The most important U.S. political trend of the 21st century, according to most observers, is the increasing tendency of college-educated voters to support the Democratic Party and for non-college-educated voters to support the Republican Party. In many ways, the two parties have swapped their historic bases. When John F. Kennedy won the presidency in 1960, Democrats still considered themselves to be a working-class party. Kennedy carried white voters without college degrees by a two-to-one margin but lost college-educated whites by an identical margin. Now those ratios are reversed, as Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in 2024 won college-educated voters by a comfortable margin but lost bigly to Trump among non-college-educated voters — with notable declines among non-college-educated minority voters compared to 2020.
Political scientists Matt Grossmann and Dave Hopkins are the co-authors of a recent book that examines not just the fact of this educational polarization but also its broader implications. Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics demonstrates how Democrats increasingly are absorbing the cultural liberalism and social values of the college-educated class, while Republicans more and more define themselves as a party tilting against establishments, elites, experts, and intellectuals.
In this podcast discussion, Grossmann and Hopkins argue that educated liberals are winning the culture war, particularly with regard to the secularization of American public life and increasing social acceptance of single parenthood, gay marriage, racial and ethnic diversity, and other left-leaning values. But they also believe that these victories for liberalism don’t necessarily translate into electoral victories for the Democratic Party, or for other liberal parties around the world. On the contrary, the backlash against these changes has empowered populist revolts in many countries and led to a widespread collapse in public trust toward most social institutions. But the result has been that Republicans under Trump have what Hopkins and Grossman term “power without credibility”: the power to destroy institutions without the ability to reorient them in a more conservative direction or to halt the movement in public opinion toward cultural liberalism.
Transcript
Matt Grossmann: There was a very long-term, important popular image that the Democrats were the party of the working class. In fact, it was the number one thing that people said that they liked about the Democratic Party. And the number one thing people said they disliked about the Republican Party was that it was the party of the rich.
Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice for the Niskanen Center. Welcome to The Vital Center podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. And I’m very pleased to be joined today by Matthew Grossmann and David Hopkins. They are the co-authors of an important recent study entitled Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics, which was published in September 2024 by Cambridge University Press. This is their second collaborative work, following on their 2016 book Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats.
Dave Hopkins is an associate professor of political science at Boston College, where his research and teaching interests include American political parties and elections, the U.S. Congress, voting behavior, and media and culture. Matt Grossmann is a professor of political science and director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University. He is also a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center. Welcome, Dave and Matt!
Matt Grossmann: Great to be with you.
Dave Hopkins: Thanks a lot, Geoff. It’s really fun to be here.
Geoff Kabaservice: Great to see you both. Matt, I’m going to indulge in a bit of synergistic cross-platform promotion by reminding everyone that you are also the host of the Niskanen Center’s The Science of Politics Podcast. And since 2017, if I remember correctly, this podcast has been keeping listeners current with the latest and greatest research on American politics and policy. And I urge everyone to listen, subscribe, and rate you five stars.
Matt Grossmann: Thanks so much.
Geoff Kabaservice: So great to have this first ever co-Niskanen branding opportunity. And I think your podcast, Matt, is nearing the 200-episode mark, so it’s been very prolific as well as very influential.
Matt Grossmann: We are. I think we’re at 192, so getting there.
Geoff Kabaservice: That’s fantastic. So since this particular recording is a bit of an in-house Niskanen production, I want to say on the one hand that I found your book on Polarized by Degrees to be absolutely fascinating. I read it with rapt attention, but I also disagreed with certain elements of it. And I might be a little more open about that disagreement than I typically am when I bring authors onto this podcast, and I hope that will be okay.
Matt Grossmann: Sounds good.
Geoff Kabaservice: So Matt and Dave, you’re writing an analysis in Polarized by Degrees that’s really admirably clear and incisive. But your argument is somewhat complicated — or rather I should say that you have one big, overarching argument and then a lot of somewhat complex sub-arguments below that. So Matt, starting with you, what in a nutshell would you say is the main argument in this book?
Matt Grossmann: We’re motivated by the big divide that we have seen in American voting behavior, where the biggest recent change is the move of college-educated voters toward the Democrats and voters without college degrees toward the Republicans. But we see it as a part of an international and important historical pattern, and we also see it as brought about by the advance of higher education and cultural liberalism in American politics and throughout the rich world.
And we’re interested in the consequences. Because we’re seeing a big culture war kind of engulf the rest of politics and the rest of social institutions, where universities are seen as on one side of the culture war alongside lots of other social institutions that are dominated by educated people. So we want to explore both the sources and consequences of this big education divide.
Geoff Kabaservice: That’s admirably put. Dave, would you add anything to that analysis?
Dave Hopkins: No, I think that’s the sort of quick version of it. We are simultaneously interested in thinking through all of the consequences of what it means for the Democrats to for the first time in history be the party of the well-educated, and the Republicans retaining the party of the less educated. And while the diploma divide is often just discussed in terms of elections and in terms of which voters vote for which party, we think the implications go very far into the governing process after the election is over, and how the parties increasingly distinctively have different governing styles and choices and priorities.
But at the same time, we’re also interested in putting this strictly political story into a much broader social context. And really we see this as one of the fruits of major societal transformations that have been going on for the better part of the last fifty or sixty years — and again, not just in the United States. Political scientists sometimes don’t always spend a lot of time focused on the broader cultural context of politics, but in our view that’s an essential part of the story. You can’t really understand the diploma divide without understanding and recognizing the major changes that have revolutionized American society since the 1960s.
Geoff Kabaservice: And it does seem to me that your book is quite pioneering in bringing in the cultural side of analysis to bear on what is otherwise usually something talked about mostly in electoral terms. Is that fair to say, Matt?
Matt Grossmann: Yes. We are conscious of some previous work that did look at the influence of popular culture. But we, I think, are the first to sort of say this is a big dominant trend of social liberalization that the right is reacting against. It didn’t come from nowhere. It came from a true transformation in our popular culture and our social institutions. And we bring all of that together.
Geoff Kabaservice: You do cite Eunji Kim as arguing that popular culture fashions actually do tend to exert a lot more influence on politics than even many of the institutional actors who are the major subjects of academic analysis.
