How Education Divides Us

01-22-2020

By Roger Berkowitz

Our societies are coming apart. This is true not only in the United States, but also in Europe and around the world. As technological bubbles enable alternate factual universes, we witness a growing divide amongst people that threatens to undo the common sense that unites us as citizens. Many in the United States see this divide as racial, but how to explain the global extent of the phenomenon? Hostility to immigrants is undoubtedly one unifying factor of the fracturing common sense in Western democracies. But Thomas Geoghegan argues that what really underlies our political and social fragmentation is a new form of class based not on income but on education.  

Here’s a little thought experiment: What would happen if, by a snap of the fingers, white racism in America were to disappear? It might be that the black and Latino working class would be voting for Trump, too. Then we Democrats would have no chance in 2020. We often tell ourselves: “Oh, we lost just the white working class because of race.” But the truth might be something closer to this: “It’s only because of race that we have any part of the working class turning out for us at all.”


How many of us in the party’s new postgraduate leadership caste have even a single friendship, a real one, of two equals, with any man or woman who is just a high school graduate? It’s hard to imagine any Democrat in either House or Senate who did not go beyond a high school diploma. (And no, I am not talking about Harvard dropouts Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.)


Still, it’s unthinkable that the college-educated base of the party would trust a high school graduate without a four-year degree to run for or hold a serious office. We don’t trust them, and would never vote for one of them. Why should they trust or vote for one of us?

It used to be otherwise. Yes, in the 1940s and 1950s, many a Democrat in the House or Senate had no four-year diploma: Even a president, Harry S Truman, did not. What’s more, those who did frequently went to night law school, or a teachers’ college, and at least still lived, or had a social life, in neighborhoods where no one over a long stretch of city blocks had college B.A.s. This was true even for the profession now cited as a sort of polemic shorthand for rule by the knowledge elite—the “liberal media.” As late as 1970, my friend Steve Franklin joined a city paper and was surprised to learn that most of the editors had never been to college—and of course they lived in neighborhoods all over the city with people who had gone to the same high schools they had.


If you want to understand what people who vote for Trump and Brexit and the Alternative für Deutschland are angry about, it is the arrogance of educated elites who insist that such people would be better off if they lived, thought, and worked as we do.  Geoghegan rightly sees that what educated elites most firmly believe is that the working and uneducated classes would be better off if they would simply imitate us. 

For this group, there is only one way to do it: Imitate us, the people who are the helicopter parents, whose parents were professionals, whose presidential candidates are Rhodes scholars or presidents of the Harvard Law Review. Can college for all solve the problems of this country? Well, it worked for us. Even some of the social Darwinians were subtler in rubbing it in.


I hate to pick on Barack Obama, because I genuinely like him and admire his legacy. But let me cite his famous speech on inequality, at Osawatomie, Kansas, where Theodore Roosevelt, before his Bull Moose candidacy, had once delivered a rousing tirade on inequality. It’s here where Obama at last acknowledged income inequalityas “the defining issue of our time.” But what did a white working class hear as the president’s number one solution to the scourge hollowing out communities and life prospects in dying factory towns and communities? He said: “We’ve got to up our game.… It starts by making education a national mission—a national mission.… In this economy, a higher education is the surest route to the middle class.” The White House website made the mandate even starker as it played up the president’s speech: “Earning a post-secondary degree or credential is no longer just a pathway to opportunity for a talented few; rather, it is a prerequisite for the growing jobs of the new economy.”


Imitate us. And that’s the center left: Further left, it gets worse. Bernie Sanders has a bill titled College for All. That’s all, as in “everyone.” I regret that even Elizabeth Warren has signed on to the same cause. She’s my ideal of a presidential candidate; I’ve even given money to her campaign. But like any smart liberal today, she is reflecting what so many highly educated Democrats think.