I think Republicans would obviously be well served by trying to be less repulsive to educated voters in ways that would be unambiguously beneficial to them, but your plot with the cities doesn't really help your point as much as you think:
* 5/11 of those are from Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Czechia) where left-wing parties are close to nonexistent electorally and where both mainstream camps are right-wing, one more pro-EU & generally market-friendly and the other more populist and Orban-like. Due to an effect I call "vaccinated against communism," every election in these countries is basically between Mitt Romney and Trump, with even moderate leftists playing a marginal role if any. That is actually kind of cool if you are right-leaning, but I don't think that is likely to happen anytime soon in the US no matter what the GOP does.
* Belgrade is an even worse example because Serbia is basically a country dominated by an Orban-style nationalist uniparty, and the Belgrade mayor is from that party. This is almost like including Moscow.
* In Berlin and Helsinki, the mayor does not actually have a right-wing majority and governs with the left in one way or the other, so it is arguable how much more right-wing substantive policy is compared to a moderate Dem mayor like Matt Mahan or Daniel Lurie.
* That leaves us with only three examples of cities governed by a completely right-wing majority in a country with an actual existing left, same as in the US. Even among these, two of them (Oslo and Valencia) are governed with the mainstream right working together with the chud right. Madrid is actually the only example of a completely chud-free right-leaning municipal government in your European list which can govern without any reliance on the populist right.
Basically urban voters are left leaning in most western countries that don't have a legacy of communism and even even with a separate non-chud center right party it is pretty hard to get a right of center governing majority.
Agreed regarding the Eastern European cities. I was surprised to see Warsaw listed as having a right-wing mayor, since the current mayor is from the less rightist of the two major parties in Poland (distinguished from the other one primarily by being less populist & more pro-EU). (There is also an actual leftist party in Poland, but it only gets about 5-10% of the vote throughout the country.)
I am not at all convinced by your argument that the reason why college-educated voters have turned to the Left on free-market issues is because of GW Bush and Trump.
There has been a clear and well-documented trend towards the Left among college-educated voters in the USA and the rest of the Western world since the late 1960s.
If memory serves correct, you wrote a column on the topic, so I know that you are aware that the trend goes much further back that this article claims.
EDIT: I found the article. See my reply below.
The reason why this has apparently intensified in the 21st Century is because of generational change. The WW2 generation started dying out in the 1990s and early 2000s, and then the Millenial generation started coming of age a bit later. Plus levels of college education increased significantly with each generation. Together this is a massive generational turn-over within the college-educated voters that explains the trend far better.
And, by the way, the Democratic party did pretty well for themselves appealing to the "Chuds" from 1932-1970. The problem is that Democrats have radically changed their policy stands since then:
College-educated activists on issue like Vietnam, race, environmentalism, gender and other issues joined the Democratic party and due to the change to new political primaries created by the McGovern-Fraser commission greatly increased their influence on the party. You can see this most clearly with the McGovern presidential campaign of 1972.
Bill Clinton actively ran against this wing of the party in 1992, so it undermines your claim that this all started with GW Bush. GW Bush and Trump are reactions to much deeper and longer ideological trends within the college-educated class.
I suspect the rising dominance of women among people with college degrees (valueless as many of the feminized degree programs are) explains a lot of the leftism and anti-market bias of college grads, since women embrace socialism because it gives them earning opportunities as commissars and apparatchiks they wouldn't have in a free-market system. They are also more agreeable and empathic, especially when it comes to spending other people's money on the beneficiaries of their empathy.
If you restrict "college educated" to engineers, business entrepreneurs, dentists, and surgeons, (a much smaller slice of the total college-educated population) you'd see more free-market support. Even the women who go into those disciplines are less likely to be socialist than those who go into teaching and nursing.
The most strategic coalition opportunity is to build a bridge between the pro-market right and left — i.e. libertarian and abundance types. This is what we're doing at The Boyd Institute.
I wish you luck, but I am not convinced that Abundance types are actually pro-market. They clearly state that they want to enable the government to build things, particularly housing, renewable energy, and transit.
They seem terrified of being considered "neo-liberal" or anything associated with the Republican party, which they know would get them kicked out of respectable circles within the Democratic party.
