River Thames, London on December 24, 2015

U.S. culture has always been friendly to attacks on education as elitist.  

This hostility to education and to the educated was temporarily dampened by the economy after World War II. US dominance of world manufacturing meant that non-college people could find good and growing wages. The booming "technostructure" of white collar jobs rewarded college degrees with good and growing salaries. 

College was a ticket to the good life so it was hard for politicians to attack it. Republicans were partially disarmed because college grads voted Republican.   Meanwhile, non-college whites could also get into the middle class with a factory job, so resentment of college’s wage premium was harder to stoke.  

That anomalous period has been over for decades. Reaganism and then Clintonism imposed anti-egalitarian economic policies that withdrew affluence from the working classes—right as the white supermajority began to fade.  On their side, university managers oversold and in fact mis-sold learning as earning. 

Today, with college wages not assured even in exchange for high tuition and student debt, human capital theory reads as a long con on working people. Republicans have long redefined expertise—and university-style analysis and critique—as attacks on heartland values and equally on the entrepreneurial will, the sole source of progress and national wealth.

It’s not surprising that knowledge hatred is in full flower. It is driven by and supports the sultanistic oligarchy that Trump, Musk, Thiel, Andreessen, et al. are seeking to establish.  

Whether the subject is cryptocurrency, “AI,” decarbonization, taxes, or immigration, we regularly see a defiant refusal to think things through. This is in part in emulation of Trump himself.  He flamboyantly disdains the analytical part, jumps on the conclusion he wants, and then forces it to be the situation’s truth.  He talked nonsense all the way to the White House, twice.

Pride in thinking badly creates disasters large and small. One example comes from reporting by Eli Saslow and Erin Schaff about a Mexican-American named Jaime Cachua in Rome, Georgia.

He sat at his kitchen table in rural Georgia across from his father-in-law, Sky Atkins, the family patriarch. Jaime, 33, hadn’t seen his own father since he was 10 months old, when he left Mexico in a car seat bound for the United States. It was Sky, 45, who had stood by Jaime at his wedding, helped him move into his first house and stayed at the hospital overnight when one of Jaime’s children was sick with pneumonia.

“There’s nothing to stop them from rounding me up once he takes office,” Jaime said.

Sky had spent much of his adulthood preparing to protect his family in a crisis. He’d learned survival tactics in the Army and had trained in hand-to-hand combat as a Georgia corrections officer. In the last few years, as he sensed the country becoming more polarized and volatile, he’d built up a small collection of firearms and a cache of emergency supplies. He’d been anticipating a moment when the government might rise up against his family, but this particular crisis was one he’d helped to create.

“I’m going to be straight with you,” he told Jaime. “I voted for Trump. I believe in a lot of what he says.”

“I figured as much,” Jaime said. “You and just about everyone else around here.”

“It’s about protecting our rights as a sovereign country,” Sky said. “We need to shut down the infiltration on the border. It’s not about you.”

“It is about me,” Jaime said. “That’s the thing I don’t understand.”

Sky Atkins filled his brain with Trump's fake knowledge about liberals and the border and voted to deport his own son-in-law.  

I’ve cited Masha Gessen's de facto tag line for this set of posts, “Rejection of genuine expertise is both a precondition and a function of autocracy.” This rejection needs to be fought. It is damaging societies everywhere, very much including the United States.

However, this injunction to prevent the rejection of expertise stumbles on the many problems with expertise itself.  Expertise generated the forty-years war on race-based affirmative action. Expertise installed neoliberalism as a fact of economic nature.  Expertise helped create the political paralysis in most wealthy countries with its constitutive suspicion of popular intelligence and public demands.

I too have critiqued expertise at length—critiqued specific, dominant, incredibly powerful uses of expertise. Unmaking the Public University took on the war on affirmative action. "Racial Equality after Affirmative Action" critiqued the professional war on equality. A chapter in The Limits of the Numerical attacked the Clintonite (and Obaman) use of economic modeling to undermine the non-college working class. Another chapter in that volume (with Aashish Mehta) explored expert quantification’s suppression of the non-pecuniary benefits of education that aim at intellectual capability for the whole population.  All the chapters in the collectively-authored Metrics that Matter critique the expert metrics (wages by major, selectivity) that the experts have used to miseducate the public about the benefits of education.  I’m unambivalently pro-university as such, pro-expertise as such, pro-thinking even when J.D. Vance is doing it, and yet my god the labor required to distinguish between good and bad modes of expertise.  At some point it starts to feel like protesting too much and washing blood off one’s hands.

So, yes, many forms of expertise have weakened society and wrongly helped disempower the wider population.  I’m sure Gessen would agree that the expertise we defend is an expertise we also rebuild. (See their piece on the battle between Supreme Court legal vs. medical expertise on healthcare for transgender people.) Expertise is often its own worst enemy, especially when it is an enemy of exactly the everyday standpoint knowledge on which our so-called democracy actually depends. 

