Eine Analyse von Umfragedaten aus den letzten fünf Jahren der US-Präsidentschaftswahlen ergab, dass die ideologischen Unterschiede zwischen den Rassen stark zurückgegangen sind, während die Unterschiede im Bildungsbereich deutlich zugenommen haben. Weniger gebildete Amerikaner neigen heute dazu, konservativer zu sein.
The political realignment of America: Education overtakes race as key ideological divider
46 Kommentare
Ignorant people will always vote against their own interests if it means hurting someone else too.
This is why Republicans are constantly trying to erode our public education systems.
I wonder how effective psyops and propaganda are against the college educated versus the less educated..
Uneducated voters have reactionary tendencies, this definitely makes sense. Instead of thinking “why” there is just a switch that flips to anger. I see it in my family relatives often.
Believe me.
We can tell.
This isn’t a new trend
Dumbfuckistan strategy worked to a tee.
Conservatism is anti intellectual
People are just going to read that education makes you liberal and oppose it even more. Troglodytes.
It’s really sad that all one has to do is point to the stunning incompetence of this regime and republicans unswerving lack of accountability as indisputable evidence of this assertion.
I’ve said it before; gettem young, keep them uneducated, they’ll vote red and against their interest. Bonus points if they have no sex education and are religious, and the cycle just repeats and compounds. 25% of Americans are illiterate. I say that’s horrifying, conservatives see it as a badge of anti-establishment and “alternative learning”.
And the political divide grows, and our chance of saving this country for future generations shrivels and dies.
Wake up honey, new confirmation bias just dropped.
I have a Masters degree from a pretty nice university . Trust me when I say an education does not make you smart by any means….I knew A LOT of dummies in undergrad and grad school…..
The article uses education level while comments are harping about intellectual capacity.
Those two things stopped being related when college stopped being a highly selective institution. Anyone with a brain would parse how the average american high schoolers scores lower than they did 20 years ago but college enrollment rates are still rising.
> *Less educated Americans now tend to be more conservative.*
If I’m not terribly mistaken, I seem to recall having seen research/survey data showing this education-level difference being true for **some** time.
Higher education-level individuals, on average, skew left politically — this isn’t exactly „news“.
> *“As democracy is perfected, the office of the president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.“*
~ **H.L. Mencken** (1922)
This is why Idiocracy is a documentary
A few thoughts I have about this:
First, I think it’s pretty easy to confuse cause and effect here. Is it that education makes you more liberal, or that more liberal people seek more education? I don’t think it’s possible to tell from this data, but I have a strong hunch that it works both ways.
Second, conflating education level with intelligence is generally not a good idea, IMO. I’m a lot more educated than the guy I hire to fix stuff at my house, but he’s waaaay smarter than I am. On top of that, I’d argue that he has life experience and perspective that is fundamentally absent in the academy. To simply dismiss that perspective as being ignorant and stupid would be folly.
Third, people in the comments here are saying over and over again that „education equals critical thinking,“ and while I agree with that to a point, I think beyond the secondary level in the current environment you get diminishing critical thinking returns. At least in my experience, as a mostly humanities undergrad, the increased education I got there was primarily instruction in a bizarre post-modernist dialect that I had to unlearn in order to communicate effectively with normal people, combined with learning to adopt a certain ideological framework and perspective on all „texts“ (and of course there is no reality outside text, so you can treat a rock as a text if you want). This isn’t exactly critical thinking in my view as much as it is ideological thinking, and my peers in the late ’90s undergrad who went on to study more in graduate school were for the most part the ones who had already fully drunk the Kool-Aid on day 1 of their first year. This is less true of my peers in the sciences.
That last point does connect somewhat to a selection effect, wherein the most liberal people are the ones who keep getting more and more education.
Fourth, in case we’re wondering why public support for scientific and intellectual institutions has eroded so much, I would encourage folks to read all the comments here with a critical eye. Most of the public didn’t go to college, and I would bet 85% of the public is more conservative than the median poster on r/science. How do you think they would interpret the contempt on display for the uneducated in these comment threads? I can tell you it’s not making the people on here look good to me.
It’s also interesting how it’s become acceptable to shame, judge and be bigoted towards people with low education
There are two kinds of Republicans. Billionaires and suckers. Check your bank account if you’re not sure which bucket you fall into
There’s too much comfort.
