Locating a Class Divide in the U.S. Political Compass and Pew Types
How Educational Attainment Plays Into Election Politics
“We’re living in an oligarchy of the credentialed,” says Newsweek opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon. She admits to being part of the group that she criticizes. In her new book, Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women, she describes how those without a college degree have become increasingly less likely to create a middle-class economically stable life. By elites she means the college-educated class of knowledge workers that “looks down on manual workers.”
She points to Democrats’ open border policies and Republicans’ lack of action on expanding health care access as political failures that have disproportionate impact on manual workers (Schlott, 2024). I count housing costs as a major reason for their precarity, given that rent costs have outstripped inflation and wage increases.
Pew Political Types and Their Educational Characteristics
A Pew Research Center survey of the U.S. general public, in 2021, showed clusters of political beliefs and values. The origin of these Pew labels and type descriptors are detailed in an earlier post. Remembering that no models are true, but some are useful, allow me some generalizations that seem supported by the Pew research. In the quadrants below, I’ve underlined the educational characteristics, which are relevant to Ungar-Sargon’s criticism.
Description for Assistive Tech Users
Visual readers, please skip this section. For those using text-to-speech software, this is the familiar four quadrants. In the auth-left quadrant, the largest of the Pew groups, Democratic mainstays, tend to be less college educated. In the auth-right, the Pew type committed conservatives tend to be highly educated. In the lib-right quadrant, Pew’s populist right is designated the least college educated. In the lib-left, Pew’s progressive left tends to be highly educated.
Both the left and right coalitions have one highly educated Pew type and a Pew type that has less educational attainment than the other Pew types tend toward. I’ve placed two Pew types in each of the quadrants. In each there is one type for which the Pew research does not designate a strong educational-attainment correlation. These that don’t have education as a defining characteristic may be a mix of high and low level of education. They may tend toward a mid-level such as some college but not a degree, or having 4-year but fewer advanced degrees.
The Left-leaning Coalition
Ungar-Sargon’s argument emphasizes the challenge Democrats face in the upcoming election. Democrat party leaders have cultivated alliance with the educated progressive left, who have made increasingly bold demands in institutions of higher education, government, media, as well as knowledge-worker corporations. The progressive left has lenient positions on immigration. It appears that part of the coalition is increasingly alienating a large portion of the working class within Pew’s democratic mainstays, especially racial or ethnic minorities who immigrated legally. Biden apparently has made many efforts toward resolving immigration, but some argue the piecemeal executive orders cannot have the needed impact. Further, Republicans seem to be intentionally obstructing reform by refusing to pass a bipartisan immigration bill, which would likely help Biden’s ratings.
The Right-leaning Coalition
Committed conservatives, based on their higher education attainment, are who Ungar-Sargon would frame as the elites on the republican side. She believes the establishment economic conservatives are best represented by Nikki Haley, who clearly was not favored by most voters. Pew’s committed conservatives do not tend to favor Trump, and by extension they probably cater as little as possible to his strongest support base, the populist right, who are less educated. My belief is that between the most likely official duopoly candidates, many committed conservatives would prefer an establishment candidate such as Biden, tho they may vote Trump to extend their tax cuts. Either way, the candidates seeming most willing to pay attention to working-class concerns are both anti-establishment: Trump and RFK Jr.
The Class Divide in Past Presidential Races
I embarked on a journey to understand the Trump phenomenon in 2015, about the same time Ungar-Sargon did. I also applied for and was accepted for official residency in Canada. I lived there four years. Thus, I can’t even claim that I was in some kind of solidarity with the rural people I grew up with. I only was better situated to understand that my liberal friends were underestimating the resentment and frustration driving Trump’s popularity. I didn’t believe the polls then. One anthropologist professor friend of mine kept trying to reassure me that the polls said we were fine: Hillary would win. I refused to be comforted. She had a new respect for my prescience after the election, and she investigated how her family might join me in Canada.
As I gained more of a grasp on the political situation, I wrote a book The Four Americas but couldn’t find a publisher for it. So instead I’m writing this Substack. I want to promote Ungar-Sargon’s idea, because she says much of what I’m trying to convey about the class divide as I explain anti-establishment positions. Everything she says in the Honestly podcast (linked at the end) is true to my experience. I lived rural for a decade, and I’m living rural now. I have talked to the same type of people she has. I have the same kind of stories. Here’s an example. When I went door to door in my Southern Colorado small rural town, campaigning for Obama in 2008, I was talking to a Latino guy (they don’t call themselves that, and they certainly don’t call themselves Latinx, because they came as Spanish settlers eight generations back, but anyway…). His friend came in and after hearing a few minutes of my appeal burst out an objection, “You can’t vote for that guy! He won’t even let you shoot someone in your own living room!”