Dave Hopkins: I saw Eunji give a talk a few years ago to a bunch of political scientists about her dissertation research, which was about how reality television shapes citizens’ perceptions of how to get ahead in America. And I was struck by how much she felt she had to kind of reassure political scientists that she was doing serious academic research, that she hadn’t just spent her graduate career watching television and writing about it.
Because to me it seemed absolutely self-evident that popular culture and popular media change how people see the world and their place in the world, and that that would have political ramifications just like every other source of influence over the perspectives of individuals. And so we certainly, I think, share the same spirit of seeing some intellectual connections to be made between traditional political science and understanding of media and culture more broadly.
Geoff Kabaservice: And actually, Dave, your approach is curiously similar to the approach that Andrew Breitbart recommended for politics, because one of his main points was that politics is in fact downstream from culture. And his advice to conservatives was they were never going to get what they wanted unless they actually took on the liberal-dominated institutions of culture that do so much to form our society.
Dave Hopkins: Well, one of the things about the emphasis on how much things have changed in our society — and in ways that render it more liberal, more to the left, than in the past — that’s something that actually conservatives have tended to be more understanding of than people on the left have. I mean, I think conservatives sometimes have seen it clearer because they see it as a set of defeats, as a set of vulnerabilities.
And Breitbart was certainly one of them, someone who felt like, “Yeah, American culture is moving in a more liberal direction and this is a problem for my conservative values and my conservative goals.” Whereas a lot of people on the left, I think, become very focused on the battles they have yet to win and the ways in which they have not fulfilled all of their ideals in society, compared to understanding how many victories they have in fact achieved.
Geoff Kabaservice: So Matt, just to pick up on this point, it does seem to me that one of the main points of your book is that there hasn’t been a cultural stalemate between the forces of Red and Blue. There has been a sustained pattern of progressive victories, really, at least since the 1980s. And to quote from the book, there has been what you call “an increasingly dominant liberal advantage. The growing population of well-educated citizens has drawn on its disproportionate social influence — within educational systems, mass communications industries, professional and charitable associations, and corporate management structures — to empower and lead a leftward shift in cultural values and institutional policies.”
You do note that this has stimulated a major backlash that has in many ways redefined conservative politics, but you say that “the broad social transformations they oppose are mostly beyond the power of elected officials to control.” I should point out that those passages read rather differently to me now in the early months of Trump’s second administration than they did when I first read them last fall before the election. And I am frankly much more skeptical of the assertion that there has been or will be what my friend Ron Brownstein, for one, has described in terms of a seemingly all-but-inevitable triumph of a “culture of transformation” versus a “culture of restoration.” So let me ask you, Matt, have the election results and what feels very much like the present demoralization of the left changed your views on such matters?
Matt Grossmann: Not on the overall leftward shift. Definitely when you look at policy opinions on things like race and gender, gay rights, drugs, even immigration until the Biden administration, you saw pretty consistent leftward trends. When we see rightward trends, it’s actually usually when Democrats are in power and when they’re moving policy leftward — then you do see a right-wing backlash. But that also means that when the right is in power and moving policy in its direction, you see a backlash on the left. That just has not necessarily fully materialized yet in the second Trump administration.
But I think viewing it through policy opinion is a bit too narrow, because these are big social and cultural changes. So just for example, people might say that gay rights and transgender rights have been under attack in the election. They are about to be rolled back in all kinds of state and federal policies. And yet there was a Gallup poll that’s taken every year that came out this week that said the number of Americans who identify as LGBT has gone up another point and a half in the last year, and it’s at 20% or more among the youngest population. All of those individual categories have gone up over time. So you can fight a policy battle, but you’re still losing a long-term cultural change that is moving the country in a more liberal direction.
Geoff Kabaservice: Dave, how would you respond?
Dave Hopkins: I think it’s helpful maybe to make distinctions between short- and long-term dynamics. I certainly agree that the lesson that a lot of people have taken from the second Trump victory has been that, “Oh, the left has gone too far on this cultural woke-ism stuff, and the country is rejecting it and demanding a sort of a rightward shift.” But even if some of that is true, as Matt says, we’re going to be left, when the dust settles and the honeymoon ends in the first year or so of the Trump administration, with a country that still overall is in a more left place than it was ten years ago. And that’s really what we are interested in: talking about the long-term transformations and long-term trends rather than the month-to-month or year-to-year dynamics, which may be a little bit less consistent.
Geoff Kabaservice: I think you do well to draw this distinction between long-term trends and shorter-term trends. And certainly during my lifetime, one of the greatest social transformations has been the widespread public acceptance of gay marriage, for example, which would have been inconceivable — well, to Barack Obama when he was first running for president back in 2008.
On the other hand, I do believe that some of the aspects of the trans debate — for example, biological males playing in women’s sports — is something that inevitably is going to be a wedge issue used against Democrats. This maximalist position on that issue is not going to hold, and I think we can see a reverse of that. Likewise, you’re seeing a considerable reverse in other areas against some of the policies adopted after the really almost quasi-religious moment following the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
And you include the question of corporate “wokeness” in your analysis, you give a whole chapter to that. A piece in the New York Times three days ago by Jeff Sommer said: “DEI Comes and Goes. Profits Are Forever.” Or there’s Megan McArdle writing in the Washington Post today under the headline, “Academia Finally got Schooled,” talking about the significant, robust, secular trend of public opinion turning against higher education over the last several years and now leading to significant actions, particularly at the state level.
So I guess there is some distinction between a society that does progress toward greater acceptance of diversity and gay marriage and social individualism more generally, but that this is different from saying that the maximal position on any issue is going to be what prevails into the future. It’s not how you portray it, but when I do come across this, it seems to me like the Whig school of history in jeans.
Dave Hopkins: I think there’s a lot of truth to that. But I also think, again, we make a distinction between what’s happening in society and who’s winning the immediate political or electoral debate. And a lot of people thought that these trends — like, for example, increasing acceptance of gay rights, especially among younger generations — were somehow going to produce a permanent liberal majority in the country or a permanent advantage for the Democrats in elections. And that’s just not how politics works.
