The insulted and the injured

 I concluded my last post by saying that Republicans seem to like the idea of being a "working-class party."   In principle, this could be based on an assessment of the potential for maximizing total votes--having a strategy that promises gains in the working class that outweigh any losses in the middle class.  But it seems to be more of a desire in search of a strategy--they think it would be a good thing but don't have much in the way of ideas about how to do it (see the articles I linked to in this post).  Moreover, some of the leading proponents of this idea have "elite" backgrounds, as Paul Krugman points out.  He mentions Ted Cruz (Princeton and Harvard Law) and Josh Hawley (Stanford and Yale Law); Tom Cotton, another leading Republican "populist," is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School.  He asks "these aren’t people who have been mistreated by the system. So why are they so eager to bring the system down?"  His proposed answer is that Republicans  have "been cut off from the rest of society.  .  .  . They don’t get news from the outside world, because they get their information from partisan sources that simply don’t report inconvenient facts."  This doesn't seem likely to me--I'd guess that people like Cruz, Hawley, and Cotton follow the mainstream media pretty closely, if only to find things to get indignant about (in fact, Cotton was a member of the editorial board of the Harvard Crimson as an undergraduate).  

I suggested an alternative explanation in a previous post, and I'll expand on it here.  On the whole, American higher education leans to the left, but there are differences among institutions, and elite colleges and universities are generally farther to the left.  There are also differences among units within universities, so that someone who majors in political science and goes to law school will encounter a more left-wing environment than someone who majors in economics and goes to business school.  So students with conservative views who go to an elite university and take an interest in politics will find that the great majority of people around them disagree with their views.  Being in a small minority can be tough even if the majority is fair-minded and tolerant, and majorities often aren't, even (or maybe especially) at universities.  As a result, they will tend to develop a sense of resentment against "elites"--i.e., those jerks I knew in college.   Moreover, given that most of the people they knew in college wouldn't dream of voting Republican, they're not going to see much prospect of appealing to college-educated voters.  So they turn to the working class as an alternative (and perhaps as a way to upset liberal elites who think that the working class ought to be supporting the left).   That is, resentment of "elites" is characteristic of conservative elites rather than of the general public.    

I don't know of a good way to test this hypothesis, since it involves small groups that can't even be identified in most surveys.  But I did run across some more data suggesting that resentment of elites isn't a strong influence among average voters.  The 2018 General Social Survey has some questions about various negative experiences in day-to-day life.  The relevant ones are how often "you are treated with less courtesy and respect than other people" and "people act as if they think you are not smart."  Answers had no clear connection to choices in the 2016 election or to opinions on a variety of political issues.