America’s new caste system The education gap has dented democracy

To fully understand what Tocqueville means by “equality of conditions”, we need to appreciate how different the new democratic societies were. Tocqueville describes the old aristocratic societies as archipelagos of mini-societies inhabited by different classes of people with very different material conditions, and therefore different sets of emotions. But on each island there was a sense of inclusion and mutual recognition of others who faced those conditions.

The situation in the United States was destined to be something else. There were no pre-existing islands of privilege, thinking, and feeling. Instead the earliest Americans faced the same set of opportunities and challenges posed by their new environment — sparsely populated and vast, the land was also wild and untamed. Securing basic necessities was difficult for everyone, not just one class. And as settlement moved West, they had to learn the art of self-government for themselves. They were, in an almost unimaginable way today, starting over.

That task was made much easier, Tocqueville thought, by another kind of equal condition: ethnic and religious homogeneity. The first settlers shared an Anglo-Protestant cultural heritage, prizing religious liberty and a shared stock of concepts for engaging in politics. Paradoxically, it would turn out that a certain kind of homogeneity in early America helped give birth to principles that would one day be employed to defend diversity.

From these observations, Tocqueville drew two very important conclusions. First, since different human feelings are generated by different material conditions, those feelings should be considered brute facts as solid as the conditions themselves. The set of dominant emotions arising from the equality of conditions in democracies are crucial givens, so long as those conditions hold. Second, since the equality of conditions towards which modern societies are tending is historically novel, so too we should expect to see novel democratic feelings.

So what are the implications of these conclusions? If American democracy rests on a bedrock of brute factual similarity — similar challenges in life, aspirations and habits — then the emotional weather of the regime will depend on the degree to which that similarity holds. If it changes, if citizens feel they belong to separate realities, if a part of the population feels excluded, we should not be surprised if it sets off an emotional storm.

American democracy, then, does not rest ultimately on the principles of liberty and equality, as so many patriotic interpreters have assumed. Nor does it rest ultimately on religious beliefs, as his pious interpreters believe. It rests instead on a lucky break. The roughly similar material conditions that the first, roughly similar settlers faced when they landed naturally gave rise to feelings of inclusion and recognition, which spread throughout the entire society, not just on small islands of an archipelago.

Tocqueville’s observations about inclusion were not wholly original — thinking about the political significance of inclusion and mutual recognition in the Western tradition began with Aristotle, was elaborated in the Christian Middle Ages, and continues to play a role in Catholic theology today. But his application of them to modern democracy was.

In Tocqueville’s view, to sustain a democratic society, feelings must be engaged and then widely shared: what “keeps a majority of citizens under the same government” is the “instinctive and, in a sense, unconscious agreement resulting from like feelings and similar opinions”. What he has in mind here has nothing to do with an aspiration to Christian virtue, or the moral principle of equality, or appeals to a contrived notion of reflective civic patriotism. He is referring to a factual reality, a brute fact of congruence in the feelings of citizens and their general outlook on the world. Either it is there or it is not.

There still are contexts in which a basic congruence of feelings and outlook among Americans becomes apparent. Imagine you have been spending a few years in a foreign country, whose language you have learned and whose customs you have got used to. One day you find yourself in a restaurant seated next to a group of loud and garrulous American tourists. Suddenly you feel yourself beamed into a psychological and moral universe you only dimly remember. In it, everyone is open, even confessional, in their speech. Self-doubt and irony have fled the room, driven out by an almost oppressive bonhomie. The poor waiter has been asked for his first name and is informed that these new friends from downstate Illinois will be staying in touch.

How do you, the American observer, feel once they have left? The sound of familiar voices might come as a welcome respite from the rudeness of the French or the humourlessness of the Germans. You might feel the urge to pull up a chair and join them, knowing that you would be welcomed into the conversation. If you’ve had too much to drink you might even share your email address with them at the end of the evening.

But what if you have been straining to fit into this foreign culture and not appear American? What are you feeling as you stick your head more deeply into your copy of Le Monde and pray that the tourists leave soon? You are experiencing exactly the same set of feelings as the other American observer, just with a negative valence. You both recognise yourselves in your fellow citizens and feel implicated in their behaviour. Some inner string vibrates at the same frequency as those of these intruders, whether you wish it or not.

