WaPo: College-educated Americans are out of touch

[kevm14]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/postever ... -of-touch/

Lots of good points here. Starting with the sub-title:

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.

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.

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.

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.

[kevm14]

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.

This is what I hate about our liberal education system. Namely the last sentence. This is called elitism.

[kevm14]

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.

Yes. It's the great hypocrisy. We need people of different skin color! As long as they think like us, of course.

[kevm14]

Exactly this.

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.

[Bob]

Exactly this.

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.

Trump was born from the rage of the less educated against the elites. Unfortunately for the less educated, their economic and social condition will not improve under a Trump administration, nor would it have under a Clinton administration, but they won't have the easy scapegoat of blaming the president for all of their problems.

[kevm14]

That is a good thing because scapegoats don't help anybody in the long run.