The reason that’s both funny and meaningful to me is that my former husband and I would periodically visit Espanola, New Mexico where his cousin, an author and professor, was living with his wife who was finishing her Harvard dissertation studies on rural drug use. They are both Latino, so they fit in somewhat and were living a romantically rustic life. They told us about when they had trouble with neighbors and talked to the local police about it. The police responded that those neighbors had connections high up, so they were immune to police harassing. They said if it got really bad, all they could do was kill them, drag them into their living room, and make it look like self defense. What the Obama-resistant resident of my town was saying was that Obama was going to take away the last option they had for self-preservation and vigilante justice.
The educated class lives in a different world. In safe neighborhoods, we tend not to understand why law-abiding people would feel a need to own a gun. Some conclude from the tragedy of school shootings that we should be like Canada and England, with only special military forces having guns. Like you, I agree there should be background checks and no loopholes for purchases at gun shows. However, pretty much everyone outside me and my transplanted liberal friends in that Southern Colorado town believed they needed to own a gun, because criminals will have a gun regardless of the laws. I eventually owned a 357. Uncomfortably I twice brought it to the shooting range, because I considered it responsible to at least practice. Gun rights is only one of many issues, not even the most important in polls, but for making a point about a valid difference in perspective, it’s more obvious than the economic issues.
How the Other Half Lives
If you don’t know how the other half lives, except depictions from movies, you’re not going to convince them to live by your values, much less shame them into it by calling them racist. I’ve always been curious about that other half. I’ve tried to make friends where it didn’t really work long term. In my early 20s even tho I had plenty of college friends, I had a working class friend that shared my interest in self-help pop-psych and spiritual books. She brought me to an AA meeting where I gained a huge respect for its spiritual principles and community-building. I tried to make friends with a gal who lived in the run-down house where my third-grade best friend had lived. Turned out she wasn’t really interested in my invitation to go hiking, and I wasn’t really interested in “partying” which consisted of playing cards, smoking, and maybe drinking, but I wouldn’t know because I fell asleep, not used to being up late. We don’t have time to be friends with everyone, but I talk to uber drivers, people at laundromats, cashiers, and unkempt people at music festivals.
I’m trying to be a mediator of sorts. I’m trying to not only learn but to connect with each quadrant, to persuade each to not demonize the others. All this is to explain why you should believe me when I promote Ungar-Sargon’ central thesis that the working class has legitimate reasons for their discontent, regardless of how inaccurate they may be about who is to blame for it and how to fix it.
A Trump Win Won’t End Democracy?
Her book will rub most liberals the wrong way. I shouldn’t promote what I haven’t read, but I support the open-mindedness of the project. A liberal went out to gather working class stories, and that changed her mind. Neither side will benefit from listening more intently to echo-chambers telling us how correct we are. This time I believe the polls, and they aren’t saying what my liberal and progressive friends want to hear. I found it actually a bit comforting to hear Ungar-Sargon, who cried the night of the 2016 election, explain that as boorish as he is, Trump isn’t Hitler reincarnate. He can read the crowd, and give them what they want. Mostly he just wants to be popular. I hope that’s true.
Healing the Political Divide
I don’t want to find out if Trump is as much a threat to democracy as many on the left believe he is, but Biden has been behind in the polls for some time. RFK Jr. seems to be a compromise candidate who wants to heal the political divide. Whoever wins, the most important goal to me now is that we the people don’t begin to see political rivals as enemies we can no longer talk to. Ungar-Sargon makes a convincing case that it’s the educated class who are intent on perpetuating political divisions. Instead of dismissing the populist right as deplorables, the educated class could better promote democracy by having some empathy for the very real struggles of the working class on both sides. The progressive left seems to consider working class White evangelicals one step away from White nationalists, but it’s imagined. Don’t make that generalization because of a few internet trolls. In my experience, the majority of the working class have been shouldering an intolerable load, without as much complaining as many of the educated and economically privileged have indulged in. Those of us committed to rooting for the underdog could take notice.
Thanks for reading. Here’s Ungar-Sargon on the Honestly podcast and a related article in Politico, “What Liberals Get Wrong About ‘White Rural Rage’ — Almost Everything” by Nicholas F. Jacobs.