A trip to the United States made me look a bit differently at left-wing trends among educated Americans. I’ll attach a graph here showing that, overall, the level of education positively correlates with a shift on the political axis to the “left” — that is, toward “take everything and divide it up,” as opposed to the side of “Atlas Shrugged.”
Look: it’s unlikely to surprise anyone that having wealthy parents is a factor that positively correlates with your own financial situation (please allow me not to provide evidence). So if your father was poor, you’ll be poor too. If your grandfather was poor, your father will be poor as well. And so on. This rule holds remarkably well across all countries; even in the land of equality — the Soviet Union — castes existed. MGIMO was for the children of diplomats, not for all kinds of street kids.
But imagine that poor people were forced to wear an old red shirt inherited from their great-great-great-grandfather. We would see people in red shirts holding mops, standing behind store checkouts, driving taxis — that is, among people doing jobs that don’t require education; jobs that don’t require initial investment; in other words, jobs for the children of poor people.
So, in the US, such a red shirt inherited from a great-great-great-grandfather does exist. It’s just not a shirt, and it’s not red — it’s a permanent black leather suit, which, as I observed, is worn precisely by blue-collar workers.
It seems to me that the more visible “leftward turn” of the US is a direct consequence of how clearly inherited poverty is visualized there. People inclined toward reflection see a fact that is harder for them to ignore than it is for residents of uniformly white Europe. (Although among Europeans as well, more left-leaning views tend to correlate with higher levels of education.)
Just to be safe, let me remind you: correlation is not causation, and “on average” is not the same as “for everyone.” As a smart libertarian, I have no doubt that there are smart people on the right, too :)