A recent article by Rachel Sheffield and Scott Winship in The American Conservative, stated:
The highly-educated are concentrating together, depriving struggling communities and dividing the country…
Are we more divided as a nation today than we were before?
New research within the Joint Economic Committee’s Social Capital Project suggests that we are.
The findings indicate that Americans are more frequently dividing themselves geographically and along lines of education.
Highly-educated Americans have increasingly moved to a handful of states over the last several decades, leaving other places behind.
This “brain drain” has clear economic implications. Beyond economics though, it’s also likely draining social capital from many places, as communities lose talent and resources that would help support civic institutions.
Brain drain and educational sorting exacerbate political and cultural divides as well: Americans segregate themselves into communities where they more frequently reside near those similar to themselves, decreasing the likelihood of rubbing shoulders with those who see the world differently.
The Rust Belt, the Plains, and some states in New England are experiencing high levels of brain drain.
It’s not news that highly educated Americans are more likely to move.
America’s highly educated have consistently been more prone to pack up their bags and seek opportunity outside their hometowns.
But surprisingly, there have been few attempts to quantify the magnitude of the problem and assess whether it is getting worse.
To rectify that, researchers created brain drain measures that compare the number of people leaving their birth states.
They found that today, highly educated movers in the U.S. tend to leave certain states and regions of the country at higher rates than in the past and concentrate in a smaller group of states that are home to booming metropolitan areas.
This leads to growing geographic divides between areas that are thriving and places that struggle. With fewer states retaining and attracting talent, more areas are left behind.
A handful of states have become exclusive destinations for the highly educated.
They not only hold onto more of their homegrown talent, but they also gain more highly educated adults than they lose. These talent-magnet states are along the West Coast, as well as the Boston-Washington corridor.
Beyond the coasts, a few other states, like Texas, are retaining their homegrown talent while simultaneously winning a balance of talent from elsewhere.
These “brain gain” states are like an elite club whose members trade among themselves.
For example, California draws the greatest share of its highly educated entrants from other brain gain states: New York, Illinois, and Texas, which are ranked third, fourth, and eighth, respectively, on net brain gain.
New York pulls in highly educated entrants primarily from New Jersey (ranked sixth on net brain gain) and California.
The most common origins of Texas’s entrants include California, Illinois, and New York.
On the opposite side of the coin are the many states that are not only bleeding highly educated adults but failing to attract others to replace them.
Rust Belt states—Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Missouri—are particularly plagued by brain drain.
Several Plains states—Iowa and the Dakotas—as well as states in New England—Vermont and New Hampshire—are also experiencing high levels of brain drain.
Although this is hardly a new phenomenon for the Rust Belt, it’s become a worsening problem over the last 50 years for the other high brain-drain states mentioned.
Brain drain’s effects on state economies are obvious. Places that lose more of their highly educated adults are likely going to be economically worse off than those that retain or attract highly educated adults.
And if the highly educated are concentrating in fewer areas, then more parts of the country will be prone to economic stagnation.
Another way that brain drain’s educational divides can deplete social capital is by creating deeper political and cultural divides between Americans.
The highly educated more often hold liberal political views compared to those with less than a college education.
America’s major metropolitan areas tend to vote Democratic, while most other areas of the country vote Republican.
Those living in urban areas are also more likely to hold liberal political views, whereas those living in rural areas are more commonly conservative.
So, as a result of brain drain and self-sorting, Americans are now more likely to live in communities where they are isolated from people who hold different ideologies and values.
Less association between people of different viewpoints can exacerbate political divides, as people become more steeped in their own beliefs.
When those who are different are further away, it is easier to cast them as a faceless group of opponents upon whom all blame for America’s problems belongs, rather than as neighbors with whom to find common ground.
Ultimately, social segregation weakens the idea that, as Americans, we share something important in common with one another.
A growing federal government only adds to the problem of geographic divide.
Naturally, neither heartland traditionalists nor coastal cosmopolitans want to be ruled by the other camp.
However, with more power at the national level, national elections have higher stakes for everyone.
The strength of our relationships is crucial to the strength of our nation.
We must find ways to reach across the divides that separate us.
So Why we can’t stand each other?
Why do Americans increasingly believe that those in the other party are not only misguided, but are also bad people whose views are so dangerously wrong-headed and crazy as to be all but incomprehensible?
Let me give you some reasons:
1. The end of the Cold War. The West’s victory in the Cold War means that (with the possible exception of jihadi terrorism) there is no longer a global enemy to keep us united as we focus on a powerful and cohesive external threat.
2. The rise of identity-group politics. On both the Left and the Right, the main conceptual frameworks have largely shifted in focus from unifying values to group identities. As Amy Chua puts it in Political Tribes (2018): “The Left believes that right-wing tribalism—bigotry, racism—is tearing the country apart. The Right believes that left-wing tribalism—identity politics, political correctness—is tearing the country apart. They are both right.”
3. Growing religious diversity. Current trends in American religion reflect as well as contribute to political polarization. One trend is growing secularization, including a declining share of Americans who are Christians, less public confidence in organized religion, and rising numbers of religiously unaffiliated Americans.
One consequence is an increasingly open questioning of Christianity’s once-dominant role in American public and political culture. But another trend is the continuing, and in some respects intensifying, robustness of religious faith and practice in many parts of the society.
This growing religious divide helps to explain the rise of several of the most polarizing social issues in our politics, such as gay marriage and abortion. It also contributes to polarizing the two political parties overall, as religious belief becomes an increasingly important predictor of party affiliation.
For example, among Democrats and Democratic-leaning U.S. adults, religiously unaffiliated voters (the “nones”) are now more numerous than Catholics, evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants, or members of historically black Protestant traditions, whereas socially and theologically conservative Christians today are overwhelmingly Republican.
