College-educated voters are moving toward the Democrats, with the less educated moving toward the Republicans. Will 2024 continue the pattern or reverse the trend? What will that mean for the culture war that has engulfed the nation and refocused the political parties? David Hopkins breaks down the consequences of the diploma divide, from woke business to the COVID wars. This is not just about polarized sides moving apart: it’s about the victory of educated liberals in the culture war and the backlash that has evened party competition while transforming the Democrats.
Guest: David Hopkins, Boston College
Study: Polarized by Degrees
Transcript
Matt Grossmann: How the diploma divide transformed American politics, this week on The Science of Politics. For the Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossmann. College-educated voters are moving toward the Democrats with the less educated moving toward the Republicans. Will 2024 continue the pattern or reverse the trend, and what will that mean for the culture war that has engulfed the nation and refocused our political parties? This week I talk to my own co-author, Dave Hopkins of Boston College, about our new Cambridge book, Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics. Dave is great at breaking down our claims and showing the broad applications from woke business to the Covid wars. But this is not just another book about polarized sides moving apart. It’s about the victory of educated liberals in the culture war and the backlash that has evened party competition while transforming the Democrats. I think you’ll find a lot of recent American politics makes more sense when viewing it through Dave’s eyes. So what would you highlight as the key findings and takeaways from our new book, Polarized by Degrees?
David Hopkins: Well, I think the main takeaway is that the so-called diploma divide, the educational polarization of the parties, is really one of the most important developments in the current era of American politics. And when it’s discussed in the media, it’s usually discussed, or sometimes by some of the previous scholarship, it’s usually discussed really just as a matter of the demographic coalitions of the parties and sort of explaining who votes for which side and which parts of the country are trending red or trending blue. But I think our argument is that it’s much bigger than just that. That’s important, and that’s part of our analysis as well. But we really think that definitionally, we’re in an age now where the Democrats are kind of the party of the well-educated. They’re absorbing the values and priorities and governing styles favored by the well-educated. And the Republicans are sort of defining themselves against all that as an anti-elite party, including an anti-intellectual and anti-expert party.
And we think that you can see that not just in election results, but in how the parties operate internally, in how they govern, and the choices they make in terms of policymaking, and then also certainly their increasingly distinct relationships with other major social institutions, like the news media, the educational system, the nonprofit world, and even corporate America. And so this is a book that’s ambitious, it’s wide-ranging, it’s synthetic, and it tells a story that I think can be applied to almost any aspect of American party politics and maybe almost any aspect of American politics, period.
Matt Grossmann: So we say it’s not just a book about increasing division, it’s a book about social change, and one that has a direction that educated liberals are winning the culture war. So make that case.
David Hopkins: Yeah. One of the seeds, I think, of inspiration for us doing this project was simply the idea, the observation that American culture is changing, American society is changing around us. It’s changed a lot in our lifetimes, and it’s changing mostly in the direction that is favored by the left more than the right. And we can see this in changing racial and gender norms and acceptance of alternative identities, in the secularization of the American public, in the way that major social institutions have changed in their values and their policies and all kinds of different ways, and just in terms of the prevailing norms of how people behave and what they believe.
This is a society that in many ways, especially if we compare it to the 1980s, is more suffused with what we might call liberal or progressive values. I know a lot of the battles that we had 30 or 40 years ago over acceptance of homosexuality and single parenthood, battles over drug use and violent crime, punitiveness of crime policy, battles over whether environmentalists and public health experts should be sort of deferred to in policymaking, the acceptance of diversity, both in terms of racial composition but also religious composition in this country, acceptance of working women and gender equality in major American societies and occupations.
I mean, a lot of those battles were basically more or less won by the left. Even among conservatives, there’s just been a lot of ground conceded on a lot of those issues. And obviously, new battles have come up, and the liberals don’t win every battle, and the Republican Party has not disappeared. But the story we tell is a story that is taking place within a particular social context where I think the perception on the right that they are sort of on the defensive, that they’ve been losing a lot of ground, that the nation is changing, and changing in a way that is specifically threatening to the right ideologically, but also threatening to white people without college degrees who are more traditionalist in their cultural instincts. They’re not wrong about that. You and I are both sort of in progressive and liberal environments and occupations and communities where sometimes our colleagues who are on the left sometimes don’t recognize how many battles they’ve won and how successful they’ve been. They’re focused on the battles they haven’t won yet.
