A lot of things will really change over the course of this week, no matter the election outcome. And with that, we were thinking it would be good to share a conversation that would be illuminating regardless of what happens. Over the past few decades, American society has experienced seismic changes. One of the trends we have seen is a rightward shift towards the Republican Party among voters without a four-year college degree and a pro democratic center-left shift of voters who have a four-year college degree. There’s a lot to unpack about what has animated these changes. Matt Grossmann is the director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research and a professor of political science at Michigan State University. Dave Hopkins is a political scientist at Boston College. Grossmann and Hopkins are the co-authors of “Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics.” They join WITHpod to discuss the origin of these trends, the effects on both major parties and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
Matt Grossmann: There is always a large part of the American public and publics elsewhere that thinks culture is moving too fast, that we should go back to the way things were, or at least slow the change. And that’s been enough to keep the Republican Party and the right, globally, quite competitive.
Dave Hopkins: The diploma divide is obviously an electoral and a party story, but it’s also really a story about who do you think should be empowered to make policy and who should be given that role in our government.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me your host, Chris Hayes. Well, if you were hearing my voice on the day this comes out, it is indeed Election Day. And as we thought about, well, what are we going to do on Election Day because a lot of things will really change over the course of today and tomorrow and Thursday and Friday. Maybe it takes longer to determine a winner. I thought about what we could do today, a conversation that would be illuminating no matter the outcome. And this is in the context of something that sort of bothers me about election analysis, which is that it tends to focus so much on who won, which obviously is important, wildly important for the country, for history, for what the government does.
But as a sort of analytical matter, whether a certain candidate got 49 or 51 percent of the vote, like as a sociological fact, is not actually that important or interesting, right? Like that’s a rounding error. It matters enormously for the course of the democracy. But if you’re talking about long-term trends of subgroups and demographics and stuff, the winning is almost beside the point, right? It’s the trends that are underneath the hood of the win and that are sort of moving over time that tell us something about the kind of more broad structural features of American democracy. So today we’re going to talk about one of those. And I think it’s arguably the most important. And I think no matter the outcome of this election, it will rear its head here. And that is the increasing polarization between to oversimplify people that have four year college degrees and those who don’t.
Now, as we get into today, it’s more complicated than that. Those are sort of two poles. There’s people in the middle and you can overgeneralize and geography matters a ton. But one of the trends we have seen is a rightward shift towards the Republican Party in the Trump era of voters without a four-year college degree and a pro-Democratic center left shift of voters who have a four-year college degree. This is relatively new, although we’ll talk about how far it goes back and when you identify the beginning of the trend. It also isn’t just happening in the U.S. This seems to be a trend that’s happening in a lot of developed democracies. I think it’s kind of arguably the most, like education polarization, which are shorthand for it, is maybe the dominant trend of our time in politics and one of the most important to understand.
And so I thought we’d take a deep dive on it today because the results that you’re going to see are going to reflect this. And the margins in terms of how much things are juiced in either direction might very well decide the outcome. But I can tell you going in blind that, for instance, Donald Trump will win white voters without a four-year college degree. That is absolutely going to happen. There’s no question about whether it will. The question is by what number. I think it’s very likely Harris will win white voters with a college degree. I think we’re likely to see shifts towards Trump among black and Latino voters without a college degree. Sometimes the data doesn’t get quite that fine grain, but these trends are going to be there no matter what the outcome is. And as you look at these returns, I thought this was a great thing to have in your ears during what I think is going to be a pretty intense week. So we have today two guests, Matt Grossman, who’s director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research, professor of political science at Michigan State University. He’s host of the “Science of Politics” podcast. Dave Hopkins is a political scientist at Boston College, and together they wrote a book called “Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics.” Great to have you guys on.
Matt Grossmann: Thank you.
Dave Hopkins: Thanks, Chris. Great to be here.
Chris Hayes: Let me start with you, Matt, and then I’ll go to you, David, just how you first found your way to this topic. What first piqued your interest about the so-called diploma divide or education polarization?
Matt Grossmann: Well, Dave and I wrote a previous book called “Asymmetric Politics,” about the differences between the two political parties, and that was in 2016. And ever since then, people have been asking, how are the parties changing? And we think that they are changing, but they haven’t become any more similar. And so we wanted to take our stab at explaining the biggest differences. And then the other thing was the 2016 election outcome obviously showed that the polls were wrong because of education polarization, and I was in the middle of it getting Michigan wrong for that reason. So I was stimulated to be very interested in this topic.
Chris Hayes: How about you, Dave?
Dave Hopkins: Yeah, I think we were also interested in the relationship between electoral politics and partisan politics and larger trends in American culture and society, which is not always where a lot of political science research puts its focus. But just as an observer of American politics myself, I have sort of come to believe that you really couldn’t ignore the effects on our political system and our political debates of fairly revolutionary changes over many of our lifetimes in gender roles and race relations and acceptance of sexual and religious minorities and other sort of really big picture transformative changes in society. And I really wanted to dive deep into those questions with our research.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, so there’s a bunch of ways to think about this. I mean, maybe I’ll start with you, Matt, of just saying like, what is the diploma divide? What’s the starting point to the extent we can identify one and what are the trends?
Matt Grossmann: Well, the diploma divide typically just refers to the fact that college degree holders are moving towards the Democrats and those without college degrees are moving towards the Republicans. Of course, it extends beyond that. It gets more fine grained. Graduate degree holders are even more leaning towards the Democrats and elite colleges are even moving even further towards the Democrats. And it is reflective of a global trend, which is the replacement of an income divide between the left and the right with an education divide between the left and the right that is associated with the rise of cultural and social issues relative to economic issues in our politics and leftward moving cultural trends that have produced a backlash, not only in the U.S., but everywhere.