In the past, to be ignorant or poor meant that you went without many conventional luxuries and that life was significantly more difficult. Now that it is easier to be comfortable and get small tastes of luxury, the desire to push back against the system and grow as a person has decreased, i.e., why should I try to expand my mind and push for change when I have a flat screen, a 12 pack, and the Bills are on at 3:00?
To paraphrase a quote in regard to this is „we were so worried about Orwell, that we forgot about Huxley“.
>I show that ideological differences have decreased sharply by race, driven primarily by Blacks becoming more conservative, but also Hispanics moving to the right.
To be fair you can’t be an educated sane person and believe that conservatives and Republicans are at all good for America after what they’ve done for the past several decades. You’d have to be divorced from reality or u educated and illiterate to believe they were.
It never fails to amaze me that poorer uneducated Americans would support Conservative parties. I mean, there is literally nothing in it for them.
Minus the apparent glee they get from attacking immigrants, visible minorities, the LGBTG+ community, other poor uneducated people, they get screwed every which way imaginable.
The key party alignment is Urban / Rural. College educated people get disproportionately pulled to white collar jobs in urban cities, where social network pressure and proximity slowly align them to the party that caters to urban voters.
The rural college educated vote +13 Republican.
The science of karma farming.
The core of conservatism is fear and insecurity. It’s a lot easier to scare people who not only can’t think critically, but have been socialized to see education as a bad thing. And at some point, people are responsible for the bs they swallow. Being willfully ignorant shouldn’t be survivable.
Trump himself has said that he loves the poorly educated and smart people don’t like him.
Unless you are in the 1%, you are voting against your own interest when you vote for Republicans, it has been that way since 1980, which also corresponds to the income inequality and wealth transfer we have seen over the last 4 decades.
There is a lot of assumptions about intellect and association with college as the difference of political views but as someone that started out conservative and progressed to more liberal I think these are not empirical truths. I think ignorance is a larger factor and that can be on either spectrum. I do agree that there is a lot of personal bias that tends to keep some people stuck in their views. I hold a masters degree and consider myself holding some conservative but mostly more progressive positions. Being able to consider all the facts objectively and accept new information is to me the key to making good decisions that benefit others and myself. Those that focus on only outcomes that benefit them are the real problem regardless of party.
When democrats became the party of corporate interest, and therefore the bourgeoisie and upper class, they lost their class solidarity.
Democrats have accomplished nothing in local or national politics since Obamacare. And that only helped the working poor, not the middle class.
Identity and social politics don’t pay bills.
When you don’t support working people, they stop voting for you.
Did they take into account that maybe having a mountain of student debt makes you less conservative?
Less educated people have lost the most wealth as society has moved from an industrial based economy to an information based economy.
“I love the poorly educated”
Dumb people have dumb politics, go figure.
I love the poorly educated. -Donald Trump
Fear born of ignorance
„We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow to go through [higher education]. If not, we will have a large number of highly trained and unemployed people.“ – Roger A. Freeman, Reagans educational advisor. Conservatives have worked for decades to slowly destroy education systems. Student loans are out of control mostly thanks to our conservatives friends
Shocker! You’re telling me dumbfucks tend to be, on average, more dumbfuck? Wow
I thank you for pointing out the uncomfortable truth that current conservatives are only engaging in self preservation when they attack education.
I have to assume that they are not giving IQ tests during the survey they are basing ‚less educated‘ on who has gone to college and who has not. That does take a lot of punch out of this title
tldr: Republicans are dumb
Is this why they want to keep their constituents dumb by removing education?
Racial resentment still being one of the strongest indicators of support for Trump.
Uneducated voters get off on the idea that their ignorance is just as good as your intelligence. These college liberals got an education and the only way they can cope is by pretending that they have something equivalent: „common sense“.
True only to a point. African Americans and Jewish Americans remain lopsided Demcratic voters. The shift is more pronounced among Hispanic and Asian Americans both of whom may emerge as key swing voters but within these groups education will also be a factor.
That was the purpose of the religious right movement in the 80s, to use religion as a cudgel against rural communities, many of whom don’t seek college or beyond because the jobs they’re doing in their own communities don’t require it. Worked out great except long-term young people in those communities didn’t have job opportunities at home and moved away. Unfortunately young people don’t vote as often which means older rural people tend to set the tone of politics.