Matt Grossmann: But the liberal cultural direction has not resulted in Democrats winning all or most elections. We still have a big divide electorally. So kind of connect those trends to what we’re seeing in the electorate. How much of a realignment have we really had, and how much has it changed the images of the parties?
David Hopkins: Yeah. Well, we don’t argue that what’s good for liberalism or liberal values in American society necessarily is what’s good for the Democratic Party as an electoral force. Sometimes when one issue is sort of more or less settled, we move on to another. And the parties aren’t fighting, for example, over same-sex marriage the way they were before or about women in the workplace the way they were before. We are now fighting about immigration or trans rights or some other more emerging, more salient issue. So there’s no guarantee that liberal cultural drift, progressive cultural drift results in people sort of rewarding the party that’s sort of more aligned with liberal values. And in fact, backlash can be a very powerful electoral force.
People who are angry and upset and alienated about the way things are going, or even just one of the trends in motion, even if they accept the others, can be a very electorally potent force. And political figures who stand against the social change can really be very electorally successful. Of course, politicians aren’t in charge of the culture. They can’t actually usually deliver on promises to actually roll back these larger social trends that are underway, because the government really doesn’t have that power. But they can certainly invoke them symbolically in a way that can be very appealing to particular subgroups in the electorate. And that I think is the story of conservative populism both in this country and around the world at the present moment in time.
Matt Grossmann: So the most scholarship has recognized, of course, these voting trends among white voters with college degrees and without college degrees, but there’s some debate about the extent to which they are extending to racial minorities and whether they are starting or how much they are also creating a broader geographic basis where people in college-educated areas are moving leftward. So where do we stand on that, and how much does it matter if it stays concentrated among white voters with college degrees and without?
David Hopkins: Yeah. Our argument about the sort of magnitude of change and the current magnitude of difference of the diploma divide between people with college degrees and those without is that that’s especially concentrated among white voters. And there’s good reasons to understand why that might be true, that in the United States minority politics, Black politics, Hispanic politics, Asian politics has its own dynamics that are sometimes distinct and that voters of color have their own attachments to the Democratic Party that are different from the attachments that progressive whites have to the party. Having said that, I think we’re very open to the idea that in the future we will see more of a diploma divide among non-white voters. And in fact, there is some evidence there’s already been a bit of a change in that respect. And so that’s, I think, an important part of our story, is that people shouldn’t assume that this is always only going to be a story about white people, white citizens, and that it doesn’t relate to or apply to anybody else.
And the fact that we’ve seen this diploma divide pattern in other parts of the world with different ethnic groups is another important data point that there’s no reason, theoretically, hypothetically, we couldn’t see a diploma divide happen here. Members of minority groups who have less formal education tend to be more socially conservative. Even on racial issues, they tend to be more socially conservative than members of their ethnic group who have been to college and graduated from college and been to graduate school. And so the fact that the culture war and the rise of cultural conflicts is one of the main trends fueling the diploma divide among white voters is another reason to believe that it’s far from out of the realm of possibility that we could see a similar pattern among minority voters. And of course, for Democrats trying to win elections, that’s a sobering proposition, given how dependent they are on high levels of enthusiasm for their party among Black, Hispanic, and Asian American voters.
Matt Grossmann: So we’ve seen trends in the electorate, but as you mentioned, the trends in social institutions seem faster in liberalizing cultural values in places like universities, nonprofits, the media, even companies, and Republicans say that they aren’t just reflecting society, they’re kind of leading society. So where do we stand on that?
