Deep Dive with Shawn C. Fettig

Degrees of Division: Higher Education and Political Sorting in America (Featuring Dr. David Hopkins)

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In this episode of Deep Dive, we examine the growing educational divide driving polarization in American politics and its implications for democracy. Dr. David Hopkins, co-author of the book Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics, joins the pod to explain how college attainment correlates with political alignment and explores cultural factors contributing to this complex landscape. We dig into:

• how the diploma divide influences voter behavior and party affiliation;
• if/how higher education shapes cultural and political identities; 
• how populism connects with working-class cultural concerns; 
• the fact that urban areas lean Democratic; rural areas gravitate towards
  Republicans;
• the perceived liberal bias in academia fuels skepticism among conservatives;
  and 
• how/why dialogue and empathy are vital for bridging educational divides.

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Dr. Hopkins:

Conservatives aren't wrong when they see academia as a profession and sector that's not inherently friendly to their point of view. Where they're not quite right is the idea that this is why people with college degrees are more left-of-center is that they get indoctrinated on campus to be so. There isn't a lot of evidence that students change their politics in a strongly liberal direction between the moment they enroll in college and the moment they graduate.

Shawn:

Welcome to Deep Dive with me, s C Fettig. This isn't a shocker, but in recent years, the United States has become increasingly polarized, with deep divides cutting across political, cultural and geographic lines. One of the most striking divisions, and perhaps consequential, especially in this last presidential election, is the growing partisan gap between Americans with college degrees and those without. This educational divide is reshaping the nation's political landscape, influencing not only electoral outcomes but also the broader health of democracy. The polarized educational divide isn't just about differing levels of knowledge or access to opportunities, although it is that. It's also about how education shapes political identities and values. College-educated Americans are more likely to adopt progressive cultural and political views, aligning them with the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, those without college degrees, particularly white working-class voters, have increasingly shifted toward the Republican Party, drawn by appeals to cultural conservatism and populism. This sorting has created a stark partisan divide rooted in education, with profound implications for governance and political strategy. Outside of electoral implications, the consequences of which we will all be living through for at least the next four years, this matters in other ways and for other reasons too. This educational divide fuels resentment and misunderstanding between groups, making compromise and consensus even harder to achieve. It also exacerbates the geographic sorting of political preferences, as urban, highly educated areas lean Democratic, while rural, less educated regions align with Republicans. This sorting amplifies polarization in Congress and weakens incentives for bipartisanship, and the divide threatens the democratic process itself. When parties are increasingly aligned along rigid demographic and cultural lines, the stakes of elections grow dangerously high and trust in institutions suffers. The result is a fractured electorate, less willing to engage in dialogue or even accept electoral outcomes.

Shawn:

My guest today is Dr David Hopkins, associate professor in the political science department at Boston College and co-author of the book Polarized by Degrees how the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics. We discuss this educational divide, how it plays out in elections, if higher education is liberally biased and, if so, how we can fix it, and what it all means for the future of American democracy. All right, if you like this episode, or any episode, please give it a like, share and follow on your favorite podcast platform and or subscribe to the podcast on YouTube. And, as always, if you have any thoughts, questions or comments, please feel free to email me at deepdivewithshawn at gmailcom. Let's do a deep dive, dr Hopkins. Thanks for being here. How are you?

Dr. Hopkins:

Doing very well, s, thanks so much for having me.

Shawn:

Absolutely, I'm kind of excited to have you over the last. Well, not kind of, I am excited, but over the last few weeks I've had a couple of different guests on to help me understand some of the underlying things that might be happening in our electoral politics or that is showing up in our elections that we might be undervaluing as being somewhat important. And so last week I talked to someone about the decline of unions and how that's kind of reshaped the electorate by way of example. But you know, elections have narratives that are assigned to them. Sometimes they're driven by the candidate or the party themselves. In advance of an election they design their strategy, design their platform, how they're going to message that, how they want to frame the election.

Shawn:

The media also plays a role here. So in this last election there was a lot of time and energy put into framing around a gender gap democracy versus authoritarianism, the Latino vote and then after an election, sometimes new narratives emerge in the I guess postmortem about what really happened or maybe what didn't happen. So you know, as we look back at this past election, it looks like maybe the gender gap wasn't really any more wide than it has been in other recent elections. But that, all being said, you know, like I led with, there are other dynamics at play that don't always get the attention that they probably deserve. So you study some of this stuff, so I want to pick your brain about it. So, given your work on populism, the culture, wars, the realignment of voters, particularly along educational lines, how?