4. Growing racial and ethnic diversity. In the long run, increased racial and ethnic diversity is likely a strength. But in the short run—which means now—it contributes to a decline in social trust (the belief that we can understand and count on one another) and a rise in social and political conflict.
5. The passing of the Greatest Generation. We don’t call them the greatest for no reason. Their generational values, forged in the trials of the Great Depression and World War II—including a willingness to sacrifice for country, concern for the general welfare, a mature character structure, and adherence to a shared civic faith—reduced social and political polarization.
6. Geographical sorting. As I stated earlier, Americans today are increasingly living in politically like-minded communities. Living mainly with like-minded neighbors makes us both more extreme and more certain in our political beliefs.
7. Political party sorting. Once upon a time, there were such creatures as liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. No longer.
Today almost all liberals are Democrats and all conservatives are Republicans. One main result is that the partisan gap between the parties is wide and getting wider.
8. New rules for Congress. The weakening and in some cases elimination of “regular order”—defined broadly as the rules, customs, and precedents intended to promote orderly and deliberative policymaking—as well as the erosion of traditions such as Senatorial courtesy and social fraternization across party lines—have contributed dramatically to less trust and more animosity in the Congress, thus increasing polarization.
It’s hard to exaggerate how much House Republicans and Democrats dislike each other these days.
9. New rules for political parties. Many reforms in how we nominate, elect, and guide our political leaders—shifting the power of nomination from delegates to primaries, dismantling political machines, replacing closed-door politics with televised politics, and shrinking the influence of career politicians—aimed to democratize the system.
10. New political donors. In earlier eras, money in American politics tended to focus on candidates and parties, while money from today’s super-rich donors tends to focus on ideas and ideology—a shift that also tends to advance polarization.
11. New political districts. Widespread gerrymandering—defined as manipulating district boundaries for political advantage—contributes significantly to polarization, most obviously by making candidates in gerrymandered districts worry more about being “primaried” by a more extreme member of their own party than about losing the general election.
12. The spread of media ghettos. The main features of the old media—including editing, fact-checking, professionalization, and the privileging of institutions over individuals—served as a credentialing system for American political expression.
The distinguishing feature of the new digital media—the fact that anyone can publish anything that gains views and clicks—is replacing that old system with a non-system that is largely leaderless.
One result made possible by this change is that Americans can now live in media ghettos. If I wish, I can live all day every day encountering in my media travels only those views with which I already agree.
Living in a media ghetto means that my views aren’t shaped and improved and or challenged, but instead are hardened and made more extreme; what might’ve been analysis weakens into partisan talking points dispensed by talking heads; moreover, because I’m exposed only to the most exaggerated versions of my opponents’ views, I come to believe that those views are so unhinged and irrational as to be dangerous.
More broadly, the new media resemble and reinforce the new politics, such that the most reliable way to succeed in either domain is to be the most noisy, outrageous, and polarizing.
13. The decline of journalistic responsibility. The dismantling of the old media has been accompanied by, and has probably helped cause, a decline in journalistic standards.
These losses to society include journalists who’ll accept poor quality in pursuit of volume and repetition as well as the blurring and even erasure of boundaries between news and opinion, facts and non-facts, and journalism and entertainment. These losses feed polarization.
So what have we learned?
For starters, we could probably make the list longer. For example, we could argue that rising income equality should be added.
Second, we can see that some of these causes are ones we either can’t do much about or wouldn’t want to even if we could.
Third, few if any of these causes contain the quality of intentionality: None of them wake up each morning and say, “Let’s polarize!” Even those coming closest to reflecting the intention to polarize, such as gerrymandering, reflect other and more fundamental intentions, such as winning elections, advancing a political agenda, or gaining clicks or viewers.
The fourth conclusion is the most important. None of these 13 causes directly perpetuate polarization.
They are likely what analysts would call ultimate causes, but they are not immediate, direct causes. They seem to have shaped an environment that promotes polarization, but they are not themselves the human words and deeds that polarize.
We need a 14th cause, arguably the most important one. It’s certainly the most direct and immediate cause of polarization.
14. The growing influence of certain ways of thinking about each other. These polarizing habits of mind and heart include:
• Favoring either/or thinking.
• Championing one’s preferred values.
• Viewing uncertainty as a mark of weakness or sin.
• Indulging in motivated reasoning (always and only looking for evidence that supports your side).
• Relying on deductive logic (believing that general premises justify specific conclusions).
• Assuming that one’s opponents are motivated by bad faith.
• Permitting the desire for approval from an in-group (“my side”) to guide one’s thinking.
• Succumbing intellectually and spiritually to the desire to dominate others.
• Declining for oppositional reasons to agree on basic facts and on the meaning of evidence.
These ways of thinking constitute the actual practice of polarization—the direct and immediate causes of holding exaggerated and stereotyped views of each other, treating our political opponent as enemies, exhibiting growing dislike and aggression in public life, and acting as if common ground does not exist.
What’s the lesson here? We need largely to think our way out. At this point in the process, unless some cataclysmic social change (economic collapse, another world war) does it for us, the first thing to change to get out of this mess is our minds.
One final consideration. It would be nice to make a straightforward “us versus them” enemies list when it comes to who’s to blame for the polarization of our nation.
But the fact is, none of us is without fault.
Some of us are more inclined to polarizing habits than others; some of us when we foster polarization are more aware of what we’re doing than others; and some of us (more and more of us, it seems) make a pretty good living these days out of encouraging and participating in polarization.
But the habits and temptations of polarization are always with all of us. That includes you and me, by the way.
The fault, is in ourselves.
So callers, What can we do to change the route we are on?