David Hopkins: Well, again, I think we have some sympathy for that argument. I think we think there’s some reason to believe that’s true. I mean, we do believe that new ideas, new social ideas, new social values do tend to come from prominent elites, thought leaders or influencers, to use a now popular term, and that the media and the educational system and other major social institutions or organizations and associations have their role to play in promoting new ideas and new policies that the rest of us, to some extent, are influenced by. And I think that is part of the story of the rise of a particular kind of progressive ethos, especially on cultural matters relating to race, gender, sexuality, and deference to expert policymaking. I think we’ve seen that play out over the past few decades. Now, it hasn’t been a kind of master plan of intentional political maneuvering that has produced that.
And I think that’s sometimes what conservatives claim, is that this is all sort of part of a kind of activist takeover of the institutional structure of American society. We don’t see it as that intentional. We see it as much more kind of a natural, to some degree, unwitting consequence of the fact that people with lots of education tend to be more socially prominent and have positions of intellectual influence in society. And if those people are politically distinct from others, then that distinctiveness is going to be reflected in the institutional policies and work ways within the organizations that they control.
David Hopkins: … work ways within the organizations that they control. So when we see the promotion of progressive racial or gender ideas, for example, by major corporations or nonprofits or universities or media organizations, that’s really just the reflection of the fact that the people who dominate the leadership of those organizations and the membership of those organizations and the patronage of those organizations, to a great degree, just tend to be clustered on the left side of the political spectrum on all these different matters.
Matt Grossmann: So we also look at the extent to which even companies which were traditionally closer to the Republican Party have also drifted on these social cultural issues. But there has been some change and some argument that we kind of reached peak wokeness and the Republican backlash has now reversed some of these trends in terms of social conscious investing, in terms of how companies are talking to the public, boycotts moving in the other direction. Where do we see where things stand in that?
David Hopkins: I think it’s fair to say that we’ve seen a bit of a shift in the zeitgeist now in 2024 compared to where things were, say, in 2019 or 2020. And I think there are a couple reasons why that’s true. One reason is Trump is no longer president, at least for now, as we’re discussing this in the fall of 2024. And we know, it’s an old political science finding that there tends to be more energy sort of in the opposition to a president of one party. The other side, there’s sort of more energy and more aggressive backlash. And I think Trump’s presidency sort of engendered a certain amount of this in the public sphere, this sort of very public concern with race and gender issues.
I also think that if you are in a position of influence within a corporation, for example, that you have reason to believe there might be a backlash to some of this. We’ve had Walt Disney and Bud Light beer for example, suffer some boycotts and other backlash stirred up by conservative media after endorsing progressive values in certain respects and getting into fights with Republican politicians.
But I don’t think that people should interpret this as being signs that conservatism itself has become more powerful within these elite circles. I think this is really more of a story of a changing trends on the left, that the left is saying, “Oh, wait. There are political risks involved if we get too publicly identified with a particular kind of progressive ideology.”
So the fact, for example, very recently, some major universities have sort of changed their policy and said, “Well, we’re not going to put out so many public statements responding to every kind of political issue that comes up,” whether it’s Israel Palestine or Black Lives Matter, whatever. “We’re sort of going to get out of the habit of doing that.”
Well, that’s a sign, I think, that they’re responding to a conservative backlash that’s very real. It’s not a sign that conservatives have gained more power within the Harvard University administration or more representation within the echelons of selective university systems over the past five years. So I think we should note these changes. There are always changes in fashion, changes in trends within liberalism or any other political cause. And we should understand that they’re responding to this conservative opposition in a strategic way more than they have been sort of actually sincerely convinced by the conservative response that they were taking on mistaken positions that they should now deny.
Matt Grossmann: So alongside the changes in electoral coalitions and the changes within these social institutions, there’s been a rise on the right of suspicion of experts of all kinds from these social institutions, and on the left, deference to them. We see that quite prominently in these cases that we discuss in COVID, in climate change, and in these battles over universities themselves. But those are kind of the leading edge cases. What happened there and how much can we extrapolate from them?
