Back in the day, we are told, the upper middle class voted Republican — the country club set — and ordinary Americans voted Democrat. But now, we are told, the people with a college education tend to vote Democrat and ordinary middle class Americans vote Republican. And the lower class and non-white Americans vote Democrat.

I wonder why? I guess my question is whether political allegiance is ideological, based on disinterested beliefs in a just society, or whether it is simply voting your economic interest.

Of course, everyone likes to advertise their virtue; it’s the human thing to do.

Let us suppose that in the good old days, say in the glory days of the New Deal, that the upper middle class was mainly engaged in business. You can imagine that the tax-and-spend orgy of FDR and his Brain Trust did not go down well with the average golfer at the country club. But we can certainly understand that the average American, devasted by the Great Depression and looking for something, anything, to put food on the table, would vote Democrat and think of FDR as a savior.

Let us suppose that today nothing has changed, and that people still vote their economic interest. Obviously we can understand why the poor vote for their benefits. And we can understand that with the decline of manufacturing that the ordinary middle class would tend to trend Republican, since the Democrats just aren’t interested in throwing bennies to the ordinary middle class.

But the educated class. Are they any different?

I’d say that we have learned in the last few years that the attatchment of the educated class to the Democratic Party makes complete economic sense. It is just obvious that educated people benefit from big government. Culturally, people with academic credentials will tend to go for a structured job in a structured bureaucracy. I’d say that if you have dutifully checked your boxes for the twenty years of sitting in class from K through grad school you have been carefully taught to fit into a structured, administrative working world.

But we have recently learned from the DOGE operation that the educated class has created over the years a huge universe of government grants and NGOs and various government-adjacent foundations and non-profit organizations that benefit it. To you and me this might seem like a vile and self-seeking corrupt spoils system. But not to the people that benefit from it. As the scientists say: the smallest measurable time interval in the universe is the time between a human getting a check from the government and deciding he deserves it.

And by the way, don’t you dare take my Social Security away from me. I paid in all my working life; I deserve every penny, and more.

In other words, anyone presently benefiting from the current system of government benefits and spoils thinks the world is working pretty well. They know that they contribute to the greater good of the world, and can’t understand the complainers that want to break it all up.

And I think that educated women are particularly connected to the government and non-profit world, for a host of reasons. That’s why educated women are more Democrat than educated men.

And yet, all over the world, the populist nationalist middle class is revolting. It’s ridiculous; it’s far right; it practically fascist; it’s literally Hitler.

Problem is: the world doesn’t work like that, with rigid structures and guaranteed outcomes proclaimed by educated priests or educated administrators. The physical world changes, all the time; the human world changes, all the time. We get surprised, all the time. And we humans have to adapt, all the time.

The rigid world of scientific planning is breaking up; the rigid world of administratve hierarchy is breaking up; the American Empire is breaking up.

And another thing that is becoming obvious. The so-called global free-trade system is breaking up. It never was a free-trade system. The US mostly practiced free trade, but allowed many of its trading partners to protect themselves from our economy. It was a US imperial system where the US shouldered a lot of the load for running the system. You could say that we ran a tributary system similar to pre-communist China, where we distributed gifts to our vassals in return for tribute from them.

The global educated class, all over the world, is horrified. They thought that they would benevolently rule for a thousand years. But now, everywhere they turn they see far-right neo-fascists and extremists and they try to shut them out of respectable politics. But they won’t be able to stop it. The world changes, whether you like it or not. And sensible people see the earth move and scramble to adapt before it is too late.