Chris Hayes: What do you mean by, what are those trends?
Matt Grossmann: Well, so opinions on social issues have been moving leftward over several decades, as have kind of non-political, but politicized concerns, like in popular culture or the teaching of evolution in schools or anything that you intermarriage between people of different races. All of those things have been moving leftward for a while, but they haven’t produced, obviously, gains for the left in politics, so we’re kind of interested in that divide.
Chris Hayes: Wait, stop right there. Let’s stop on that. So this seems like an important part of this because I don’t think this is necessarily where I would start with this. So if you think about interracial marriage, which at a certain point, a majority of Americans opposed, I imagine that’s a majority of white Americans. I don’t know the racial breakdown, but a majority of Americans opposed and now enormous majority’s support, right? I think it’s like 80, 85, somewhere in that ballpark. And we have longitudinal data on this because I think Gallup among others have asked people over time. So your point is that is a trend that we’d identify as moving to the left towards a sort of more egalitarian ethos, right? Less hierarchical, more egalitarian. Support for same gender marriage, right? Another example of that, right? We’ve seen support increase over time. It used to be a real minority view. Now it’s a majority view. I mean, your point is these indexes of public opinion over time, they’ve been moving on these social cultural issues in that direction. And when you say they haven’t conferred a political advantage to the Democrats, unpack that a bit.
Matt Grossmann: Well, we just mean that our politics remains quite divided between the left and the right and cultural conservatism has been resilient, you know, to moving on from seeding ground on gay marriage to talking about transgender issues today. There is always a large part of the American public and publics elsewhere that thinks culture is moving too fast, that we should go back to the way things were, or at least slow the change. And that’s been enough to keep the Republican Party and the right, globally, quite competitive.
Chris Hayes: So okay, I just want to center in on this. I’m going to come to you, Dave. So you think the thing that is keeping the Republican Party and the global right, which we see, you know, again, we see success for right-wing parties. We might call them right-wing populist parties. You think the thing that is keeping them competitive or even outright victorious is what we might say, either traditional, which I think would be the kind of euphemistic way, or I would say like anti-egalitarian, pro-hierarchical stances on things like gender, race, immigration, et cetera.
Matt Grossmann: Yes, but we think it goes beyond kind of traditional political issues to just seeing things in popular culture that reflect those social changes and real changes in the economy. So we don’t want to say it’s a non-economic set of changes when women are in the workforce at much greater degrees. They’re in positions of power. Those are shifts in the economy as well as the culture, but they reflect this cultural divide.
Chris Hayes: So the big question is, okay, so if we say there’s this sort of engine here of a lot of conservative politics is these sort of positions on what we call social and cultural issues as opposed to economic issues that is sort of the fuel in the fire, which I think is true. And I think it has to do with a kind of ideological exhaustion of a certain kind of conservative politics that was very central to Reagan and even Paul Ryan, which was making these kinds of economic arguments about free markets. I think if you look at American politics, that’s really fallen away. Like Donald Trump doesn’t even bother to pretend to make those arguments. Right-wing populists in Europe don’t really make a ton of them. It’s not where they center a lot of their conversation. It’s a lot where they sort of center their appeal. They center their appeal on things like there are too many immigrants. We need to preserve our country against them, right? So then the question becomes like, okay, yes, you’re identifying a reactionary impulse that’s probably been with us since the dawn of modernity, depending on when you want to date it. Dave, how do you understand that intersecting with whatever degree of educational achievement someone has achieved?
Dave Hopkins: Well, we understand that in two different ways. One way is simply that on those specific cultural issues, people with more education tend to have more progressive views. And so that suggests a divide in public opinion, prevailing public opinion, where the more of that cultural issues are salient, the more that that’s going to divide a relatively left-leaning high-education faction from a relatively right-leaning, you know, less-educated faction. But we also tell a story in the book that goes beyond just that, which is simply that the social and economic returns to education have been going up and up and up over the same period of time. And the number of people who have gone to college and to graduate school has gone up over that period of time.
And so we live in a society that is ruled by the educated, where a lot of the institutional power is held by the educated much more so today than say 50 or 70 years ago. And so that has helped reinforce this divide in our view because the new norms, new values, new ideas and new identities that provoke a lot of this backlash are ones that have been promoted and adopted disproportionately by highly-educated people occupying positions of social and institutional status.
Chris Hayes: I see. Okay, so you’ve got the fact that these views on these issues. Do economic views track in the same way or they they’re less predictable, right, by this education divide, like things like support for a higher minimum wage or redistributive taxation, right? I mean, that’s why we’re focusing on cultural issues because they cleave more neatly across these lines of education.
Dave Hopkins: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: Okay. You know, people that are more educated, have more progressive views on these social issues. And then the other thing you’re saying is that the gains to education in this era have increased such that the commanding heights of the economy and culture are controlled by this group of people almost exclusively. And also that group has different views on these issues. And this creates a sort of the perfect recipe for populist resentment. Essentially, there’s a group of elites, they have outsized cultural power. They’re the people that write all the TV shows, act in all the movies, produce all the culture. As a whole, they’re all four-year college degree holders or higher. As a whole, if you polled them all, their views are to the left of where people without those are and this is the engine of a kind of populist resentment. That’s basically, Dave, the story you’re telling.