David Hopkins: Yeah, I think that there are good case studies in a larger sort of difference between the parties that it seems to me is extremely important in our current politics, which is to what extent do you believe we’re living in a complicated society with lots of major global problems and the answers to our problems lie in expertise? And empowering experts who know what they’re talking about to sort of, and have the intellectual credentials to guide the rest of us about what we should do.
I think, certainly, environmental policy, public health policy like COVID, and higher ed are great examples of that. But I think on almost any issue, you can see people who say, “The experts have the answers and they know what’s up,” are people who are increasingly are on the left side of the ideological divide and they align with the Democratic Party. And I can’t think of any issue offhand where Democrats or prominent liberals say, “The experts have it wrong and they should shut up and take a seat.”
And then, of course, on the right, it’s the opposite. That the sort of alienation on the right with communities of credentialed experts, the belief that these people are not as smart as they think they are, and that when they tell us what the policy should be, they’re motivated more by ideological bias than they are by actual superior knowledge. Well, that too, I think is applied to an entire range of issues, even though COVID policy and climate change policy are some of the most prominent and famous cases. I think that’s become a more broad issue, a more broad perspective and worldview on the right, is that suspicion of so-called expertise, of smarty-pants people who like to talk about how their fancy PhDs give them better judgment than regular folks.
I think that that’s become a part of the larger ethos of the Republican Party in the conservative movement. So I would expect those issues to be, in some ways, harbingers of other issues that may come up over time and become the basis of partisan debate. And there’s no reason to believe that this isn’t, in some ways, a sort of a self-perpetuating dynamic where people who have a kind of intellectual approach to policymaking find themselves fitting in better with the Democrats and people who sort of have a distrust of intellectualism migrate into the Republican Party.
Matt Grossmann: So our approach is not necessarily in the weeds of political science theories and debates, we don’t articulate three or four families of theory and the hypotheses that might distinguish them. But it does draw from research in American and comparative politics and is designed to extend that. So how would you talk about where we sit in relation to debates within the discipline?
David Hopkins: I think that we have used this book to make a lot of synthetic connections across a lot of specific areas of political science. I view us very much as friendly to a lot of the research that has come before in all these different areas. And our contribution really is finding the connections and the big picture. There’s so many different areas of research that are of specialized, that are looking at little pieces of the story, party organizations or voters or public opinion or policymaking or business and politics or law and politics or political psychology. And we’re kind of integrating a lot of those findings into what we see as sort of a major argument about American politics today.
Having said that, I do think that we take a bit of a distinct position compared to some of the prevailing previous research. I think that we are more certain than political science has been over the last two decades or so, that cultural politics are becoming a really preeminent axis of partisan differences. And that this is not just about people taking different positions on different policy issues and answering different distinct ways to survey questions that measure your position on this specific issue or that specific issue. But it’s about larger questions about values and identity, where we think that the Democrats and the Republicans are staking out different positions and people are migrating into the parties on the basis of their degree of comfort with the sort of progressive or the populist conservative worldview.
Speaking of migration, we also think that political science in the current era has tended to emphasize stability and strength of party identification as opposed to openness to change. And it’s, of course, understandable in a very polarized era where a lot of voters really are very loyal partisans and have very dark views of the opposing party, that that’s an important part of the story and that a lot of the research has focused on that.
But we also see, over the past 20 years, an awful lot of voters who have changed their party. 20 years ago, white voters without a college degree were split more or less 50/50 between the Democrats and Republicans, and now they are preferring the Republicans by a 2:1 ratio. That’s a pretty extraordinary change over a not very long period of time, and it can only by… It can’t be explained just by generational replacement or things like that, it really is actual individual people who are sort of moving from one party to another. And yet, our discussion as scholars of the current party era is often, “Well, everybody’s sort of dug into either the red team or the blue team and nobody’s in the middle and nobody’s open to persuasion from the other side.”
Matt Grossmann: The book also draws a lot from journalism and from popular culture. So what do academics miss by kind of focusing more narrowly on elections and political institutions, that may have been a reason why these trends were sort of noticed outside of political science before kind of taking a prime place within them?
