A more educated voting public and urban sprawl are factors contributing to an increasingly polarized electorate, New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks said in a speech yesterday entitled "The Presidency Wars: Politics and Culture in a Polarized Age."
An increasing number of voters with college degrees produces a voting populace that is more likely to vote along party lines and less likely to register as independent, Brooks said. A higher level of education means a voter is more likely to identify as strictly liberal or conservative, and is more likely to vote along those lines.
"The more educated you are, the more partisan you are, the less independently you think. Education leads away from independent thinking," Brooks told The Dartmouth in an interview Tuesday.
The nationwide exodus from big cities to smaller suburban communities and new building and development in the suburbs, as well as the increasing mobility of the information age have all led to geographic segmentation, Brooks said.
"People are really good at finding people who share their culture, and in the information age where people are not tied down to a mine or a farm or a port they have more freedom to move to places where people like themselves live," Brooks said.
"Wherever I go, and it doesn't matter where I go, I am always struck by how little people in this country know about other groups of people in this country," Brooks said in his interview.
Some polarization is legitimate, Brooks said, because it is a time of war. Parties in wartime are more unified around a foreign policy and hence are more coherent.
Bush has also played an important role in political polarization and culture, according to Brooks. So-called "golf-zen" Republican communities identify with Bush because he shares their lifestyle, and they vote accordingly. Brooks said these voters see candidates like Al Gore as "too good" for them.
Brooks joked, "If you want to understand the soul of the ex-urban man, you have to go where he is feeling most emotionally open and vulnerable, which is the Home Depot where he is buying a barbecue grille."
Other geographic polarizations are the "starter-suburbs," urban hipster neighborhood and the more affluent, upper-middle-class areas that have traditionally voted Republican.
Starter suburbs will largely be Howard Dean supporters, Brooks said, because he offers an alternative to the political mainstream, typically regarded with suspicion in such communities.
Many higher earning, traditionally Republican communities can be expected to vote Democratic in 2004, Brooks predicted.
Brooks joked that this demographic was represented by the "uber-mom," or women who were corporate executives and "took time off to utterly perfect every aspect of their children's lives."
"These are the highly educated, really upper-middle class suburbs that are thriving mostly around the big cities. And they are increasingly Democratic," Brooks said.
Republicans reflect these centrist tendencies in their increasing of education appropriations in an effort to reverse the public perception that the party is anti-education. This leaves Republicans without a governing philosophy.
"They are a united party because of the war in Iraq," Brooks said. "If not for that, the Republican Party would look like a party that would be divided and mediocre ideologically."
As for his prognosis for 2004, Brooks pointed to the national appeal of a centrist candidate.
"In my view, Southern centrist Democrats win and Northeastern liberals lose," he said. "I think that's essentially the choice the Democratic Party faces over the next couple of weeks."
Brooks' anecdotes and jokes were well-received by his audience. He appeared as part of the Montgomery Foundation's series on Truth and Ethics in Journalism. On the title of the series, Brooks laughed that he "thought it was a good idea, and it's worth trying."