Dr. Hopkins:

do you explain the outcome of the November election? Well, elections are always kind of a product of both short-term and long-term trends and dynamics, and I think if we want to explain 2024, in the short term, the easy explanation is Americans were dissatisfied with the economy, and generally when that occurs, it's bad news for the ruling party. And if you look at really any reputable source of public opinion data, you saw pretty deep dissatisfaction and pessimism with the economic performance of the country, arguably even more than would be sort of expected based on the objective performance of the economy. But people's perceptions were that the economy was very much going in the wrong direction. They were unhappy about inflation in particular, and so it shouldn't be a shock that this was a tough environment for the Democrats.

Dr. Hopkins:

But then there's also the long-term story, and you mentioned education polarization, which I'll say right off the top, is my obsession of the moment and the subject of my most recent book with Matt Grossman, which is a trend that's now sort of entering its third decade in American politics, which is a steady divergence, partisan divergence, separating voters with college degrees from voters without college degrees, and this is also not a unique trend to the United States.

Dr. Hopkins:

It's happening most places around the world, and especially almost everywhere in the developed, rich, democratic West, and the big kind of development in 2024 was not just that this trend continued in general, which is not such a surprise, but also, very importantly, we saw unmistakable signs that it was extending beyond just white voters to black and Latino voters as well, especially Latinos, and that therefore, this was a trend we shouldn't just treat as restricted to one ethnic group, but that really was a broader development across the electorate and since there are more people who did not graduate from college than did graduate from college, and because, especially among the non-white population, you had a lot of former Democratic supporters who do not have college degrees, therefore the poaching by the Republicans. This also, of course, played into Trump's victory in terms of giving him a new source of votes that had not previously been there for Republican candidates.

Shawn:

So I want to talk a little bit about something that I think I mean I'm going to put myself in the. Well, I'm not going to put myself, I just am in the educated, I guess firing line, as it were, and so I don't know if I'm coming from what is a somewhat elitist position or perspective, or have that perspective. But I feel like there's a dynamic that's emerged that's becoming particularly potent in our elections, and that is the dynamic between, and the interplay between, economic concerns and quote unquote culture, war concerns, and it's been part of our politics since, you know, time immemorial. And maybe it's just that we have evolved, or we think that we've evolved so much as a society that when these two are at play in past I think about when queer rights were becoming a much bigger issue in the late 80s and the 90s and early 2000s I think it was easier as a society when we were pitting economy versus culture in determining our vote. It was easier for us to accept the idea that people would give the economy more weight.

Shawn:

Right, and so, even though they might disagree on a culture type issue, they would still vote based on the economy, and that might be a vote against themselves to some degree, but I feel like now these have become so salient that it's difficult for me to wrap my head around the idea that a I don't know how to phrase this without sounding like a real asshole, but that a decent person would vote for someone like Trump, based solely on economy, given some of the you know rhetoric that is so culturally demeaning and socially demeaning to people. So I guess where I'm going with all of this is do you think this is just an elitist type view, or does it fit into that camp, or is there something more to that?

Dr. Hopkins:

Yeah, there's a tradition of us kind of treating economic interests and economic beliefs and views and preferences as kind of one dimension you know, one kind of ideological dimension and cultural beliefs, values, preferences, interests as being a kind of separate dimension. And there's some validity to that in that there are people who line up more with one party on one set of issues and more, on the, you know, with the other on the other set of issues. But there's also evidence that there's interplay between them and that, for example, people who feel more economically vulnerable often are more open to culturally conservative political messages. And if you look, for example, at the issue of immigration and globalization, which is driving so much of our politics right now, you really see this interplay of, on the one hand, seeing immigration and globalization as an economic threat to the working class of America, as a source of economic competition and the outsourcing of jobs. But you also, of course, have a very strong cultural component to that issue, about sort of concerns that diversity and migration threaten the ethnic composition of the country, threaten the cultural values of the country, and so people don't necessarily make a clean break in their own minds.

Dr. Hopkins:

Along those two lines and one of the reasons I think that Trump has had such success with the working class and even not just the white working class, but the working class in this country has been that he has departed from the kind of traditional conservative economic message which was that government programs that help the working class were too generous and should be cut, which was the sort of the position of the sort of common philosophical, limited government Republican Party for a long time.

Dr. Hopkins:

But that was a real vulnerability for them. Anytime they wanted to try to kind of, you know, attract working class support, was that the Democrats could always come in and say, yeah, but these people want to cut your Social Security, they want to cut your Medicare, they want to, you know, deprive you of health insurance. And one of the, I think, underappreciated strengths that Trump has had as a politician is that he long recognized that this was, whatever other merits you might have to small government conservatism, not a popular electoral position to take. And so he simply has jettisoned that from the sort of Republican Party platform, the Republican Party emphasis, and he has not proposed or attempted to deprive, to cut Social Security benefits or to deprive people of Medicare coverage or these other sorts of things, and that has, I think, freed him to ground his appeal to the working class more on the cultural issues where their proclivities line up better with the kind of conservative cultural message.

