by outright hostility to higher education and expertise. That’s especially the case at our moment of history, when so much of the human world depends for its functioning on specialized knowledge. But the underlying dynamic isn’t new. Indeed, it’s as old as the history of political philosophy itself.
Plato’s Republic is, among many other things, a highly nuanced examination of the enduringly fraught relation been knowledge and political power. Achieving justice in the city-in-speech that Socrates and his conversation-partners construct in the dialogue famously requires the rule of philosophers—the wisest men in the city. This isn’t just a clever joke or a self-serving rationalization. (A philosopher thinks philosophers should rule? No kidding!) Can’t we all agree it would be great if our political leaders were the smartest, most capable people around?
There are several reasons why this never seems to work out in real life, however. One is that we don’t agree about the precise kind of knowledge our leaders should possess. Another is that the knowledge required of political leaders is very hard to specify, leaving us uncertain how to determine which people possess it in abundance. Yet another is that those who know a lot can still succumb to overweening ambition, corruption, and other vices, turning them into a threat to the political community despite their knowledge.
But there’s another factor at play, too. Some people (maybe even a large number of them) don’t want to concede that anyone is more fit for political rule than they are. Indeed, they respond with anger to the claim that a few members of the community are especially deserving of political power, as an affront to their dignity. How dare they! Just who do they think they are? Who’s to say that certain people are especially suited to be given more political power and honors than I am?
So, even if we could identify an elite group of people who possessed the knowledge and wisdom especially suitable for rule, the very attempt to place them in positions of power would likely spark a backlash by others in the community who refuse to concede the premise of the exercise. They reject the notion that anyone is more suited to rule than anyone else.
That’s what makes Plato’s Republic a utopia. The word “utopia” means “no place,” and accordingly, the dialogue meticulously exposes both the many reasons political justice requires the rule of the wisest and most knowledgeable and the myriad obstacles to instituting such an arrangement in any actually existing political community.
Aristotle works through a similar (if briefer) thought experiment in Book III of his Politics, showing how every healthy political community needs to mix in elements of democracy (rule of the many), not because all men are created equal, but rather because the common people stubbornly refuse to go along with any higher claim to rule, including those based on the possession of special wisdom, knowledge, or intelligence. The very attempt to claim that certain people possess virtues that make them more suited than others to political rule inflames the vanity of the many, provoking a backlash and the need to make concessions to the mob.
More of the Same, Only Worse
What this implies is that our own educational polarization is unlikely to lead to positive consequences for anyone. Democrats will continue to be prone to thinking their educational attainments entitle them to political power, while their own admiration for learning and educational credentials will lead them to put too much faith in a higher class of experts and take too little responsibility when those experts make mistakes, as they inevitably will.
Meanwhile, Republican suspicion of educational credentials and expertise more generally will continue to make them less capable of contributing to the running of our expertise-driven world, prone to feelings of dishonor and resentment at the socioeconomic consequences of this fact, and easily manipulated by demagogue-charlatans who devise ways to profit from the constantly triggered sense of wounded pride.
What would it take to break this self-reinforcing cycle? I honestly don’t know. What I do know is that it’s bad for the polity to become divided along lines of both education and class—and that when it happens, it can foment a crisis of political legitimacy. Given that fact, American patriots should do whatever they can to push back against the trend toward ever-greater educational polarization.
Wow, this one hit home for me. As a media person who works for a conservative website and generally feels more comfortable on the right (or in the center) than on the left, I've been hoping to revive the kind of highbrow intellectual conservatism that takes ideas seriously and champions a liberal arts education for liberty, virtue, and good parenting, leadership, citizenship, etc. There is a tradition there, though it's too often eclipsed by other things. As usual, I say a pox on both their houses. There are pressures on both sides:
(1) from the leftist higher ed institutions themselves, of course, which seem to have traded in meat and potatoes survey courses (at least in the humanities); attention to the classic, foundation texts of civilization (both East and West!); and commitment to the transmission of knowledge for arcane topics courses and endless exercises in race, class and gender that aren't much help to those seeking wisdom, enlightenment, satisfaction of curiosity, virtue *or* valuable skills. Higher ed (at least on the elite level) also seems to promote a climate where intellectual diversity is discouraged, DEI stuff is intrusive and takes up far too much time and money, the administration is bloated, the university tries to do too much (e.g., mental health, adjudicating sex assault claims), and students must blindly submit to the latest identitarian dogma, as a sort of civil religion, to get ahead. There are many testimonies to this.
(2) pressure from the right, which is good at pointing out all of the above but too often forgets its own insight that it is much easier to tear down than to build. So, as Damon noted, there's all this the populist animus against higher-education-as-it-is that is in part justified (see #1) but shades too easily into anti-intellectualism and anti-universities broadly, which shades into conspiracy thinking and knee-jerk contempt for the expertise that we do very often need, because we live in a specialized society and most of us decidedly do not have the background to, e.g., do our own research on the safety of vaccines.
My sense is that the right needs to make a positive case for education alongside its critique of the postmodern university and the experts -- a case that is more than a skills-only approach or a vague liberal arts advocacy that treats "Western Civilization" as a signifier for Christianity, the West-as-superior hagiography narrative (which in turn further alienates the Left) or a kind of nostalgic return to the pre-progressive era.
The left needs to stop its endless self-criticism (captured brilliantly in this intercept article, which to me as a veteran of conservative institutions was like reading about another country: https://theintercept.com/2022/06/13/progressive-organizing-infighting-callout-culture/), tamp down the myopic postmodern theorizing and reductive race/class/gender analysis, focus more on the basics in education, and give Plato et al. their due.
My solution is to make Ron DeSantis do a full undergraduate degree at St. John's College (the great books one) and starve the idea-laundering academic journals so that professors will be forced to stop doing masturbatory post-Hegelian BS and start re-learning how to introduce students to Shakespeare.
And not a word about the misogyny dripping from Matt Gaetz' tweet. The inference that an educated woman deserves derision, the archaic notion that married women hold higher social standing than single women, and the bizarre assertion that single, educated women take up the cause of abortion rights because they have nothing else to do.
It still shows the direction the GOP has been traveling in for years now. White male privilege, that a "real" man who dropped out of high school is worth more than a man with a university degree, and even worse - that educated women are unattractive and made the butt of jokes. Gaetz is looking at a possible prison term for his alleged inappropriate liaisons with under-aged girls.