Review of Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics by Matthew Grossman and Daniel Hopkins (Cambridge University Press, 2024)
After being warned not to flaunt his intellectual prowess during an upcoming event, fictional president Jed Bartlett — Nobel Prize winner in economics — quipped back to his press secretary, “Yes, God forbid that while speaking to 60,000 public-school students, the president should appear smart!” Moments later, Bartlett, portrayed by Martin Sheen, boasted that he could convert temperatures from Fahrenheit to Celsius in his head. Rather than gag at the moment’s pomposity, viewers of Aaron Sorkin’s liberal fantasy political drama The West Wing were intended to swoon.
Since the show first aired in the fall of 1999, Bartlett’s embodiment of technocracy and cultural elitism has found an increasingly welcome home in the Democratic Party. Inspired by this managerial ethos, the party has pushed growing numbers of less-educated Americans from flyover country into the MAGA ranks. Political scientists Matthew Grossman and Daniel Hopkins explore this shift in their immensely helpful and, given recent events, extremely topical new book, Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics.
Grossman and Hopkins argue that education polarization over the last two decades has caused the most significant shift in partisan voting since the Republican takeover of formerly Democratic Southern…
Auteur: Jared Abbott
