How education, religion & gender have redrawn America’s political map
The Washington Post and others published details of a shift in the political landscape that is affecting the 2024 election and all aspects of American issue and culture.
The Washington Post reports says affluent D.C. suburb of Fairfax County, Virginia, once leaned Republican. In 2000, George W. Bush won the county by 1.4 percent, or 5,860 votes. But by 2020, Democrat Joe Biden claimed it by a staggering 42-point margin.
Such a dramatic swing in one of the nation’s wealthiest counties points to a deeper reconfiguration of American political identity — one in which education, not income brackets, increasingly determines party loyalty. As the proportion of college-educated residents in Fairfax County surged — reaching more than 60 percent by 2020 — so did Democratic vote share.
The declining salience of class represents perhaps the most consequential political shift of the past century in the United States, altering the very nature of the partisan divide in the process. From the end of World War II until 2012, Whites among the top 5 percent of income earners were the most likely to vote Republican. Not only is this no longer the case, the pattern has reversed almost entirely. Now, the top 5 percent are the least likely to vote Republican. Meanwhile, Democrats are losing working-class White voters by a 2-1 margin. In short, a growing number of Americans are voting against their traditional class interests. What exactly happened? The number of Americans with bachelor’s degrees increased exponentially from about 6 percent in 1950 to around 38 percent today. Higher education is strongly associated with liberal attitudes on cultural issues. For instance, 69 percent of college graduates oppose overturning Roe v. Wade, compared with only 47 percent of those without a degree. In another survey, 45 percent of college degree holders — compared with 29 percent of those without — say it is extremely or very important to identify someone by their new gender pronouns. Even among Democrats the divides can be stark: 44 percent of those without a bachelor’s degree believe America is “the greatest country in the world.” Only 25 percent of Democrats with a degree say the same.
And, as LifeNews reports, New Study: Young Men 18-34 are Becoming More Conservative.
As the Democratic Party has become dominated by the upwardly mobile and the highly educated — and shaped by their sensibilities — the more socially progressive it has become and the more it has defined itself around cultural rather than class concerns. This, in effect, widens the values gap between the parties, with one party progressing and the other largely staying put.
There is continued debate as to whether — and how — education might spur such shifts. One innovative study examined sibling pairs in which only one attended university, finding that a college degree significantly liberalized attitudes on questions of individual choice, tolerance and gender equality. Rather than direct “indoctrination” by professors, as some Republicans claim, the mechanism appears more subtle, with “social interactions in the classroom, extracurricular activities, and residential life” conditioning students toward live-and-let-live sensibilities.
This educational polarization has coincided with a second profound shift in the liberal political imagination. Social liberalism among Democrats has made them more skeptical of the role of religion — specifically Christianity — in public life. This, too, is relatively new, much of it occurring over the past two decades. If there was a secular dream, it was that as religion retreated, American politics would become more rational and reasonable. Citizens would spend their time improving people’s lives instead of fighting about whose religion was better. That didn’t happen. Instead, polarization intensified. Part of the reason is that secularization has not been equally distributed, mapping instead onto preexisting divisions around education and geography, as well as party affiliation.
A distinct group of American “secularists” who are openly distrustful of any public religion — more than 10 percent of the population and growing — is a dominant force within the Democratic Party.
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