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.

Matt Gaetz @mattgaetz

How many of the women rallying against overturning Roe are over-educated, under-loved millennials who sadly return from protests to a lonely microwave dinner with their cats, and no bumble matches?

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.