I work in academia, and below are issues related to this article that have concerned me. I would be interested in the thoughts of Mr. Yglesias and others on them:
In recent years, it has become increasingly common for advertisements for faculty positions to require diversity statement as a part of the application materials, which contains a discussion of the candidate's commitment, experience, and plans surrounding diversity and inclusion. At this point, nearly all positions in my field require them. My concern is that requiring diversity statements further exacerbates the political polarization among faculty.
Admissions for graduate programs in my field is moving in the same direction, where an increasing number of programs are requiring diversity statements. In my department, a subset of our graduate students and faculty consider themselves to be activists and social justice warriors, and they would like to use diversity statements as a means of only admitting graduate students who feel the same way. They are largely succeeding at this point.
I consider myself to be quite liberal, and I naturally prefer to associate with others who have similar political beliefs, but I don't think that these trends are healthy for academia and society, as discussed in the above article.
(My preference for both faculty openings and graduate admissions is to ask applicants to discuss the issues that they are passionate about, with diversity as an example of a topic that they might discuss.)
“And would it really be so hard to throw urban libs a bone in the form of some concern for climate change?“
I’ve tried! Specifically, I advocate protecting dense areas with seawalls and making air conditioning more broadly available. Urban liberals have not appreciated my concern. They’ve called me a denialist, or acted as if I want to protect every uninhabited arctic island rather than just dense areas like New York City and Norfolk.
The problem is urban liberals view climate in moral terms, so they think mitigation is like making a pact with the devil.
Furthermore, if urban liberals want to cooperate, why don’t they kick the Paris protocol’s “1.5 degrees or death” alarmism to the curb or, at a minimum, cut out their airplane vacations and learn to like nuclear power? If they could compromise as well as they sneer we might get somewhere.
I recognize the reality or climate change, I’m willing to invest significant resources in electrification and mitigation, and yet urban libs treat me like a neanderthal for saying things like “cold causes more human misery than heat” and “carbon intensive technologies have improved agricultural yields and sharply reduced hunger.” Urban liberals are not fun to engage.
There used to be a libertarian-ish strain of intellectual conservatism ala Milton Friedman that laid claim to technocratic competency. I know growing up I’d read all sorts of conservative arguments that liberals understandably wanted things like abolishing poverty (crucially, this was always pitched sympathetically, which seems completely alien now!) but they didn’t understand that really they were doomed to immiserate everyone because they couldn’t see clearly—the sort of people who identified with the Churchill quote about you have to become a liberal by 20 if you have a heart and a conservative by thirty if you have a brain.
I suspect that losing this sort of stance (through a combination of economic knowledge objectively moving away from a Friedman-ish stance, and stronger influence of Evangelical+Fox News popularism) is as much a cause of the polarization as an effect. If you’re a smart-ass teenage boy, being able to signal your intelligence by “Well-actually-ing“ whatever your bleeding heart liberals say is a strong incentive to incorporate intellectually independent conservative into your identity and prove that that’s why you should go to University of Chicago (but you’ll settle of course for any other highly selective school). If there’s no project to incorporate conservatism into your identity as a smarter than average student, it’s unsurprising that students will give up on conservatism before they give up on proving how smart they are.
I grew up in a rural Republican household in the 70s and 80s, went to an urban college in 1986 and by the time I graduated I was functionally a Democrat (though registered Independent). I can't think of a single professor saying anything that made a difference in my outlook. It was fellow students who I took my cues from.
Of course, a lot has changed since then, but something tells me this is still mostly about peer effects and not professors.
As someone who teaches in the humanities, the revelation that spending more time studying the humanities is causing students to become more absolutist and less nuanced is going to make me start day drinking.
The Republican party tried 'not being the party of inhuman sociopaths' when it comes to immigration policy for years by having a national leadership that was far more pro-immigration than their base, and that was part of how they put themselves in a position for Trump to take over and destroy their party.