Shawn:

I think in my camp it's easy for us to I don't know that we're confused, but it's easy for us to paint these voters that care about the messaging coming from Trump or are inclined to believe the messaging coming from Trump and, I guess, by the Republican Party at large these days, as it relates to government intervention and programming and you know, quote unquote welfare programming and taking care of working class voters, et cetera, as just rhetoric, and that these voters themselves are being hoodwinked. And in that regard, then, these voters are voting against their own best interests. Right, we hear that all the time, but we might be missing something in that Trump actually is delivering beyond just the rhetoric, and I'm not sure what is happening here, if people are voting against their own best interests or if the Republican Party under Trump is actually evolving to be something productive for these voters.

Dr. Hopkins:

You know I personally am always reluctant to define in my own mind what someone else's best interests are. I find that often just puts you in a place where it's difficult to get out of, because interests, in my view in politics, are not just about economic interests and they're not just about the dollars and cents that you can measure in terms of, like, the budget of a social program or something like that. All of us have, and I think we can recognize this in ourselves. We're motivated by things beyond just which party promises us the, you know, the most money and the most generous benefits. We think politics is about more than that and we think that our interests are not just that narrowly defined, that they also go to things like social status and social respect, acceptance, symbolic gestures of affinity. So I think that you know there's a common.

Dr. Hopkins:

You know progressives in particular are sometimes just sort of mystified by working class conservatism because they sort of define their own political movement as kind of objectively sticking up for the interests of the working class. But I think again, class conservatism, because they sort of define their own political movement as kind of objectively sticking up for the interests of the working class. But I think again once you get beyond economic redistribution. There are other sets of interests where maybe progressives don't speak for the interests of all members of the working class, and certainly from the point of view of the working class, I mean, this is objectively true. They are decreasingly likely to believe that the Democratic Party speaks for their interests, and so that's something we need to understand, and I can appreciate that for progressives that's a source of frustration.

Dr. Hopkins:

But it seems to me that the first step in trying to resolve the issue is to kind of sort of understand what it looks like from the perspective of these working class voters who, I do think, see Trump as speaking for their interests, and not just their economic interests but their overall social and cultural worldview as well, and they see a Democratic Party as increasingly disconnected from their interests, and I think that's part of the story.

Dr. Hopkins:

Now, of course, there's a countervailing trend that's important as well among educated people, people with college degrees, who used to be mostly Republican, that they have become more alienated from the Republican Party under Trump. They used to think Republicans, you know, spoke for their interests, and they too have revisited their traditional partisan ties, and that's where, to the advantage of the Democrats and the left in, you know, in among the more educated and affluent segment of the electorate. So it hasn't been obviously only in one direction. But I do think that part of the reason so many people find our current political moment so baffling is that they sort of impose a logic on the worldview of some of their fellow citizens that the citizens themselves don't actually, you know, don't actually share.

Shawn:

So we can follow this thread a little bit because I want to dig into and understand a bit better the I don't know, maybe emerging cleave as it relates to partisanship and higher levels of education. But one of the arguments that you make in Polarized by Degrees, is that people with higher levels of education are more likely to consistently engage in partisan behavior. And I want to place this against what you just said, because I think what I hear is that this might not in what you just said about conservatives, that conservatives with higher levels of education are perhaps leaving the Trump Republican Party, and so this argument seems to cut against what is happening as it relates to conservatives with higher levels of education. So I want to give you a little bit of space to kind of explain you know this finding as it relates to partisanship and partisan behavior based on levels of education, and then what might be happening or evolving with conservatives as it relates to it.

Dr. Hopkins:

Sure, you know, the relationship between education and opinions on cultural issues is a longstanding you know it's a longstanding correlation, you know, going back all the way back to where we start to have reliable public opinion data in the mid-20th century, is that people with college degrees have more liberal cultural views than people without college degrees, especially on issues of race or gender or internationalism, or, you know, gay rights, abortion rights, all of those kinds of package, gun control, all those kind of package of what we generally call culture issues or cultural war issues. People with college degrees are, you know, are more left of center than people without. But in the past we had a party system that was mostly structured around economic interests and economic points of view, and so those people, though they were more liberal on those issues, still were predominantly Republicans compared to Democrats, because for them it was more salient that the Republicans were the party of laissez-faire economics. And the reverse was true. Among the working class. You had working class people who had more conservative cultural views, but they were still mostly Democrats, because what really mattered most to them was that the Democrats were the party of um, you know, of of big government, of of uh active um, amelioration of of economic um, of economic deprivation, um, and really what's happened over time has been that, you know, our politics has become more and more about the culture war, and so people are changing their you know the salience in their minds of what issues matter most to them, and that's really the primary explanation for why this diploma divide has gotten so large. And so a lot of people of higher education attainment were already moving away from the Republican Party even before Trump came along.