Dave Hopkins: That’s right. And when those people start to use their positions in our culture and our society explicitly to promote left of center progressive norms, that they say, well, we’re going to use, you know, our platforms in Hollywood or the mainstream media or the nonprofit world or the educational system to push norms of diversity and tolerance and, you know, global orientation and all of that, then it’s even more obvious in the perception of the public at large that there is a difference in values between those people and some of the people with less educational attainment.
Chris Hayes: Right. One of the things about that story, Matt, that I think people would respond with is that you’re sort of confusing two different things, which is like what people say in survey data and how these actual high institutions function, right? So it’s like, yes, it’s true that folks at the commanding heights of American culture, if you got them in a room and surveyed them, right, have views on say, probably trans folks or gay marriage or racial equality or police violence that are to the left of the median voter, particularly the median voter without a college degree, that’s almost certainly true.
But they’re functioning in institutions that are fundamentally conservative, small-c conservative, often reactionary. I mean, things from university trustee boards to corporate boards to corporations to the way that media companies might work. So it’s missing part of the story there. It’s missing a sort of unseen force, an unseen conservatizing force in the story, which is the sort of way that institutions function.
Matt Grossmann: It could be in that it’s a source of a lot of the attention within those institutions, but I think it is clear that society is observing the trend and the trend is leftward and more openly expressive of culturally-liberal attitudes across these institutions. And it’s one that’s meant that attitudes that used to be confined to kind of the conservative elite have now made their way to the public on the right. So, Republicans in the public are now more skeptical of universities, of the media, of even companies than they used to be because of these trends.
Now, I would just say there’s a difference between this social divide and others in that, you know, Republicans at elite levels are also college degree holders. So, you know, 95% of members of Congress have college degrees, 70% have graduate degrees, everyone in the kind of political class is from this same set of social environments. So obviously there’s a diversity of views there. There’s —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Matt Grossmann: — right-wingers, but they are portraying themselves as kind of traitors to their class and people who know what it’s like in these institutions but are supposedly against them. The big difference in the U.S. is that there’s no third party outlet for these kinds of trends. There’s no populist anti-immigration party that can take these trends on the right. There’s no green or liberal party that can take these trends on the left. And so instead they transform our major parties in ways that really are unique to the U.S.
Chris Hayes: Well, to stay on that, so how have these trends shown themselves in a place like Europe where you have multi-party parliamentary democracy in a lot of places?
Matt Grossmann: So all over the world and they’re all over the rich world, if you combine the parties on the left and the parties of the right, what you will see is that income used to divide them with higher income voters being on the right. And now education divides them with more educated people being on the left, but that’s if you take the sort of party coalitions as a whole. If you look at center left or center right parties, many of them have not changed as much as the parties in the U.S., which have to kind of contain what would be third party factions within them.
Chris Hayes: So, but if you look at say like the right-wing party and like the Swedish party that just won a big chunk of votes, the sort of right-wing populist party there, you’re saying you see a working class, a non-college educated base in those kinds of parties over and over again. That divide rears its head.
Matt Grossmann: That divide is there and that’s where the growth of those parties are. It’s just in the U.S., everything is contained within the strictest two-party system in the rich world.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: Let me ask you this question, Dave, to go back to the origins of the degree divide. There’s two causal stories you could tell. One of them being that the fact of achieving higher education produces a more sort of cosmopolitan and egalitarian set of views in people. The other is that people with an orientation personality-wise towards that kind of worldview tend to gravitate towards higher education more and select into it. You know, it doesn’t have to be one or the other, but talk a little bit about like how, because there’s this amazing sorting that happens and you watch it in American life all the time. I know a lot of people from towns that are now very sort of pro-Trump rural towns. They were of a group of people from their high school that went away from college and then moved to a big city, right? So there’s this like selection process that’s constantly operating on the American populace and the degree to which it’s like self-selection or the institutions are doing it, like how do you think about that?
Dave Hopkins: It’s a great question. There’s obviously a lot of discussion these days just in American politics about, well, to what extent are universities sort of like, you know, brainwashing students —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Dave Hopkins: — into being progressives, right? And the actual evidence on that is extremely mixed. As you say, there’s a huge selection effect about who chooses to or has the opportunity to go to college versus who doesn’t. And our story doesn’t really depend on universities themselves being engines of transformation of students. Because we think that that’s only one way in which people who are more educated are different from people who aren’t. They graduate and they have totally different careers. They work in different places, they live in different places, they marry other people who have higher education, their neighbors and their friends have more education. And so, the educational divide is not just about having an experience on four years of a college campus —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Dave Hopkins: — versus not. It’s about your entire life going in a different direction and being exposed to different media sources, ideas, colleagues and so forth. And, you know, we have lots of people who went to college years and years ago who happily voted for Bob Dole and John McCain and Mitt Romney, who once Trump came along, said, I’m not a Republican anymore. And it wasn’t because of their college experiences, you know, which was long past, it was because of their ideas that they had even later in life.
Chris Hayes: Okay, so I’m glad you brought that up because there’s two things happening hydraulically rear, right? So you’re saying, well, the increasing returns to education, which have produced a sort of class that is exclusively college educated and have different views than folks who are not. You know, again, I want to just say these are all aggregate data. This is all generalizing over a population of 330 million. There are literally millions of exceptions to literally everything we say. So just we’re using broad demographic categories to talk about broad demographic trends. So that’s part of it and I think that’s undoubtedly true. But the other thing that’s happening is how Trump has accelerated this in the other direction. I mean, it is really interesting to me. And I know these people personally, many of them educated, relatively affluent people that live in metro areas, who were Mitt Romney Republicans, who have become like complete obsessive MSNBC viewers in the Trump era. Like I know these people, believe me.
