08-31-2018, 09:07 AM
(08-30-2018, 08:36 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(08-30-2018, 11:45 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: A pattern may be emerging. White people with less than a college education are not especially prone to supporting reactionary politics -- if they are not Christian Protestant fundamentalists or evangelicals.
Quote:Mike Podhorzer, AFL-CIO’s political director, suggests that if we want to have a better understanding of white, non-college educated voters, we need to stop lumping them into one, catch-all category. What really distinguishes a Trump-supporting white voter from one who doesn’t isn’t education or even gender, it's whether or not that voter is evangelical.
Podhorzer’s analysis leads to two conclusions. First, stop assuming that all white, non-college voters are core Trump supporters. Trump’s base is evangelical white voters, regardless of education level. Second, white non-evangelical, non-college women are the ultimate swing voters.
https://www.cookpolitical.com/analysis/n...ite-voters
...I am guessing that the distinction in the polls between white voters with college degrees and white voters without college degrees is that Fundamentalist and Evangelical Christians are much less likely to attain college degrees. Fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity have strong currents of anti-intellectualism that secularism, mainline Protestantism, and Roman Catholicism do not have. Biblical literalism to the extent of promoting young-earth creationism is strongly anti-intellectual, and anti-intellectualism is not good for surviving four years of college without dropping out.
This data would also seem to support those of us on the new "commandments" thread who say that evangelicals are predominantly narrow-minded, prejudiced and/or stereotypically dogmatic and conservative.
This is still not true for all evangelicals, although it is much more true today than 50 or 100 years ago. You might not have guessed, for example, that ultra-liberal George McGovern, the idol of young hippie anti-war rebels like me in 1972, was evangelical.
We need remember that the word Fundamentalist is itself derived from the title of a set of books titled The Fundamentals (1915), a set of ninety essays expounding orthodox interpretations of Protestant theology and opposing modernist tendencies in higher criticism, such secular trends as socialism and evolution, and religious doctrines (Roman Catholicism, Mormonism, Christian Science, and Jehovah's Witnesses) that the essayists considered heretical or obsolete. Orthodoxy met conservatism, and they merged.
The rise of the Religious Right corresponds with church-shopping by ultra-conservatives who found new evangelical and fundamentalist churches as safe havens for their political reaction and cultural conservatism.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.