David Hopkins: I think political science as a discipline has not been as attentive as it could have been to connections between party politics and larger trends and fashions in American society. And we do have some colleagues who are interested in those questions and are interested in the intersection of politics and popular culture, and they’ve done some really interesting work, but I think sometimes their work is not as widely recognized within our discipline as it should be. I think that this is really important. I think where people get their ideas about political matters isn’t just from explicitly political communication. It is from popular culture, for example. It is from non-political institutions, or at least ostensibly non-political institutions in society.
And the political world we’re in is just a piece of a larger social world. So changes in the larger social world, we should expect, will then have implications for our politics. And as a discipline, we’ve often been very narrowly focused on what we think of as explicitly political forms of influence on the sensibilities of the public, for example, messages in political media.
David Hopkins: For example, the messages in political media, for example, as opposed to messages in non-political media like general entertainment. And I think that the culture war and the culture conflicts that we have now in American society really do touch on bigger questions of identity and values and perceptions of the direction of the country that go beyond the strictly political. And that a lot of people are sort of taking the ideas that come from other parts of their experience and applying them to politics.
And Donald Trump is a great example as personification of someone who became very famous, not in explicitly political context. And then wound up becoming both the president and the major figure of one of our major political parties. So he certainly proves I think beyond a doubt, the importance of larger pop culture trends on our politics.
Matt Grossmann: We also try to put American politics in comparative perspective and draw a lot from a comparative scholarship. So where are we in those debates over post-materialism and populism? And where does the US stand out and need an American-specific explanation?
David Hopkins: One of the things that I think is really important that we tried to do in the book, is to provide some international context to the diploma divide in the United States and its implications, to point out to our audience who may be people who are most familiar with American politics or specialist American politics, that a lot of the same trends are happening in a lot of other places around the world. The diploma divide is not a uniquely American phenomenon. We’re seeing the same pattern a lot of other countries, especially with rich Western democracies where people with more education are moving left and people with less education are moving right.
We’re also seeing the rise, obviously of populism as a response to globalization, immigration and ethnic diversification in a lot of European countries and other Western countries. We’re seeing a lot of the same issues, political issues. And identities are becoming politically important in other countries, as well as the United States. So we want to I think push back against the idea that America’s the unique case, or that the rise of populism was somehow accidental here. Well, Trump just happened to come along and get the nomination in our crazy presidential nomination system, or Fox News is the reason why it’s different in America. We don’t really think that’s true.
At the same time, we do think there’s a very important way that America is different, which is that we have a two-party system as opposed to a multi-party system. And so, rather than seeing the rise of new parties to represent these new ideas, identities, and issues the way that we are seeing in a lot of the European counterparts in United States, here in the US, we have the same old two parties we’ve had for the better part of two centuries. And they’re the ones who have to work through all these changes. And so, the Democrats have to absorb this new cultural progressivism, even as they try to retain their more old-fashioned working class and labor support. The Republicans have to absorb this new culturally-fueled backlash on the right, even as they try to still remain the party of business and the party of the institutional status quo.
And so, that’s of course, part of what’s causing some of the very dramatic internal debates that we’re seeing within both parties, especially on the Republican side. So that’s I think the context we want to put this story in. We want it to be a global story, but with a specifically American set of implications that help our audience understand why politics in America is so polarizing. How it’s so easy to have an us versus them dynamic when you only have two parties. And so, one becomes us, the party of us, and the other becomes the party of them. And why it is that so much of our political debates play out within the parties, as well as between them.
Matt Grossmann: So you have no excuse. You knew what you were getting into working with me again on a giant project. What should listeners know about how we work together?
David Hopkins: Well, I did know what I was getting into and we’ve had a lot of fun. We had a lot of fun with the last book and it was a great experience writing Asymmetric Politics. And so, I was certainly ready for another go-around. I would say that our collaboration is maybe a little different than some other people’s. Often collaboration in our line of work has to do with different people bringing different say methodological specialties to the job or different kind of theoretical ideas to the job. Whereas I feel like for us, where you see our collaboration is that we write these books where there’s one big argument and one big idea, and then below it, there’s 20 or 30 sub-points and sub-arguments.