Dr. Hopkins:

But Trump sort of supercharged that trend because a lot of these people found him, in particular, objectionable. And you know, you sort of you see this in obviously certain circles of the conservative movement, which is sort of at the intellectual level, which is very much split over the question of whether Trump is, you know, a hero or a villain. And you have people who have considered themselves to be conservatives in the past, someone like Bill Kristol, for example, who once Trump comes along and say, well, you know, this is not the conservative movement I signed up for, I find Trump loathsome and I'm actually going to go over and support you know, I'm going to support Joe Biden, I'm going to support Kamala Harris, and so, again, that's a part and parcel of these larger social developments of, you know, a conservative movement that has moved in a populist direction which has alienated more intellectually-minded people, even people who used to consider themselves right of center, used to consider themselves Republican supporters, and so that's, that's had interesting implications at the, you know, among the, the higher ed, you know higher educated, you know sort of segment of of the population, but of course that's that's still a minority when we talk about the voting electorate overall. And and that trend has been, has been, you know, sort of counterweighted by the, the movement toward the Trump led Republican party among the, the segment of the, of the public without, without college degrees, um, and so again, this is um, you know it's. It's easy to tell a story here where it's all about, it's sort of all about Trump, um, and Trump is really just the center of everything. And, gosh, if Trump hadn't kind of semi-accidentally wound up being the nominee of the Republican Party in 2016, we'd live in a very different world.

Dr. Hopkins:

But where we think in the book, you know, a cautionary perspective should come for that set of assumptions is looking internationally, should come, for that set of assumptions is looking internationally. And you know, you look internationally. You see, well, gosh, similar kinds of things are happening at lots of other places. Right and the sort of Trump-esque figures and Trump-type movements populist nationalist movements are popping up all over the world, and the progressive or left of center parties and movements are increasingly adopting, you know, cultural stances that are more popular among educated people than less educated people again, all over the world and moving to the left, on issues of gender and race and immigration and LGBT rights. That's not unique to the United States either, and so the more you dig into it, in my view, the more you see it as well.

Dr. Hopkins:

This is just kind of the moment in history we're all living through.

Dr. Hopkins:

This is something that's sort of happening globally, as our species, if you will, sort of finds itself at a moment in time where these sorts of issues are important to people, where migration and economic global integration and secularism and progressive ideas about gender and race are just sort of being confronted and worked through everywhere, or almost everywhere around the world, and so then we should not be so surprised, I think, as we were at the time, that a Trump-like figure has come to dominate our politics and come to personify the conservative movement in America.

Dr. Hopkins:

It's really just one manifestation of a much bigger set of trends that, again, were already in motion before Trump came, that we sort of can see Trump as a consequence, and not just a cause, of all of this transformation. And I think, you know, if we sort of take that big picture, historical and global perspective, I think we can do a better job of kind of recognizing our moment, recognizing where we fit in and where the controversies of the day fit in, and I think that that's a valuable way to try to make sense of all the things we're seeing around us these days, of make sense of all the things we're seeing around us these days.

Shawn:

So one of the things that you know as it relates to how we think about higher education and the role that higher education can play in our personal lives and then, I suppose, by extension, our familial lives and society at large, is that, you know, higher education provides you a toolbox to success, right, to maybe attaining some element of the American dream or at least some middle class stability, right.

Shawn:

And I feel like what's happened, especially in kind of the right wing media, you know, I don't know echo chamber is this framing and I want to approach this from a different direction in a minute, but first you know this framing that higher education settings are liberally biased and, as a result of that, it feels like that's the lens through which a lot of maybe Biden to Trump or Obama to Trump voters are seeing higher education through, and that's a very different way to perceive of higher education and it feels to me as if that's fueling a cultural divide that is potentially existential to higher education, if it's not just that a significant chunk of the electorate sees higher education as not being an effective tool to success, but actually sees it as something threatening to them tool to success but actually sees it as something threatening to them.

Dr. Hopkins:

Yeah, we have a lot of data in the book that show that there's been a big turn against higher ed among Republicans over the last 15,. You know that faculty are overwhelmingly and administrators are overwhelmingly liberal, that they punish conservatives, that they have a biased worldview that they try to inculcate in students and you know that is obviously something, as you say, the conservative media and Republican politicians have very much encouraged this view. So Democrats traditionally, when they talk about higher ed, as you say, they sort of treat it as a kind of a stepping stone to success, upward mobility in the US, and of course, people do, to a large extent, perceive that as being the case. They do agree that it's easier to get ahead in America if you go to college, and that is one of the reasons most people who do go to college go is that they expect that they will make more money and have a higher social status after they complete their studies at college. And you know, overall, over time, as we show in the book, there has been a pretty dramatic increase in the share of Americans who attend college and graduate from college. That used to be a very rare experience if you go back a few generations. And now, even though it's, you know, most Americans have at least attended some college and approaching 40% of them now have graduated from a four-year college, and that's much higher than it has ever been before in history.