What we’re pointing out is not that the Democrats are winning all the battles. We’re pointing out that the terrain that is being fought in these battles looks a lot different. If the terrain is: “Should openly trans people be competing in this or that sports team?” — well, that may be a battle that the left doesn’t win, at least in the short term. But just the fact that that’s what we’re talking about, that’s what the argument is about at this point compared to what the arguments were about twenty or thirty years ago — that’s really what we mean when we mean that things have changed in a liberal direction. And the ground that the right has had to concede on culture is pretty stunning when you look where they were fifty years ago and where they are now, even though they’ve been winning plenty of elections during that time and will win plenty more in the future.
Geoff Kabaservice: Matt, what would you add to that?
Matt Grossmann: I think one of the interesting trends is that when these social and cultural issues are in the middle of partisan politics is not when they tend to be gaining ground socially. So just in the gay marriage debate, the only time when public opinion was not moving leftward on gay marriage was in 2004, when it was the subject of ballot initiatives and was still rising from a low level of support and got in the middle of a political campaign and became politicized. But obviously, over time, that opinion has continued to move.
We don’t mean that liberals win every policy battle. I mean, you can look at American racial history, for example, and certainly find the left trying some things where they were defeated in racial integration. But I still think any fair characterization of American racial opinions over time shows that they’ve been moving leftward pretty substantially and steadily.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, let me ask a question somewhat more narrowly tailored around the 2024 election results. You do point out in your book that there were early indications before this election that minority voters without college degrees were starting to move away from the Democrats, often because these minority groups are fairly socially conservative to begin with. It does seem that the 2024 election really in many ways pointed toward at least a potential political future where the Republican Party is the party of the multiracial, multi-ethnic working class. You saw significant defections from the Democrats among minority groups without college degrees, particularly among Hispanic men, but to some extent among other groups as well.
Given that this was a factor that you had paid attention to in your analysis as possibly being important to change what the future might look like, how do you respond to this particular result that came out of the 2024 election? Matt, you first.
Matt Grossmann: Certainly there’s a continuation of electoral trends that we saw in progress. Even when you have a nationwide move towards the Republicans, you still saw the place that Democrats were doing their best was among white voters with college degrees. And two of the trends that we had questioned whether they were going to expand the education divide did continue in 2024.
As you say, there was a continuation of the divide, which had been prominent among white voters, to Hispanic voters and Asian American voters. And in addition, there was a reinforcement of the geographic context effects, that it matters not just whether you have a college degree but whether you live around other people who have college degrees. And we had a nice opportunity to separate that from just basic density effects, because actually geographic density polarization did not increase because Republicans did slightly better in cities. But the education context effects did continue. So I think both of those trends that we were wondering — would they continue and expand the education divide? — certainly did.
I think on minority voters, our big contribution is just to say it’s not as big of a divide based on education, but all of the issue divides and views of culture that divide white voters by college education also divide minority voters by college education. So there was, I would say, too much prediction of Black voters moving towards the Republicans in this election and in pre-election polls. But it’s still the case that Black voters without college degrees differ a lot in their opinions from Black voters with college degrees. So that still is always going to be out there as a source of potential coalition change.
Geoff Kabaservice: Dave, what would you add to that?
Dave Hopkins: Not much to add. I just think we have a dynamic in our politics where there are lots of people who are well-educated progressives who make these assumptions that working-class minority voters share their very progressive views on race and gender and culture. And that’s just simply not true. It’s never been borne out by any public opinion data. And I think one of the reckonings that’s happening in the wake of this election is the having to come face-to-face with the clear evidence that Donald Trump has not had this uniquely polarizing effect on minority voters that a lot of people, especially on the liberal side, expected that he would have. For all of his transgressions on racial issues in terms of the things that he says, or gender issues, that’s just not something that alienates minority voters who are less educated as much as people assume.
And even, for example, the question of immigration and the idea that his views about immigration are sort of uniquely alienating to Hispanic voters — well, we have some pretty clear data there that say that the truth is a lot more complicated than that. And so I think that that’s something that belatedly the political world is starting to learn, even though if you were paying close attention to public opinion you probably shouldn’t be too surprised.
Geoff Kabaservice: I think this is a point worth dwelling on. Because in your book, you go through fairly carefully the advantages and disadvantages that accrue to both parties from this separation of college-educated voters versus non-college-educated voters into the two parties. But the fact remains that there are a lot more non-college-educated voters than there are college-educated voters. And yes, their average propensity to participate, particularly in off-year elections or special elections is less than those of the college-educated. And no, they don’t have the sort of institutional and cultural heights from which to exert influence in the way that the college-educated do. But if you’re talking about a political party which has its base in a third of the country, more or less — that tends not to be a recipe for success in presidential elections going forward.
Matt Grossmann: That’s right. College voters are a minority. And that means that for the time being, if you could pick one of those boxes, you would want the non-college box to win elections. But as you say, college-educated voters do vote at higher rates and do participate in politics at higher rates across all kinds of activities including calling Congress, donating money… So all of those things matter in the interim as well.
But I think we should place this in international context. We had a German election this week, for example, that showed an education divide, but the education divide was among the non-center/traditional parties. It was Green Party voters and Left Party voters taking overwhelmingly from the college-educated population, and the Alternative for Germany, the far-right party, taking overwhelmingly from the non-college voters in Germany.
And that mirrors a pattern that we’ve seen in all kinds of other democratic places, where overall there’s a divide between the left and the right, but it has these outlets, right? The non-college voters can move toward a populist, more authoritarian party, and the college voters can move towards a green party or a party focused on the cultural concerns of urban liberals. And we don’t have those outlets. We have the strictest two-party system in the world. So instead, what you’re seeing is a remaking of the two major parties. And the good news for the parties is they’re keeping a big base. They’re basically close to 50-50 and they’re not going away. But the bad news is their popular images look more like those of the third parties elsewhere. They look more like they’re becoming a green party and a populist party rather than retaining their traditional images — because their coalitions have been transformed.
Geoff Kabaservice: Just on that point, I followed the German elections fairly closely too. And I’m reminded of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s remark when she got into office, pretty early in her career, that she would not typically have been in the same political party as a Joe Manchin if the United States were not bifurcated into this two-party system. In German terms, I would say that her political evolution would be that she would have started with Die Linke and then moved to the Greens, and then at this point probably would be somewhere in the SPD more-or-less mainstream.
