All Those Academics
Is there any evidence that most, or even a singficant chunk, of Obama’s supporters are academics? ~Jonathan Chait
Chait asks in response to this Barone column. Considering that he has received something in the neighbourhood of 14 million votes (including all caucus and disqualified states), that would be an awful lot of academics if they constituted a large percentage of his support. Even if there are that many graduate degree-holders running around out there, there are probably still a lot fewer full-time academics. Besides, this isn’t a mystery. We have exit polls that can give us some rough idea of how many Obama supporters have post-graduate educations and how many do not. Furthermore, we have all talked to death the “beer-track”/”wine-track,” working class/creative class divisions among these voters.
What does Barone mean when he says “academic” anyway? As near as I can tell, his category of “academics” includes college students, whom we already knew disproportionately supported Obama in these elections, and seems to extend to upscale voters as well. Barone writes:
In state after state, we have seen Obama do extraordinarily well in academic and state capital enclaves. In state after state, we have seen Clinton do extraordinarily well in enclaves dominated by Jacksonians.
We knew that Obama gets a lot of his support from professionals, students and young people, all of whom are going to be concentrated in “academic and state capital enclaves.” We also already knew that Obama was winning the endorsements of many public sector unions. Clinton’s relative strength among downscale white voters, particularly the Scots-Irish and Midwestern ethnic communities from southern and eastern Europe, is not news, either. So besides being redundant where it is even somewhat correct, this talk of “academics” and “Jacksonians” creates categories so broad and imprecise as to be meaningless. (By the way, why do people frequently apply the name “Jacksonian” to things that have no meaningful connection to Andrew Jackson, except for, in this case, the accident of similar ethnic background?)
Now it’s true that if you are an academic and you’re voting for one of the two Democrats, you are probably for Obama, since academics or academics-in-training will tend to fit the Obama voter profile in multiple ways: younger, professional, (too) many years of education, urban, probably secular. They will also be more inclined to identify with someone whose intellectual style is more familiar and agreeable to them. It helps that he has at least briefly been an instructor, and his biography pushes all the right buttons. That much is true, but it’s hardly a revelation at this point.
Barone becomes almost comical when he describes Jacksonians, as if they were some Melanesian tribe that he has been studying for National Geographic:
Jacksonians, in contrast, place a high value on the virtues of the warrior and little value on the work of academics and public employees. They have, in historian David Hackett Fischer’s phrase, a notion of natural liberty: People should be allowed to do what they want, subject to the demands of honor. If someone infringes on that liberty, beware: The Jacksonian attitude is, “If you attack my family or my country, I’ll kill you.”
Of course, a lot of people who are public sector employees also believe this. They are called soldiers.
Then Barone just starts lying:
His standard campaign statements on Iraq seem to suggest that all honor should go to the opponents of the war and none to the brave men and women who have waged it.
That’s simply not true. He has said:
Our men and women in uniform are performing heroically around the world in some of the most difficult conditions imaginable.
And:
And it’s about honoring our veterans by giving them the respect and dignity they deserve and the care and benefits they have earned.
He says these sorts of things all the time. Barone should know that, and it’s ridiculous for him to make such a claim when the evidence to the contrary is just a click away.
It is also not terribly convincing when Barone says:
Go back to 1995, and look at the polls that showed that most Americans would support Colin Powell for president. I don’t think you’ll find any evidence of resistance by Jacksonian voters to the Powell candidacy.
That’s because Powell didn’t run and no votes were cast for or against him, and certainly not in a straight-up one-on-one race such as we have had the past two months. You can’t find evidence for it, because polling is probably pretty unreliable on this question even today and may have been even more so 13 years ago.
There are probably some people with Scots-Irish Democratic backgrounds who will be drawn to McCain because of his military service, but speaking as someone with such a family background I can say with confidence that “Jacksonians” don’t necessarily support McCain. The academic in me can’t rationalise a path to backing Obama, either, but in my case it isn’t because he lacks some intangible fighting spirit. If anything, he is too willing to use force or endorse its use when it is unnecessary or misguided. Meanwhile, the “Jacksonian” side fears that McCain will bog us down in so many conflicts that it will expose our country to grave dangers that we will have much greater difficulty warding off.
Arggh–I frankly think David Hackett Fischer has a lot to answer for here. I remember some years ago getting my first taste of *Albion’s Seed* at a small academic conference, and finding it outrageously hokey [and I, too, am Scots-Irish]. It’s a book that relies heavily on musty early-twentieth-century tomes that still spoke of “racial character.” Certainly it’s the sort of cultural determinism that drives a lot of Appalachian Studies types I know up the wall. But it gets cited with unseemly frequency by popular writers who think this sort of stuff is profound.
Also consider how unspecific and unremarkable the insight is. “People should be allowed to do what they want, subject to the demands of honor.” Well, yes. Depending on what the given culture defines as those demands, that changes the scope of liberty pretty dramatically. I can imagine all kinds of people who have this “notion,” and yet it wouldn’t be the same thing.
[...] Daniel Larison beats Michael Barone about the head and neck. [...]
Barone is nobody’s fool, and unlike most pundits, works with data.
You’re right–his cover terms aren’t the best, but you acknowledge he’s on to something, even if it’s not entirely new.
There is a line, though,from Stevenson to McGovern to Hart, Tsongas, and Bradley, of candidates who entrance the chattering classes and the intelligentsia, such as it is, but flop among the non-NPR-watchers of the world. Obama’s in that line, but adds to that the black vote, for obvious reasons.
He might turn out to be another McGovern, a liberal anti-war candidate while our forces are in harm’s way, but McCain has his own vulnerabilities (the war and the economy, for starters).
If Obama wins, only then will we discover whether he’s a centrist conciliator or a doctrinaire pinko. If McCain wins, we’ll see whether he’s a sober military man or an angry old man who sends the young out to die.
I can’t fault Barone for ignoring academics like you. Unfortunately, you’re a one-off.
No doubt he’s talking about a divide that is real enough, and Barone knows his demographics as well as anyone, but that doesn’t give him license to just invent Obama’s views about the military and the use of force overseas. Also, my parents worked in the public sector, and they’re as “Jacksonian” as you could ever want. I resent the generalisations about public employees and academics, especially when they are framed in such insulting terms. It’s even worse coming from someone who considers himself an academic.
While Fischer has a better academic pedigree, I think Barone is channeling Walter Russell Mead, who wrote a bunch of op/eds around 2002 and a book that celebrated GWB and his neo-imperialist foreign policy as the second coming of Andrew “sharp knife” Jackson. For Mead, Jackson epitomized the mythical American indivdualist; independent minded, ready to use extreme violence in a righteous cause, like Indian Removal, and if insulted quick to defend his honor and/or his access to petroleum.
While on the subject of Jackson, one of his flacks was George Bancroft, the premier academic historian of his day.
As for our times, do the human copy machines at AEI, Heritage, the Hoover Institute, and sundry other rightwing think tanks count as academics and, if so, do they drive pickup trucks to work and consume only brown spirits and black coffee? Same for GOP staffers living in those bohemian state capitals.
Quite right. Mead was one of the people I had in mind when I made my remark about the label Jacksonian.
Good question about the think tankers. They aren’t supposed to count in this analysis, but it would be interesting if Barone would apply the same criticisms to them when it comes to their attitudes towards the military.