And I’m curious, okay. Matt, I’ve got the story in one direction, which actually feels fairly straightforward to me, that this group of people who are so-called, you know, whatever elites or people who are in charge of American cultural and political production have an experience that’s different and they have views that are different, that’s alienating to folks that are not in there. But what’s going on in that other direction? So like, what is going on in the Donald Trump repelling folks such that there’s these parts of the country that voted for Reagan, right? These zip codes that voted for Reagan by 30 points, that are going to vote for Harris by 30 points. Like, how do you understand that part of the story, Matt?
Matt Grossmann: Right, so there is a division in the timeline. The move of college-educated voters toward the Democrats is much more recently concentrated and much more about the Trump era itself than the other trend, which is more longstanding —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Matt Grossmann: — that non-college white voters have been moving towards the Republicans for an extended period, really starting in the 1970s, accelerated by Trump, but not exclusive to Trump. Part of what’s happening is a change in the issue agenda. Both parties are talking more about social and cultural issues relative to economic issues. Another is a change in the class image of the parties. You know, from the 1950s to the early 2000s, the number one thing people said they liked about the Democratic Party in open-ended survey questions was that it was the party of the working class or the common man. And the number one thing they said they disliked about the Republican Party was that it was the party of big business or the upper class. That’s a posture that’s sort of harder to maintain as the coalitions of the parties shift. And it has meant that we’re talking about different things, but also that different people see themselves at home in different parties.
Chris Hayes: Okay, so that thing you said is to me the most fascinating tension and contradiction at the heart of American politics, right? As a sociological fact, you have this sorting that’s happening. And yet the material commitments of the party remain at odds with their own coalition. The Democratic Party remains a robustly, firmly, redistributive party. It has done not just in commitment rhetorically, but in what policy it’s done. The policy undertaken in the Biden administration has involved hundreds of billions of dollars in government subsidized investment directed wildly disproportionately to areas that are represented by Republican members of Congress because they vote overwhelmingly Republican, because they are overwhelmingly non-metro areas, rural working class areas, right? The agenda around things like healthcare and Medicaid expansion.
So you’ve got this crazy thing where the coalitions are shifting, but the material outcomes and the actual political economy of the two parties governing commitments remain essentially the same. And Dave, it’s like, at some point this has to break in one direction or the other. If Trump gets in and they just pass another huge billionaire in corporate tax cut, which I think they’re going to do, you do wonder if there’s any material interest left where all of this has gotten so removed from political economy that you don’t have to resolve the tension.
Dave Hopkins: There was kind of an interesting alternate path that I think a lot of people were kind of predicting in the aftermath of the 2016 election, which was that Trump really was going to move the Republicans to the left on economics. And you could kind of make that argument if you looked at some of the things he was saying on the campaign trail that year. But of course, if you look at the actual policy that was put in during the Trump presidency, trade is kind of its own separate issue that has never really cut across, you know, sort of cuts weirdly across the parties anyway.
But certainly in terms of like, yeah, corporate taxation and deregulation, you saw a very, very conventional Republican, you know, policy agenda driven by the Congressional Republican Party. And then on the other side, the fact that the Democrats are more now than before, the party of affluent white collar suburbanites has not actually meant that the Democrats have moved much to the center either on economics. We haven’t had that depolarization on either side. And the Democrats actually found maybe surprising success in continuing to have people with the sort of stoke resentment among people with six figure incomes of the benefits of people with seven and eight figure incomes.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, totally.
Dave Hopkins: And so they haven’t had to rethink their traditional redistributive economic agenda either. And so whereas you might tell the story that well, at least we would get depolarization on economics with this diploma divide. Well, we haven’t gotten that actually either. And yeah, maybe you’re right that at some point we do, but it’s remarkable how little that’s happened so far.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, so what I think, the reason that I think this tension is so interesting is there has been a massive rhetorical shift. It just hasn’t led to policy shifts. So it just is absolutely the case that Trump talks differently about the economy than Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, Mitt Romney. He does not talk in the terms of Milton Freeman. He does not talk about free markets, free markets of free people. He never uses the word freedom. He doesn’t like the word freedom.
In fact, freedom used to be the watchword of the right because it was associated with the battle against communism and free markets and free markets and free people, right? The entire rhetorical and ideological trapping of freedom to choose Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, neoliberalism of the ‘80s is utterly banished from Donald Trump’s lingo. He does not talk about the economy that way. He talks about it in mercantilist terms. He talks about it in these like just totally antithetical at a deep foundational principle level, like how he thinks about the economy. He’s like, we’re going to just cap interest rates. We’re going to put a 20% tariff on everything. Like I want the American economy of the 1890s. I want to go back to McKinley.
Now, that doesn’t necessarily translate to like a policy agenda yet, although we’ll see. But here’s my take on this, Matt, my understanding of it. And then I want you to tell me what you think. I think the great financial crisis wildly discredited a whole political and ideological school of thought about free markets and quote, “liberalization.” I think that all political parties in the developed world have dealt with that and don’t talk in those terms anymore. And because that fight about regulation versus free markets and stuff has diminished in salience, it has led to the higher salience of this other stuff. Because they’re not engaging at that level, they don’t want to have that fight on the ideological terms of quote, “free markets.” And that’s led to the rising salience to the other issues.
Matt Grossmann: Well that sounds plausible, at least the change in rhetoric at the elite level. But the rise in cultural issues relative to economic issues is really goes back before the most recent financial crisis is sort of a long, slow build to this becoming more part of our politics. One thing that I think is misunderstood about the difference between the left and the right here is people look at the Trump coalition and they see a lot of change. But actually the Republican Party has always gotten most of its vote from non-college white voters and that proportion that comes from non-college white voters really hasn’t changed much over time.