But, notwithstanding that example, we cannot deny that the feelings of democratic belonging have diminished rapidly in our contemporary democracies. A complex cultural gap has opened up in our democracies that we find much more difficult to bridge.

Tocqueville’s subtle observation about the difference between Southerners and Northerners that he discovered on his travels might help us understand:

“If two men belonging to the same society have the same interests and to some extent the same opinions, but their characters, education, and style of living are different, it is highly likely that they will not see eye to eye.”

Even if he found himself speaking to people of the same class, with the same economic interests, their characters, education, and styles of living were so different — mainly due to slavery — that mutual recognition and political friendship between them was difficult, and soon would become impossible.

Today the cultural gap in America is not a function of geography but of education. A certain level of education — basically a bachelor’s degree — is now required to advance significantly in society. We may forget in our little university and urban cocoons but only a little more than a third of adult Americans have such a degree. When I looked up the percent of Manhattanites with a university degree, which I assumed to be a little less than 50%, I discovered that it has risen to nearly 70%. It is only 23% in the Bronx. I had no idea.

And the consequences of this gap are not just economic. University does not only provide training for entering lucrative professions, it also socialises students into new styles of living, as Tocqueville called it, that are vastly different from those of the less educated. Graduates come out of the university with different ideas about how to comport themselves in public and at work, what to eat, how to entertain themselves, how many children to have and how to raise them, how to manage money, and how to take care of their health. Even the typical bodies of our cultural classes are notably different today.

The term caste is thrown around fairly promiscuously, but frankly I can’t think of a better one to describe the seriousness of the new cultural gap. If Tocqueville was right that extremely different styles of living can set apart even people who have shared economic and political interests, then we are in trouble.

A widely shared sense of exclusion, with all the attendant emotions of shame and resentment, is toxic to democracies. We are living with a new brute, generating fact that is triggering new feelings of distrust, contempt, resentment, antipathy, and withdrawal. A large class of white Americans is experiencing for the first time a range of emotions that American minorities, especially black Americans, have always had to contend with on a far vaster scale.

That is why I have come to take very seriously the expressed need to feel included, “to see people who look and talk like me”, beginning in our educational establishments. In a book I wrote a few years ago I treated such expressions as divisive, on the grounds that emphasising group identities can block people from recognising the wider common good. While that can be true, it is more true of diversity. There is, I think, a tension between the ideals of diversity and inclusion, since the former is centrifugal in effect and the latter is centripetal.

But the feelings of exclusion in Americans today extend beyond minority groups. The white working class feels it, the religious population feels it, the South feels it. Our common sense of mutual recognition is melting away and we have no idea really how to stop it. The crisis of inclusion extends far beyond our elite spats over college admission and corporate hiring.

Is there an institution that still helps Americans from different walks of life feel included? The only example I can come up with is college sports — and for a somewhat personal reason.

My late father never attended college. But he was a sports fan and had developed a vicarious attachment to the University of Michigan. The day I was admitted to the university was the second happiest day of his life, the happiest being the day he saw the team win the Rose Bowl. After he was widowed, he came to visit me every weekend and we would go to games together — football, basketball, anything. He started buying up paraphernalia and soon everything in his house was covered in maize and blue.

But the significance of the experience for him was not simply in watching university sports. It was that when we crossed campus together, he felt at home. He knew the streets and he knew the buildings. He felt somehow welcomed — even without a degree. And it certainly made him more willing to pay taxes for the university.

This story is not to say life is like football — quite the contrary. I am simply saddened and a little shocked to discover that I couldn’t think of a single other institution in American life that makes people from different education classes all feel included.

And even then, I’m not sure it’s still working. When I attended an Ohio State game last year, I marvelled once again at the class diversity of the crowd and the palpable sense of friendship among those who attended. But as I walked past the cars in the parking lot when the game was over, I saw nothing but bumper stickers expressing hate or contempt for fellow citizens who didn’t share the owner’s political outlook. What happens in the stadium, stays in the stadium apparently.

So, yes, we are in a very bad way.

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This article is based on a lecture delivered at the conference “Beyond the Impasse: Theological Perspectives on DEI” at the Aquinas Institute in Princeton.