Dr. Hopkins:

But I do think that people on the left in the Democratic Party haven't always been sensitive to the idea that there are always going to be people who don't want to go to college. There are always going to be people who are skeptical of colleges and people who go to college, and what's their message for those people? And, you know, you've sort of belatedly in the last couple of years, have seen some Democratic politicians try to acknowledge that and try to. For example, we've had some governors, including here in my state of Massachusetts, reclassify some state jobs as no longer requiring a college degree, as a kind of a way to, you know, curry favor among non-college educated people, kind of a way to, you know, curry favor among among non-college educated people, and so you've seen a little bit of that. But there hasn't really been a, you know, a bigger rethinking of the, the message on education, other than, well, you should, you should get it, everybody should get as much as they can, because that's what you need to get ahead. A lot of people want to live in this country, want to live in a world where you don't have to get a college degree to get a good job, and you know what's the message for those people, and that's something I think the Democrats have struggled with a little bit more than the Republicans have. The Republicans have a message that says, yeah, college is not necessary, or it wouldn't be necessary if we didn't have so much immigration and globalization. So that's exactly where a lot of this, I think a lot of this conflict does lie that the parties increasingly do see higher ed differently, and this, I think, is starting to have policy effects If you look at what's happening, especially in Republican-controlled states, at the state level, of course, a lot of our higher ed policy is made at the state level in this country, and a lot of the money for higher ed is appropriated at the state level, and you have these state public university systems that are, you know, while they don't get the attention that the Ivy League gets, educate a whole lot more Americans than the Ivy League or the sort of the top elite private institutions do, and so that's very, very important in terms of overall education policies.

Dr. Hopkins:

Looking at what happens with state university systems and we do see increasing partisan conflict there we do see state legislatures becoming more active not only in changes to the funding of the programs but also in passing laws to abolish DEI programs at state university systems, to abolish certain programs or disciplines or departments that are seen as kind of havens of left-wing thinking and to establish and this is sort of important and again maybe understated trend to establish sort of countervailing, more conservative branded institutions.

Dr. Hopkins:

So we're seeing at Texas and Tennessee and North Carolina, a lot of these states, these new centers on campus for the study of liberty and constitutional, you know, principles and things like that which are sort of so, I think, fairly transparently attempts to rebalance the ideological tenor on campus by providing, you know, an institutional support of resources for more conservative scholars and more conservative students.

Dr. Hopkins:

And so, yeah, that's a major area of partisan dispute these days. Higher ed has not always been in the partisan line of fire that much. There's often been a lot of bipartisanship in the past on education policy, both federal and state levels, and we're seeing increasingly as the culture war continues to sort of incorporate higher ed. You know, debates over higher ed policy we're seeing that that really extend to higher ed policy, and a lot of it is driven by the perception that higher ed is sort of enemy territory for conservatives and that this is something that conservatives need to pay attention to, because young generations of Americans are being you know, are being indoctrinated on campus by liberal values, and so that's a major concern of people on the right. Obviously, people like Ron DeSantis have done a lot at the state level to, you know, to respond to these perceptions, and, again, this isn't something that should surprise us, given all the other trends we're seeing around us.

Shawn:

Point blank. Let me just ask are higher education settings generally liberally biased?

Dr. Hopkins:

Yes, the answer is clearly yes of the ideological proclivities of faculty and administrators in the United States, and not just the United States, and certainly the United States shows that overwhelmingly there's a lot more people on the left than on the right. That varies a bit by disciplines, but even in the sciences and engineering and economics and medicine, which used to be the more conservative disciplines compared to the humanities, it's still these days very much true that it's, you know, left to center. Now, not everyone who's a liberal spends their time, you know, talking politics, but I think it's fair to say that the overall climate on most campuses is friendlier to, you know, to the left than than the right. Um, I think there's there's reason to believe that that's, uh, that that's true. And the farther up you go in the kind of ladder of status of the institutions, the more that that tends to be true. And so conservatives aren't wrong when they see academia as a profession and sector that's not inherently friendly to their point of view. Where they're not quite right is the idea that this is why people with college degrees are more left-of-center, is that they get indoctrinated on campus to be so.

Dr. Hopkins:

There isn't a lot of evidence that students change their politics in a strongly liberal direction between the moment they enroll in college and the moment they graduate.

