The Political Right's Hostility to Education

When I was younger, one heard the term "country club Republicans" frequently and the Republican Party was considered by many as the party of the educated and wealthy.   Now, more and more educated people have abandoned the GOP.  Yes, there are still country club and yacht club members who cling to the delusion that the GOP is the same as it was 40 years ago or who care about cutting taxes more than basic morality, but the extremism and celebratory embrace of ignorance by the GOP is toxic to many former Republicans, yours truly included. What's driving the GOP hostility to education?  My premise is that the evangelical/Christofascist base of the party has long been hostile to science and education because both undermine their ignorance based beliefs and, therefore, must be stomped out.  Add to this the fact that surveys have shown that evangelicals are typically the least educated of any Christian group, and it is a recipy for distrust of education in general.  The mindset of the white supremacists within the GOP is similarly hostile to an accurate portrayal of history since it reveals the horrors that have been wrought by white supremacy.  The icing on the cake is the realization by Republican office holders and candidates that ignorant voters are more easily misled and easier to dupe into voting against their own economic interests.  A column in the New York Times looks at the attacks on education: 

Ron DeSantis, who is currently governor of Florida and wants to become president, has been trying to position himself as America’s leading crusader against wokeness. And lately higher education has become his most visible target. He picked a very public fight with the College Board over its new advanced placement course in African American studies, and in the past few days has broadened that attack into a suggestion that Florida might stop offering A.P. classes in any field.

[T]he fundamental context: the extraordinary rise in right-wing hostility to higher education in general.

Is every accusation about left-leaning professors trying to indoctrinate students false? Probably not: America is a big country, and it surely must be happening somewhere — although the specific charges made by right-wing critics are often ludicrous. In a meeting with the College Board, Florida officials asked whether the new A.P. course was “trying to advance Black Panther thinking.” Guys, the Black Panthers closed up shop when Ron DeSantis was a little kid; say the words now and most people think you’re talking about Wakanda.

It is true that college faculty members are much more likely to identify themselves as liberal and vote Democratic than the public at large. But this needn’t be evidence of anti-conservative bias.  . . . . The police skew Republican, but I presume that everyone accepts that this mainly involves who wants to be a police officer.

So what’s really driving the attacks on higher education?

Not that long ago most Americans in both parties believed that colleges had a positive effect on the United States. Since the rise of Trumpism, however, Republicans have turned very negative. Recent polling shows an overwhelming majority of Republicans agreeing that both college professors and high schools are trying to “teach liberal propaganda.”

But what actually happened here? Did America’s colleges — which a large majority of Republicans considered to have a positive influence as recently as 2015 — suddenly become centers of left-wing indoctrination? Did the same thing happen to high schools, run by local boards, across the nation?

Of course not. What happened was that MAGA politicians began peddling scare stories about education — notably, denouncing high schools for teaching critical race theory, even though they don’t. And right-wingers also greatly expanded their definition of what counts as “liberal propaganda.”

Thus, when one points out that schools don’t actually teach critical race theory, the response tends to be that while they may not use the term, they do teach students that racism was long a major force in America, and its effects linger to this day. I don’t know how you teach our nation’s history honestly without mentioning these facts — but in the eyes of a substantial number of voters, teaching uncomfortable facts is indeed a form of liberal propaganda.

And once that’s your mind-set, you see left-wing indoctrination happening everywhere, not just in history and the social sciences. If a biology class explains the theory of evolution, and why almost all scientists accept it — or, for that matter, the theory of how vaccines work — well, that’s liberal propaganda. If a physics class explains how greenhouse gas emissions can change the climate — well, that’s more liberal propaganda.

U.S. politics is increasingly polarized along educational lines, with the highly educated supporting Democrats and the less-educated supporting Republicans. This polarization is often portrayed as a symptom of Democratic failure — why can’t the party win over working-class white voters? But it’s equally valid to ask how Republicans have managed to alienate educated voters who might benefit from tax cuts. And the party’s growing hostility to education is surely part of the answer.

[T]his turn against education is taking place precisely at a time when highly educated workers are becoming ever more crucial to the economy. This is especially obvious when you look at regional data within the United States: The college-educated percentage of a city’s population is a powerful predictor of both its current prosperity and its future growth.

For now, the important thing to understand is that people like DeSantis are attacking education, not because it teaches liberal propaganda, but because it fails to sustain the ignorance they want to preserve.