The science behind why Donald Trump loves the ‘poorly educated’

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Episode Summary

“I love the poorly educated,” Donald Trump famously boasted in early 2016 as he started racking up victories in the Republican primary election. It was an unintentionally hilarious thing to say, but it pointed to a truth that’s since became undeniable: People with less education are more likely to vote for Republicans.

Trump has almost certainly never heard of the 19th century philosopher John Stuart Mill, but the disgraced ex-president’s enthusiasm for the poorly educated echoes something that Mill said on the floor of the English parliament in 1866 that “stupid persons are generally conservative.”

What if Mill was right? Since 2016, it’s become commonplace to think of having a bachelor’s degree as a sort of proxy for Trump voting among white Americans, but what if there’s something even deeper at work?

Republicans don’t want to hear this, but there’s a pretty long-standing body of social science research that indicates people who have right-wing attitudes, particularly regarding religion and epistemology, appear to have lower cognitive capacity.

Thinking about this topic can be uncomfortable, but it’s important because understanding that political movements are just as much about psychology as they are about ideology can help us understand the enduring appeal of someone like Trump who is flagrantly stupid, corrupt, and deceitful. I also feel like I can discuss this given my personal history as a former Mormon fundamentalist and Republican activist.

Our guest in today’s episode to discuss is Darren Sherkat, he’s a professor of sociology at Southern Illinois University where he focuses the relationships between ideology, cognition, and religious belief. He’s also the author of “Changing Faith: The Dynamics and Consequences of Americans' Shifting Religious Identities,” and another book which will be forthcoming on these topics.

The video of this discussion is available. The transcript of audio is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text.

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Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

02:19 — Why discussing cognition in a political context is not unfair or deterministic

08:51 — In the 1970s, Republicans were the party with higher verbal ability

10:10 — How the "Southern Strategy" remade the Republican party cognitively

13:01 — Why "poorly educated" is a better term than "uneducated" in this context

14:56 — How religious fundamentalism inhibits sound thinking at individual and the communal levels

20:02 — Cognitive capital and social capital

23:44 — Theodor Adorno's "authoritarian personality" research included cognition

30:46 — Why cognition is a better predictor of Trump support than education

35:38 — Abductive reasoning versus empirical reasoning

44:23 — Trump is an ideal candidate for less-intelligent people

50:58 — Why Ron DeSantis, JD Vance, and intelligent reactionaries have trouble copying Trump

54:53 — Public education as the cornerstone of democracy

01:00:19 — Non-religious Americans need to start advocating for themselves

01:03:00 — Conclusion

Audio Transcript

The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So, these are some very sensitive topics to people that we're going to be discussing here today. It's no fun for people to discuss cognitive ability and political ideology if you are the group assessed to have lower cognition at least outputs. But before we get into that, though, I did want to ask you—and to clarify that because the brain is a highly plastic organ and cognition is a form of exercise, these are not necessarily judgments that are set in stone, if you will. And this research is still just beginning in a lot of ways, right?

DARREN SHERKAT: [00:03:00] Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think that we've had kind of a disjuncture between the kind of genetic model of cognition and the more environmental model of cognition. And it's not been very sociologically informed about how do processes of politics and religion and other factors influence individuals. Instead, it's been individuated that it's an assumption that this is a product of the individual rather than their social origins and their social settings.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And people's environment and also their own behavior, it can modify what their cognitive outputs are.

SHERKAT: Absolutely. I mean, we're seeing this mostly in our gerontological research about, kind of use it or lose it. That if you don't think about things in systematic ways, then your brain will not operate as it should in an ideal [00:04:00] way.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And also, I have to also say that, myself as a former fundamentalist Mormon and former Republican activist, this is me talking about my former self. And I can say, when I reflect back on my earlier life, when I had these belief systems, they did inhibit my ability to think clearly and to fully perceive the world accurately. That actually was something that, that did inhibit me.

So, I did want to kind of mention that before we get further into it. But before we get into your research here, tell us about your background on these matters, your overall academic background,

SHERKAT: Personal background or academic background?

SHEFFIELD: Academic background.

SHERKAT: I came to research American fundamentalism, American religion largely because we didn't really know much about it back in the eighties and [00:05:00] nineties when the second wave of the new Christian right came up we didn't even know how many. conservative Christians there were, and so I really came through it through religious demography and looking at how many of these people are there that are fomenting these political movements, and at the time they were still not identifying as Republicans.

Back in the early 90s, many of them voted Republican, but they didn't identify as Republicans, and that's shifted over time. So gradually I came to do more political research that was more partisan in a sense that it paid attention to things like party politics. And that's where some of my research has been going in the last decade or so.

And I'll be presenting a paper at the I'm going to be having a number of sociology of religion meetings here in the next few weeks that examines these kind of cognitive issues by party and how religion plays a role in that looking at the measures of [00:06:00] cognitive sophistications that I have available, which are related to verbal ability and vocabulary.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And then like, what's your so you were a sociologist by academic training. Yes,

SHERKAT: yes. I had a PhD at Duke in the early nineties.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Before we get into, the specific findings of the studies that you're just referring to you were using a metric that people maybe may not be familiar with the idea of using verbal ability as a proxy for cognitive ability. So how, how does one measure verbal ability in the research that you're doing, that you're relying on?

SHERKAT: