More Educated = More Liberal?

[pbrower2a]

Europe already went through that.

Before, more you were educated, more you were right-wing.
In the recent years, it took a smile shape. Very uneducated and very educated people voted for the left, the averagely educated to the right.
And now, it's becoming more you are education, more you're left-wing, more or less.

Different factors must be factored too: race, religion, income, unions...

Being well educated in Europe before 1945 implied that one was almost certainly part of the Establishment. High levels of education were the norm only for entrenched elites, and working people (who were generally socialists except under fascist regimes) were usually thrown to the wolves in the economic order, often at an early age.  After WWII entrenched economic elites became less powerful if they were allowed to remain (a distinction between Romania and Italy), and as a rule post-WWII governments encouraged advanced education for anyone who could benefit from it. If there was an Einstein or Freud whose parents were industrial workers the educational system might find him and give him a chance -- especially after the people who gave the world Einstein and Freud were largely exterminated.

In the US  much the same process happened in the early 1960s, when high-grade universities quit using class identity as a criterion for acceptance or rejection. School board scores began to matter greatly and family connections (he is at the bottom of his prep-school class but a couple years at Ivy might do him some good) didn't matter so much. Why have someone like that at Ivy when you could have some middle-class Jewish or Italian-American kid from Brooklyn who takes learning seriously and has the grades and board scores? The results from such choices looked increasingly good, and they stayed in place. The kid who might use a couple years at Harvard ended up going to some 'alternative choice'.

The Republican Party used to have the advantage with educated people because the under-educated, bigoted white people of the South voted Democratic and often well-educated Northern moderate voters despised those people and identified with Eisenhower and Rockefeller. The Republican Party began to court those under-educated, often bigoted white voters hostile to highly-educated people and lost the well-educated Northern moderate voters to the Democratic Party.

The Republican party has been pandering to anti-intellectual white people; by such it lost the chance to pick up a rapidly-growing (and well-educated) Hispanic middle class that seemed set to drift increasingly into the Republican Party. But by disparaging formal education the Republican Party has lost many of the sorts of people who voted Republican at least until Dubya.

Just look at an overlay between elections involving Dwight Eisenhower and Barack Obama. In 2008 President Obama won 365 electoral votes -- all but 15 from states that Eisenhower lost. In 2012 Barack Obama didn't win any state that Dwight Eisenhower ever lost.     

       

[pbrower2a]

Your wording is very misleading. There are many ways to be educated other than the liberal academic environment funded by Democrats.

UC Berkeley and the University of Texas at Austin get much the same political results from their graduates.

 

[pbrower2a]

Areas with high rates of education have historically been associated not just with Liberalism but also urbanization, advanced industrial development, expanded international trade, and "modernization" (for better or worse, depending on who you ask). Liberalism has always had a fairly elitist flair to it, especially when it comes to education, "cosmopolitanism"/worldliness, and cultural sophistication, so it's not (or shouldn't be) much of a surprise when less educated, working-class people find Liberalism's advocates off-putting, at best.

...and with higher-than-average investments in human capital and infrastructure, which tends to suggest economic liberalism.  Highly-educated people rarely go to rural areas except for recreational purposes, and such places tend to have very urban amenities (like places with skiing, boating, hiking, and camping).

 Small, isolated communities have long had difficult times attracting physicians and dentists. What is to be offered? Cheap golf on a nine-hole course?

Add to that, urban areas have costly infrastructure. Two-lane blacktop roads are adequate for local traffic in the Dakotas, and such highways as I-29, I-90, and I-94 exist to connect people and freight to such destinations as Winnipeg, Omaha, Minneapolis, Chicago, and Seattle. But a four-lane divided expressway in northeastern New Jersey or the San Francisco Bay Area is usually inadequate for local needs.  Indeed, ten lanes of expressway may be inadequate.