Matt Grossmann: That’s right, we have these two huge coalitions. But one place that it does match your story on this perhaps being worse for Democrats is that there was a very long-term, important popular image that the Democrats were the party of the working class. In fact, it was the number one thing that people said that they liked about the Democratic Party for fifty years. And the number one thing people said they disliked about the Republican Party — again, for fifty years — was that it was the party of the rich. So to the extent that the class coalitions have changed the popular images of the parties, and that’s no longer something that people can say about the Democrats, it really is a challenge to how they’re perceived.
Geoff Kabaservice: And Dave, you make the point in your book that in the United States, because there are only these two parties, that means that the educational polarization that we see elsewhere expresses itself in almost uniquely polarizing and rancorous ways.
Dave Hopkins: Well, sure. I mean, when there are only two choices, you’re on one side and your enemies are on the other side. I mean, that is one thing that I think also distinguishes our politics from the politics of most of the other world democracies, is that just only having two choices itself has a polarizing sort of a flavor to it. And a lot of people are in one party not because they love that party but because they detest the other party.
And even in this case of the diploma divide, what we’ve seen is a lot of people shifting parties in part because they are feeling alienated from the party that they’re in. They no longer think that it speaks for people like them. And we all know people who used to be loyal Republicans and happily voted for George Bush and Mitt Romney, but when Trump came along said, “Oh my God, what has happened to this party that I used to be part of? I guess maybe I’m for Joe Biden now.” And we also know that there are plenty of people who have exactly the opposite story, that they were happily Bill Clinton supporters — or Barack Obama supporters even — who are now supporting Trump.
And again, it’s not just because they like Trump, but because they dislike what they think the Democrats have come to stand for. And so the fact that we have this zero-sum dynamic in our politics means that there’s always a fight, and you’re always either a friend or an enemy in any given time. And I think that is part of why our politics has the particular character it does.
Geoff Kabaservice: Matt, the term “diploma divide” has actually achieved fairly wide currency at this point, partly because of its catchy consonants. Do you think your term “the edu-cultural realignment” is going to catch on?
Matt Grossmann: Well, we’ll have a more uphill battle there. Some people love it, some people hate it. We’ll see. It worked for us just because we wanted to link these two trends to make sure people knew that, first of all, college education makes you more culturally liberal but does not make you more economically liberal. Second, the places where this diploma divide has become most pronounced are the places where culture has come to dominate politics. That’s true across the world, across time, and even within the elections in the United States. The more elections are about cultural issues, the more you see the education divide increasing and an income divide declining. So we’re sticking with it even if it doesn’t catch on completely.
I will say, one other thing I just want to mention about the big two-sided fight that matters to us is it means that social institutions have a very hard time staying out of the fight. At the point that they clearly have more educated people within them, they are going to be seen as taking one side. And we’re certainly seeing that play out now. It’s just very hard to say you’re above something when you’re directly under attack as part of the divide.
Geoff Kabaservice: And this is a large feature in institutions of all kinds losing public trust over the decades. And in fact, there was a very interesting point somewhere in the book that even people who like the political direction in which an institution may be trending have less trust in it as a result of that politicization. Is that fair to say, Dave?
Dave Hopkins: Yes. There’s declining trust, of course, over the years in many social institutions. And one of the elements of that is the perspective — the not inaccurate perspective — that a lot of people have that they’ve become more aligned with one side or the other in the ideological or partisan battles that we’ve been having. Obviously the media is a classic example of this, where you see the decline of conservative trust in the media. But the funny thing about trust in the media is that Democrats became more trusting in the media after Trump got elected. Once Trump was attacking the media all the time, every day, Democrats said, “Well, we’re going to rally around the media because they’re obviously on our side. If they’re pissing Trump off, they must be good for something.”
And so that’s the kind of dynamic you see. It’s not necessarily that you say, “Oh, here’s an institution where they only care about truth and they’re indifferent to politics.” It’s like, “Oh no, this institution is on my side of the political fight.” And so you might appreciate that while also feeling like, yes, it has indeed become politicized.
Geoff Kabaservice: Something I always do on this podcast is ask the people who come on to tell me something about where they grew up, where they went to school, and what some of their principal influences have been. And in fact, you both lead off this book by telling readers something about your backgrounds. So Matt, can we start with you?
Matt Grossmann: Yes, we did put the acknowledgments first to talk about our kinds of inspiration. And I got to tease my dad because he was involved in Republican political campaigns in Missouri, and I was involved as well. But he was trying to fight the battle from a college town, often running Republicans that were affiliated with the university against out-state Democrats who were more culturally conservative. And it’s the only place in Missouri, other than central St. Louis and Kansas City, where the politics are not trending towards the Republicans. And it’s a part of that basic dynamic that culture came to dominate, and there really aren’t any of those culturally conservative Democrats or culturally liberal Republicans left in that. So I lived this. The other place that we lived it is within academia. We’ve seen the transformation of our profession and of the reaction to our profession.
Geoff Kabaservice: And how about you, Dave?
Dave Hopkins: Well, I come from Rochester, New York, which is an area where there used to be a big political divide between the city itself and the surrounding suburbs. And almost all of the surrounding suburbs, except for the one that was predominantly Jewish, tended to be very Republican. When I worked in local government — this is about twenty-five years ago — back home, I worked on a redistricting plan. At that time, the deepest-red precincts in the county were the precincts right around the big golf courses. Those were the biggest center of Republican votes everywhere around: the richest, most privileged people. You could see it stick right out on the map. And these days, those are blue parts. Those go blue now. The richest town in the county went for Biden by 30 points in 2020, when it never voted for Bill Clinton once.
And of course, when you go down into the smaller towns down in the Finger Lakes region, where it used to be mostly Republican also, but there were more pockets of blue-collar Democratic support in those days. And that’s almost all completely gone at this point. Again, unless you’re in a college town, you don’t see that anymore.
