Educated voters’ leftward shift is surprisingly old and international

This topic is anemic without going back to the historical foundations of "left" and "right" wings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left%E2%80%93right_political_s...

ianai• 5 years ago

From there:

The terms "left" and "right" appeared during the French Revolution of 1789 when members of the National Assembly divided into supporters of the king to the president's right and supporters of the revolution to his left. One deputy, the Baron de Gauville, explained: "We began to recognize each other: those who were loyal to religion and the king took up positions to the right of the chair so as to avoid the shouts, oaths, and indecencies that enjoyed free rein in the opposing camp".

beebeepka2• 5 years ago

From the same wiki article:

Beginning in the early twentieth century, the terms "left" and "right" came to be associated with specific political ideologies and were used to describe citizens' political beliefs, gradually replacing the terms "reds" and "the reaction". The words Left and Right were at first used by their opponents as slurs.

vinceguidry3• 5 years ago

The most salient split in politics these days is between leftism and liberalism. Leftism is about a direction, liberalism is about a philosophy. The split is similarly old and international.

What we call liberalism nowadays is probably better called progressivism.

beebeepka2• 5 years ago

What's the difference between "direction" and "philosophy" in this context?

imtringued• 5 years ago

It's completely unsurprising and much older than 1970. Hitler had a general disdain against the "educated elite" and according to old data a lot of Jews were highly educated.

friendly_chap• 5 years ago

I often see the reasoning that the right is less educated as proof that they are the wrong unwashed masses.

What I do not see mentioned, that experts of propaganda clearly know that more educated people are more susceptible to propaganda.

For those who want sources for this, please refer to Jacques Ellul: Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes.

This is my own wording (and like a poor one): for propaganda to work, the population must be educated. There is little room to inject your machinations to the simple and straightforward thought processes of less educated men.

Those who deal with more abstract and complex thought, the more educated, are easier to lead astray with minutiae.

For a contemporary example, just look at MMT and the mother of all bubbles forming right now. A simple man might say if you print more money, money will be worth less. He would be at a high level quite right. Even if he gets many details wrong. The more educated mind might be more inclined to try to understand QE, money velocity, money supply etc, to the point where in the end he is probably less wise than the simple man.

"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."

chhickman• 5 years ago

There's no shortage of very striking counter-examples to what you're saying in recent events. I think it's far more accurate to say that the educated can be led astray by complex ideas that are difficult to prove and the uneducated equally likely to be led astray by ideas that are laughably easy to disprove.

js8• 5 years ago

There is education and "education". I think the general understanding what it means to be educated (in this context) is that the people have been exposed different philosophical worldviews, from the left to right, and they can choose from these.

In this sense, middle-class is often uneducated, despite receiving education. For example, neoclassical economics was (and still is) often taught in economic schools at the expense of economic history and political economy, which are more colorful. How many basic economic textbooks talk about Cambridge Capital Controversy before using word "capital"?

For a contemporary example, just look at MMT and the mother of all bubbles forming right now. A simple man might say if you print more money, money will be worth less. He would be at a high level quite right.

A simple man might think that MMT is the cause, but it is rather an explanation of these bubbles. In MMT, money are endogenous, and the bubble originates outside of the government control. The people who applied QE knew very well, that the neoclassical monetarist theory is no use, because they came from praxis (central banks). They were educated in the practice, not in theory, and it told them that theory is useless (and dangerous). Of course they could have used helicopter money than QE to banks with the same or even greater effect (as Steve Keen recommended), but it wasn't quite in their self-interest.

So the problem with "simple man" is that he assumes there are only two sides in the argument. The crisis of 2008 itself shows there are not - there was neoclassical monetarists and people believing in them, despite this being empirically wrong; then there was central bankers (and other politicians at the revolving door), who knew better, wanted to save the economy, but didn't care about the common man; and finally, there was a common man, who got into debt, because he was told so, and now was confused why banks are being saved and not him. So he opened economic textbook, found about Friedman and Hayek, and was like, ha, I knew you're doing something nefarious!

nextstep2• 5 years ago

The saying goes, once you learn enough history you either become a Marxist or a liar.

The man whose name is now synonymous with “smart” has a nice essay about this:

“Why Socialism?”, by Albert Einstein https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/

benjohnson• 5 years ago

Das Capital should be read by everybody - after they turn 40 and have some experience.

