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| Santa Barbara, Calif. on October 31, 2019 |
The good news is that Harris’s defeat discredited Clinton-Obama neoliberalism as the Democratic party’s dominant center. Harris ran a good campaign with corporate Bidenism and it failed. Trump ran a bad campaign opposing that and it succeeded. Center-Dems will fight (e.g. for the “abundance agenda”) but this loss was their loss and they lost big.
This gives the left a massive opportunity to theorize and build a better Bernieism across race and class. This would be a new model democratic socialism, one that would not downplay the civil rights gains of the past 80 years, including trans rights. (The widespread freakout about the means to trans equality and racial equality is an underanalyzed driver of the Trump victory.) But this is America, so this new New Left will be called something horrible like “pocketbook populism” (Robert Kuttner’s term, who’s been writing accurately about this for decades (e.g. this 2014 critique of Obama). In 2024, anti-corporate Democrats often ran ahead of Harris in Trump districts and often won.
The bad news is that Trump is the most regressive slayer of neoliberalism I can imagine. If the majority wanted to reduce inflation and make things fairer for the working class, they did it in the worst possible way.
His (small) majority voted for oligarchic capitalism that will make the price of eggs go up, and houses go up, and insurance go up, and medical costs go up. They voted for deregulation that will make Big Egg get bigger and make monopoly pricing easier. They voted for an openly racist version of cheap eggs and ham, the most openly racist since Alabama Governor George Wallace’s campaign in 1968. They voted for the most misogynist version: white women voted 53-47 for Trump after he took their reproductive rights away and lost a civil suit over sexual assault. They voted for his spectacle of coercion and force, for the dictionary definition of an authoritarian personality. Left rebuilding starts in a deep cultural and psychological hole.
The big question here is why does economic anger pushes people to the cultural right? This has happened all over the world: Hungary and Poland, Brazil and Argentina, India and the Philippines. The U.S. is a standout in this rear guard. The cultural win against “woke” will push the U.S. further behind in the sectors most beloved by Trump’s base, like manufacturing. Speaking of which, the U.S. is behind China in green tech and under Trump will never catch up. If status-quo economics is your problem, why solve it with the cultural right?
People are right to focus on our messed-up information ecosystem. But the explanation I’ll start exploring for this rightward shift is education. Racist anti-neoliberalism seems to work less on a common type of thinking person. Same goes for economically incoherent plutocratic anti-neoliberalism.
By “thinking” I mean people who gather a decent amount of information—and know how much they have. They use that information. “Thinking people” assume that information should shape their conclusions and actively use information to shape them. These people are comfortable going back and forth between evidence and argument to check the fit. They actively respond to misfits between facts and claims. They see changing their claims to fit new evidence as good rather than weak. Also, they think about how they think about politics, family dynamics, their jobs, and other things.
Obviously everyone thinks. But there is huge range in how well people think, even in one person over time. Thinking is hard. Thinking takes time, as the political activist and thinker Freddie Payne used to say. Thinking is easily rushed by the pressures of everyday life. Thinking is also burdened or impaired by limits in training, comfort with various kinds of data, etc. My experience, including forty years as a college teacher, is that everyone is smart but that they often do not think. Or they often don’t think well.
I don’t know how to put this politely. It feels elitist and obnoxious even to bring this up. But a teacher’s job is to evaluate the quality of thinking every day. Ironically, society gets very upset when we don’t do this, invoking grade inflation or social promotion).
Also, “anti-intellectualism in American life” has long bullied educators out of being able to talk about bad thinking as a public problem. Nixon and Agnew, Reagan and Bush were good at this. But Trump is the Bully King. In spite of this generations-long propaganda campaign, we do need to be able to talk about the power of ignorance in American life—and in that of other countries.
So onward: Universities obviously aren’t the only sites of systematic thought. Social movements think, sports fans think, auto mechanics and farmers think. However, thinking is taught, cultivated, coached, corrected, and enforced systematically by universities.
Three aspects of university thinking are especially important, in part because they’re not always easy to find elsewhere.
One is thinking about thinking, or meta-reflection. Is my thinking suited to this problem? How is my thinking going? How can I tell how well it’s going? Do I need to change my method? Do I need to start over with different data? Can I stop thinking now, or do I need to keep going?
A second aspect is the relation between thinking and feeling. Universities uphold a standard of disinterestedness, however difficult or theoretically unattainable that is. The student or researcher is not allowed to let their convictions control their inquiry or conclusions. If you’re a left-wing political scientist, you’re not allowed to let your anger at Trump’s win push you to conclude that all Trump voters are economically illiterate racists—or shape your study to that premise. If you’re a white Christian, you’re not allowed to let your indignation at local news coverage of undocumented immigrants push you to conclude that American identity is under existential attack—and bake that into your survey or teaching.
