Matt Yglesias: “Conservatives are clearly very bothered (seemingly genuinely so) by the low esteem in which they are generally held by cultural elites. They complain about it constantly. At the same time, conservatives are not as policy obsessed as liberals are. Very few conservatives pronounced Donald Trump a ‘failed president’ despite his very meager legislative achievements. In other words, the big edge that education polarization gives Republicans in the Senate does not satisfy what they truly crave in life, which is something like respect or a desire to have their putative status as the great defenders of women’s sports taken seriously as a good-faith concern.”

“If you want to see your values reflected in Marvel movies and beer ads, then you need to try to find topics on which to align yourself with those younger metropolitan audiences. Demagoguery about refugee resettlement, for example, does bring some electoral benefits. But is the juice really worth the squeeze if it codes you as the party of inhumane sociopaths in the eyes of the youngest and most cosmopolitan generation? There used to be an elite consensus around such things. Republicans decided to break with it, and on one level it has worked, but on another level, I feel like it really hasn’t delivered what they actually want. For some people, of course, the current system works great. Culture wars and skewed maps help Republicans win elections, after which they cut taxes for rich people and multinational corporations while doing nothing to satisfy their base’s resentments – resentments that fuel the fire for the next campaign. But there is only so much cynicism to go around, and I think the steady growth in education polarization is mostly serving to frustrate both sides of the never-ending war.”