The NYTimes had a report last year that showed Harvard's incoming class had as many students from the top 1% of households as they did from the bottom 60% of earners. Combine Trump's more downscale appeal and the general trend of the upper class toward Democratic voting and I'm not shocked at the results.
The Democratic party is clearly on the ascendency relative to the Trump-addled Republican party. But I suspect the coalition of the top 20% of earners with the traditional Democratic base of lower-earning service workers will cause some friction in the coming years.
I had the benefit of being involved in a number of community projects in Somerville, MA (call back!) that got me the opportunity to take a course pro-bono at the Kennedy School at Harvard led by Hugh O'Doherty. The course was on Adaptive Leadership.
A technical problem is one that can be clearly defined, and has a definitive solution. It may be horribly complicated, but eventually there are specific ways that it can be tackled as guided by technical expertise.
An adaptive problem is one where the issue lies more with people themselves and the way they interact; with emotion. It's a problem defined by its LACK of a technical solution, simple or complex.
The left has technocratic impulses that cause it to think that every problem is a technical problem. Climate change can be addressed if we do X, Y, Z. However, the real issue with climate change is that it requires a fundamental rewiring of a current dominate human culture. That's an adaptive problem.
When you misread an adaptive problem as a technical problem, you waste your time trying to sway the skeptical with your evidence and your credentials, but with an adaptive problem there is too much emotion involved for that to ever work. The real work is not in convincing others that you and your solution are correct, but in addressed a deep sense of risk and loss and working together to dig out of that hole.
The left has hollowed out to all technical solutions to adaptive problems. The right has hollowed out to nothing but a gaping sense of loss that reacts poorly to proposed technical solutions and in their emotional void will embrace any garbage that makes them feel, even momentarily, like they are losing less.
It can be argued that aging white men had an overabundance for so many centuries, and so that sense of loss is justified and they should just get over it. It can also be argued that they aren't really losing as much as they fear, and that the only thing to fear is fear itself.
Neither one is going to work. At the same time, what's required by the would-be technocrats is empathy and working through complex adaptive problems WITH their opponents. And the more childish the right gets, the more difficult that is to do. The constant culture wars keep everyone's nerves frayed empathy is literally impossible. That part I blame entirely on the right. Not-so-cottage industries are entirely devoted to fanning the flames. Murdoch and Ailes at work.
So yes, these issues are pervasive and not going away. And it makes sense that education and occupation are major fault lines. Credentialism feeds technical thinking. At the other end the real loss of economic opportunity for the less educated in a post-industrial hyper-capitalist society provides a real baseline for other senses of loss, some real, and some entirely imaginary.
Ironically, the only path to change that I can even imagine is a rollback, to some degree, of globalization. We clearly need to rely less on imports for key components like microchips, and have a risky over-reliance on China for so much. As a matter of future national security we need to manufacture more at home. But that means paying more for things. This is an adaptive problem. And we aren't very good at those.
Matt, you & I both know plenty of conservatives from our elite undergrad days (we'll call them "Ross Douthat Conservatives"). I'm still friends with a bunch of them (or at least "friends" in the Facebook sense). Not a single one voted for Trump. Not one. And many of them are still Christian soldiers in the way that vast swaths of Red America are -- no quarter on abortion/homosexuality, the Bible is God's inerrant Word, all of it. They're all smart and well-educated enough to see through Trump's con and have enough principles not to stand for it, not to mention love our country enough not to want to see democracy destroyed. And (though I haven't asked them), if Ted Cruz had been the nominee in 2016, I'm pretty certain they would've voted for him over Hillary without hesitation.
My point -- I'm actually surprised as many as ~6% of incoming Harvard freshmen voted for Trump. These are truly the Elise Stefanik/George P. Bush/future Federalist Society judges with no principles but serving the powerful.
