To Smart for Their Own Good?

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To Smart for Their Own Good?

Why a Political Party Favored by the Highly Educated Seems Out of Ideas
By John Quinterno
Email: jquinterno@yahoo.com

Has the Democratic Party become too educated for its own good? Judging by the Sunday

brunch crowd sitting on the lawn of Weaver Street Market, a cooperative grocery in North

Carolina’s Research Triangle, the answer is “yes.”

Housed in a refurbished mill, Weaver Street is a popular gathering place for the well-

educated, liberal-minded people associated with the area’s technology firms and research

universities. The patrons’ backgrounds lead to politics, particularly Democratic Party politics,

featuring prominently in Sunday conversations. In recent years, numerous brunch discussions

have tried to explain the Democratic Party’s electoral difficulties. While a variety of theories

have been debated, popular opinion has coalesced around the idea that the party’s struggles result

from a lack of ideas.

This theory, however, fails to account for people like those sitting at Weaver Street. How

can a political party preferred by a majority of the country’s best-educated citizens lack ideas?

Can such a party declare intellectual bankruptcy?

The paradoxical answer is “yes.” For in the course of becoming the party of choice for

the kinds of voters who frequent Weaver Street, the Democratic Party has absorbed too much of

the culture of higher education for its own good. If Democrats want to understand why they seem

out of ideas, they should look critically at the universities that nurture core supporters. If they

did, they would see how detrimental the intellectual, social and management characteristics of

universities are to successful electoral politics.

Copyright  2007 by John Quinterno. All Rights Reserved.

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Conservative commentators never miss a chance to denounce universities as hotbeds of

liberalism. Though exaggerated, such criticisms contain an element of truth. Universities and

their surrounding communities typically are more liberal places than America as a whole.

Consider voting returns. In 2004, Sen. John Kerry captured 55 percent of the vote in the

Research Triangle, North Carolina’s richest source of votes, but lost the state by 12 percentage

points. Further south, 56 percent of the voters in Travis County, where the University of Texas at

Austin is located, chose Kerry compared to 38 percent of all Texans. Even in California, Kerry

ran 21 percentage points ahead of his statewide total in the University of California, Berkeley’s

Alameda County.

Data like these excite some pundits. John Judis and Ruy Teixeira have described well-

educated professionals like those in the Research Triangle as the bedrock of “an emerging

Democratic majority.” Judis and Teixeira argue that the increase in the number of professionals

educated in the liberal environments that took root in universities in the 1960s has led

professionals to abandon their traditional Republican home and embrace the Democratic Party.

Weaver Street exemplifies this shift. The political loyalties and intellectual resources of

the market’s customers should provide the Democratic Party with a storehouse of powerful ideas

tailored to contemporary issues. After all, with the support of people connected to world-class

universities Democrats should be staggering under the weight of too many ideas. Yet analysts of

all stripes describe the party as intellectually spent.

II

Some observers argue that the Democratic Party lacks a counterpart to the GOP’s

interlocking network of donors, think tanks, media outlets and political operatives. This belief

Copyright  2007 by John Quinterno. All Rights Reserved.

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has motivated the creation of institutions designed to be the liberal counterparts to conservative

institutions. From the Center for American Progress to the Third Way Institute’s New South

Project to Blueprint North Carolina attempts are underway to build a new liberal infrastructure.

Before incorporating another organization, however, Democrats should pause and recognize that

they already possess an intellectual infrastructure – an infrastructure comprised of universities,

foundations and mainstream media – that dwarfs its conservative counterpart in size. What is

wrong with that infrastructure?

A simple answer is that the centerpiece of the Democrats’ intellectual apparatus,

universities, works at cross-purposes to the requirements of electoral politics. The aim of politics

in a diverse society is to identify shared beliefs and transform them into actions that advance the

public good. Contemporary university culture, in contrast, elevates narrow, divisive issues over

broader, unifying ones. Unfortunately, the movement of university-educated professionals into

the Democratic camp has carried this negative mindset, along with problematic social and

management characteristics, directly into the party’s heart.

