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I haven't gotten around to reading David Frum's big inequality piece yet, but I did take a look at his column in The Week, which has some very perceptive things to say about the intersection of class resentment and educational attainment, but also ignores some of the crosscurrents that complicate the picture:
Few things enrage Democrats more than the consistent Republican success in branding Democratic presidential candidates as overprivileged snobs...But it’s really no great mystery...The Democratic Party runs strongest where formal educational attainment is widest.Of the 10 states with the highest proportion of college graduates, Obama will almost certainly win at least seven, with only Virginia, Colorado and New Hampshire offering any hope to McCain. Of the 10 states with the lowest proportion of college graduates, McCain will probably win at least nine, with only Nevada contestable by the Democrat.That's true at times, but in many of those states, it's not the whole story. Of the 10, seven are Southern. And their low educational attainment has a lot to do with very large, very poor, African-American communities. Communities which vote overwhelmingly Democratic. And whose Democratic voting patterns are directly related to the reason that the whites in those states vote overwhelmingly Republican. Which is why those states go Republican. Which is to say, Democrats often do perfectly well among those with the least education, but lose for other reasons.So what Frum is offering as a class divide is, at times, a racial divide, or at least the enduring legacy of a racial divide. The societal insecurities that Frum thinks Democrats play into may have something to do with education, but they have a lot more to do with a lingering resentment that pointy-headed Democrats think they know what's best for the South, which is the direct descendant of a period when Democrats did think they knew what was best for the South, and that was integration, and the South didn't agree. Over time, it became untenable to express that conflict in racial terms, and it got folded into a more sterile and broad-based attack on Democrats for being elitist, or cosmopolitan, or another word that suggests contempt for traditional American ways, which has the virtue of occasionally being true. But not always.