It’s the Democratic Party whose coalition is dramatically changing because society is getting more educated over time and it’s getting more diverse over time. So only a quarter of Joe Biden’s votes came from non-college white voters, whereas a majority, near majority of Bill Clinton’s votes came from non-college white voters. So that’s a huge shift in the coalition. The Republican Party has always kind of had to have this two-face between representing a constituency that really doesn’t necessarily benefit a lot from its tax policies or deregulation that they have dealt with at different ways over the course of time.
I think for Democrats, it’s a newer issue that their self-image as the party of the downtrodden does not necessarily match the current party coalition. I don’t want to let them off completely. I think it has changed. I think that the two major accomplishments of the Biden administration in terms of policy victories were really student loan relief and the climate change package in Build Back Better. And the large redistributive initiative might have been missing in terms of the success of the policies. So I do think the Democratic Party does reflect its changing coalitions. But because of the two party system, in comparison to parties elsewhere, it really hasn’t had to change its traditional economic policy agenda.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I mean, I don’t think I agree with that just because I think the redistributive impacts of the child tax credit, the ARP, and where the investments, like again, this gets back to this sort of like symbolic versus material. Like if you look at the Inflation Reduction Act as representing the rhetorical, conceptual, and ideological fixations of the elite, yes, right? If you look at like, where did the physical money of these investments go? Like it really did go overwhelmingly. I mean, we had a guy on the podcast talk about this, like three to one, two to one, two Republican districts, right?
So that to me identifies precisely what you’re talking about, right? Like, yes, fundamentally, was the climate part of it engineered by a relatively elite group of people, if we’re talking about like four-year college degree holders who are disproportionately concerned with this issue and elite political circles, 100%. But how is that played out physically, right? Materially, like where’s the money, where are the shovels? And I guess the other question is I just feel like everyone who works in politics is swimming upstream of this trend, Dave. And everyone’s trying to sort of figure out how to deal with it.
Trump’s trying sort of, I think half-heartedly, trying to make sure he gets back a few suburban women that he doesn’t like repulse. Harris is clearly concerned about working class, particularly working class men of color. You could just see that in the appeal and you can see it in the data, but the river’s moving in that direction.
Dave Hopkins: Yeah, and another thing that I think is important here is that Trump, one way where Trump is different from previous Republican candidates is he never proposed cutting Social Security or Medicare. And that was something that Democrats have been bashing Republicans about my entire lifetime, you know, and Trump did, I think, have a grasp that was just not smart politics for him, especially with his, you know, his particular constituency. And so he’s been able to avoid getting targeted on that same economic ground the same way that Romney was and that, you know, Bob Dole was in the past.
But I think you’re right about the parties. The parties are both trying to navigate this new age we’re in. And of course the parties hate seeing voters they used to get support from deserting them.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Dave Hopkins: And they want to know, what can we do —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Dave Hopkins: — to bring them back. And especially among the Democrats who tend to always be full of anxiety and neurosis, there’s a big obsession about what can we do to bring back the white working class. And we chronicle some of these things in the book and some of them are quite reasonable. And even Biden’s selection as the standard bearer in 2020, I think owes a lot to Democrats perception that trying to go out of your way to appeal —
Chris Hayes: Totally.
Dave Hopkins: — to culturally moderate white working class voters is sort of smart politics. But here’s where we kind of have a different view from maybe kind of the Washington view, which is that in the Washington bias is in favor of, well, every problem can be solved with a new ad or a new message or a new sort of consultant strategy. And our bias as academics is we’re all floating, you know, little specks of dust —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Dave Hopkins: — in this great wind of historical change.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Yeah.
Dave Hopkins: And so —
Chris Hayes: That’s my view as well.
Dave Hopkins: — while we do think that at the margins and of course the margins matter when everything is so close. At the margins, yes, it’s —
Chris Hayes: It really matters. Yes.
Dave Hopkins: — you know, sure. You know, pick Tim Walz to be vice president or you know don’t endorse a national abortion ban or these other sorts of things. Yes, they can be decisive in election after election. But the more that you look at the big picture and again not just the historical picture over 50 years of American history, but the picture around the world, the more that you see that even these politicians are just buffeted by these bigger and bigger transformative social changes, and they only have a limited ability —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Dave Hopkins: — to kick against them and to harness them for their own purposes.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: I’m curious why, if you have a theory about immigration and its salience, because if you want to reduce this further, right, I mean, if you want to tell a singular story about developed democracies in the sort of rich world, as we might call it, it’s often really a story about immigration. I mean, when you go look at those right-wing parties in Europe, that’s what they’re hammering on centrally. There’s other stuff too, but that is the central issue that they want to have the most salience. It’s obviously the central issue for Donald Trump. It was from the first day he announced.
My take on this to your point about us being moats of dust in the cosmic wind, the period of colonization in the globe lasted from 1492 to, depending on when you want to say the 1960s, you can even say the 1980s, if you go all the way up to Soviet colonization of Central Asia in 1989. So, let’s say four or 500 years, the world was ordered around the colonial conquest by one set of countries of another set of countries. We’re in the very little part of the post-colonial era in which all of that hundreds of years of stuff that happened is presenting itself in all different kinds of ways. The wild, you know, differences and divergences and levels of wealth and development, the convergence that is happening out of that. The increased mobility of people, the hydraulic effects of people wanting to go from poorer places to richer places.
