The Reversal of College Graduate Political Identity

Old Codger Remarks

Photo by Ryan Hoffman on Unsplash

To what extent does identity foster behavior?  Once a person is identified as, say a college graduate, how likely is it that he or she will “live up to” the expectations of that status and adopt the life-style associated with the identity?  And does this “acting” extend to political identities and social beliefs? 

More, I suspect, than most realize.  The, to some surprising, fact that college graduates are holding fashionable “left” views and voting for Democratic Party candidates may of course be attributable to having been “seduced” by liberal college faculty (a surprisingly weak argument when examined) but it may also be because this is a performance expectation of today’s society.  If you are a college graduate, you are perceived these days as having liberal views, and how one is perceived social scientist tell us, is a powerful inducement to behavior. 

This is of course a reversal of the traditional view that found college graduates the stable vanguard of conservative forces, the leaders of established institutions, professional associations and every small town and suburb’s Republican Party elite. But, perhaps, even this was partly a public performance on the part of those newly minted as class representatives.  The scions of old wealth were conditioned to their roles by more traditional patterns of socialization and some actually “wavered.” (I.e. the Roosevelts and Rockefellers.) 

This insight is not by any means a complete explanation of the phenomenon.  It will seem a bit too general, and of course it is.  However, bear with me for one last thought.

Are we not in many social setting marionettes and isn’t social pressure manipulating the strings?  There is little time in our lives to cultivate genuine beliefs or study the detail of public policies.  That was as true while in college as afterwards.  (Some of us fought for more leisure space for students, but with limited success.)  Sans the wisdom of serious study and thoughtful appraisal, most of us fall back upon group consensus, a self-fulfilling prophecy of what’s expected of us in our dealings with the world. 

Presently the most direct attempt to train college minds comes from the right and it will be interesting to study the graduates of their institutions to see whether the theory proposed above is wrong or weak.  I personally think young Americans are too independent to be indoctrinated, while not, as I’ve said, independent enough to withstand social conformity.