And so one of the things that struck us when writing this book is that we live in an age where the conventional wisdom kind of says, “Well, politics is so polarized these days that everybody picks a team and they stick with that team. And they cocoon themselves in a particular media environment and social media environment where they only reinforce their existing partisan proclivities and they’re completely invulnerable to changing their mind.”
And one of the things that spurred us to write this book was to say, well, actually we’ve all seen a lot of change — and not just the social and cultural change that we talk about in the book. But also we’ve seen a lot of partisan change among different subgroups and among different geographic areas just in the past ten, twenty, twenty-five years. So we need to reconcile our mental picture of Team Red and Team Blue in this perpetual loyal battle with the reality that, in fact, a lot of Americans are changing their minds about politics and what’s going on there — and what are the implications for that? And that’s part of the inspiration that led us to write this book.
Geoff Kabaservice: I see that you both mention in your Acknowledgments that you met at the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. And Matt, it’s entirely possible that we might have crossed paths there in 2005, because Nelson Polsby, who was the longtime director of the institute, actually flew me out there to talk to the graduate students about meritocracy and elite formation, which was the subject of my first book. And I have very fond memories of being up in Nelson’s home in the hills, looking down on the beautiful city of Berkeley, and just what a great intellectual and political education that was.
Matt Grossmann: Yes. Well, I think you’re talking to… We sort of claim to be the last two students of Nelson Polsby, but neither of us is officially that because Nelson died right before we left Berkeley. But we certainly were a big part of that atmosphere and it certainly shaped us.
Geoff Kabaservice: So how did you both have the idea of collaborating on your first book, the book that became Asymmetric Politics?
Matt Grossmann: I believe it was over dinner at Midwest, at the Political Science meetings in Chicago. I forget what we were both working on, but I think the first idea was just to write an article listing all of the differences between Democrats and Republicans. This also comes from Nelson, basically. I can’t do the accent right, but he used to say, “The Democrats and Republicans are two different parties.” And we wanted to elaborate that in a list. And once we were listing all of the differences, we just came to decide that really this was one big difference that most political observers have known for a long time and that we needed to articulate for a new era.
Geoff Kabaservice: I’ve got to say that book was actually quite influential on Niskanen in terms of the formulation of our approach to politics. However, I’ve noticed that I have let the phrase “asymmetric polarization” drop from my vocabulary. Because it seems to me that whereas the Democrats had not actually polarized to the extent that Republicans had toward their extremes up until about seven years ago, nowadays I find them both to be differently polarized, but equally polarized. Is that fair to say, Dave, or do you think I’m over-reading?
Dave Hopkins: Well, I think that there’s some truth to that. We didn’t want to peg our argument in the book just on the idea that the polarization was asymmetric. We still think the parties are pretty different and operate pretty differently. And we think that’s still true, even though there are ways in which the Democrats certainly have become more socially liberal, and the rise of ideological activists in the party has become stronger. But it’s still hard to say, in the Age of Trump, that the internal dynamics between the two parties are mirror images of each other.
And so we still think there’s something to the argument that we’re dealing with two kinds of different animals that work in different ways and have different logics to them. And even the way that Biden was pushed aside in this last campaign shows, I think, that there are ways the Democratic Party operates that we would not expect from the Republican Party and vice versa.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes. Matt, how did you have the idea to work on this book? And did you see it as in any way picking up on some of the arguments that maybe had not been fully refined in the previous book?
Matt Grossmann: Well, on the one hand, people definitely always ask us how much has changed in the parties. And we believed that things had changed considerably, but not in making the parties closer to one another. So we did want to write an update of sorts. But I actually think the origins were, again, that we thought we were working on different things and decided we were working on the same thing. I was working on a project more about technocracy and the rise of educated elite in policymaking and the backlash that that was causing, and Dave was working more on generational divides and trends among voters. And we again decided that it was part of the same big trend.
Geoff Kabaservice: Part of why your book was so fascinating to me was that, like I said, a lot of my early work was on meritocracy. And in particular, at the level of the elite institutions like Yale, which was the focus of my study, a displacement of the old WASP aristocracy by a new meritocracy that was recruited from members of both sexes, all races and genders, and different walks of life.
But between 2004 (when I came out with that book) and now, the political valence of meritocracy has changed somewhat, I think. In other words, when I was writing about it, it was almost entirely a development embraced by the left. But since then, meritocracy has hardened into its own kind of aristocracy, and increasingly you see a lot of criticism of meritocracy coming from the left. And maybe thermostatically… Although you do say in your book that the right has turned away from meritocracy, I think you’re seeing a re-embrace of meritocracy — a re-appropriation of meritocracy even as a term — by the right. I noticed it was actually in Elon Musk’s Twitter handle the other day, although I don’t know if he’s changed that.
So let me ask you… Meritocracy isn’t a term that comes up much in your book, although it is there. But do you think that the dynamics of meritocracy are still something that the right is against and the left is in favor of? Or how would you characterize where we are right now? Dave, why don’t you go first?
Dave Hopkins: Sure. Well, I think when the actual, literal term is used — and I assume this is probably the way that Musk used it — it’s a line of attack against liberal affirmative action of some type: the idea that liberals don’t want the person who’s actually the most qualified for the job, they want to fulfill some kind of race or gender or sexual orientation quota or diversity program or whatever. So in some ways, you could say, “Yes, well, the right will associate itself with meritocracy and accuse the left of being against it.”
But I also think that in another sense — and it’s sort of implicit in our book — the left has mostly accepted the idea that major social institutions do have an appropriate authority in our society. There isn’t as strong a critique from the left of the New York Times or the Ivy League or the top agencies of the federal government as there used to be, say, during some of the period you were writing about it in the mid-twentieth century. As the Democrats on the left have become more educated, they’ve become more accepting of the idea of the legitimate authority of people who have risen to the top of these institutions, and they believe that those people deserve to be there and are there for the right reasons.
And so maybe they don’t come out and term it “meritocracy,” but I think implicitly… One of the things that struck us is that when you compare the left today to the left of, say, the 1960s, is how much less rebellious individualist spirit is there and critique of major social institutions is there, and how much more the idea is that these are the people who are rightfully in positions of authority in this country, intellectual and social authority, and it’s the ignorant right who’s sort of riling up the yokels against them.