Like all that stuff is big and no one’s stopping it. No one is stopping it. No one is stopping people to want to go from poorer places to richer places, okay? But how the politics deal with that has become a central issue. And how much, I guess, Matt, do you think this really is a story about immigration?
Matt Grossmann: Well, certainly it has played a big role in the transformation of the parties in recent times. And part of what Donald Trump did was to sort of Europeanize our politics and make them more about the cultural differences that were central there. And it’s worth looking back and saying, you know, that when the culture war language kind of started, and became prominent in the 1990s. People really thought the U.S. would be different. They thought that it was going to be more about religion in the U.S. than culture, the U.S. was going to remain a quite religious country and thus there would be kind of breaks on the cultural changes in the U.S. that weren’t apparent elsewhere. And in the end, it didn’t really turn out that different. It turned out to actually reflect these more global historical trends that you’re talking about.
Chris Hayes: Meaning so the U.S. is getting more secular, which is one really important trend. And the salience of immigration, the sort of populist nationalism about, you know, France for the French kind of thing, America for the Americans, that has a salience here. And that is interesting because of the fact that we tell ourselves a different story about the American nation than the French do about the French and the Italians, certainly the Italians do about Italy. I know, because I live there. But like, you know, the idea of what a European nation state is, as a sort of unified people and the challenge that multiculturalism poses to that is a little different than the U.S., which is this kind of creedal nation that has had this pluralism kind of built in from the beginning in certain ways, particularly around religious sectarian conflicts within Christianity and then broadening out through a lot of different ways.
And it is interesting that we’ve adopted a kind of European style, blood and soil nationalism. I mean, interesting and scary, but I also wonder, you know, sometimes I think immigration is the driver and then sometimes I think as I’ve watched right-wing politics in my life, they just pick up whatever’s around. So like, you know, it was gay people, then it was terrorism. It was the war on terror and it was Islam. My favorite example of this, this is a great example, I think. When Trump was running the first time, there was a Muslim man who shot up a gay nightclub in Orlando called the Pulse nightclub. I went and covered that afterwards. And Donald Trump’s pitch after that was to gay people that you needed Donald Trump to fight against the Islamic menace. Okay? This time around, Trump has gotten an endorsement from a prominent Muslim mayor in a Michigan town who has been radicalized against the LGBT agenda in which the argument is the Muslims need Donald Trump to fight against the gays.
And I just think it’s a perfect example of the fact that like it doesn’t really matter what the issue is. It’s some in-group and some out-group and the definition of the way that our politics work is, I’m going to fight for you against that out-group. It could even be the same group on the in and on the out depending on what’s useful, Dave, but the actual issue set doesn’t matter. It’s that form of politics that matter.
Dave Hopkins: I think there’s definitely something to that. I do think that there’s an interesting change though also in conservative politics. When I think back about the conservatism of the Reagan era and even the Bush era, there was a lot more optimism that America was strong —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Dave Hopkins: — and the future was bright and free for conservatism. And the people who were the enemies —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Dave Hopkins: — of conservatism were wrong, but they were also sort of marginalized.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Dave Hopkins: The average American didn’t pay them any mind. They were just academics and ivory towers. And they were —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Dave Hopkins: — you know, there was an optimistic and confident view about the future that you saw during that time, and that is gone. And in our book, we sort of say that’s gone for a reason. Like conservatives are right to believe that in a lot of ways the country is moving away from that. But this sort of new feeling of vulnerability, and it’s obviously applied to immigrants, but not just to immigrants, it’s also applied to younger generations of native-born Americans, that they believe all these crazy liberal progressive things about trans rights or gender or things like that. It’s applied to major social institutions that conservatives used to defend, like the school system, and even corporate America —
Chris Hayes: Corporate America is the big one. Yes.
Dave Hopkins: Yeah, we have a chapter in our book about —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Dave Hopkins: — the new Republican fight against corporate America. You know, once these liberal values start to become promoted by the big corporations And so this is I think where we see a big a difference in the kind of tone of conservative rhetoric, is the flip from the sort of assured confidence that they’re going to win out in the end —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Dave Hopkins: — to the feeling of vulnerability that even the country as they know it is about to disappear.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I mean, the way that I understand it is, current politics is like, you guys have everything we want. We take politics. And it’s not we’re losing everything, so it’s not fair. Like that’s why it’s our rightful place to have politics. Kind of like because we can’t control, you’ve taken all the institutions. You have the universities, you have the Chamber of Commerce, which is nonsense. I mean, at some cultural level, I think it’s probably true that like the corporate America, but not in a sort of deeper, you know, through a kind of Marxist lens, it’s not true. But like you guys have all these institutions and politics is our means of retribution, basically of balancing the scales of taking power back, you know.
And actually, for that reason, I think that like right-wing cultural production is really important. Like every time they start one, I’m like, great, that’s what you should do in a free pluralistic society. Go start a podcast. Like don’t try to win the governorship to tell people take your cultural power back. And I think the other thing that I think about, and this is my read on the degree divide, Matt, which is like a little more kind of poetic than reality grounded, but I think it gets at something. So like, yes, it’s not the full empirical story.
But again, overgeneralizing, I think it also is like a pro-system, anti-system way of viewing and low trust, high trust, which is that if you’re a person who gets a four-year college degree in America, you’re in a part of the American society that for all its challenges and all its inequality, and there is a ton, is kind of functioning along a sort of conception of the American dream. And if you don’t have a four-year college degree, you are operating in an America where like, that stuff isn’t really working as well. Like how you’re going to get ahead, how are you going to buy, like do all these things, there’s a pathway with a four-year college degree in the U.S. in a way there isn’t without one, and that ends up sorting people into broadly these sort of pro-system, anti-system camps.
