How Democrats became the party of education credential hierarchy

Even as a child, this always puzzled me. How could this sheet of paper, rolled and tied with a ribbon, stand in for a human brain?

Of course, we have all come to accept this talismanic relationship. That is to say, the diploma is taken to stand in for broadly applicable knowledge and capability, such that we have assigned it a central function in our political economy in a way that was unimagined back in 1939. But credentials of this sort don’t just serve a professional purpose, they also have a political valence. Although the percentage of people who graduate from college doubled between the elections of Presidents Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, from around 15% to around 30%, even as the economic gulf between graduates and nongraduates widened, upholding the importance of degrees has become perhaps the distinguishing feature of today’s Democratic Party.

It was surprising to hear Democratic nominee Kamala Harris announce recently that her prospective administration would eliminate higher education degree requirements for federal positions. Such a policy has much to recommend it, but to sign on to it would induce what are likely impossible tensions within the prevailing ethos of today’s Democratic Party, which has increasingly made such degrees a central part of the identity of both officeholders and primary voters.

Perhaps needless to say, this was not always the case. Up until at least the Great Society era, the Democratic coalition was a multiheaded beast. Today, however, the Blue Dog Democrats scarcely exist, and the southern Democratic faction is increasingly limited to James Carville’s admittedly ubiquitous television appearances. They control no state legislatures south of Maryland, and the Dixiecrat legacy thankfully died with Robert Byrd. The classic socialist wing of the Democratic Party, one that fundamentally opposes the orientation of the political economy rather than merely seeking greater regulatory control over it, is limited to the aged Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), whose presidential ambitions his own party mobilized quite effectively to block in both 2016 and 2020.

This doesn’t mean that either major party today can be reduced to a single thing. Within the contemporary Democratic universe, one can find economic populism alongside billionaire elites and racial demagoguery alongside pleas for tolerance and harmony.

But, in the end, what binds together this otherwise unstable political compound is a code of credentialism. This has created a frequently comical opposition between the two parties, as each seeks to define itself against the other. Thus, the GOP has historically had to rely upon an elite policymaking class even as it rhetorically distanced itself from them. It is an ironic testament to this state of affairs that neither former President Donald Trump’s supporters nor his critics tend to bring up his Wharton School of Business degree — it crosses too many streams.

In any case, as the example of the Scarecrow indicates, any credential has an imperfect relationship with the qualities or qualifications it notionally represents. And most people understand this on some level. This is why a mug bearing the claim “World’s Best Grandpa” may be an acceptable gift but isn’t otherwise taken as a status token.

This is not to say that credentialism is necessarily an empty signifier. People generally don’t allow nondoctors to perform surgery on them, and, given the choice, they will prefer the surgeon be a graduate of a more prestigious program, be affiliated with the “best” hospitals, and so on. But all this prestige is ultimately anchored to a desired material outcome — its value has to do with its status as a proxy for successful medical outcomes. It is the rare person who would say, “At least the guy who botched my surgery was a Harvard man.”

Nonetheless, there has always been a tension between prestige and merit when it comes to such things. Elite universities, though now quite old — most of the Ivies are older than the country itself — have, for most of their history, served as something more like finishing schools for an existing political and social elite rather than the conferrers of elite status themselves.

The actual convergence of substantive excellence and prestige is surprisingly rare. There’s a very funny passage in the great historian Peter Brown’s memoir where it emerges that neither he nor his adviser, Arnaldo Momigliano, had deigned to notice that technically he had been kicked out of his doctoral program at Oxford, nor did it much impact his research. They could afford not to care, both because they were each improbably brilliant and the institution that sustained them had fostered a culture favoring scholarly excellence over resume-boosting.

Within a larger society, however, the utility of a credential lies in how it actually defers the tricky question of excellence. It is thus both meritocratic and un-: a strange combination of egalitarianism — everyone with a degree is equal — and an elite guild system, separating the degree-holders from the nonholders.

As far as the Democratic Party is concerned, this arrangement has helped stabilize what is otherwise a fairly fractious ethnic coalition. It has also created an increasingly complex caste system, given the incentive to pursue ever higher degrees to distinguish oneself from the larger, growing class of four-year degree-holders.

And though degrees are undeniably convertible into material wealth, it would not be accurate to treat this phenomenon as simply a proxy for economic inequality. Red states, after all, have their own avenues of wealth, and the owner of a car dealership certainly owns greater material assets than a New York Times columnist. The true value of these degrees lies in what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called “institutionalized cultural capital.” This highly fungible source of capital has served to bind together a formidable array of both governmental and nongovernmental institutions.

This is ultimately why it would be most surprising to see any Democratic president follow through on a promise to dispense with credentials within its major establishments. To put it somewhat bluntly, the Democratic Party, not to say the larger class that it represents, is likely not prepared to sacrifice this hard-earned source of capital. A degree is convertible in a way that mere brilliance is not. Evaluating the originality and acuity of a given individual’s intellect requires the application of one’s own personal judgment, which also relies on the quality of one’s judgments. A degree outsources that determination to a separate body, the prestige of which is guaranteed by society at large. And that a genuinely meritocratic system would be at odds with the prevailing ethos of racial egalitarianism is just one of the many tensions within the party’s credentialism, which requires constant management to keep the top from blowing off.

The de facto result is at once egalitarian and regressive. It is open to an ever-wider pool of applicants, but it is a system that runs on a combination of taxation, existing personal wealth, and debt.

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Of course, at the same time, the Democratic Party is notionally the party of, well, democracy. Its defining ethos historically has been egalitarian, given its association with organized labor, economic redistribution, and, in the post-Civil Rights era, racial justice. And since 2016, the party and its unofficial supporters throughout the media-academic-NGO complex have emphasized this theme in more fundamental ways, insisting that democracy itself is imperiled in the age of Trump. One need not doubt the sincerity with which these claims are advanced to suspect, however, that there may be a bad conscience at work here about what the party has become.

Meanwhile, one cannot fully appreciate the mutual animosity of contemporary politics without recognizing this shift that the Democratic Party has undergone. A historically strong middle class combined with a uniquely dynamic political economy has largely saved the United States from the kinds of class conflict to which democracies are prone. The consolidation of one political party around formal credentials, however, has reproduced that dialectic in unexpected ways. Class conflict in contemporary America is obscured by the fact that it doesn’t cleave along ordinary lines of rich and poor, but along those of cultural capital. Now, this form of capital has come to be associated with a single party. Today, this development has intensified the factionalism in political life. And tomorrow … who knows?

David Polansky is a Toronto-based writer. Find him at strangefrequencies.co.