Interesting stats on political opinion in the elite universities, but I'd really like to know the comparison between places like, say, Oklahoma State University and BYU compared to their surrounding communities. Those are the schools that will produce local elites. If they're trending relatively liberal, that suggests some interesting divisions in coming years.
But in general, this increasing polarization between college vs non-college and urban vs rural is truly the marker of our times. It's helped lead to this weird political environment where Republicans think electoral success should be indefinitely based on threading the needle of winning by losing the popular vote and squeezing their (diminishing?) advantage in political maps, whereas many Democrats think that a paper-thin victory means the conditions are perfect to pass the most ambitious domestic agenda since the New Deal. One of them is living in a dream world, though more likely both.
Damn, I am late to the party. As a semi-conservative, here are my thoughts.
1. I'm not sure that Trump is a good representation of conservative leanings, since... well he was a pretty horrible conservative. Assuming these Ivy League dudes are all smart (despite what we see on Twitter.... kidding), I assume that if conservative, they would be more logical conservatives, and less likely to have voted for Trump.
2. I used to call myself Republican/Conservative, but quite frankly, Trump embarrassed me so much that I don't really identify as that anymore. I was always a swing voter, but I am a lot swingier than I was pre-Trump.
3. Anyway, this whole conservative/liberal things is going to balance out sooner or later. Positions will get adjusted naturally.
4. Anyway, my daughter who is elite college bound is Vice President of the Young Democrats Club. Her best friend is the President. I've had a few conversations with them, and their liberalism doesn't run super deep. At least she will fit in with whatever University she ends up at.
5. I suspect that 20% of all Democratic Professors and students are really conservative anyway if you got them pinned down on the issues.
Hell, 20% of the time, I am pretty sure our own Matty here is conservative.
Sorry, but anyone who uses the line “our school/company should reflect our community/nation” as justification for race-based hiring/admissions is gonna have a hard time justifying those numbers.
>>>The actual, concrete electoral gains to Republicans from various measures to make it harder to vote are imperceptibly small, if they exist at all. So what is the point of pushing measures that make you look like an authoritarian menace? <<<
My perception is that wide swaths of the right in America *genuinely* belief the progressive agenda (more or less social democracy) is either profoundly morally flawed or actually violates the constitution. Liberals think right wing policies are bad or ill-advised, but generally don't view things through the same sort of lens as conservatives.
So for people on the right, preventing left of center policies from being enacted and left of center politicians from winning elections equates to defending the constitution. Which sometimes means anything goes. And almost always means leaving no stone unturned (including eking out infinitesimal advantages, including of the variety mentioned by Matt here).
It seems to me that this is being driven by ever-growing Republican / "movement conservative" hostility to the concept of objective truth, which has been growing for decades. Go back and look at Reagan trying to prevent C. Everett Koop from publishing true results about the health harms of cigarettes, or the safety of abortion procedures. (My dad was an officer of the Public Health Service, and noted that Koop was himself a quite "morally conservative" Christian, but he was also a good doctor and a good scientist, and was unwilling to _lie_ for political allies.)
The GOP has turned itself into the capitalist equivalent of the Soviet regime that wanted to sweep Chernobyl under the rug. A disaster would embarrass the party, therefore there can be no disaster.
They like to accuse liberals of "political correctness", but that's a form of projection. They are in fact master practitioners of political correctness as practiced in the regime that originated that term. It is inconvenient for coal and oil donors that climate change is a thing? Fine, climate change is a hoax. Or maybe it's real, but it's caused by some solar cycle, not by humans. Or if it's caused by GHG emissions, then doing something about it would be economically ruinous. Oh, solar and wind are cheaper than coal now? Well, wind is responsible for the Texas blackouts. (narrator: Gas plants under-performed and wind over-performed relative to utility projections for this scenario.)
Trump turns this stuff up to eleven -- he can never fail, only be failed -- but it long pre-dates him. Conservative media outlets have long been funded by laughably dishonest marketing for snake oil, or get-rich-quick schemes. You see high ranking Republicans like Paul Ryan shilling for faddish exercise or diet plans.