Dr. Hopkins:

You know, so that that that is not really what's happening. And, of course, many of us who teach students like to say that, you know, if we had that kind of power over over what students thought and did, we'd use it to get them to. You know over what students thought and did, we'd use it to get them to. You know, uh, read the syllabus more. And you know, uh, learn, learn. You know, learn the course material better um than than to, you know, try to change their politics. Um. So so you know, not every conservative critique of academia is a fair one, but the fundamental idea that academia is a liberal environment and that, in particular on issues of race and gender and other sort of cultural issues, that there's a sort of a set of norms that tend to prevail in the campus environment and within the world of higher ed that are not friendly to conservative views on those topics, I mean that's a fair observation.

Shawn:

So, assuming this were or is a problem that would need to be fixed, you know there's a lot of different avenues to do that and one is what? One of the things that you mentioned earlier, which is states and, I suppose, private donors funding universities and university systems that are specifically conservative minded, as I suppose I don't want to say bulwark, but a balance, right to strike some type of a balance. That's one approach. I suppose Another would be kind of a profound restructuring and redesign of the university system as we know it, and that would need to come from, I suppose there's some exogenous factors that could put pressure, but that would there would need to be endogenous factors as well. So, like you know, within the university systems themselves, the influential folks making decisions to alter these things, to provide or strike a balance.

Shawn:

And I feel like, if, if these were our only two options and this was a problem that needed to be fixed, I want the latter, because the former, in which we just have different types of universities geared towards different ideologies, just feeds right into some of the divide that we're already experiencing on things like abortion and how media is funded in certain areas and an urban-rural divide, and that just starts to feel more threatening to democracy than somehow addressing the system as it exists now. And where I'm going with this is I'm wondering if you've given thought to what are some things that universities could be confronting to try to somehow strike a balance and deal with a liberal bias try to somehow strike a balance and deal with a liberal bias.

Dr. Hopkins:

Yeah, I think there's a lot of interest in this question these days in universities. You know, within the world of higher ed and especially higher ed administrators, the events about a year ago, a little more than a year ago, with the university presidents that testified before the House of Representatives and a couple of them subsequently no longer were the university presidents long after that. That has left a real mark. The rest of us may have forgotten, but if you're a university administrator you've not forgotten. I think there's a lot of interest right now in thinking about how higher ed can kind of navigate this very, very fraught political environment that it finds itself in, dominated by conservatives. I don't think that's a very practical solution, just because the startup costs of founding kind of a new Ivy League of the right are just really prohibitive and there just aren't enough and again, there just aren't enough conservative scholars and students to fill it. And so you might have, you know, the University of Austin, you might have these sort of examples and you might have again, centers and institutes at existing universities that are kind of like the Hoover Institution is at Stanford, that are kind of like conservative identified and friendly to conservative ideas and conservative scholars and students. That might be a more plausible way to go than to try to sort of found your own completely separate set of universities. Find ways to placate conservatives at least to some extent and to avoid some of the things that have drawn a lot of negative conservative attention. And so, even if it's just something like renaming your DEI office some other name that's not DEI, you know, even if you don't get, even if the office stays the same and it does the same things, if it doesn't have the name DEI, then like it won't get the same.

Dr. Hopkins:

You know, attacks from the legislators in your state disrupted or attacked so that you don't have that kind of headline that oh, so-and-so came to your college to speak and they got, you know, treated badly. Talking a little bit more about freedom of speech and academic freedom on campus and talking about the need to respect different people and different points of view and to have free exchange of ideas on campus, sort of reemphasizing that. More than emphasizing kind of progressive ideas about politics, I think you're going to see some kind of strategic response to the election and the events of the past couple of years with an attempt to bring the temperature down a little bit in these wars and to protect higher ed. Of course what they care about most is the money they get from the government and to protect that and the other advantages that higher ed policy gives to American universities and to hope that. You know, some of this blows over, at least temporarily, and doesn't attract the same attention of conservative media and conservative politicians as it has over the past 10 years or so.

Shawn:

So I'm a pessimist, so I envision a different scenario and it's alarming and particularly bleak which is that if it's true that a liberal bias exists, or at least is perceived to exist, on the right and they're willing to attack higher education kind of relentlessly, and we also, you know, layer on top of that emerge, revolve into a society in which all people that are liberal or progressive get higher education degrees and people that are conservative do not. I don't know what that portends for the future, like what that looks like, but it feels pretty bleak to me.

Dr. Hopkins:

Yeah well, I don't think the lines will ever be that clean. I mean, one of the kind of funny things about all this is that we're increasingly ruled by people with college degrees and that. But that's not just true of the Democratic Party in the left, that's true of the Republican Party in the right as well. I mean, almost every member of Congress has a college degree, regardless of the party they're in. Donald Trump and JD Vance both have Ivy League degrees of which they're proud.