Matt Grossmann: Absolutely, and it’s just weird that in the U.S., because of the two-party system, we have an anti-system major political party that controls —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Matt Grossmann: — large parts of the system. In most places, it remains more of a peripheral force, or at least starts that way.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Matt Grossmann: And in the U.S., it doesn’t. Now, liberals have changed too. It didn’t use to be the case that —
Chris Hayes: The liberals have gotten more pro-system.
Matt Grossmann: Yeah. It did not use to be the case that “The New York Times” and Harvard University were the great engines of liberal progress in mind. They used to be some of the enemies of the left. And now there’s a lot more realization that these are cultural forces moving us in a leftward direction. We do agree with you on the Republican —
Chris Hayes: Well, people would really disagree with that. I just want to say, like, the people are listening as being like, no. Harvard University and “New York Times” are not moving us in a leftward direction. Again, I want to toggle back and forth between these. Let me just put a pin in this. There’s different frameworks for analyzing this, right? It’s like, if you poll the people who work for Harvard, yes. If you poll the people who work for “The New York Times,” if you analyze how they function in the world as institutions with those institutional prerogatives, I think you get a slightly different answer. But just keep going.
Matt Grossmann: Oh, we agree that it does not necessarily move us, especially in an economically liberal direction.
Chris Hayes: Right. Culturally, yeah.
Matt Grossmann: The cultural change is real, as is the change in the perception in the public on the democratic side, which is much more pro-media and pro-institution than it used to be. We also agree with you, though, on the right, we call it power without credibility in our book, that the Republicans have sort of given up trying to win these battles within institutions with equivalent levels of credibility. And instead they’re now on the burn it down and start your own side of this debate. They really have cocooned themselves in a separate set of environments.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, and you know, the RFK journey is a perfect little allegory for this, right? I mean, it’s sort of anti-system, conspiratorial skeptic who started out in the ideological left and has ended up in the Trump camp. And Trump has really cultivated a kind of conspiratorial, anti-system, low trust coalition. They are lying to you. They don’t want you to know X. They, the mainstream media, or the capital T they, and that can be everything. It can be, you know, the sort of from Ayahuasca to unpasteurized milk, to, you know, secret sex rings being run by Hollywood perverts under, you know, major locations. Like all of it, that’s the anti-system coalition.
Dave Hopkins: Yes. And we think this is also really important for policymaking. And this is a big part of our book. You know, the diploma divide is obviously an electoral and a party story, but it’s also really a story about who do you think should be empowered to make policy and who should be given that role in our government. And more and more Democrats subscribe to the ideal. The policy should be made by well-educated, credentialed specialists, experts who should be given the power to set the rules and promote norms for the society at large. And Republicans think that all of those people are liberals, that their claims of expertise are inflated and that they use their status as a cloak for imposing left-wing values. And we have a chapter where we have sort of three case studies about this. One is COVID —
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Dave Hopkins: And, you know, COVID policy. One is climate change and scientific policy. And one is policy in higher education. And in each area, and these may well be harbingers of lots of other areas to come, we see the same pattern, which is that the Democrats say, let’s have a technocratic ideal for governance. Let’s listen to the experts and do what they say. And Republicans say those experts are, you know, liberals who are arrogant and who are cut off from the real life of normal people and everything they say is wrong by definition. And we can expect obviously very much more of that, right? And a second Trump administration, if RFK is not just an electoral supporter, but he’s helping to develop health policy, you know, we can expect that incredibly strong divergence between the party’s policymaking approaches to increase still further.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And there’s one more thing I just want to add to that picture, which is the role of democracy, right? Because you could imagine, you know, there’s a famous left-wing pamphlet entitled, I think it was a populist pamphlet, it might be a 19th century, “Shall We Leave it to the Experts?,” which was a sort of left-wing anti-technocratic tendency and you saw that in populism. But the answer there might be, small D, democratic, right? You might like have more plebiscites or small democratic engagement, right? The people should decide. But what you see, I think in the Trump manifestation is actually kind of both anti-technocratic but also anti-democratic, which is essentially this sort of like authoritarian tribune of the vogue, meaning like us, not necessarily a majority because it doesn’t really matter if we’re a majority, but us, the guy that we have, our champion is the one that decides.
And through him, not through some like, small D, democratic process, but through actually like the only way to get this done is some figure with significant enough power to crack down on the elites who is representing us as the kind of vision for this, Matt. And you see it interestingly in right wing jurisprudence around the power of the executive, right? Against the deep state, right? I mean, there’s like actually a whole intellectual structure here that maps on to what Dave was saying about the administrative law and who has the power and wanting basically the president to be maximally empowered against the sort of civil servants in the executive.
Matt Grossmann: There is, but the trends that the conservatives are identifying are real trends. These are professionalized expert driven institutions —
Chris Hayes: Oh, totally. Yeah.
Matt Grossmann: — that they are, you know, fairly incapable of actually, you know, completely reversing these trends, even, you know, throughout policy debates. You know, they have to find experts as well because it’s an expert-driven kind of process. And so this is their reaction to it. We don’t want to let the experts completely off the hook. We, obviously, experts have increased knowledge, but they also have distinct values and interests and their —
Chris Hayes: True.
Matt Grossmann: — pronouncements are a mixture —
Chris Hayes: Yeah, absolutely.