In my opinion, it's a dangerous read, because it will turn you into a fire breathing totalitarian if you don't see the subtle flaws in it.

nextstep2• 5 years ago

What are those subtle flaws? I’m not yet 40 so I guess I’m gullible like Einstein.

the_third_wave6• 5 years ago

Another saying goes like this:

If a person is not a liberal when he is twenty, he has no heart; if he is not a conservative when he is forty, he has no head.

https://freakonomics.com/2011/08/25/john-adams-said-it-first...

naruvimama3• 5 years ago

Educated people tend to hold white collar jobs. They are less affected by inflation, illegal immigration, corruption but have a greater pressure to virtue signal.

throw0101a2• 5 years ago

Piketty goes over the numbers in his book Capital and Ideology in several chapters:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_and_Ideology

(His earlier Capital in the Twenty-First Century is more well-known.)

the_third_wave6• 5 years ago

Have a look around the average university campus, look at the curriculum. Is it any surprise that those who went through these institutions come out ideologically lopsided? This is true for most of the countries I have experience with, it even holds true for a large part of pre-university education. Add to this the more recent phenomenon of trying to label all those who do not keep within the (narrow and shifting) window of allowed opinions and the recipe for producing an ideological monoculture is complete.

To me this is a sign of these institutions failing in their duties. It this situation does not get remedied it will lead to the creation of new institutions which welcome those who do not wish to align themselves with the current dogma, something akin to the way the Protestant church was founded out of disagreements with Catholic dogma.

therobot245• 5 years ago

> Have a look around the average university campus, look at the curriculum.

not sure what you mean here, what exactly are you postulating? Is it that there's a bias in any university curriculum? Is it that a large group of a younger (primarily 18-25) demographic create an echo chamber or that there's peer pressure to a specific ideology?

There's a lot to unpack in your comment, and it all appears that it isn't really in good faith.

naruvimama3• 5 years ago

It is true, the left has no bars when it comes to pushing its agenda into the curricula. Even targeting children for social engineering.

the_third_wave6• 5 years ago

The mere fact that someone does not hold with leftist ideology does not imply this criticism is "not in good faith", the opposite is actually true.

Yes, the university curriculum - and especially the humanities - is a left-wing echo chamber. If you do not agree I'd like you to show me some proof in the form of neutral or conservative courses in these fields. Why do you even try to deny this fact, seeing as to how this is so obvious? If there were to be a place for a "not in good faith" accusation it would be far more towards your reply than to my original comment.

Also, there is nothing to "unpack", the message is clear and honest: universities are currently - and have been for a long time - largely left-leaning, especially in the humanities but more recently also more in other fields.

therobot245• 5 years ago

for those who didn't read the article here's some quotes:

Thomas Piketty, an economist, became famous for a book that analysed 200 years of data on wealth inequality in a wide range of countries. This month he published a paper, co-written by Amory Gethin and Clara Martínez-Toledano, which applies a similar approach to the relationship between demography and ideology. Its findings imply that the electoral victories of Donald Trump and the Brexit campaign in 2016 were not an abrupt departure from precedent, but rather the consequence of a 60-year-old international trend.

Opening credentials

In 1955 both the richest and the most educated voters tended to support conservative parties. Conversely, both poorer and less-educated people mostly chose labour or social-democratic ones. Today, wealthy people still lean to the right. In contrast, the relationship between education and ideology began to reverse as early as the 1960s. Every year, the 10% of voters with the most years of schooling gravitated towards left-wing parties, while the remaining 90% slid the other way. By 2000, this had gone on for so long that, as a group, the most educated voters became more left-wing than their less-educated peers. The gap has only grown since then. This trend is strikingly consistent. It developed just as fast in the 20th century as in the 21st, and appears in almost every Western democracy studied. This includes both two-party systems and proportional ones, in which green parties now lure educated voters, and nativist parties attract the less educated.

This isn't just because of trump and while current right-wing narratives hate on universities for being echo chambers, the research says this shift has been occurring for a long time.

Although the authors do not identify a cause for this trend, the simplest explanation is that it stems from growing educational attainment. In 1950 less than 10% of eligible voters in America and Europe had graduated from college.

This makes sense, institutions have largely had a consistent mission (we could maybe argue with the access to federal loans there's been more change to cash in while they can), however access has been increasing significantly over the last 70ish years.

bitshiftfaced2• 5 years ago

Over the last century, there's been a trend of more jobs in education coming more from public dollars. We now live in a world where those, whose job it is to instruct students and form ideas in their minds, depend on the system to exist for their job to exist. It's no surprise that the product of a system that relies on an ideology should be biased toward that ideology.

david38• 5 years ago

We also have a system that is far more complex than before and requires education in many fields to understand it.

Our system requires an unprecedented level of cooperation between orgs and governments which appears to be more the left wing style of thinking (sort of). It’s difficult to have these growing nations with resource scarcity and still have a “hands off” policy.

bitshiftfaced2• 5 years ago

Not sure what you're trying to say. I wasn't making a comment on whether the system is needed or not, or good or bad, only that the existence of bias should be no surprise.

naruvimama3• 5 years ago

I forgot to include. Leftist are like the mafia, they recruit their own and place them in positions of power like universities.

You can see their behavior on these comment thread, meticulously down voting comments that are not in their favor.

If they spent that kind of effort in actual doing some good for the poor, nobody would complain.

Universities are churning out champagne socialists.

Educated voters’ leftward shift is surprisingly old and international

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