III

Intellectually, universities underwent a profound change during the 20th century. For

generations, European universities viewed the academic disciplines as interconnected parts of a

coherent body of knowledge. This belief, which had been eroding since the Enlightenment, was

swept away by the atrocities of the last century. By the 1960s, America universities had joined

their European counterparts in discarding the idea of objective truth.

Without an objective touchstone, knowledge fragmented into highly specialized fields

answerable only to that field’s methods. Such fragmentation has yielded scholarship that has

grown increasingly parochial and predictable. No matter the topic, it will be viewed exclusively

Copyright  2007 by John Quinterno. All Rights Reserved.

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through the lenses of gender, race, class and sexual orientation. Such a focus on the particular

prevents university scholars and graduates from speaking about ideas grounded in the human

experience and capable of resonating with a larger public. Unfortunately, this intellectual

narrowness has seeped into the Democratic Party, which itself has become a holding tank for

issue experts who know their field intimately but possess little sense of an overarching good.

IV

Socially, the number of college-educated Americans has risen since the 1960s. Because

the emergence of a “knowledge economy” has changed the rewards associated with higher

education, people now view education less as an end in and of itself and more as a ticket to

upward mobility and a social marker conferring elite membership.

Places like the Research Triangle reflect this change. In such areas, people with advanced

degrees abound and regularly interact. They therefore are apt to believe that everyone has been to

a university and resembles them. Concentrate large numbers of such people together in an

organization like the Democratic Party, and their views will dominate the organization’s

consciousness.

The problem with this is that university-educated people are relatively scarce. In 2004,

only 27 percent of American adults possessed at least a bachelor’s degree. Earning a degree from

any college, let alone an elite one, is a rare feet. Moreover, people who earn degrees tend to be

quite homogenous because universities draw students from a fairly narrow social stratum. Once

in school, students are exposed to an even narrower set of values and beliefs that, though held as

given in university communities, are controversial within the larger population.

Such limited social horizons form a political liability. A basic political task is to sway

individuals to a particular point of view, but if the people trying to persuade are unable to relate

Copyright  2007 by John Quinterno. All Rights Reserved.

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to experiences and ideas different from their own, they will fail to convince others or, even

worse, appear condescending. Unfortunately, Democrats regularly fall into this pitfall, even

though it probably hurts them more than any stance on a contentious social issue.

The injection of university-style management into the Democratic Party is another

problem. Universities are notoriously mismanaged institutions in which every tenured academic

is a lone gun answerable to no one and offered little incentive to act as part of a team.

Universities thus are organizations that equal vastly less than the sum of their parts.

Yet a political party cannot administer itself like a sociology department. A party requires

a discipline and organization generally lacking at a major university. Nevertheless, the

Democratic Party tries to organize itself like a university faculty with factions built around

individual subjects and personalities rather than a larger institution. This structure militates

against collective action directed towards a common goal like winning an election. If form

dictates content, as literary theorists say, then the Democratic Party’s form dictates defeat.

VI

In recent years, Democrats across the country have gathered at places like Weaver Street

and declared their party is intellectually bankrupt even as it simultaneously deepens its ties to

America’s best-educated citizens – citizens like themselves. How can that be?

This answer is that the Democratic Party has absorbed the negative aspects of modern

university culture as it has become more deeply connected to university-educated people. If

Democrats want to know why they seem out of ideas, they should look at themselves. If they did,

they would see that they have become too smart for their own, and the country’s own, good.

Copyright  2007 by John Quinterno. All Rights Reserved.

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About the Author

John Quinterno is a research associate at the North Carolina Budget & Tax Center, a non-governmental public
policy research organization in Raleigh. Quinterno is an expert in issues of state-level labor market analysis,
community college policy and workforce development, particularly as they pertain to low-wage working families.
Known for an ability to translate complex issues into a form easily grasped by public officials and opinion leaders,
Quinterno has published widely in popular formats on the impact of economic change and strategies for assisting the
workers and communities upended by those changes. He also has served on numerous public, philanthropic and
non-governmental committees interested in reforming the public workforce development system and expanding
economic opportunity. Quinterno is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Copyright  2007 by John Quinterno. All Rights Reserved.