This is very interesting. I had no idea that there was a correlation between education and tendency to commit political violence. But in hindsight it makes total sense. Just seems like uneducated trump voters find just as many things to be mad about than those that attain higher education.
Thanks for this great post. I particularly appreciate citing Sean Westwood's research showing that many estimates of support for political violence are too high.
I had never seen the breakdown of the data from Westwood / Polarization Research Lab by age and education level. It's interesting it's bimodal, with highest support at the lowest and highest levels of formal education.
I'm interested if this pattern holds with other questions of political violence the Lab asks about, like vandalism or assault. With over 150,000 respondents, it should also be possible to break down the data by political affiliation and gender, which may generate additional insights.
I am with you on most of this, but I think we need to acknowledge that there are professors in universities and activist groups conveying or adhering to decolonial/post-colonial and other liberation ideologies that allow for/justify violence. Also look at the Democrat-leaning politicians and platforms hosting people like Hasan Piker without pushing back much or at all on his most extreme views (like 9/11) was a good thing.
I agree there is a strand of leftist academic thinking that justifies violence against oppression. I just don't think it's that common, or that commonly taught to students. I tried to do a quick estimate of how many students major in "critical" disciplines where they might most commonly encounter these ideas. Here's what Claude came up with:
The federal CIP [Classification of Instructional Programs] category that maps most directly to what's commonly called "critical" disciplines is "Area, Ethnic, Cultural, Gender, and Group Studies" (CIP 05), which covers ethnic studies, women's/gender studies, area studies, etc. In 2021–22, US institutions awarded 15,615 bachelor's degrees in this category (https://www.collegefactual.com/majors/ethnic-cultural-gender-studies/) out of roughly 2.06 million total bachelor's degrees — about 0.75%.
Re Hasan Piker, I don't think we should count Dem politicians appearing on his show (e.g. Mamdani) as endorsing his ideas, any more than we should count Dem politicians appearing on Rogan as endorsing Trump. Rather, in both cases they are there to reach a specific audience. Ruling that out, my quick search turned up only one politician who has actually seemed to endorse his views, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed who held two campaign events with him and defended him publicly. Please let me know if you know of more!
This is very interesting. I had no idea that there was a correlation between education and tendency to commit political violence. But in hindsight it makes total sense. Just seems like uneducated trump voters find just as many things to be mad about than those that attain higher education.
Thanks for this great post. I particularly appreciate citing Sean Westwood's research showing that many estimates of support for political violence are too high.
I had never seen the breakdown of the data from Westwood / Polarization Research Lab by age and education level. It's interesting it's bimodal, with highest support at the lowest and highest levels of formal education.
I'm interested if this pattern holds with other questions of political violence the Lab asks about, like vandalism or assault. With over 150,000 respondents, it should also be possible to break down the data by political affiliation and gender, which may generate additional insights.
I am with you on most of this, but I think we need to acknowledge that there are professors in universities and activist groups conveying or adhering to decolonial/post-colonial and other liberation ideologies that allow for/justify violence. Also look at the Democrat-leaning politicians and platforms hosting people like Hasan Piker without pushing back much or at all on his most extreme views (like 9/11) was a good thing.
I agree there is a strand of leftist academic thinking that justifies violence against oppression. I just don't think it's that common, or that commonly taught to students. I tried to do a quick estimate of how many students major in "critical" disciplines where they might most commonly encounter these ideas. Here's what Claude came up with:
The federal CIP [Classification of Instructional Programs] category that maps most directly to what's commonly called "critical" disciplines is "Area, Ethnic, Cultural, Gender, and Group Studies" (CIP 05), which covers ethnic studies, women's/gender studies, area studies, etc. In 2021–22, US institutions awarded 15,615 bachelor's degrees in this category (https://www.collegefactual.com/majors/ethnic-cultural-gender-studies/) out of roughly 2.06 million total bachelor's degrees — about 0.75%.
Re Hasan Piker, I don't think we should count Dem politicians appearing on his show (e.g. Mamdani) as endorsing his ideas, any more than we should count Dem politicians appearing on Rogan as endorsing Trump. Rather, in both cases they are there to reach a specific audience. Ruling that out, my quick search turned up only one politician who has actually seemed to endorse his views, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed who held two campaign events with him and defended him publicly. Please let me know if you know of more!
Thanks for reading!