And that’s really a lot of what we saw during, say, the COVID pandemic or on debates about environmental policy and climate change, or debates about education policy. We see much more and more of the left defending the idea that the people who are in these positions deserve to be there, they have the credentials and the intelligence and the expertise and the experience to make major decisions for the rest of us, and that they deserve deference from people who don’t have those same credentials.
Geoff Kabaservice: Matt, anything you would add to that?
Matt Grossmann: I forgot to say we did see you at the Kingman Brewster book talk at Berkeley. So yes, we’ve known about your role in this debate for a long time. And I know you know that it marks quite a bit of change for the left to be so pro-institutional in its view and the right to be so anti-institutional in its view, and we think that does reflect these changes.
And just to pick up on what Dave said about things like on environmental policy… It’s not just, “Okay, we should believe these people because they’re on our side.” It’s also like, “We should defer to consensus among the experts and tell everybody who is trying to go against that consensus that they’re peddling misinformation. And then we need to listen to the scientific experts, and the people who are against them are just not listening to the evidence.” That mode has become much stronger on the Democratic side in recent years.
And the willingness… Elon Musk may say that he’s a meritocrat, but he is just trying to fire everybody in all agencies without looking at anything specific to the agency, assuming that anybody who’s in these positions hasn’t been doing anything useful for the last week. That is quite a bit of disrespect for the experts and for the policymakers and for experience — all of these things that Democrats have increasingly come to support.
Geoff Kabaservice: The DOGE rampage is something whose impact will not be known for some time to come. But nonetheless, it actually seems to go against part of the conclusion in your book that there is actually very little that a president on the right can do to change the overall cultural dynamics or even significantly affect the outcomes. Is Trump actually showing that the “deep state” is less rooted perhaps than you suggested in your book, Dave?
Dave Hopkins: Well, our point there was to say that the president’s not in charge of the culture, and that just electing a president of a particular party does not mean that the society will move in that particular direction. We certainly believe the president has some power over the government — though perhaps less power than a lot of people think — and obviously not no power. But we’ll have to see how much of this stuff actually survives the inevitable court challenges and other things that can tie things up even when a president is determined to do something.
But I think it also goes to another aspect of this question about the differences between the parties, which is that for all the ways that experts can be arrogant and overly sure of themselves and self-interested and all of the other things that the conservatives have come to accuse them of being, sometimes they actually are useful in helping you govern competently. And the long-term risk here of this kind of thing that we’re seeing right now from Trump, just as we saw in the first Trump administration, is that you end up with a bunch of people who don’t know what they’re doing, making bad decisions that ultimately come back to bite them politically.
And that is, again, why I’m hesitant to… For all the trouble that the diploma divide puts the Democrats in electorally, and we’ve discussed that earlier, this is part of why I am reluctant to declare an emerging permanent Republican majority as a result of the diploma divide. There is one equalizing force: incompetence — or one could say an imbalance in competence between the parties. What happens when one party has all the experts and the other party doesn’t? Well, it could be that the other party makes some mistakes in governance.
And so that’s what’s going to, I think, be put to the test in this current Trump administration. Are there actually any real consequences — identifiable, perceivable consequences — that strike the average person that come from this way of managing the government or not? Maybe not. Maybe it will turn out that life just goes on without all these bureaucrats, and they get away with it and succeed politically.
But they’re certainly running a risk here that at some point the government will stop being able to do something that the American people expect of it, and there will be a political price to be paid for that. And so that’s what I think about when I start seeing what’s going on around us right now and how that relates to the arguments that we make in the book.
Geoff Kabaservice: Matt, you used a phrase in the book to describe what happens when Republicans do try to push back on Democrats institutionally, and the term was “power without credibility.” Can you explain what you mean by that?
Matt Grossmann: Yes, it’s the consequence of the very competitive nature of our electoral system compared to the imbalance among experts and institutions that Dave just spoke about. You can have real power and Republicans can change the rules, but they aren’t trying anymore to have credibility within these spheres or institutions. They’re trying more the burn-it-all-down strategy, and we get to see whether that works.
I do think that in some ways our book was predicting that there really would be a broader battle here, where the right really was itching to go against even companies in some cases, but certainly universities and bureaucracies and nonprofit institutions. I think these institutions have still been caught off-guard, even though they had the first Trump administration to prepare, in seeing the degree to which they are now seen as the enemies by a lot of people in power, and they are using that power to go directly against them. And they can assume that the people who will be hurt the most will be the people affiliated with those institutions.
Geoff Kabaservice: You do point out that the Republicans’ urge to tear institutions down has not been accompanied with an equivalent urge to replace them with something better — or at least the same but more conservative. And it’s funny, because I actually was just looking through some of the Bill Buckley notes that I had from the research I did on him, his actions in the 1960s. He wanted there to be a conservative New York Times, but he eventually found out that was a really hard thing to do. And there are some also issues that you get into about there not being enough Republican personnel who have experience of government bureaucracies and institutions to credibly be able to reproduce in conservative form those kinds of institutions.
But I also wonder… You noted in passing that in a number of public universities in red states, particularly in the South and West, legislatures there have actually funded centers at the public universities, typically at the flagship universities or sometimes beyond that, that are kind of explicitly designed to counter-program the overwhelming left-leaning faculty. And in a way, I’m actually kind of encouraged by this development, because it is at least Republicans supporting institutions of some kind, and an institutional response rather than a tear-it-down response.
But do you have any early feelings about whether these institutions at places like, let’s say, the Hamilton Center in Florida or other such centers in Texas, the University of North Carolina, even at the University of Michigan right now I believe — do you have any feelings about how or whether these things will succeed in gaining “power with credibility,” Matt, to use your term?
Matt Grossmann:I’m skeptical so far. Conservatives are right that universities are mostly populated by liberals. And these new institutions can hire people, but they are hired from the academic population. They can try to appeal to students, but they are going to have to develop people who want to take these majors and they’re going to have to react to that.
And it’s not the first time that this happened. At Michigan State where I am, we have a college of public affairs that really was founded with pretty similar principles to be Great Books and go back to the beginning. And conservatives would consider it not exactly the cutting edge of wokeness, but it’s certainly not a conservative institution. So academia, once given faculty lines and majors, is still going to take on a life of its own.