Matt Grossmann: — of their knowledge and their distinct interests and values. And the status that we’re at is that conservatives have noticed that and are distrusting of a lot that they say.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I mean, again, this is where the sort of useful, I think, the sort of way that ideological formation has changed like. Ross Douthat wrote a column about the sort of rights embrace of Foucault, but you know, we all as leftist undergrads got our Foucault and we were taught to be skeptical of knowledge power and the ideological substrate that operates under institutions that are producing knowledge. And we’ve all read our James Scott, seeing that like a state and we all know that like, you know, there are ways in which the sort of institutional power and knowledge is constituted at the nexus of a set of interests and a set of ideologies and a set of power relations.
I don’t disagree with any of that. I got it on the other side in my own sort of formation. But I do think that there’s a way to balance that with some kind of, you know, something other than epistemic nihilism and like, you know, everyone take ivermectin. I mean, and this is the danger. I mean, you know, where the rubber hits the road on COVID is that what I come back to is there were absolutely moves made by public health authorities that signaled a kind of ideological affiliation that was alienating to people.
There were absolutely sort of things said by those authorities that ended up being kind of noble lies in ways that ended up backfiring where they weren’t transparent about what they did and didn’t know, right? It’s also the case that fundamentally this mass vaccine rejectionism killed tens of thousands of people who shouldn’t have died. And in the end, the vaccines are safe and effective and we’ve created, whoever’s fault it is, there’s now a tendency in American life that is like rejecting like foundational germ theory of disease. And like things are like, are actually genuinely well-established science for hundreds of years to like calamitous effect. And I would like to reverse that somehow.
Dave Hopkins: Yeah. And you know, the diploma divide again, often it gets framed as trouble for the Democrats, um, in terms of elections. And there’s much reason to believe that it is potentially troubling the Democrats in life, especially if it starts extending beyond just white voters to minority voters as well. But it’s also a problem for the Republicans for governing. You know, if you’re going to —
Chris Hayes: Yes, culturally. Yes.
Dave Hopkins: — reject expert opinion, yes, the experts aren’t right all the time, but the non-experts aren’t right, even more of the time.
Chris Hayes: Right. Exactly. Yes, right.
Dave Hopkins: And so the —
Chris Hayes: One fell too on RFK. Right, yeah.
Dave Hopkins: So there’s a challenge for both parties here, right? And this is something that, you know, I think thoughtful Republicans should also really be concerned about is like what happens when you turn over the keys of governing to people who don’t have the policy knowledge in an increasingly complex world to not navigate the evidence and the reality before them.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, and this has been a problem for all kinds of, again, you know, different political tendencies that have achieved power, you know, born of kind of ideological coalitions or movement politics. And then it’s like, okay, who do we have in the movement who like really understands the city budget, you know? And it’s like, you need someone that does if you’re going to be mayor. And this is a real problem. There’s a whole bunch of forms of technical expertise that people need to govern effectively and that can’t be hand-waved away. And if you don’t have them, you’re going to end up, you know, I think court in calamity.
Okay, last question here is, you know, we see trends that one of the lessons I’ve learned in this life at the age of 45 is don’t just take a current trend and extrapolate it out forward. And it’s a hard lesson to learn because I think there’s all kinds of things I used to do that with, you know, the sort of Obama coalition and the, you know, the goose is cooked for the Republican party is the country grows less white, blah, blah. You know, trends happen until they don’t. What do you see, possibly on the horizon here, that’s different than just this trend continuing?
Matt Grossmann: Well, there are a lot of self-reinforcing processes here. As the parties are changing, especially in a two-sided system, even on the expertise trends that we’re talking about, you know, yes, the Republicans are going completely overboard in their anti-expertise vision, but the Democrats respond to that by kind of embracing expertise —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Matt Grossmann: — and saying trust the science and not necessarily —
Chris Hayes: Pro system.
Matt Grossmann: — being as skeptical as they used to be.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Matt Grossmann: So it’s a hard set of cycles to break, especially in a two-sided system. Part of the reason we think it’s been kind of hard to break recently is it usually takes a big electoral loss that the parties admit to sort of get some kind of shifts.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, right.
Matt Grossmann: And we just haven’t been seeing that.
Chris Hayes: Right. If everything’s narrow, there’s never the Goldwater moment, there’s never the 1980 moment, there’s never the ‘72 moment. Like all of those were like, oh wow, we got our butts kicked, this is not working or whatever came out of it. In the case of Goldwater, it’s a more complicated story than this is not working. But yes, if you don’t get landslides, which our system doesn’t seem capable of producing, and going back to where I started today’s conversation in the intro of like, at a sociological level, like there’s not a big difference between 49% of people and 51. But at a democratic level, it’s all the difference in the world.
And so you could tell yourself a story if you’re, well, this time we got 49, they got 51. Or this time we got 51 and they got 49, they still won, which is a possibility. Why should we change? We’re the GD majority, which is 100% a possibility if people listen to this on election week. Yeah, without that, it’s hard to get the inspiration to change. This may stay for a while. I think a landslide repudiation of Donald Trump might change it, maybe, but who knows?
Matt Grossman is Director of Institute for Public Policy and Social Research, a professor of political science at Michigan State University. He’s hosted the “Science of Politics” podcast. Dave Hopkins is a political scientist at Boston College and they both wrote “Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divided and the Culture War Transformed American Politics.” Great pleasure to have you guys.
Dave Hopkins: Thank you.
Matt Grossmann: Thanks, Chris. This is a lot of fun.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Matt Grossman and Dave Hopkins. Thought it was an illuminating conversation. There’s much more to dig into. This is a very, very fertile topic. And Lord knows by the time you’re listening to this, there might be a lot of new data shedding light on it. Who knows? I mean, there’ll be some new data. It may be ominous or promising, depending on your politics.
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