Analysis: College-educated, liberal elites intent on running our lives are clustering in their own bubbles

Since the Nov. 3 election, liberals have been trying to downplay how broad support ran for President Donald Trump in 2020, using a trite theme: “Land doesn’t vote.”

For example, a recent report by the left-leaning Brookings Institution shows Trump won 2,584 counties in 2016 to Hillary Clinton’s 472; in 2020, the president captured 2,547 counties, compared to 509 for Joe Biden. (Brookings noted its results were based on 99 percent of counties, so the numbers could change.)

Yet those areas Clinton took were responsible for generating 64 percent of U.S. GDP, while this year, Biden’s backers produce even more, 71 percent, according to Brookings. The upshot is that more economic activity is generated in large, urban areas.

Similarly, CNN is promoting a map it found on Twitter that shows where voters are concentrated and how they voted. This map, according to its creator, doesn’t simply paint an entire state or county red or blue but reveals that Trump, for instance, has more voters in Massachusetts than he does in Mississippi and that Biden has more support in Mississippi than he did in Vermont.

Regardless of how you carve them up, both maps tell the same story: Democrats clearly cluster in big cities, and largely reject rural areas.

The conservative group Campus Reform recently released a report sharing that idea in a different way, based on education.

CR found that voters in counties with the most college degrees have overwhelmingly shifted for Democrats.

'Party of the professional-managerial class?': Share of college grads voting Democrat rises dramaticallyhttps://t.co/cTcS9hsjb7

— Campus Reform (@campusreform) December 22, 2020

According to its report, Biden carried 84 of the 100 counties with the largest shares of people who have at least a bachelor’s degree.

It wasn’t always that way, the group notes. Ronald Reagan won 76 of those counties in 1980, and 80 of them four years later. George H.W. Bush captured 58 of them in 1988.

But since Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992, Democrats have held a strong majority of these communities in each subsequent election with one exception, in 2000, when Al Gore won 51 of them.

The consequences of this for the country as a whole are profound, according to CR.

Benjamin Winegard, a psychology professor at Hillsdale College, has characterized the Democratic Party as rapidly becoming “the party of the professional-managerial class.”

He told CR that Democratic dominance of college-educated voters, especially those under 50, produces “broad cultural affinities” that are widely shared among college-educated people and are seeping out into the culture at large.

As he explained, “Such individuals tend to be cosmopolitan in outlook; favorable toward myriad forms of diversity; and tolerant of members of outgroups, including foreigners. Those who are highly educated tend also to be secular, open to social and cultural change, and what we might call ‘woke.’”

“It’s not terribly surprising that individuals who possess these values would find the Republican Party problematic,” he said.

The conservative scholar James Burnham touched on a similar phenomenon in his 1941 book, “The Mangerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World.” Summarizing Burnham’s argument in 2017 article in the journal American Affairs, Julius Krien noted, “It was not socialism that was in the ascendancy, however, but rather a new type of exploitative society that he termed managerialism.”

Burnham’s “managerial society,” he wrote, was a “technocratic elite of credentialed managers, exercising power through enlarged corporate and government bureaucracies,” who “would occupy the commanding heights of the economy, politics, and culture. Private property would not disappear, but the state nonetheless would exercise a dominant role in the economy, and social and political arrangements would be radically altered. The managerial economy would be categorically distinct from previous forms of entrepreneurial capitalism, and the managerial regime would not be democratic or classically liberal in its essential characteristics.”

Brookings saw this in its map of that small number of counties captured by Biden:

“Biden’s counties tended to be far more diverse, educated, and white-collar professional, with their aggregate nonwhite and college-educated shares of the economy running to 35% and 36%, respectively, compared to 16% and 25% in counties that voted for Trump. In short, 2020’s map continues to reflect a striking split between the large, dense, metropolitan counties that voted Democratic and the mostly exurban, small-town, or rural counties that voted Republican. Blue and red America reflect two very different economies: one oriented to diverse, often college-educated workers in professional and digital services occupations, and the other whiter, less-educated, and more dependent on ‘traditional’ industries.”

Brookings notes, “This economic rift that persists in dividing the nation is a problem because it underscores the near-certainty of both continued clashes between the political parties and continued alienation and misunderstandings.”

In other words, liberal elites concentrated in major cities will continue to promote wokeism and their alleged cultural superiority over the rubes who cling to traditional values. The liberals’ way of looking at the election map should give conservatives renewed appreciation for the Founding Fathers’ genius, and a determination to defend the system they established.