Elite White Liberals Unleashed

Zach Goldberg documents the transformation of the Democratic Party into the home for the best-educated white Americans in his ­February 2023 Manhattan Institute report, “The Rise of College-Educated Democrats.” College-educated whites now make up a larger cohort in the Democratic Party (27.3 percent) than do non-college-educated whites (25.2 percent). Their rise stems in part from an increase in the number of Americans with a college degree. But there are still twice as many non-college-educated whites as there are college-educated, so the main factor driving the rise of college-educated Democrats has been the migration of non-college-educated whites into the ­Republican Party.

Goldberg observes that the college-educated are more socially liberal than the general population. By virtue of education and income, they exercise the most influence on the political process. As a consequence, the ideological tone of the Democratic Party is set by the growing cohort of socially liberal, college-educated white voters (and donors). The near majority of non-white Democrats are more socially conservative, but they have less say in their party’s politics.

The power of college-educated whites in the Democratic Party is magnified by the fact that non-white working-class Democrats are less politically engaged and thus less influential than white working-class voters. Put simply, non-college-­educated whites are more effective in holding their leaders accountable to their interests. Thus, the migration of non-college-educated whites into the Republican Party over the last generation has allowed articulate, ­committed, and well-to-do white liberals to attain ­unprecedented dominance over the Democratic Party.

This phenomenon goes a long way toward explaining the increasing polarization of our politics. Goldberg’s analysis foretells an accelerating radicalism and still greater polarization in the future:

As college-educated whites—who have long been more cosmopolitan and socially liberal than their less educated counterparts—make up a larger share of the Democratic Party, party elites and candidates have less to lose and more to gain from taking positions that would have been electorally risky in years past. They could, for instance, champion amnesty for undocumented immigrants without worrying that doing so would occasion backlash on the part of socially and racially conservative white Democrats. Instead, the concern increasingly becomes whether they are pressing the right “buttons” to attract and/or maintain the support of white liberal activists and donors. And the resulting party’s priorities are only more attractive to college-educated whites.

In sum: College-educated white liberals enjoy great freedom to press their political agenda, and they now do so without counter-pressure from once influential white working-class voters in the Democratic Party.

These trends are reinforced at every turn. Because of the shift in party allegiance, college-­educated whites have strong political incentives to denounce non-college-educated whites as racists, bigots, and “haters.” Divisive rhetoric rallies non-white working-class Democrats, whose votes replace those of working-class whites. Furthermore, charges of grave moral and civic defects, epitomized in epithets like “deplorable,” enable elites to cast working-class whites as threats to America’s future, enemies of “our ­democracy.” The populist demands made by this cohort are invariably characterized as one or another version of “white supremacy.” Democratic politicians and their propaganda ministry, the legacy media, insist upon a Manichean political choice: It’s the Rainbow promise of an inclusive society—or Jim Crow 2.0.

Polarization is rightly lamented. But we need to be clear about its cause. Polarization is not driven by evangelical preachers in Texas. Nor should we blame Donald Trump, who sensed the growing anger among non-college-educated whites. Trump capitalized on the frustration of the working class over their ideological abandonment by college-educated whites, an abandonment that was ripening into an aggressive hostility and rhetorical assault not infrequently echoed by the Republican establishment. Rather, our political culture has become toxic because of demographic ­changes in the Democratic Party, which dominates most of the cultural institutions in America. College-educated white Democrats have shed constituencies that formerly held them accountable, and they superintend a diverse constituency that allows them to indulge their most extreme ideological ambitions.

Democrats in Rhode Island, as elsewhere, have introduced a bill to allow illegal immigrants to vote. This is entirely predictable: It reinforces college-­educated-white dominance. There is no population more abjectly incapable of political agency than people who are here illegally. For a long time, I have suspected that white elites embrace multiculturalism because it preserves their power. A coalition of “the excluded” is far more dependent upon patrons who “empower” them than are mainstream, working-class Americans who have a long history of bringing elites to heel. Identity politics operates in ways similar to the Ottoman Empire’s millet system. It’s a marvelous way to undermine ­democratic accountability.