A few days ago, Michael Brendan Dougherty had an op-ed in the New York Times which said that the post-Trump GOP would include a wider range of views: "What will unify this fractious coalition after Mr. Trump is a common enemy in the liberals of the credentialed class. That class staffs the very institutions — such as universities — that Americans have come to broadly distrust." This seems like a poor choice of "common enemy": about 40% of American adults have a bachelor's degree, and they vote at higher rates than people without a degree. When you start by calling half of the voters the enemy, it's going to be hard to get a majority. Moreover, even people who didn't attend college generally have friends or family members who did.
Gallup regularly asks questions about how much confidence you have in various institutions: a great deal, quite a lot, some, or very little. In June 2026, the responses for higher education were 18%, 20%, 37%, 24%, with 1% volunteering "no confidence." Of the 17 institutions that Gallup asked about, higher education ranked fourth in combined great deal and quite a lot responses, in between the police (45%) and "the church or organized religion" (33%). That provides a good standard for assessing Dougherty's vision for the Republicans: a proposal that the Democrats could succeed by uniting against the police or organized religion as a "common enemy" would universally be regarded as foolish.
OK, who should the Republicans unite against? Traditionally the left has used rich people and big business as the enemy: in the Gallup survey, only 17% say they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in big business. In contrast, the right has generally maintained that everyone shares a common interest ("what's good for the country is good for General Motors and vice versa"). Rather than uniting against an enemy, they have focused on attaching themselves to widely popular things like the nation, the dominant religion, families, small business. To the extent that there's an enemy, it's the misguided people who try to divide the country. When the right has had an enemy defined by social position, it's been ethnic or religious minorities, and most of those cases are not ones that conservatives are proud of today.
Dougherty's dislike of the "credentialed class" is not unique to him--it seems to be widespread on the contemporary right. It didn't come from Trump, who frequently mentions his graduation from an elite university as a point of pride and accuses his betes noires like Obama and Bill Maher of having been poor students. The actions that the second Trump administration has taken against universities seem to have been driven by people who have attached themselves to Trump (e. g., Harmeet Dhillon, Chris Rufo, Linda McMahon) rather than Trump himself. A few years ago, I had a post on the trend of conservative hostility to educated people, and I'll return to the issue in the future.