Now, that doesn’t mean that it’s not important. It is an important development. I do think it’s a little funny that the people who are benefiting from this within academia are people who want to do political theory, go back to the classics. I don’t know how much Trump would know of this movement that is aligned with him. But they’re certainly taking advantage of it for the moment.
Geoff Kabaservice: I’ve actually thought about revisiting my earlier work on meritocracy, because I do think that there have been some drawbacks with it as it has evolved as a system. And one of the ones that people often bring up, which you bring up in your book, is that meritocracy in a way has created a caste system. The average person with a four-year college degree lives eight years longer than the average non-college graduate, and he or she has a better range of other life outcomes including rates of getting and staying married, even the likelihood of becoming obese or incarcerated or dying from an opioid overdose. And you don’t get into it in your book, but Dave, I wonder if you have any speculations about why this is so: why this difference in outcomes, and what college does to drive these differences in outcomes?
Dave Hopkins: It’s a great question. I don’t have all the answers, certainly, but one of the things that we think is important to talk about is that when we talk about the political differences between the college-educated and non-college, traditionally the obsession about that is about the campus experience itself. And the easy conclusion people draw is that, well, if you go to college, you get indoctrinated into liberalism in those four years you spend on campus, maybe by your professors or maybe by your peers or just the campus life or the town you live in. And then people who don’t go just don’t have that experience.
But again, there’s not a lot of hard evidence that that part is really true, number one. And number two, the diploma divide we’ve actually seen shows a lot of people, long after they graduate from college, actually changing in both directions, long after they were college-age. And so it can’t just be a function of the college experience itself. And so what that does, I think, is help remind us that what college really does, more than anything else, is it sets you on a completely different path of life (at least for most people) than if you didn’t go to college.
And you earn more money. That is certainly true, and that is more true than it used to be in the past. And that’s why even though college has become more expensive, you’ll still make that tuition back over a lifetime of enhanced earnings. But that’s only the start of it. You will consume different media. You will live in different neighborhoods. You are very likely to marry somebody who is of comparable educational attainment to yourself. You’re very likely to have coworkers who have comparable educational attainment to yourself, neighbors who have comparable educational attainment to yourself. And so your entire life is going to reinforce the worldview of either the college-educated, if you yourself are college-educated, or the not if you are not.
And I think that, as you say, there is this way in which we can kind of consider this a class system; that we can think of class as not just about wealth but about educational attainment, because the cultural values are so distinct between the college-educated and the not-college-educated. And of course, people who are themselves college graduates, their children are more likely to go to college — and so it becomes self-perpetuating.
And sometimes there’s this idea that we should be working towards a future where everybody goes to college, and that the problem with America today is that while there are just people who don’t have the opportunity, that of course everyone wants to go to college but some people just can’t afford to so we should make it more affordable or what have you. But I don’t think that’s right. I think we need to understand that there are plenty of people who don’t want to go to college necessarily, don’t find it appealing to go to college. And those people will always be with us, and they will always have lots of votes.
And so we need to think about — especially the politics of the left needs to think about — how do you appeal to people beyond just saying, “Oh, we’ll help make it more affordable for you to go to college”? How do you appeal to people who don’t wish to go to college, who wish to have jobs that don’t require a college degree, but still of course want those to be good jobs and jobs that gain them a certain amount of social stability and respect?
Geoff Kabaservice: Matt, I have a sort of global concern about all of the discussion around higher education and the segmentation of our politics by education, which is sort of a sub-theme in your book but also is a little more explicit in Stephen Macedo’s and Frances Lee’s new book, In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us. And that is that you don’t automatically become inducted into the elite by virtue of graduating from a four-year college. It’s not like you get the Masonic handshake and welcomed into the club. Frequently, the elite comes from a fairly small subset of college graduates and a fairly small subset of institutions.
But nonetheless, it is an elite. And if you were actually to compare the current meritocratic elite with the past elite, in some ways the older elite had some advantages. They did not think that they’d really earned their place in society — they’d largely inherited it — and that gave them a certain sense of guilt, maybe, and a greater concern about their legitimacy. And one of the ways that the graduates of places like Yale and Harvard would show that they deserved to be elite was by sending their sons to war in greater numbers than those of non-college-graduate families, and having those sons be killed and injured at greater rates as well.
And it seems to me that what we actually have now is a highly educated elite, very much believing in the values of technocracy, as you say, but also one that is actually quite separate now from the people over whom they rule: the majority of the non-college-educated public. And they have ideologized some of their beliefs about what the role of institutions and leadership are. And this is leading into some of the problems that we experienced, for example, with the COVID pandemic. How do you respond to this generally? Just some off-the-top thoughts, you don’t have to give me a thesis at this point.
Matt Grossmann: Well, I think most of that is consistent with what we say. Certainly we use college/non-college as a shorthand for understanding the electorate. But even in the electorate, one, you have data that says the more elite college you went to, it’s going to show an even more Democratic skew. And similarly, the longer you go to school — to graduate school or beyond — the more liberal you will be on these cultural issues. So that means that, yeah, once you get to who is at the New York Times or Harvard University, you are going to get an extremely well-educated and separated-from-the-rest-of-us kind of constituency. I think that’s true.
Another way that I’ve been putting it about the role of experts, I think, just as a useful shorthand for understanding it, is expert pronouncements do come from greater knowledge. So they have that advantage of greater knowledge, but they also come from distinct values, which may or may not be better values. And they come from interests, which definitely are not better. So when you have an expert pronouncement, as in COVID, it’s going to be a mix of those things: the increased knowledge but also the distinct values and the not-better interests. And so people will always be able to react against the elites.
I’ll take your word for it that the older elites did not necessarily act in concert with those three things aligned. But certainly the current elites are often not very reflective about the fact that they are projecting not just knowledge but also distinct values and particular interests.
Geoff Kabaservice: And you do point out at several points in your book that it is a problem for the current elite that they not only invoke their superior intellectual knowledge but also their moral superiority to those who disagree with them.