It is impossible to be a person who cares about rational inquiry of any kind, and retain respect for people like this. It didn't have to be this way. Tucker Carlson is not a stupid man -- back when he was bemoaning the fact that the NYT skews liberal, and talking about founding a serious conservative media outlet, he was absolutely correct. But he _didn't_ found a conservative response to the NYT. He founded the Daily f***ing Caller, because flattering people's false assumptions, by nut-picking stories to misrepresent weird fringe cases as the norm, or just giving people outright-false information, _is profitable_. Conservative media has a "Market for Lemons" problem, or a Gresham's Law problem. A large, profitable audience has been trained to only accept outlets that confirm their biases as legitimate, so an outlet that ever lets reality intrude will be cast out in favor of something crazier, as we're seeing now with NewsMax and OANN starting to eat into Fox's market share, because Fox has not always 100% acquiesced to Trump's delusions.
I would be thrilled to see a party, and accompanying media ecosystem, that stood in meaningful opposition to the Democrats. Something that would be a comfortable fit for the Davids French, Aviks Roy, and Reihans Salam of the world. There absolutely are "conservative" ideas worth having in the public debate. Chesterton's Fence is a good principle to keep in mind! But if we cannot have a conversation in which both sides agree that their own claims are falsifiable, and everyone has to bring evidence, then what is even the point? How can academia possibly accommodate people who want to ban academics from studying things, rather than accept that their preferred policies might have costs? (It's not even like knowing the costs would be the end of the conversation -- maybe you can make an argument that the cost is worth it. But they want to just suppress the evidence, because they're afraid if people understood the stakes, they might lose.)
The bigger issue is that this type of educational polarization is happening outside the U.S. in Europe too, so there must be structural issues explaining this that are broader than the idiosyncrasies of American politics.
I work in academia, and below are issues related to this article that have concerned me. I would be interested in the thoughts of Mr. Yglesias and others on them:
In recent years, it has become increasingly common for advertisements for faculty positions to require diversity statement as a part of the application materials, which contains a discussion of the candidate's commitment, experience, and plans surrounding diversity and inclusion. At this point, nearly all positions in my field require them. My concern is that requiring diversity statements further exacerbates the political polarization among faculty.
Admissions for graduate programs in my field is moving in the same direction, where an increasing number of programs are requiring diversity statements. In my department, a subset of our graduate students and faculty consider themselves to be activists and social justice warriors, and they would like to use diversity statements as a means of only admitting graduate students who feel the same way. They are largely succeeding at this point.
I consider myself to be quite liberal, and I naturally prefer to associate with others who have similar political beliefs, but I don't think that these trends are healthy for academia and society, as discussed in the above article.
(My preference for both faculty openings and graduate admissions is to ask applicants to discuss the issues that they are passionate about, with diversity as an example of a topic that they might discuss.)
“And would it really be so hard to throw urban libs a bone in the form of some concern for climate change?“
I’ve tried! Specifically, I advocate protecting dense areas with seawalls and making air conditioning more broadly available. Urban liberals have not appreciated my concern. They’ve called me a denialist, or acted as if I want to protect every uninhabited arctic island rather than just dense areas like New York City and Norfolk.
The problem is urban liberals view climate in moral terms, so they think mitigation is like making a pact with the devil.
Furthermore, if urban liberals want to cooperate, why don’t they kick the Paris protocol’s “1.5 degrees or death” alarmism to the curb or, at a minimum, cut out their airplane vacations and learn to like nuclear power? If they could compromise as well as they sneer we might get somewhere.
I recognize the reality or climate change, I’m willing to invest significant resources in electrification and mitigation, and yet urban libs treat me like a neanderthal for saying things like “cold causes more human misery than heat” and “carbon intensive technologies have improved agricultural yields and sharply reduced hunger.” Urban liberals are not fun to engage.