And this was true of Asymmetric Politics as well. Polarized by Degrees is a book that has one big argument. But there are so many somewhat smaller and more focused, but also really important implications and cases and areas of application, and explanations for different aspects of what’s going on in politics. And I feel like you and I are both good at coming up with and supplying these different kind of implications, and some of them are ones that the other one might not have thought of. But when we put our heads together, we wind up with a whole lot of different takeaways under the banner of the big central argument of the book.
And so, I feel like that’s one thing that was very distinctive about our last book, and I think it applies to this book too.
Matt Grossmann: So what will sound familiar to readers of Asymmetric Politics in this book, and what parts of it will sound like a departure?
David Hopkins: I think a lot of it will sound familiar, not in the sense that it’s really the same argument, but I think just we take a similar tack. We just have a similar style of analysis. We want to talk about the big picture. We want to be very integrative and synthetic, and draw connections in a lot of different areas. We want to talk about mass politics and voters, but we also want to talk about institutions and elites. All of that, I think is very familiar. We also take each party as its own animal. We don’t treat them as two sides of the same coin. And again, in this book, we tell a story about how the Democrats have changed. We tell a story about how the Republicans have changed, and that’s not always the same story.
Where I think readers of Asymmetric Politics may find something that they didn’t get as much in the last book is, in the last book, because our emphasis was on the group interest and group coalition nature of the Democratic Party, we didn’t talk as much about ideology on the left. Ideology on the left for us was important, but it wasn’t the definition of the Democratic Party, especially at the mass level. And our emphasis was then, and I think we still believe this, that the Democratic Party as a mass organization is composed of a lot of people who don’t necessarily have ideological commitments to the politics of the left.
But I think in this book, we do talk more about progressive ideology and what’s important about it for our politics, and where it has a lot of influence in our politics. And a lot of its influence isn’t that it drives rank and file voters to support the Democratic Party and its candidates, but it has other areas of importance. We can see how progressive ideology has changed the way that nonprofit organizations work and the educational system works, and the media works. We can trace how progressive ideas about cultural matters, like race and gender have spread through elite-dominated institutions, and from there to the mass public as well.
And so, I think there were some people who were kind of critiquing Asymmetric Politics, saying that we sort of didn’t give committed ideological liberals enough attention for their role in our politics. I think if that’s what you felt about the last book, you’ll find a lot about those people in this book.
Matt Grossmann: So the book was obviously finished before the recent replacement of Joe Biden with Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee, and the selection of Tim Walz as the vice presidential nominee. So how well does our story fit with how the Democrats are presenting themselves in 2024? And how much would we expect the electoral trends to continue rather than reverse this year?
David Hopkins: I think the Democrats in 2024 are still a party that presents itself as a culturally progressive party and a party that still believes in deference to expertise as the default mode of governing. I think that the style of campaigning has changed a bit in this election compared to the last. I think that there is a growing fear among the politicians and political consultants in the Democratic Party, that too much specific invocation of progressive language on cultural matters is risky from an electoral perspective. And even if you believe that there’s structural racism, for example, in society, talking about a lot doesn’t necessarily help you win Wisconsin.
And so, I do think we’ve seen a change in the rhetoric of Harris and Walz compared to say the rhetoric of the Democratic candidates, including Harris, in the 2019, 2020 period. But at the same time, what you don’t see is an explicit walking away or distancing of the party from progressive ideas. Whereas in the ’90s, when the Democrats worried that becoming too associated with cultural liberalism was an electoral risk, they would actually pick fights. Bill Clinton famously would pick a fight with Jesse Jackson to show that he didn’t align with the progressive edge of American politics. And Democrats today don’t want to do that. They want to maybe shift their emphasis to try to win back as much of the white working class as they can.
They want to talk about Tim Walz as a football coach who can go hunting on the weekends and lives in middle America, and is a plain-spoken guy. But that is not accompanied with saying that the progressive activist community is explicitly incorrect about some major cultural issue. They’re trying to change their style and their rhetoric without really changing their policy positions. And I think that is a testament to the ongoing influence of progressive cultural ideas in the Democratic Party.