I think it is more like they are less fanatical in their opposition to markets than most active Democrats.
The synthesis is that pro-market reforms make it easier for the government to build stuff too. A government housing project has to jump through all the same regulatory hoops as private developers.
No, I am not assuming "state capacity means anti-market"
I never claimed that the Abundance movement is "anti-market." My claim is that they are very reluctant to come out publicly as pro-market partly because of the political consequences within the Democratic party and partly because of their actual beliefs.
Read the Abundance book. They are very careful not to endorse pro-market economics for the reasons that I listed above.
Increasing state capacity is not the same as pro-market.
Yes, but a desire to deregulate government is not the same as a desire to deregulate the overall economy.
The Abundance writers are very clear about separating themselves from anything that hints of sweeping pro-market reforms.
And their focus on renewable energy and transit is explicitly pro-government intervention. Housing zoning rules is really the only area where the Abundance movement focuses on what might be called pro-market reforms, but it is not an accident that they rarely use the term in even housing debates.
They also seem to become decidedly less enthusiastic when abundance ends up looking more like Dallas and less like Manhattan.
Like I have seen 98374109238 abundance articles praising infill in downtown Houston and like 0 praising Houston suburban sprawl or praising congestion pricing in Manhattan but 0 praising the building of mega freeways funded by tolls.
If the pro-market people were voting for Hillary, that simply helps confirm that the alleged market focus of the Republicans was a joke even by the time Trump showed up.
The main issue is that a party cannot only include elites (at least in the American two party framework) redistribution is a way democratic elites can get support from a broader segment of the population to win elections. It is the least worst option, as opposed to direct interventions in markets.
"I have some socially conservative views on topics like tattoos,"
I'm also not a fan of tattoos, but I've never thought of my preference as socially conservative. Perhaps it is, but according to AI Overview:
"Pew Research Center study reports that 33% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents have at least one tattoo, compared to 32% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents."
In the 1960s, long hair signaled left wing. By the late 1970s, I'm pretty sure that was no longer the case.
Or is the problem that I'm wrongly equating socially conservative with Republican?
This adds up. From my experience, tattoos are worn either by artistic socially liberal types rebelling against the concept of a social norm or low class conservatives who want you to think they're tough.
Edit needed: “Compared to its own past decades and Europe today, the modern US is distinguished bt the extent to which the conservative party isn’t even competitive in major urban centers.”
What matters more, though, are the average voters of each party, not educated voters per se. And the average GOP voter remains considerably more favourable to free markets and limited government than their Democratic counterparts.
There’s just no appetite among Democrats for reduced spending and regulation, income or corporate tax cuts, or even a more general business-friendly attitude. There are too many special interests—first and foremost, unions!— opposed to such a move.
There’s a reason why you’ll never find libertarians in the DNC, but plenty in Republican administrations, including today.
I don’t think supporting high taxes is the same thing as being anti-markets.
I think the urge towards confiscatory levels of taxation is quite concerning, and I agree it’s frequently associated with innumeracy and very bad policy ideas, and being anti-market is similarly innumerate and bad policy in many areas.
But that doesn’t make “I’d like a more social democratic system” mean someone doesn’t support relatively free markets.
"Democrats tend to like direct tax and spending, which redistributes money away from wealthy white people and toward poor minorities and elite white people who work in education and academia."
Minorities are elevated in the discourse, but a huge share of welfare and medicaid recipients are white people. Rural hospitals are suffering right now, and they are overwhelmingly white. And of course Social Security and Medicare are also dominated by whites.
Democrats do themselves no favors by playing up race because these programs have broad support.
The last major trade deal was the TPP. Hillary Clinton originally supported it, but then oppose it after Bernie and other leftists attacked her for it. Trump hates all trade deals he didn't personally negotiate, so it became a dead letter when he took office.
I think Republicans would obviously be well served by trying to be less repulsive to educated voters in ways that would be unambiguously beneficial to them, but your plot with the cities doesn't really help your point as much as you think:
* 5/11 of those are from Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Czechia) where left-wing parties are close to nonexistent electorally and where both mainstream camps are right-wing, one more pro-EU & generally market-friendly and the other more populist and Orban-like. Due to an effect I call "vaccinated against communism," every election in these countries is basically between Mitt Romney and Trump, with even moderate leftists playing a marginal role if any. That is actually kind of cool if you are right-leaning, but I don't think that is likely to happen anytime soon in the US no matter what the GOP does.