Dr. Hopkins:

There's rhetorical attacks on the right and, in some ways, policy attacks on the right towards higher ed, but it hasn't translated into the idea on the right that you know if you're a conservative you shouldn't go to college or that you won't. You know you won't get an advantage out of going to college and even graduate school, getting a law degree, getting an MBA. Those are still things that conservatives do, even if most of the people now who graduate from college are more left than right. So we're still in a world where gaining higher social and economic status usually does mean attending a university, and that's true of conservatives as well. And so the diploma divide is real and it's important, but it's not absolute, and my guess is that that will continue and obviously that puts elite conservatives in a weird kind of bind.

Dr. Hopkins:

They're going to be attacking higher ed a lot, not just rhetorically but in some ways substantively as well. But it also means they still want their kids to go to college by and large, you know they still have some investment in the credentials that they themselves earned in the educational system meaning something for their own success, the educational system meaning something for their own success, and so that will. But that of course means that within the Republican Party and the conservative movement there is always the potential for a backlash against the leaders of the movement that you can say well, these people are a bunch of, you know, college educated snobs and you know, because most Republican voters are not college graduates, they can still maybe be suspicious of the leadership of their party from time to time as being sort of out of touch with the experiences of regular working class people. So I think it's going to continue to just create tensions and complexities in our politics rather than kind of sort out incredibly neatly, you know, along educational lines.

Shawn:

So you don't see this playing out such that we become an educational wasteland?

Dr. Hopkins:

Well, you know I don't have a good feel for prediction over the long term and I'm not, you know, I'm not, I've not been given a crystal ball to see into the future.

Dr. Hopkins:

But I think that you know there's a lot of strength in the higher education system in this country that it would be difficult for any single you know party, at least in the short to medium term, to take away, and that I don't even think they want to do it.

Dr. Hopkins:

I don't think that the project of the conservative movement now is to sort of obliterate higher ed. I think it's to rein it in, I think it's to assert some more control over it, more control over it, and I think that they may have some success in that. But there is still a vulnerability If they are seen as not wanting to maintain the university system at all. I think there are lots of voters who, even if they think well, higher ed's a little too far left and it's a little too progressive, I think they would draw the line and actually let's get rid of higher ed or let's sort of damage it entirely. And so I think, you know, I think we can go too far in sort of anticipating that this would go to some extreme policy outcome. I think a lot of it is simply that it's a very fertile political target at the moment for conservatives, and with some reason, but that doesn't mean that their mission in life is to destroy higher ed.

Shawn:

So, in addition to things an urban-rural divide in our politics, a cultural divide, the diploma divide that we've been talking about there's another story about our politics, which is that we are becoming more extreme, especially Republicans, not to see things like January 6th and not see that as being reflective of our politics and the state of political violence in the United States and extremism, and this also suggests that you know we might be headed for some type of a bleak future. But, given what you've studied and what you know, is it true that we're becoming more extreme? I can understand the argument that the elites might be becoming more extreme but the electorate itself is not, or vice versa, but I guess I'd like to understand a little bit better.

Dr. Hopkins:

Yeah, I think a lot of it comes down to the question of how exactly do we define extremity. That's a word that can be applied in a lot of different ways, just like the word polarization can be applied in a lot of different ways. There's a traditional way of talking about extremity. That's just about policy. Is your policy sort of center, or is it way on one side or the other? And both parties have moved, in general, farther apart from each other on policy over time, and that's sort of the classic polarization picture. But there's complexity in that too.

Dr. Hopkins:

As I said earlier, we should recognize Trump's abandonment of previous Republican positions about cutting certain social programs. In some ways that's a move towards the center in its own way, though it doesn't often get recognized as that. And the other thing I would say is that the Democrats have become more extreme, you know, compared to how the Democrats used to be, especially on cultural issues. The party has moved leftward fairly steadily over the past 30 years or so, and positions that were once, you know, sort of beyond the bounds of the national party leadership are now much more embraced by the party leadership on social issues. So there is an element of our politics that is extreme on policy, but you're also talking about when you're talking about things like January 6th.

Dr. Hopkins:

You're talking about the sort of extremity, about you know, how much do we respect the workings of the system?

Dr. Hopkins:

Versus how much is there kind of rebellion, including, in some cases, violent rebellion, against the system and against the government, and of course, we have seen elements of that pop up in our politics of the last few years and that is certainly troubling to a lot of people. On the other hand, you know, when you think about historical perspective and you think about the 1960s, for example, where we had multiple, you know national leaders assassinated and we had, you know, groups, you know bombing government buildings and things like that, it's not like it's unprecedented, you know, in this country's history to have elements of armed conflict, armed protest and violence, political violence. There's nothing new about that. There was, of course, plenty of political violence in the South for most of this country's history and so I think, yes, the trend over the short term has been that we've seen an uptick in that kind of behavior, but I would say that's not historically unprecedented or historically unusual if we take the broad sweep of the legacy of this country into perspective.

