Barton Swaim: Democratic Party is "the educated party"

The most obvious change in American politics this century is the sorting of voters along educational lines.  The Democrats are increasingly the party of educated urban elites; the GOP belongs to the white working class.  The dispute is over suburban and minority voters.  The latter still plump mostly for Democrats, although the party’s social radicalism is pushing them toward the GOP.  Voters with impressive educational credentials tend to be Democrats, and those without them lean strongly Republican. 

That one party is the educated party—that its members see themselves, in some respects accurately, as more cultured and informed than their opponents—has generated an intellectual pathology that is obvious to everyone but themselves.  Adherents of the smart-people party have lost the capacity for self-criticism.  Which on its face makes sense.  If your views are by definition intelligent, those of your critics must be dumb.  Who needs self-reflection?

~ Barton Swaim, "Why the 'Smart' Party Never Learns," The Wall Street Journal, December 9, 2022