* Belgrade is an even worse example because Serbia is basically a country dominated by an Orban-style nationalist uniparty, and the Belgrade mayor is from that party. This is almost like including Moscow.
* In Berlin and Helsinki, the mayor does not actually have a right-wing majority and governs with the left in one way or the other, so it is arguable how much more right-wing substantive policy is compared to a moderate Dem mayor like Matt Mahan or Daniel Lurie.
* That leaves us with only three examples of cities governed by a completely right-wing majority in a country with an actual existing left, same as in the US. Even among these, two of them (Oslo and Valencia) are governed with the mainstream right working together with the chud right. Madrid is actually the only example of a completely chud-free right-leaning municipal government in your European list which can govern without any reliance on the populist right.
Basically urban voters are left leaning in most western countries that don't have a legacy of communism and even even with a separate non-chud center right party it is pretty hard to get a right of center governing majority.
Agreed regarding the Eastern European cities. I was surprised to see Warsaw listed as having a right-wing mayor, since the current mayor is from the less rightist of the two major parties in Poland (distinguished from the other one primarily by being less populist & more pro-EU). (There is also an actual leftist party in Poland, but it only gets about 5-10% of the vote throughout the country.)
I am not at all convinced by your argument that the reason why college-educated voters have turned to the Left on free-market issues is because of GW Bush and Trump.
There has been a clear and well-documented trend towards the Left among college-educated voters in the USA and the rest of the Western world since the late 1960s.
https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/137/1/1/6383014
This started with the coming of age of the Baby Boom generation in the late 1960s and has gradually increased with each generation since.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/conscience-without-god-the-cultural
If memory serves correct, you wrote a column on the topic, so I know that you are aware that the trend goes much further back that this article claims.
EDIT: I found the article. See my reply below.
The reason why this has apparently intensified in the 21st Century is because of generational change. The WW2 generation started dying out in the 1990s and early 2000s, and then the Millenial generation started coming of age a bit later. Plus levels of college education increased significantly with each generation. Together this is a massive generational turn-over within the college-educated voters that explains the trend far better.
For a better explanation:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/explaining-the-long-march-through
And, by the way, the Democratic party did pretty well for themselves appealing to the "Chuds" from 1932-1970. The problem is that Democrats have radically changed their policy stands since then:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/how-the-democrats-have-changed-since
College-educated activists on issue like Vietnam, race, environmentalism, gender and other issues joined the Democratic party and due to the change to new political primaries created by the McGovern-Fraser commission greatly increased their influence on the party. You can see this most clearly with the McGovern presidential campaign of 1972.
Bill Clinton actively ran against this wing of the party in 1992, so it undermines your claim that this all started with GW Bush. GW Bush and Trump are reactions to much deeper and longer ideological trends within the college-educated class.
EDIT: I found the Oct 22, 2022 Richard Hanania article that seems to contradict the conclusions of this article.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/a-psychological-theory-of-the-culture
Also, he doesn't contend with cultural backlash theory
I suspect the rising dominance of women among people with college degrees (valueless as many of the feminized degree programs are) explains a lot of the leftism and anti-market bias of college grads, since women embrace socialism because it gives them earning opportunities as commissars and apparatchiks they wouldn't have in a free-market system. They are also more agreeable and empathic, especially when it comes to spending other people's money on the beneficiaries of their empathy.
If you restrict "college educated" to engineers, business entrepreneurs, dentists, and surgeons, (a much smaller slice of the total college-educated population) you'd see more free-market support. Even the women who go into those disciplines are less likely to be socialist than those who go into teaching and nursing.
The most strategic coalition opportunity is to build a bridge between the pro-market right and left — i.e. libertarian and abundance types. This is what we're doing at The Boyd Institute.
I wish you luck, but I am not convinced that Abundance types are actually pro-market. They clearly state that they want to enable the government to build things, particularly housing, renewable energy, and transit.
They seem terrified of being considered "neo-liberal" or anything associated with the Republican party, which they know would get them kicked out of respectable circles within the Democratic party.