There used to be a libertarian-ish strain of intellectual conservatism ala Milton Friedman that laid claim to technocratic competency. I know growing up I’d read all sorts of conservative arguments that liberals understandably wanted things like abolishing poverty (crucially, this was always pitched sympathetically, which seems completely alien now!) but they didn’t understand that really they were doomed to immiserate everyone because they couldn’t see clearly—the sort of people who identified with the Churchill quote about you have to become a liberal by 20 if you have a heart and a conservative by thirty if you have a brain.
I suspect that losing this sort of stance (through a combination of economic knowledge objectively moving away from a Friedman-ish stance, and stronger influence of Evangelical+Fox News popularism) is as much a cause of the polarization as an effect. If you’re a smart-ass teenage boy, being able to signal your intelligence by “Well-actually-ing“ whatever your bleeding heart liberals say is a strong incentive to incorporate intellectually independent conservative into your identity and prove that that’s why you should go to University of Chicago (but you’ll settle of course for any other highly selective school). If there’s no project to incorporate conservatism into your identity as a smarter than average student, it’s unsurprising that students will give up on conservatism before they give up on proving how smart they are.
I grew up in a rural Republican household in the 70s and 80s, went to an urban college in 1986 and by the time I graduated I was functionally a Democrat (though registered Independent). I can't think of a single professor saying anything that made a difference in my outlook. It was fellow students who I took my cues from.
Of course, a lot has changed since then, but something tells me this is still mostly about peer effects and not professors.
As someone who teaches in the humanities, the revelation that spending more time studying the humanities is causing students to become more absolutist and less nuanced is going to make me start day drinking.
The Republican party tried 'not being the party of inhuman sociopaths' when it comes to immigration policy for years by having a national leadership that was far more pro-immigration than their base, and that was part of how they put themselves in a position for Trump to take over and destroy their party.
The NYTimes had a report last year that showed Harvard's incoming class had as many students from the top 1% of households as they did from the bottom 60% of earners. Combine Trump's more downscale appeal and the general trend of the upper class toward Democratic voting and I'm not shocked at the results.
The Democratic party is clearly on the ascendency relative to the Trump-addled Republican party. But I suspect the coalition of the top 20% of earners with the traditional Democratic base of lower-earning service workers will cause some friction in the coming years.
I had the benefit of being involved in a number of community projects in Somerville, MA (call back!) that got me the opportunity to take a course pro-bono at the Kennedy School at Harvard led by Hugh O'Doherty. The course was on Adaptive Leadership.
A technical problem is one that can be clearly defined, and has a definitive solution. It may be horribly complicated, but eventually there are specific ways that it can be tackled as guided by technical expertise.
An adaptive problem is one where the issue lies more with people themselves and the way they interact; with emotion. It's a problem defined by its LACK of a technical solution, simple or complex.
The left has technocratic impulses that cause it to think that every problem is a technical problem. Climate change can be addressed if we do X, Y, Z. However, the real issue with climate change is that it requires a fundamental rewiring of a current dominate human culture. That's an adaptive problem.
When you misread an adaptive problem as a technical problem, you waste your time trying to sway the skeptical with your evidence and your credentials, but with an adaptive problem there is too much emotion involved for that to ever work. The real work is not in convincing others that you and your solution are correct, but in addressed a deep sense of risk and loss and working together to dig out of that hole.
The left has hollowed out to all technical solutions to adaptive problems. The right has hollowed out to nothing but a gaping sense of loss that reacts poorly to proposed technical solutions and in their emotional void will embrace any garbage that makes them feel, even momentarily, like they are losing less.
It can be argued that aging white men had an overabundance for so many centuries, and so that sense of loss is justified and they should just get over it. It can also be argued that they aren't really losing as much as they fear, and that the only thing to fear is fear itself.
