Does Getting a College Degree Make You Elitist?

According to most pundits, what has fueled the recent divide in our elections has been the divergence between voters who are college educated and those who aren't. For example, Nate Cohn wrote about "how educational differences are widening America's political rift," with college graduates now a firmly Democratic bloc and those without degrees flocking to Republicans. 

Here's a bit from Cohn's piece that doesn't usually get much attention.

Overall, 41 percent of people who cast ballots last year were four-year college graduates, according to census estimates. By contrast, just 5 percent of voters in 1952 were college graduates, according to that year’s American National Elections Study.

Here's a chart that demonstrates that swing:

While the gap persists for Black Americans, we see the same upward trajectory. 

Just as that is happening, we're being flooded with the idea that college graduates are the "elite" in this country that are now pulling the strings in the Democratic Party. For example, in writing about how the cultural elite came to rule the Democratic Party, Michael Barone defines those "elites" as follows:

White college grads have become the dominant constituency in the Democratic Party. Even as the descendants of the party’s blue-collar constituents have become Donald Trump Republicans, Democratic percentages among white college graduates have ballooned.

We see that conflation of college graduates and elites from people as diverse as Niall Stanage, David Brooks, Bernie Sanders, and Thomas Edsall. It springs from the same place as those on both the far left and the right who have appropriated "wokeness" as a pejorative - as if waking up to the reality of systemic racism is a negative.

This one has actually had me floored for a while. Perhaps because I was part of the first wave of women to go to college. Surely there were those from my mother's generation that blazed a trail, but it wasn't until my generation that it became somewhat of a norm. It has always seemed to me that having the opportunity to go to college was an integral part of the American dream. All over this country, parents sacrificed in order to provide that opportunity to their children. Now those who did so are being tarred negatively as "elitists."

How did that happen? It shouldn't be lost on any of us that, just as women and people of color make great strides in getting a college education, the ability to do so is being flooded with negative connotations. 

But that's just part of the problem. Whether they're willing to admit it or not, conservatives have long been aware that, as Stephen Colbert so famously noted, reality has a liberal bias. When young people go to college, one of the things that happens is that they learn about reality - and thus get exposed to a liberal bias. That is why part of the conservative agenda for years has been to target institutions of higher learning.

Meanwhile, over the last few years (and especially in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic), there has been a subtle movement in this country to celebrate ignorance. At the root of that is what Colbert named "truthiness." We are being told to believe what we feel rather than consider what the experts tell us, and to assume that facts based on science are merely opinions. 

The trend towards tarring members of the Democratic coalition as elitists didn't start during the Trump era. No one has explained all of this better than Leonard Steinhorn, who went back to the time when, during his 1981 inaugural address, Ronald Reagan said that we should not allow “government by an elite group” to “ride on our back.” A major tenant of the so-called Reagan Revolution was to paint the government as a "them" that represents the problem, not the solution. 

For four decades now, Republicans have succeeded in framing Democrats as the party that uses government to bigfoot rather than aid the American people. Democrats may celebrate public servants for keeping our food safe and our lakes healthy, but Republicans have successfully portrayed them as a humorless bureaucrats who salivate at the urge to exert power and control over taxpaying Americans.

And Republicans have very artfully created a counternarrative, turning the market into a synonym for liberty and defining it as an authentic expression of American grass-roots energy in which small businesses and entrepreneurs simply need freedom from government to shower benefits on us all...

Indeed, in the Republican playbook it’s the teachers, unions, environmental groups, professors and civil rights organizations that constitute the establishment whereas Koch and other industry-funded astroturf groups are the real gladiators fighting the status quo...

In effect, conservatives have rather successfully portrayed liberals and Democrats as willing to use cultural and political power against ordinary Americans. They want to take my guns, regulate my business, dictate who I can hire, and tell me what I can buy, which doctors I see, how I live, when I pray and even what I say — so goes the conservative narrative...

Taken together, Republicans have successfully defined Democrats as a party of bureaucrats, power brokers, media elites, special interests and snobs who have created a client state for those they favor, aim to control what everyone else does and look down their noses at the people who pay the taxes to fund the same government that Democrats use to control their lives.

That is the core messaging problem that Democrats need to grapple with. In a representative democracy, the government is "us," not "them." As such, it is the tool we have to protect and promote our own interests and hold tyranny at bay. That difference was highlighted when, at their 2014 convention, Republicans overreacted to President Obama's claim that "you didn't build that." Obama's speech at the Democratic Convention provided the road map for a response.

We, the people — recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which asks only, what's in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.

As citizens, we understand that America is not about what can be done for us. It's about what can be done by us, together through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government. That's what we believe.

That is why it is so infuriating when liberals join with right wingers and buy into the notion that college educated teachers, unions leaders, staff of environmental groups, professors, and the leaders of civil rights organizations are "elitist." We might agree or disagree with their beliefs and proposals, but the real elitists are those that are trying to strip the American people of their ability to exercise their citizenship by fulfilling their responsibilities via the hard but necessary work of self-government.