Educated rage

American polarisation: part 2

Continued from yesterday

To the historian Eric Hobsbawm, the expansion of western universities was as seismic an event as the disappearance of the peasantry. Across the West the proportion of people in higher education trebled in the post-war period, with a doubling in the number of American students from 1955 to 1974. In some countries it increased by as much as nine-fold.

Today, higher education is associated with liberal and radical politics, but it was not always the case. Controlling for all other variables, having a college diploma in the mid-20^th century made a citizen of a western democracy more likely to vote for parties of the right. One study of political manifestos from 300 elections found that a big political divide began to open in the 1970s, and ‘the salience of cultural issues… increase[d] just as college graduates became an electorally significant demographic.’ The same paper found that ‘as cultural conflict became more prominent, educated professionals became more left-wing’ and by 2020, this pattern was to be found in all western countries. The ‘culture wars’ were born.

The end of the peasantry is one analogy, but another might be the end of the priesthood and its replacement by a clerisy. Many have compared the seismic changes in western society of our lifetimes to a ‘second reformation’ and the expansion of higher education has played a central part - not just in fuelling these culture wars, but in making both sides more extreme and intolerant.