Neither one is going to work. At the same time, what's required by the would-be technocrats is empathy and working through complex adaptive problems WITH their opponents. And the more childish the right gets, the more difficult that is to do. The constant culture wars keep everyone's nerves frayed empathy is literally impossible. That part I blame entirely on the right. Not-so-cottage industries are entirely devoted to fanning the flames. Murdoch and Ailes at work.
So yes, these issues are pervasive and not going away. And it makes sense that education and occupation are major fault lines. Credentialism feeds technical thinking. At the other end the real loss of economic opportunity for the less educated in a post-industrial hyper-capitalist society provides a real baseline for other senses of loss, some real, and some entirely imaginary.
Ironically, the only path to change that I can even imagine is a rollback, to some degree, of globalization. We clearly need to rely less on imports for key components like microchips, and have a risky over-reliance on China for so much. As a matter of future national security we need to manufacture more at home. But that means paying more for things. This is an adaptive problem. And we aren't very good at those.
Matt, you & I both know plenty of conservatives from our elite undergrad days (we'll call them "Ross Douthat Conservatives"). I'm still friends with a bunch of them (or at least "friends" in the Facebook sense). Not a single one voted for Trump. Not one. And many of them are still Christian soldiers in the way that vast swaths of Red America are -- no quarter on abortion/homosexuality, the Bible is God's inerrant Word, all of it. They're all smart and well-educated enough to see through Trump's con and have enough principles not to stand for it, not to mention love our country enough not to want to see democracy destroyed. And (though I haven't asked them), if Ted Cruz had been the nominee in 2016, I'm pretty certain they would've voted for him over Hillary without hesitation.
My point -- I'm actually surprised as many as ~6% of incoming Harvard freshmen voted for Trump. These are truly the Elise Stefanik/George P. Bush/future Federalist Society judges with no principles but serving the powerful.
Interesting stats on political opinion in the elite universities, but I'd really like to know the comparison between places like, say, Oklahoma State University and BYU compared to their surrounding communities. Those are the schools that will produce local elites. If they're trending relatively liberal, that suggests some interesting divisions in coming years.
But in general, this increasing polarization between college vs non-college and urban vs rural is truly the marker of our times. It's helped lead to this weird political environment where Republicans think electoral success should be indefinitely based on threading the needle of winning by losing the popular vote and squeezing their (diminishing?) advantage in political maps, whereas many Democrats think that a paper-thin victory means the conditions are perfect to pass the most ambitious domestic agenda since the New Deal. One of them is living in a dream world, though more likely both.
Damn, I am late to the party. As a semi-conservative, here are my thoughts.
1. I'm not sure that Trump is a good representation of conservative leanings, since... well he was a pretty horrible conservative. Assuming these Ivy League dudes are all smart (despite what we see on Twitter.... kidding), I assume that if conservative, they would be more logical conservatives, and less likely to have voted for Trump.
2. I used to call myself Republican/Conservative, but quite frankly, Trump embarrassed me so much that I don't really identify as that anymore. I was always a swing voter, but I am a lot swingier than I was pre-Trump.
3. Anyway, this whole conservative/liberal things is going to balance out sooner or later. Positions will get adjusted naturally.
4. Anyway, my daughter who is elite college bound is Vice President of the Young Democrats Club. Her best friend is the President. I've had a few conversations with them, and their liberalism doesn't run super deep. At least she will fit in with whatever University she ends up at.
5. I suspect that 20% of all Democratic Professors and students are really conservative anyway if you got them pinned down on the issues.
Hell, 20% of the time, I am pretty sure our own Matty here is conservative.
Sorry, but anyone who uses the line “our school/company should reflect our community/nation” as justification for race-based hiring/admissions is gonna have a hard time justifying those numbers.
I feel like being in a group that's polarized creates a feedback loop where it polarizes its members even further.