Dave Hopkins: Yes. I think we’re all old enough to remember the days when the left were accused of being moral relativists who didn’t understand or care about the concepts of right and wrong. That seems like a long-gone day, right? Now it’s “Oh, they’re moralizers. They want to impose their ideas on everybody, and they don’t respect people for having different opinions about that.” That’s a kind of implicit concession, it seems to me, of how much power the cultural left has gained in the last forty years or so, and how much the right has changed from traditional religious-based moral authority as their centering ideological ideal to this more ethno-nationalist view of what their ideals are.
Geoff Kabaservice: I’d like to end the interview with two specific questions and then a more general one. So the specific question is: Part of what I love about your book is that it has the feel of sitting atop this mountain of social and political science studies and papers. There seems like hardly a significant article from the past several decades that you have not incorporated and thought about and used in the argument. But I guess the question is what areas of your book make you feel that there are areas that have yet to be fully explored by scholars in your fields? What seem to you to be the most promising areas that further research will come from? Matt, maybe you first?
Matt Grossmann: Well, we actually thought that for this book there was a lot less scholarship to rely on than for our previous book. We thought, “Yes, we’re compiling everything we can, but a lot of times we’re going to more recent working papers or responses to what happened in the latest campaign or policy debate rather than just summarizing and popularizing what the classics know.” Here we did think we were going into a new era.
So I think we found what was out there, but there’s a lot more to be done, especially when you get to the consequences. So what is this debate in business, how is it going to evolve? How is this conflict over expertise going to develop in areas where it hasn’t already been there, outside of climate and COVID? Those are areas where we did not find a lot of scholarship.
Geoff Kabaservice: And Dave, what would you like to see researched to a greater extent?
Dave Hopkins: Well, again, we discussed this a little bit before, but the relationship between politics and larger popular culture. I think there’s so much more to know there than we know. And it’s a challenging thing to study; I mean, there’s a reason why there’s not more there. Think, for example, about the impact of social media on our politics. We do have studies about that. A lot of those studies are, “Well, if you expose people to this specific message this many times, they become this percent more likely to agree” — that kind of stuff.
But what I’ve been thinking lately, just idly — I mean, I don’t know if this is ever where my research is going to go — is what happens when the entire way people understand the world comes through social media? What becomes of the fact that that is now their primary source of information? How does that affect their understanding of everything, basically? That’s a really hard thing to study empirically, but it seems to me an incredibly important thing that will have lots of ramifications for not just the present but certainly the future of our politics.
And yet we all might have opinions about that, but we don’t have a lot of hard evidence. And we’re going to need some in order to really make sense of it. And so that’s the kind of thing where I think political science in particular could really make some fruitful contributions to our larger understanding of very essential parts of our world. And I hope there’s more good work to come on that.
Geoff Kabaservice: Just on a cultural note… Your book was the first time I had ever seen the divisions among Straussians analogized to East Coast versus West Coast rap rivalries of the ‘90s, but it makes a certain amount of sense.
Dave Hopkins: We did our own part in this book to have a few cultural references to contribute to the genre, yes. I’m glad you noticed that one.
Geoff Kabaservice: Excellent. As a last question then, Dave, let me ask you this… There’s a lot of debate and questioning on the part of Democrats about how they should respond to the present political moment, the fact that they are now in the minority of both houses of Congress and that Trump is seemingly both radicalized and empowered in his second term. You do suggest in your book that the Liberal Patriot idea of people like John Judis and Ruy Teixeira that Democrats should moderate on cultural issues, that they should have a lot of Sister Souljah kind of moments, is probably not the way to go. What would you now say, given the different political context that we’re talking in, as opposed to when you were writing this book?
Dave Hopkins: I think that the Democrats really do face a challenge in appealing to the working class, and not just the white working class. I think that’s now beyond debate. And I think that the more that politics becomes about certain progressive social ideas, the harder it will be for the Democrats to do well among the working class. But I also think that it’s not just a matter of the policies you adopt. Again, political scientists, this is one thing we know we should be able to explain to everyone, that voters don’t just vote on policy. And part of it is just the style that you adopt, the way you speak as well as the content of what your speech is and what your attitude seems to be towards people who have less education, less advantage than yourself. I think all of that is an important part of this too.
But I also want, at the same time, to say that parties only have a limited ability to have influence over their own fate. This is another lesson we took from thinking about all this for the time that we were spending on this project: there are just these bigger historical and social trends out there, and the parties are being thrown around by them just like the rest of us. And yes, there are strategic choices they can make to maximize their advantage (or not so much). And when there’s a close election, those strategic choices may well be critical to that particular election, but there still is a lot of stuff that’s beyond their control.
There’s a kind of Washington mentality that “You get the smartest strategy and the smartest message and the best TV ads, and that’s all you need.” One thing I really took away from this is like, well, there’s a lot of other stuff going on, and the parties in the political system are just reacting to it as well as everything else. And so yes, there are things that Democrats could do, but they also should reconcile themselves to the idea that some of this stuff may just be beyond their control.
Geoff Kabaservice: Thank you, Dave. Matt, final thoughts?
Matt Grossmann: We don’t disagree with… There is political science evidence that moderation helps candidates in elections. There’s also a commonly held perspective between the Liberal Patriot side and the Bernie side that talking more about economics and less about culture would lessen the education divide relative to the income divide. There’s evidence for both of those things. We just think that there’s a lot of self-reinforcing processes that lead the parties in the directions they have chosen.
And I think one of the things that folks engaged in this debate are struggling with is… It’s not enough to change what Kamala Harris says in the last couple months of the campaign. Even if you can do that credibly, there’s an image of the political party that is based on its coalitional structure and its elites that is just not so easily dislodged. And one reason that we look internationally is to say that a lot of the reasons the U.S. is distinct is just because we have a two-party system. In terms of challenges facing the left or facing the right, we are not that distinct.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, Matt Grossmann and Dave Hopkins, thank you so much for joining me today. And congratulations again on your great new book, Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics.
Dave Hopkins: Well, thank you, Geoff. It was really a pleasure to be here and talk with you.
Matt Grossmann: Thanks.
Geoff Kabaservice: And thank you all for listening to the Vital Center Podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. And if you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating or send us an email at contact@niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director, Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer, Ray Ingegneri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C.