Another example of the problem appears in an essay of Roderick Ferguson’s earlier this year.  It the course of a discussion of the State of Florida’s attack on the teaching of race and race in history, he invokes an essay on intellectuals by Edward Said: 

Said pointed to how professionalism pulls back the self at the very moment that it should be launched into critical thinking and ethical commitments. Professionalism is how we habituate ourselves to lines of thought that are organized to protect the status quo. It fosters a notion of responsibility that fixes people’s gaze on profession[alism] and its criteria for good behavior. Presuming its job is to deliver people to the mainstream, professionalism rarely brings them to alternative destinations, ones that try to achieve something other than the given order. As a result, professionalism promotes notions of responsibility that are antithetical to the forms of responsibility . . . that are presumed in ancestral sources. Indeed, as professionalism lures people—especially minoritized individuals—from more critical routes, it reveals itself to be a terrain ripe for ethical, intellectual, political, and existential crises.

 Ferguson’s title is, “An Interruption of Our Cowardice,” and that is indeed the thing that experts must now seek.

My basic view is that the U.S. needs a revolution in its knowledge culture, from anti-knowledge to systematically pro. This must be a popular revolution in the sense that it transforms a key institution of knowledge –the university—while preserving and redirecting its resources, its base knowledges, its intensities, its collaborations, its spaces of actual thinking, bringing the full public into contact with these and learning much better than it currently does from that public. 

This talk of “actual thinking” is awkward in the liberal arts, since we are all constructivists now.  Who are we to say J.D Vance is anti-knowledge? He's a Yale law grad and he's pro knowledge-- pro his knowledge and Trump's knowledge.  If we can't wave around a simple picture of anti-knowledge how can we say he's part of a "rejection of genuine expertise"?

Well, in Vance's case we can wave around a picture of him refusing to admit that Joe Biden was elected president in 2020.  The same goes for Trump times 10,000. Also the broligarchs, et al. that surround them.  The more complicated cases of anti-knowledge knowledge just take more work to expose and replace.

Everyday people—“non-college” as we now call them—do serious thinking routinely: child care, car repair, shop-floor process flow, delivery routes, gardening, a friend’s alcoholism, you name it, serious thinking takes place or happiness and survival don't occur.

Take Sky Atkins' not linking Trump's deportation rhetoric to the deportation of his Dreamer son-in-law.  

In reality, Atkins is perfectly capable of enacting "genuine expertise.” He did this with his martial training. He can think, ok, my family member Jaime is undocumented and then study up on what to do. He can read official government documents about Jamie's legal limbo. He can read expert commentary on current Dreamer legal issues rather than rely on podcast, Facebook, and TV sources. He can steep himself in the details of the immigration process that Jaime has already undertaken and help him strategize about it.  He can think through the likely effects on Jamie of a Trump win. He can come to a judgment about likely Trump effects by weighing pros and cons.  

Atkins might ponder deeply and then decide that were America rid of 10 million undocumented people and his son-in-law is gone with them, then so be it. 

Or he might support mass deportation but assume that it will never affect Jaime—as he seems to do. But he can and should test such conclusions with friends and family, and take on board negative feedback. 

He can take this feedback or do further reading and rethinking and then plausibly and logically conclude that though he believes in “a lot of what Trump says,” he really shouldn’t actually vote for Trump. He could also tell his friends why he won’t vote Trump and why they shouldn’t either.

  

This general process is easy enough to explain to anyone.  It means investigating a claim to see if it holds up or not.  

The process isn’t peculiar to software engineering or literary criticism, but is part of everyone’s everyday life. Are eggs really cheaper at that other store today?  This needs looking into. People have procedures for doing that. Show me the parent who is not an expert on comparative pricing. 

Thinking doesn’t deny or purge emotions (“The Democrats couldn’t care less when I can’t afford eggs”) but works with emotions and works them through. This should mean, in voting, studying enough in this field of interest, food prices, to create a few more sentences in one's head (“my town used to have 12 groceries stores and now they’re 8.  And they all seem to be owned by 2 or 3 chains”). 

Professional intellectuals have the same obligation to think, and we are as good at skipping thought as any other group. This skipped thinking gets into public discourse that pisses off tens of millions of people because they know it’s wrong.  

Exhibit A this year was “inflation is under control.” This came from price statistics whose model has flaws and which is also detached from the kind of standpoint experience that made voters not believe it.  We know how this worked out. 

Again, it takes work to understand things. Organized expertise offers short cuts, because you can figure things out faster and more accurately if you know the subject, the methods, the other people who know similar things, and previous successful solutions. This applies whether you’re in high energy physics or bulk food purchasing. 

Expertise is the result of labor, not of elite status. This needs to be pointed out all day long, especially during an administration that will be hostile both to labor as such and to labor that generates inconvenient truths.

For me the key is the collective stance toward knowledge coupled with the ethos of knowledge that the collective stance accrues.  Having a pro-knowledge stance is the life-and-death difference between pretty good knowledge and knowledge that gets a lot of people harmed or killed.  

Creating this stance and its rebuilt institutions is something that professionals and non-college people will have to do together.  We need each other to do this right.

Santa Barbara, Calif. on October 31, 2019

I’ve shifted to a good-news / bad-news stance towards the Trump victory. 

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.