Harvard’s Class Gap Can the academy understand Donald Trump’s “forgotten” Americans?

harvard magazine ^ | May-June 2017 | RICHARD D. KAHLENBERG

[posterchild]

THE GAP BETWEEN coastal elites and America’s white working class has been growing for decades, but in the wee hours of November 9, America’s intellectuals discovered that they had been drowned in a tidal wave of anger and frustration. Harvard students may have supported Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump by 80 percent to 6 percent, and 91 percent of Harvard faculty members’ campaign contributions may have gone to Clinton—but none of that mattered as non-college-educated whites delivered a convincing electoral college victory to a man whom many elites abhorred. If selective colleges are the place where smart high-school kids begin to enjoy the “revenge of the nerds,” election day 2016 was something like the very opposite: the comeuppance of the intelligentsia.

[setha]

Given Haarvaard’s population and alumni, it would be impossible for them to understand ordinary citizens, especially those of the Midwest and South.

[MAGA2017]

Colleges and academia in general are essentially foreign entities.

[epluribus_2]

Trump won the college educated whites.

[WMarshal]

Trump got my college-educated vote and I have a bachelors degree in Marxism, a.k.a. anthropology.

[Billthedrill]

It's nice to hear that some of our intellectual "leaders" are finally catching up with the rest of us. I'm afraid, though, that despite an honest effort our author cannot avoid a certain elitist contempt himself. There are several underlying premises acting that are not altogether attractive to anyone attempting to bridge the gap between economic classes, the first of these being an assumption that working class people vote out of anger, bitterness, resentment, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc, etc, the entire panoply of contemptuous accusation that typifies the elitist attitude toward that class, and that the elitist class votes out of enlightenment, rationality, and intellectual objectivity. That is so embarrassingly out of touch that it is no wonder the social analysts miss the mark so often.

Among sociologists, race and gender have swamped class.

Yes, they have. Even in this discussion the term working class is unfailingly prepended with "white". No one appears to notice that the decline of the working class isn't broken along racial or sexual lines. It's everyone. It's the answer to the perpetual mystery of why black and Hispanic working class people could possibly vote conservative. It's outside their class interests, goes the narrative, obviously a sign of false class consciousness; in short, only because they're dumb, as dumb as their white counterparts... Could it be that they're all voting not out of ignorance, but in their own class interests that have nothing to do with race, sex, ethnicity, etc?

A second issue with this piece actually begins in agreement with this:

In the context of race relations, Harvard professor Gordon Allport’s well-known “contact hypothesis” suggested that prejudice is reduced when people of different races come into contact on a basis of equal status.

Well, yes, and that too ought to suggest that within the working class there is a certain tempering of prejudice that appears not to cross the economic boundaries. Any military veteran can tell the author that. What rings oddly is a sense of estrangement between the author and us denizens of the class he's attempting to view like bugs under a microscope. Are we to believe that even in the stratospheric halls of academia no one has to empty the trash? Are working-class people a rarity in Cambridge? Or is somebody simply too lazy to ask them a few simple questions? I'm leaning toward the latter hypothesis, myself.

Maddening stuff, this institutional deafness. When a conservative such as myself has to offer Marxian analysis to Marxists because they've never heard it before, there's a real problem here. And within this relentless Balkanization the Marxian dialectical knife separates us all into there's one other class signifier, one other class, that is apparently unworthy of consideration, and that's the American class. Because when tribal politics separates the country, as it has, into one class of people who love it, warts and all, and another of people who hate it, other class dynamics tend to be blurred. If the Left ever figures that out we could be in trouble, or they could, but in fact they never will.

[Calvin Locke]

It's nice to hear that some of our intellectual "leaders" are finally catching up with the rest of us.

What I got from the article that is that the elites were too loud in proclaiming the elitist views, and that they should temper it to the extent that an elitist despicable such as HRC can win.

(BTB, somebody posted that Mizzou's BLM pandering has resulted in such negative economic growth that has them reducing the custodial staff to the extent that profs now have to empty their own wastebaskets.)

[setha]

Ivies (and near-Ivies like Stanford & Berkeley) take it to another level entirely. They have no problem with being like the USSR in all but name.

[apocalypto]

Exactly.

I am just wondering which of the Ivy league school is the least left-wing. Yale?

[BlueLancer]

"I am just wondering which of the Ivy league school is the least left-wing. Yale?"

Ahhh ... a Yale man ...

[Calvin Locke]

Yale got rid of a provost or the like because he didn’t think Halloween celebrations were “offensive”.

[apocalypto]

Insane!

[setha]

I don’t know either. It is almost impossible to tell the difference between each university.

[Ohioan]

What is amusing about this, is that an apparent Harvard publication is so willing to refer to the Harvard students and faculty as “intellectuals,” and as an intelligentsia.

In point of now demonstrable fact, they are now revealed as such only in the sense that the Academy that Swift's Gulliver discovered on the isle of Laputa, was also an "intellectual" center. (But Swift's picture was intended as satire, by exaggeration of academic idiocy. Contemporary Harvard?)

[apocalypto]

Interesting.

[Ohioan]

We note that you quoted a passage about the late Harvard Professor Gordon Allport, a notorious propagandist for those who would break down most ordinary personal preferences as "prejudices"--even such as family identification. Of course Allport in the 1930s had a Communist front record, and was one of those whom we discuss in our Chapter on Myths & Myth Makers In American "Higher" Education

You can bet your bottom dollar that Allport would have been all in for Mrs.Clinton.

[9YearLurker]

But not the Harvard (or other Ivy League) educated whites.