I think it is more like they are less fanatical in their opposition to markets than most active Democrats.
The synthesis is that pro-market reforms make it easier for the government to build stuff too. A government housing project has to jump through all the same regulatory hoops as private developers.
Yeah I think he’s assuming state capacity means anti-market. Not true.
No, I am not assuming "state capacity means anti-market"
I never claimed that the Abundance movement is "anti-market." My claim is that they are very reluctant to come out publicly as pro-market partly because of the political consequences within the Democratic party and partly because of their actual beliefs.
Read the Abundance book. They are very careful not to endorse pro-market economics for the reasons that I listed above.
Increasing state capacity is not the same as pro-market.
Yes, but a desire to deregulate government is not the same as a desire to deregulate the overall economy.
The Abundance writers are very clear about separating themselves from anything that hints of sweeping pro-market reforms.
And their focus on renewable energy and transit is explicitly pro-government intervention. Housing zoning rules is really the only area where the Abundance movement focuses on what might be called pro-market reforms, but it is not an accident that they rarely use the term in even housing debates.
They also seem to become decidedly less enthusiastic when abundance ends up looking more like Dallas and less like Manhattan.
Like I have seen 98374109238 abundance articles praising infill in downtown Houston and like 0 praising Houston suburban sprawl or praising congestion pricing in Manhattan but 0 praising the building of mega freeways funded by tolls.
How did “ditch the chuds” work for legendary two term President Adlai Stevenson?
If the pro-market people were voting for Hillary, that simply helps confirm that the alleged market focus of the Republicans was a joke even by the time Trump showed up.
The main issue is that a party cannot only include elites (at least in the American two party framework) redistribution is a way democratic elites can get support from a broader segment of the population to win elections. It is the least worst option, as opposed to direct interventions in markets.
Excellent post, but one comment caught my eye:
"I have some socially conservative views on topics like tattoos,"
I'm also not a fan of tattoos, but I've never thought of my preference as socially conservative. Perhaps it is, but according to AI Overview:
"Pew Research Center study reports that 33% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents have at least one tattoo, compared to 32% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents."
In the 1960s, long hair signaled left wing. By the late 1970s, I'm pretty sure that was no longer the case.
Or is the problem that I'm wrongly equating socially conservative with Republican?
This adds up. From my experience, tattoos are worn either by artistic socially liberal types rebelling against the concept of a social norm or low class conservatives who want you to think they're tough.
Edit needed: “Compared to its own past decades and Europe today, the modern US is distinguished bt the extent to which the conservative party isn’t even competitive in major urban centers.”
Thanks.
Have you seen the paper 'Intelligence makes people think like economists: Evidence from the General Social Survey' by Bryan Caplan?
It seems to fit well here.
What matters more, though, are the average voters of each party, not educated voters per se. And the average GOP voter remains considerably more favourable to free markets and limited government than their Democratic counterparts.
There’s just no appetite among Democrats for reduced spending and regulation, income or corporate tax cuts, or even a more general business-friendly attitude. There are too many special interests—first and foremost, unions!— opposed to such a move.
There’s a reason why you’ll never find libertarians in the DNC, but plenty in Republican administrations, including today.
I don’t think supporting high taxes is the same thing as being anti-markets.
I think the urge towards confiscatory levels of taxation is quite concerning, and I agree it’s frequently associated with innumeracy and very bad policy ideas, and being anti-market is similarly innumerate and bad policy in many areas.
But that doesn’t make “I’d like a more social democratic system” mean someone doesn’t support relatively free markets.
This is an odd conflation.
On this:
"Democrats tend to like direct tax and spending, which redistributes money away from wealthy white people and toward poor minorities and elite white people who work in education and academia."
Minorities are elevated in the discourse, but a huge share of welfare and medicaid recipients are white people. Rural hospitals are suffering right now, and they are overwhelmingly white. And of course Social Security and Medicare are also dominated by whites.
Democrats do themselves no favors by playing up race because these programs have broad support.
The last major trade deal was the TPP. Hillary Clinton originally supported it, but then oppose it after Bernie and other leftists attacked her for it. Trump hates all trade deals he didn't personally negotiate, so it became a dead letter when he took office.