We’ve long known that Seattle, where we have lived since 1990, is a blue bubble politically. Something like only 12% of the vote in Seattle went for Trump this November.
But lately I have become aware of what is arguably the much more important bubble in which I dwell, managing to do so with little awareness of it. Like the proverbial fish who doesn’t notice water. (Older fish swims by two younger ones and asks, “How’s the water?” The two younger ones look at each other and say, “What’s ‘water’?”)
I occupy the bubble of the college-educated. That bubble, Patrick Ruffini argues in his 2023 book, Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP, is the most important political and cultural divide in America today. Note the publication date, 2023, i.e. prior to the most recent election, an election which appears to have confirmed Ruffini’s analysis.
“A college diploma,” writes Ruffini, “has replaced income as the new marker of social class and key dividing line in our elections. And the relationship between this new conception of class and partisanship now runs in the opposite direction [to what it has historically]: the more highly you rank, the more Democratic you vote.”
He continues, “If politics now feels less like a contest of competing policy ideas, and more like an existential cultural struggle, educational polarization is why . . . At the end of World War II, only a tiny fraction of young people went to college. Those who did were a narrow elite, and those who didn’t were the country’s mainstream. Today, college graduates represent a much larger elite, and those who don’t are defined, socially and politically, as the working class.”
That said, today’s “working class,” as Ruffini goes on to make clear, is a more complex category than the traditional picture of it as those who work in factories and on assembly lines.
But here’s the number that really got my attention. The percent of the population today who are college graduates is 33%, which means that 67% — the large majority — are not.
Then I thought about those I know and those in our social circle. Virtually all are college graduates. Moreover, without much thinking about it, I have assumed that the percentages were roughly the inverse of what they actually are, and that a large majority of Americans are, like me, college graduates. Such an assumption is way out of touch with reality. It owes to the fact that these are the people I know, talk with, work with, and with whom I exchange ideas.
While I know people dubbed “working class” I can think of only several, at most, I count (or count me) as friends. Others are people who service my car, remodel a bathroom, or with whom I chat at the hardware in Joseph, Oregon in Wallowa County, Oregon, where we spend four to five months of the year. There the large majority are “working class,” and proud of it.
I had extrapolated from my highly educated bubble all sorts of conclusions, not least that “most everyone goes to college, don’t they?” This, I thought, was “normal.” But I was wrong. Moreover, my casual assumption effectively rendered two-thirds of my fellow Americans “not normal,” and kind of invisible. Not only are the non-college-educated the large majority in America, but in the last 40 years, quality of life indicators for this majority have taken a huge nosedive.
David Brooks noted this in his first post-2024 election column, which deserves reading or re-reading, even now. In “Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?” Brooks lists a string of alarming social indicators for the non-college educated:
” [T]he diploma divide became the most important chasm in American life. High school graduates die nine years sooner than college-educated people. They die of opioid overdoses at six times the rate. They marry less and divorce more and are more likely to have a child out of wedlock. They are more likely to be obese. A recent American Enterprise Institute study found that 24 percent of people who graduated from high school at most have no close friends. They are less likely than college grads to visit public spaces or join community groups and sports leagues.”
These indicators of social decline are not simply the result of less formal education. They are the result of social and economic shifts that have left many working class people, and the places where they live, out of the prosperity experienced by the more educated and degreed in a high-tech, knowledge-based economy. This, Ruffini notes, was only amplified by the COVID pandemic.
“Stark differences by job sector translated to differences by worker education levels. From May 2020 to April 2021, the average rate of teleworking . . . was 24 percent. Rates were vastly different based on education: an average of 52% of those with graduate degrees working from home, as did 38% of those with a bachelor’s degree. The rate for high school graduates: 8%.” Turned out the working class were the “essential workers.”
Columnist Peggy Noonan observed that our society now divides between the “protected” and “the unprotected” classes. While educated liberals talk a lot about the “marginal” and “disadvantaged,” we missed the largest group to whom such terms actually apply. Not only was that majority of the population overlooked, they were often labeled as “racist” or “sexist” or “authoritarian.”
Brooks wrote, “That great sucking sound you heard was the redistribution of respect. People who climbed the academic ladder were feted with accolades, while those who didn’t were rendered invisible.” While the Democrats were busy devising ways to forgive “student loans,” vocational training programs were being eliminated.
As I have noted in recent blogs my post-election focus has been on better understanding the people who have returned Trump to the White House and what motivated them to do so. Ruffini’s book has been an eye-opener for me. It also goes a long ways in explaining why Trump has gained support among Hispanics and African-Americans.
Two things now seem urgent. First, a better and more empathetic understanding of those on the other side of the college diploma divide. And, second, greater self-awareness and humility on the part of those of us on this side.