A century of research has shown how our emotions do shape our thinking and that there’s no clean opposition between reason and emotion. And yet universities teach ways of managing the continuous interaction so research is more rather than less accurate about the reality outside our heads.
Third, universities expose students and instructors to multiple methods. Engineering students are usually required to take a literature or history course where they learn hermeneutics—how the interpretation of language has procedures and methods that they can apply. Whether or not students align with the content of particular courses, a graduate from a US college or university knows that cultural and social knowledge is a practice with its own methods and bodies of learning, and not brainwashing that can be contrasted with the quantitative methodologies of the sciences. I don’t know where else one learns qualitative methods. This learning is a huge advantage in evaluating cultural or historical issues like calls for reparations for slavery or the ethics of taxing capital gains at a lower rate than wages.
To someone with cultural expertise, nearly all Republican efforts to stigmatize critical race theory, trans rights, and other historical or civil rights issues depend on a lack of cultural knowledge and basic competence with the disciplines. Their arguments sounded wrong, or dumb, or driven by an angry vendetta. Exposure to the underlying issues, like the relation of critical race theory to “critical legal studies” forty years ago, offers the college goer some immunity from false statements about them. One might still vote for De Santis or Trump or support the hostile takeover of New College, Florida, but not so much on the false ground that CRT is a novel reverse racism against white people.
Okay, that’s the short brief on university learning. What does university learning do to voting patterns?
There’s this long-term trend.
SOURCE: John Burn-Murdoch, Financial Times
Republicans lost the overall college vote during Bush II’s administration and have never gotten it back.
Why then? A defining feature of his administration was its fabricated lie about Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction and the cover-up of related measures, like bulk data collection on US resident. It was alienating, day after day, to watch the falsification of evidence and the nonstop deception.
Bush II’s second feature, as he settled in, was to strut his policy illiteracy and tie it to success.
He promoted Social Security privatization like this:
Bush often appears with an “expert” who supports his Social Security plan—some adviser, professor or smarty-pants whom the president likes to use as a foil to contrast with his own academic record. “I’m a C-student,” Bush said proudly in Louisville . . .“He’s the PhD. He’s the adviser. I’m the president. What does that tell you?” (Cited in Andy Borowitz, Profiles in Ignorance, 117-18).
Well, it told a lot of people that Bush didn’t care enough about the truth not to destroy Iraq.
Which brings us to Trump, who as a liar and shit-talker is the Greatest of All Time.
The evidence we do have suggests that voters who answer basic questions incorrectly skewed away from Harris and towards Trump.
SOURCE: Clifford Young, Sarah Feldman, and Bernard Mendez, Ipsos
The smallest point swing is 29, for the stock market question. The other gaps are in the range of 80-90 points. There’s an awkward correlation: if you get the wrong answer, you’re more likely to vote for Trump.
The same October Ipsos poll linked error on one salient issue to Republican preferences on other issues. The result is the same.
SOURCE: see above.
Right answers line up with Harris; wrong answers line up with Trump.
The effect isn’t specific to a particular policy area. There’s not just a policy gap but a knowledge gap between Trump and Harris voters, with Trump voters having less knowledge or wrong knowledge.
Other things being equal, a Trump voter is likely to be wrong about policy facts and therefore likely wrong about the future effects of their candidate’s views.
The Trump win also means that the less informed now rule the more informed through the incoming Trump administration. Voiding California’s net zero laws, or a state’s offshore drilling restrictions, or its banking regulations, or rules against use of local police for migration enforcement, you name it-- the low information voter has in effect decided for everyone.
I am not calling Trump voters generally deluded or dumb. But as I mentioned, I taught for 40 years. And when I said, “you didn’t do the reading,” I was not saying “you’re not smart enough for my class.” When I said, “that’s not really what this author is saying,” I did not mean, “why are you more stupid than Priti over here?” What I meant was, you didn’t learn the material so you’re not doing a good job of thinking about it. That’s literally what I meant.
The data we have suggests Trump voters were less likely to have done the reading or the problem sets—or to have thought about them.
The person who thinks carefully about the Trumpian gulf between fantasy and reality doesn’t have to have gone to university. But such is the relation to thinking that universities systematically teach and also insist upon. A B.A. is a wager: it increases the odds of thinking through an issue in a way that confronts and works through one’s feelings, especially negative feelings of anger and resentment of the kind that drives the Trump crusade.
With this orientation towards thinking, a voter will, I believe, have a harder time convincing themselves that Trump, who they can see is a flaming plutocratic racist with overt hostility to women who reject sexual harassment, and who is the textbook definition of the authoritarian personality, was going to deliver prosperity to the honest working class. That’s how I read those graphs.
Whatever the New Left for 2030 is going to be, it will have to reinstall real education as the basis for democratized policy on climate, inequality, and everything else. This means some kind of higher education for absolutely everyone, no questions asked, no preconditions about mind or motive, and entirely debt free.
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