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The War Between Higher Education And The Right

By Amanda Gardner
Published on: 22:41 PST, May 3, 2016

Throughout the 2016 campaign season, exit polls have consistently shown the average liberal voter to have a higher education than the average conservative. For example, a report published on April 26 by Pew Research Center shows the supporters of the two parties are “more divided along ideological lines than at any point in the previous two decades.” In addition to the blanket division between liberals and conservatives, the report found “growing ideological divisions along educational and generational lines.” Why is a war currently being waged between higher education and the right?

Higher education has one main purpose: to give students the tools needed to succeed. Of the tools higher education provides, the two most important are knowledge and the ability to think critically. While it is obvious to all that an individual who pursues a higher education will gain more knowledge than his or her less-educated counterpart, the increase in an individual’s ability to think critically is often overlooked.

Although often underestimated, it is the combination of knowledge and critical thinking ability that higher education facilitates that leads a voter with a higher education to become increasingly suspicious of the right, which has, in turn, forced the right to wage war on higher education. To put it simply, the more knowledge one has and the more critically one can think, the easier one can identify impossibilities and see through rhetoric, and the right knows its policies cannot appeal to knowledgeable critical thinkers.

Take Donald Trump’s Mexican border wall as an example. Footage of countless campaign rallies, such as the one held in Burlington, Vermont, which MSNBC highlighted in a report in January, has shown Trump asking his supporters, “Who’s gonna pay the for wall?” to which the audience enthusiastically responds, “Mexico!”

Any American voter armed with both the knowledge and the ability to think critically gained by higher education can easily determine that Trump’s claim to have the power to force a sovereign nation to pay for a wall that has no benefit for that nation is ridiculous. Consider Trump’s explanation of how he intends use the trade deficit to force Mexico to pay for the border wall.

“When they say ‘but Mexico can’t pay for the wall,’ I say of course they can. We have a trade deficit with Mexico that’s unbelievably big. Humongous. It’s a humongous number. It’s billions and billions of dollars — far more than what we’re talking about for the wall. The wall’s peanuts compared to that.”

As Politifact pointed out in a report on Trump’s plan, simply because a deficit exists does not mean the funds to cover the deficit exist. The United States owed China more than $1.2 trillion as of January 2016. Does anyone believe the United States has the power to repay that debt immediately? No one with a higher education does.

Although Trump’s rhetoric and his impossible plans have widened the gap between voters with higher educations and those without, he is not solely to blame for the increasing division, because the division began widening before his campaign. In fact, the blame for the gap sits squarely on the shoulders of the members of the GOP. For decades, conservative politicians were simply conservative, both fiscally and socially. Recently, they have become increasingly religious, increasingly judgmental, and decreasingly convincing.

An individual with a higher education who supported fiscal conservatism could, for many years, ignore the GOP’s social conservatism, secure in his or her higher education-provided knowledge that the checks and balances assured by the three branches of government and the bicameral legislature would prevent the implementation of über-conservative social policies. However, with the rise of the extreme right, a voter with a higher education now has to consider the conservative social platform with increasing scrutiny, and many previously conservative voters have had to abandon support for the party because they can simply no longer stomach the extreme and irrational views the party supports.

A voter with a higher education and the resulting understanding of science, history and the world outside of U.S. borders simply cannot support policies that defy logic, such as those that deny climate change and evolution. Nor can a voter with a higher education support a party with members like former Representative Todd Akin whose rigid anti-abortion stance left women across the country bewildered after hearing him speak on why abortions should not be available to anyone — even victims of rape.

“If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something: I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.”

In an article published shortly after Akin made the now-famous and completely unscientifically supported comment, The New York Times warned that Akin’s comment could actually help him gain political ground, as the state’s conservatives appeared to be moving further to the right. In the end, his 2012 Senate campaign was a failure, but his campaign was a sign of things to come amidst the continuing war the right is waging against higher education and science.

As the Republican party moves further the right, former moderate Republicans are being forced to move further to the left. A voter with a higher education simply cannot support a party that embraces politicians like Kentucky’s governor, Matt Bevin, who cut funding to higher education while approving an $18 million tax break to Answers in Genesis, the Ken Ham-led creationist group that is building a gigantic Noah’s ark at a theme park in the state.

The combination of Bevin’s cuts and his tax breaks is perhaps the most clear evidence of the war between higher education and the right to date: Bevin allowed cuts to higher education while supporting a group that believes the world is 6,000 years old — a group that views its theme park as an educational opportunity, where children are taught dinosaurs lived at the same time as humans.

If the right is allowed to continuing waging its war on higher education, voters with higher educations are going to continue moving further to the left, while the less-educated Americans are left susceptible to the influence of people like Todd Akin, Matt Bevin and Ken Ham. It is time to see the right’s war on higher education for the Orwellian nightmare it is — a means to gain political security by preventing the growth of a thinking, knowledgeable population. Remember, “Ignorance is strength.”

[Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images]

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