this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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Politics
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This is speculation but:
Higher education is typically liberal leaning. Liberals tend to be less religious and far more free thinking.
Conservatives are far more religious and illiterate/less educated. Conservatism as it is now is a minority to progressive ideologies (frequently outvoted in populist polls).
To get more power they need more religious and less educated voters to sway with propaganda/media talking heads. Higher ups are certainly pushing the narrative of private education (run by unlicensed teachers; teaching selective conservative values in textbooks) and it’s parroted by every republican voter and their mothers.
An uneducated voter base will equally vote against their own interest. They just don’t know any better. I’ve seen relatives (grandma with Native American heritage vote republican; anti women’s rights/anti Native American rights/anti social programs) vote to harm themselves because fox told them to. Insanity.
I suspect fear and uncertainty plays into it a lot too.
The world is changing quite quickly. Boomers got to live through the boom of the 70's, and younger people keep being told about some fictional utopia of the "good old days." Whatever they jobs they used to do are either automated or irrelevant now. The white cis male power dominance is eroding, and with it a lot of the social advantages they used to get for free are going away.
So, things are getting worse, and they're scared and want to do something about it. The problem is, a lot of these people have a zero-sum mentality, where to improve their own standing, they must do so by harming someone else's standing. The idea that things can be better for everyone with no one losing out just doesn't exist there.
Obviously that's not true, but if you try to convince them of that? Well, you're just trying to trick them so that you can take from them. It's an us vs. them mentality. And you surely don't want your kids to join the enemy's side, so you do your best to make sure they're raised the "right" way. And if your side wants to harm you? Well, as long as the others are getting hurt more, it's still a good thing, because now you're getting ahead of the others.
Might be a typo there. You probably mean the 80s and early 90s. The 70s were pretty grim.
Higher education is not liberal leaving a priori. It's just that acknowledging reality and facts, and even just some parts of scientific consensus, is completely incompatible with agreeing with anything the GOP does or says.
I don't think "higher education is typically liberal leaning" but rather as you learn more about the world, and how to think critically about it, you realize that most conservative ideals are not in the best interest of most people. They are actually in the interest of those already in power and/or with wealth.
It's kind of like that saying that nothing removes prejudice faster than travel (or something like that, I'm paraphrasing from memory here).
Also, the whole "liberal indoctrination" of colleges is only a half truth. Do people who go to college come out more liberal? Yes, but not because the colleges are indoctrinating them.
Let's say you've lived in a small town all your life. Everyone you know is pretty much the same. You know very few people who are different so stereotypes abound.
Then you go to college. You start meeting some of the people you had stereotypes of. They don't match what you thought "those people" would be like. Your stereotypes break down and instead of thinking of them as some scary Other, you see them as actual people.
When you go home, everyone back at home hasn't met the people you did. They make the bigoted, stereotype filled comments that you once would have echoed. Except, now those comments have faces attached to them for you so you object to them.
To your parents and the people in your small town, you've changed. They blame the college for "indoctrinating" you, but in reality it is just that you were exposed to different people and viewpoints.