Matt Grossmann: We also in the book hold up obviously Trump as a emblem of what’s happened in the Republican Party, but also Obama as an emblem of what happened in the Democratic Party. And it does seem that the convention showcased the extent to which Obama’s style still reigns in the party, especially this idea that you sell progressive vision, but you sell it as a middle-American vision. So how should we think about Obama as a representative of the Democratic Party and its direction?
David Hopkins: Yeah. I think that the Democrats are still very much the party of Obama. And I think another thing that we really want to do in the book that I think is a major contribution of our book, is just to talk about the Democratic Party. Because over the past decade or two, there’s been more discussion of the Republican Party, and that’s true in the popular media, but-
David Hopkins: And that’s true in the popular media, but it’s also true in the academic community and people who do work on parties and party politics, there’s been more focus on the changes on the Republican side. And there’s understandable reasons for why that’s true, but we are trying to point out that the Democrats have been changing too. Less dramatically than the Republicans, but in very important ways steadily. This is a party that’s evolved from the way it was 30, 40 or 50 years ago. And just look at the career of Joe Biden, and you can see that evolution. He’s the personification of the evolution, the Democratic Party over time.
And Joe Biden owes the last couple chapters of his political career to alignment with Barack Obama. And an absorption of Obama style politics, broadly, which is liberal, but not without selling liberal positions as a continuation of American traditions rather than a departure from them as an optimistic, forward-looking idea of America as opposed to one that centers on complaints and injustices in America. And that allows racial and gender diversity to be personified in an increasingly diverse class of leaders as opposed to something that has to be explicitly engaged rhetorically all the time.
And I think Harris is an Obama-esque figure in a lot of those ways. And I think the way she’s presented herself since she became the Democratic nominee is very much using the Obama playbook and Obama’s vision of what the Democratic Party should be. And Obama is, I think, an extremely important historical figure, not just for being the first Black president or his accomplishments as president, but also for sort of being the major face of the Democratic Party in the 21st century. And that the Democratic Party has in some ways redefined itself around him.
And there are no major factions remaining in the Democratic Party who don’t invoke Obama and follow Obama as a figure. So we see, I think, that continuity with the current campaign as well. So there’s a lot of talk of the Republican Party being the party of Trump, and may be the party of Trump enduringly, the Democrats in their own way are the party of Obama.
Matt Grossmann: So the reason that there was so much focus on Republicans for the last decades are mostly about the rise of Donald Trump. So what role does Trump play in our story? How much would things have turned out differently without him as a specific personification of this and relatedly, when he finally exits, how are the Republicans likely to look?
David Hopkins: Trump’s certainly a big part of our story. He’s a big part of anybody’s story about 21st century American politics. I do think that our perspective on Trump is to emphasize him as a consequence as well as a cause of political change in America. To see his rise as only being made possible by previous developments in American politics and emphasizing those as opposed to treating him as someone who sort of dropped out of the sky into our political world and sort of reordered everything out of nowhere. The diploma divide was already happening before Donald Trump became a presidential candidate.
He certainly accelerated it because he hastened both the growing attraction of non-college white voters to the Republican Party and repelled college-educated voters away from the Republican Party. But both of those trends were already in motion, especially the first one before Trump came along. I also think that it’s important to emphasize that many of Trump’s messages and his sort of worldview, his political worldview is very much a political worldview that already existed across a lot of the conservative media universe.
And so while he was in some ways a novel figure as a candidate for elective office in talking about politics the way he did, emphasizing the issues he emphasized and styling himself as an opponent, not just of the liberals, but of the establishment conservatives as well. All of those elements were already in place and sort of waiting for a candidate to sort of come along and harness them. And I think that that’s an important part of our understanding of Trump as well.
And of course, the fact that there are these sorts of Trump-esque figures in other countries that have much of the same message, have much of the same persona is another piece of evidence from a social science standpoint that Trump shouldn’t be treated as a kind of unicorn figure without any parallels anywhere else. So Trump’s a major figure in our book, but he’s part of a larger picture.
