i can't believe i'm about to type this

but Ross Douthat just wrote a fairly insightful and stimulating piece. Douthat is the conservative picked up recently by the NY Times as clearly their other authors are just so gosh darn radical tree-hugging hippies.

I've particularly enjoyed Naked Capitalism's warning labels. For example, for the bizarre hit piece called The Agony of the Liberals, Yves Smith added the disclaimer:

The Agony of the Liberals Ross Douthat, New York Times. Read this only if you want to raise your blood pressure.

But this week, in The Roots of White Anxiety, he almost accidentally hits upon something important. You have to get past the obligatory conservative homage to a Pat Buchanan intro, and past some of the unhelpful generalizations, like the implicit barb that 'elite universities' are somehow unfriendly to conservatives or 'Red America', to see it.

But it's there. He lays out in black and white the challenge confronting our body politic. Our system of higher education represents the class divide rocking our society, morphing from institutions of equality and meritocracy to places designed to amplify and harden socioeconomic status across generations. Working class Americans of our rural and urban communities have at some points in our history worked together to achieve progress. Much of the unfolding of the past few decades has been efforts to break these two groups apart, to create as much tension and hostility as possible to prevent them from working together. That's essentially why the culture wars were fought: not just to get Republicans fired up to oppose those Godless commies, but also, to get Democrats to relate less to all the racists who live between NY and LA.

The culture wars themselves are largely irrelevant now (sorry boomers, but most young people really don't care much about petty things like skin color or abortion bans or the evils of homosexuality). But the remnants of the culture wars are all around us, in the increasingly separate worlds inhabited by various socioeconomic classes. Lack of familiarity breeds distrust and undermines cooperation. Not on purpose. But just because we're more comfortable with stuff we're around, from ideas to people. The outcome is class stratification, and looking at the demographics of admissions to top universities gives a great empirical insight into the larger trend.