Expanding I-94 in North Dakota from two lanes on each side to three on each side would be comparatively inexpensive -- but pointless. Widening an expressway from ten to twelve lanes in an extant urban area implies costly land acquisition, the relocation of utilities, and major reworking of bridges.  Labor costs are higher in big cities, of course, just to accommodate the higher cost of living. Public services don't come cheaply. San Francisco has bad public schools in part because teachers have plenty of alternatives. Because a good teacher is essentially a salesperson or at least a good talker, just about any sales or tourist job offers a career alternative to any teacher who thinks himself underpaid. In rural areas, teaching is the only game in town for someone with a teaching credential.  Cops who can be paid cheaply in small towns have to be paid enough in big cities and suburbs so that they don't find going onto the informal payroll of organized crime an attractive way in which to supplement a meager income. Costly infrastructure and public services mean high taxes.     

 

[pbrower2a]

All that is utterly beside the point CP.  I do agree however that welfare is not the right approach - we should be eliminating private property and guillotining the rich.  Giving welfare just reinforces capitalism, and after all slavery is still the problem.

We eliminated slavery in 1865 as a condition of the Civil War. You'd like to behead those who have more money than you? This thread is about education.

No, capitalism still enslaves in a functional sense all who are not owners.  Yes, this thread is about education, but like all other issues, the 'problems' of education are imposed by the ruling class.

Redistribution of the wealth enslaves those dependent on welfare to the Democratic Party. Democrats impose the problem of slavery on the poor by getting them addicted to welfare.

Redistribution of wealth and income is going on, and over the past three decades, but almost as a strict rule toward fewer people. Real wages have been in decline. Welfare of any kind is becoming harder to get.

Big Business, whether as tycoons or as executives, has been exploiting the disappearance of meaningful choice between jobs and has exploited such to the fullest. Add to that it has gotten Congress to enact tax changes that favor monopolization of business and reward people for having economic advantages.

[pbrower2a]

Of course there are myriad ways to measure education. What I am saying is that with current data, you cannot perform rigid analysis of other forms of education, considering we do not have figures for these.

Here's some data from previous elections that looks at white voting patters based on educational attainment. For mid-income whites, educational attainment seems directly proportional to the propensity to vote democratic. The same is true for high-income whites, discounting the rich whites without a HS degree category, which has a huge margin of error. For low-income whites we see the familiar C-curve.


http://andrewgelman.com/2012/03/23/voting-patterns-of-americas-whites-from-the-masses-to-the-elites/

I think a better question would be not if, but WHY the highly educated skew democratic. I think a lot of it is due to the democrats being perceived as the party the intellectuals call home (I mean, we did have Adlai Stevenson). Social issues, as I have stated before, are also a big reason.

I don't think we can even measure education based on data.

Critical thinking, a practice that allows people the knack for seeing through propaganda, is far more likely to be homed in advanced humanistic studies -- that is, the liberal arts in college. Although college students whose training is in more technical and vocational areas (engineering, accountancy, computer programming, and nursing) might not need much exposure to the liberal arts for their careers, about everyone else in the intelligentsia needs the capacity for critical thought.  Think of schoolteachers who get exposed to every permutation of thought that one can imagine. They must exercise critical thought without becoming excessively judgmental. Critical thought allows one to talk one's way out of trouble not of one's own making and can keep people from getting into trouble.

Critical thinking is good for detecting the speciousness of the statements of schemers, scammers, and demagogues. Such people appeal to mass greed, superstition, resentment, bigotry, and fear in people more likely to panic than to analyze a situation. Beyond doubt such people would gladly keep people either grossly ignorant or at least limited in knowledge to what is 'safe' for their position.   
     

[pbrower2a]

Libertarians.  Socially moderate/liberal and economically, moderate/conservative.

White collars still tend to favor the GOP though for tax reason and since their gross incomes are higher. 

It depends heavily on what white-collar workers one speaks of. Government employees may be more concerned with funding of their jobs than with the taxes that they pay.