Matt Grossmann: I want to make sure you get any chance to ask any questions of me that haven’t come up so far.
David Hopkins: Sure. Well, I’m curious, we haven’t really talked about this, we haven’t really had a debriefing about after the book was done, about did it turn out the way you thought? Were there ideas you had at the beginning of the project that ended up changing while you did the project? I mean, how much did the final project match your own initial inspiration? I’m sort of curious about that.
Matt Grossmann: Well, I think part of what might have an agenda still to be done is that we actually approached this with kind of two different projects in mind. I think mine was more about technocracy and policymaking and the role of experts and your initial framing was more about the generational divide in American public and parties. And I think there’s a chance for both of us to potentially extend those original ideas beyond where they intersect in talking about the education divide. But I think that I always appreciate our ability to think big, to try to be as integrative as we can to find everybody who’s done anything related to the topic that we have, but to not try to focus on where we disagree with people or nailing down exact mechanisms different from they would, but in doing a big integrative project.
So I would say just for example, some of the poli-sci concerns that might be front and center, things like what is the causal role of getting a college degree relative to other factors in voting decisions? Or to what extent is being at college and hearing some messages there or interacting with peers there actually producing these liberal cultural values relative to being in a community or occupation surrounded by college educated people. And I continue to think all those questions are very important just for us. I think we ended up deciding that the answers to them don’t necessarily make a big difference for their implications.
And so I think our approach so far was to just say, and yes, we’ve had all of these important findings and there are still some debates about them, but either way, it changes the image of the parties, it changes how they relate to policymaking, how they’re seen by other voters. And so I’m happy with how we treated that so far, but there’s still a long way to go. I think in comparison to our previous book, this is a less mature area of scholarship that we were integrating.
David Hopkins: I agree with that. I think that when I look back on the notes we had right at the start of working on this project, it surprised me actually how much of it did make into the final book. We had more there than I had recalled, but there were certainly these other ideas too, and we just never got to everything. There was going to be this whole thing about campaigns and how campaign practices had become transformed by social science and technocracy, for example, which we kind of never really-
Matt Grossmann: Which is true, they’re technocratic, democratic.
David Hopkins: So there’s so much more, and maybe we’ll get to it and maybe someone else will get to it, hopefully. But there’s so much more to say about this topic for sure. And sometimes you just have to make the decision if you want the book actually done and not to weigh 10 pounds, that we’re going to stop here, at least for now. But there is much, much more to say.
Matt Grossmann: Sounds good. Anything we didn’t get to that you want to include?
David Hopkins: Well, what I’ll say about this book that I think is important is that we really work very hard to make this a book that’s accessible to a broad audience. We really were very, very gratified, I think. I can speak for you as well, in the way that asymmetric politics was something that people discovered who weren’t only our own professional colleagues, as gratifying as that is, but that it found a bit of a wider audience as well, just from journalists, analysts, people who are professional members of the political world, who wrote to us and spoke to us about how much they enjoyed the book.
And even just sort of lay readers, people who are just political junkies interested in politics, find politics important. We hope that those same sets of people also like Polarized by Degrees as well. We wrote it for them as well as for our professional colleagues. We try to make it digestible, accessible, interesting, written in a style that is easily graspable even if you aren’t one of those people with a fancy PhD in the social sciences. And so that was our intent, and hopefully that intent is realized as the book makes it out into the world.
Matt Grossmann: There’s a lot more to learn. The Science of Politics is available bi-weekly from the Niskanen Center. I’m your host, Matt Grossmann. If you liked this discussion, here are the episodes you should check out next, all linked on our website. Are the Democratic or Republican parties becoming more similar or different? Higher education, an engine of social mobility or a driver of inequality? Policymakers follow informed expertise, polarized opinion on climate change and messages that move conservative, and how misperceptions and online norms drive cancel culture. Thanks to David Hopkins for joining me. Please check out Polarized by Degrees and then listen in next time.