Shawn:

All right, Final question you ready for it? Absolutely Okay. What's something interesting you've been reading, watching, listening to or doing lately, and it doesn't have to be related to this topic, but it can be.

Dr. Hopkins:

Well, I've been interested, I'm getting more and more interested in the relationship of popular culture to politics and we have some elements of that in this book. But I'm continuing to sort of collect, mentally, collect in my mind, more examples and more cases, and I don't know if this will turn into another research project. But I'm especially interested in gender and gender roles these days. It's just sort of been on my mind a lot since the last election and how social and cultural ideas of gender and gender roles relate to politics and people's politics these days. So I've been sort of reading a little bit about that and thinking a little bit about that. And then on top of that I'm always interested in music and the history of music and music biographies and I'm often reading a music biography.

Dr. Hopkins:

I just finished one about the Replacements, the alternative band from Minneapolis in the 1980s, which was quite a remarkable and well-done book called Trouble Boys by Bob Muir, and learned an awful lot about the underground scene of alternative indie rock in the 1980s. And so you know, I sort of try to marry my own, you know, my own interests, my own tastes, cultural tastes, with my kind of analytical job to make sense of American politics. And that's often where I kind of seem, you know, sort of seen my own research go is in trying to make those connections, and so my guess is that whatever I write about next, it'll probably have something to do with that. And so I at least say to myself that even when I'm, you know, engaging my leisure time, that I'm doing something that might help inform my next, my next professional project.

Shawn:

You're so much more legit than me. You mentioned musical biographies and I was like or autobiographies, and I was like oh yeah, totally. And then you mentioned that book and I'm thinking well, I'm reading Cher's book.

Dr. Hopkins:

Oh well you know that's. There's another very important cultural figure, to be sure.

Shawn:

Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Hopkins:

Absolutely.

Shawn:

I do want to just very quickly say, like I've been, I think this election you kind of take it apart in the elements that we assumed would have some type of an impact and we focus primarily on pop culture. I think this election was really fascinating and I think maybe Taylor Swift and Beyonce to some degree have become aware of this shift, in that they probably don't have the same electoral influence that famous figures in past have had and I wonder how much that played into their calculus as to how and when to endorse. You know, because it doesn't look like it mattered at all.

Dr. Hopkins:

Yeah, and I think that you know, one of the ways that popular culture and politics can sort of play off each other in ways that can be surprising to people is that popular culture is often dominated by the young, and politics is not a young person's game. The electorate is a lot older than the population in general, and I think there's often an assumption in going into elections that you know winning the youth vote and catering to young people is kind of the ticket to victory, but just from an arithmetical standpoint, that's where the turnout is the lowest. The average voter is in their 50s and you know, if you want to reach them in terms of pop culture, the latest young pop star is probably not the way to do it, and so I think there's a lot of kind of easy assumptions people make about the interplay between pop culture and politics that don't ultimately get validated in the end, and I think in 2024, we certainly saw some of that.

Shawn:

Dr Hopkins, thanks for taking the time, Thanks for the conversation and I look forward to what you're studying next. Thanks very much, Shawn. This was a lot of fun. I appreciate you having me.

Shawn:

Education shapes how we see the world, what we value and, ultimately, how we vote. We are experiencing this in real time and with real implications for our lives, our politics and our governance. This sorting has created two Americas one largely urban, progressive and highly educated, and the other predominantly rural, conservative and less educated. These divisions deepen mistrust and they harden political identities. They make compromise seem impossible, as we discussed here today. The stakes of this divide reach beyond elections. They threaten the foundation of democracy itself.

Shawn:

When political identities are rigidly tied to cultural and educational differences, it becomes harder to bridge divides, if not impossible, and maintain faith in our democratic institutions. Like much else about our politics in the United States these days, these dynamics could profoundly impact how we govern ourselves, and we may not probably won't like how this plays out, but it will play out and we need to find some way to address it, While the solutions are complex and it pains me to say this because in many ways I see Trump supporters as truly disassociated from the democratic experiment. But since we have to live with each other in some way, barring a blue state red state divorce, which, admittedly, is looking more and more appealing to me, if not inevitable so, since we have to live with each other, we need to foster dialogue and empathy across these divides, because it really is an essential component to preserving democracy. So I'll try to do my part. If you'll try to do yours. All right, check back next week for another episode of Deep Dive Chat, soon, folks. Thank you, Thank you.

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Shawn C. Fettig

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