>>>The actual, concrete electoral gains to Republicans from various measures to make it harder to vote are imperceptibly small, if they exist at all. So what is the point of pushing measures that make you look like an authoritarian menace? <<<
My perception is that wide swaths of the right in America *genuinely* belief the progressive agenda (more or less social democracy) is either profoundly morally flawed or actually violates the constitution. Liberals think right wing policies are bad or ill-advised, but generally don't view things through the same sort of lens as conservatives.
So for people on the right, preventing left of center policies from being enacted and left of center politicians from winning elections equates to defending the constitution. Which sometimes means anything goes. And almost always means leaving no stone unturned (including eking out infinitesimal advantages, including of the variety mentioned by Matt here).
It seems to me that this is being driven by ever-growing Republican / "movement conservative" hostility to the concept of objective truth, which has been growing for decades. Go back and look at Reagan trying to prevent C. Everett Koop from publishing true results about the health harms of cigarettes, or the safety of abortion procedures. (My dad was an officer of the Public Health Service, and noted that Koop was himself a quite "morally conservative" Christian, but he was also a good doctor and a good scientist, and was unwilling to _lie_ for political allies.)
The GOP has turned itself into the capitalist equivalent of the Soviet regime that wanted to sweep Chernobyl under the rug. A disaster would embarrass the party, therefore there can be no disaster.
They like to accuse liberals of "political correctness", but that's a form of projection. They are in fact master practitioners of political correctness as practiced in the regime that originated that term. It is inconvenient for coal and oil donors that climate change is a thing? Fine, climate change is a hoax. Or maybe it's real, but it's caused by some solar cycle, not by humans. Or if it's caused by GHG emissions, then doing something about it would be economically ruinous. Oh, solar and wind are cheaper than coal now? Well, wind is responsible for the Texas blackouts. (narrator: Gas plants under-performed and wind over-performed relative to utility projections for this scenario.)
Trump turns this stuff up to eleven -- he can never fail, only be failed -- but it long pre-dates him. Conservative media outlets have long been funded by laughably dishonest marketing for snake oil, or get-rich-quick schemes. You see high ranking Republicans like Paul Ryan shilling for faddish exercise or diet plans.
It is impossible to be a person who cares about rational inquiry of any kind, and retain respect for people like this. It didn't have to be this way. Tucker Carlson is not a stupid man -- back when he was bemoaning the fact that the NYT skews liberal, and talking about founding a serious conservative media outlet, he was absolutely correct. But he _didn't_ found a conservative response to the NYT. He founded the Daily f***ing Caller, because flattering people's false assumptions, by nut-picking stories to misrepresent weird fringe cases as the norm, or just giving people outright-false information, _is profitable_. Conservative media has a "Market for Lemons" problem, or a Gresham's Law problem. A large, profitable audience has been trained to only accept outlets that confirm their biases as legitimate, so an outlet that ever lets reality intrude will be cast out in favor of something crazier, as we're seeing now with NewsMax and OANN starting to eat into Fox's market share, because Fox has not always 100% acquiesced to Trump's delusions.
I would be thrilled to see a party, and accompanying media ecosystem, that stood in meaningful opposition to the Democrats. Something that would be a comfortable fit for the Davids French, Aviks Roy, and Reihans Salam of the world. There absolutely are "conservative" ideas worth having in the public debate. Chesterton's Fence is a good principle to keep in mind! But if we cannot have a conversation in which both sides agree that their own claims are falsifiable, and everyone has to bring evidence, then what is even the point? How can academia possibly accommodate people who want to ban academics from studying things, rather than accept that their preferred policies might have costs? (It's not even like knowing the costs would be the end of the conversation -- maybe you can make an argument that the cost is worth it. But they want to just suppress the evidence, because they're afraid if people understood the stakes, they might lose.)
The bigger issue is that this type of educational polarization is happening outside the U.S. in Europe too, so there must be structural issues explaining this that are broader than the idiosyncrasies of American politics.