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Venture capitalist David Sacks explains why there is a 30-point gap in voting patterns between the college-educated Professional Class and the Working Class.
DAVID SACKS: The thing about this woke phenomenon is that it spans across corporate America. You have so-called Woke Capitalism. You’ve got ESG, with boards of directors and all these global non-profits; the NGOs, you’ve got the Think Tank World, the media, you’ve got Hollywood. It’s a phenomenon that spans across virtually every major institution in our society.
And so the question is how does something like that happen? I think it can only happen in a shift of attitudes of an entire class of people which in this class is the Professional Class, the class of people that have college degrees.
If you look at polling data on virtually any socio-cultural issue, the biggest divide in the country is not between race or gender. It’s actually on the single variable of whether you have a college degree or not… There’s a 30-point gap, roughly in voting patterns in political affiliation, based on whether you are Professional Class or Working Class, Professional Class meaning you have at least one college degree and the Working Class means you are high-school educated but not a college degree. This is the single biggest divide in the electorate.
It’s downstream of the fact that the universities got taken over a couple of generations ago by the far left.
The quid pro quo of our civilization is if you want the economic and social advancement that a college degree grants you, you have to go to one of these schools and submit to voluntary reeducation for four years. You’re basically indoctrinated in this ideology. It’s the only way to explain why the people graduating from these institutions come out with these far left views that are very different from the rest of the country.
So I tend to think that is what’s happening – and Andrew Sullivan has this line “we all live on campus now” – we all live on campus because campus has indoctrinated two generations of Americans and now they have these views.
Now, it’s not like every single person who goes to college believes in it. I tend to believe there are three groups. There’s the True Believers, who are maybe 10%. Maybe 1% rebel against it and they become either conservative journalists or founders, which is why I can stay in business with the views that I have.
And then roughly 89-90% are certainly the herd. They tend to populate the rank of the professional elite. They get the well-paying corporate jobs; it’s the McKinsey consultants and the bankers at Goldman Sachs and so on.
And then the true believers go to the low-paying professional jobs. It’s the think tanks and foundations and the HR police at corporations, the enforcers of the regime. And they staff the ranks of activist groups in the Democratic party and things like that…
It’s produced this broad phenomenon of all of our institutions going woke at the same time, because all college graduates have breathed-in this ideology and they either support it – or know not to oppose it.
This explains a huge amount of the sense of conflict and division in our society. Two-thirds of the country is Working Class. Only one-third of the country is Professional Class.
The Professional Class holds beliefs and values that are at odds with the Working Class… So you have a democracy in which most of the people don’t agree with the agenda that’s being foisted on them by their institutions…
The people running these institutions are always claiming that what they are doing is in the interest of “democracy”. But democracy is you let the majority of the population exercise its will and get its way and that’s not what is happening here. It’s this Orwellian doublespeak where in the name of “democracy”, you’re doing things like censoring one side of the debate – probably the side of the debate that has the numbers and has more support from most of the people…
You have to wonder if we had a completely fair and level playing field, if Big Tech wasn’t engaging in censorship on behalf of the elite, and the media wasn’t constantly covering for the elite. You’d have to think that maybe these elections go a little differently.
Great article, Alexandra.
Thank you.
Very interesting conversation from two well informed people. Just a comment on a minor point they made and that is the growing anti-Russian hysteria. I have an anecdote how that translates down into the elementary school level. Kids are sponges for this type of thing–they hear all this on the media and through adults. A close relative of mine is married to a Russian and has kids in the schools who suffered horrendous discrimination for being Russian. Imagine that you are a kid who has absorbed the Russia prejudice of the last few years. You really don’t know much about the war, the country, whatever; but you know some kids who are Russian in school. Wow.. there they are… the Russians. It got so bad my relative has to to move with her family. We are reckless with prejudice in a way that is the worst it has ever been. Look at the attack on the unvaccinated, or the gender neutrality thing. No one sees in gender neutrality the opportunity of the narcissistic divorced male who now doesn’t have to pay child support (mothers don’t exist), kids are dropped off at relatives houses, and he threw her across the room more than once–that is why she divorced him. So in a world with no men (even huge men) and women (tiny women)–for some reason those guys always pick tiny women that they can throw around. Now in gender neutral California, women are being horribly abused. Another example of this reckless “woeness”.
Dear FK,
your article is spot on.
I’m one of the few academics who is anti-woke and pro traditional values.
Simply by comparing which ideology creates a more stable society.
We are out there but we are far and few in-between . I deal with a lot of verbal abuse.
Jenne
Jenne, you are salt in society. Be of good courage, in that you are on the right side of nature and natures Creator at least insofar as this matter goes. This generation is the epitome of artificial entertainment reality. Wishing falseness to be true, no matter how sincerely believed does not make it true.
Sorta kinda.
A legitimate view, but it’s much deeper than that. It’s who and what defines just treatment of self, and neighbor. Since people naturally ban together to protect themselves from others who do not share their values, they naturally codify those values in their codes of conduct and traditions.
If those values conflict with their immediate neighbor, there will be discord and unhappiness. Fortunately for previous generations of Americans, most generally agreed with the Mosaic codes of conduct as interpreted by Jesus, taught by his apostles and the Reformers. Doesn’t mean the agreement was perfect or pure and there was plenty of wiggle room for dissent as long as it was respectful and willing to negotiate if need be.
It was never perfect, and unfortunately, white Europeans all too often did not view themselves as accountable to their Maker for unjust treatment of other tribes! However the history that is being taught today is just as grievously unbalanced in the opposite direction, if not more so than the fanciful history taught in my generation. In defense of white European settlers in America, we must not forget that native Americans were opposing them on the one hand, sometimes as surrogates for foreign intrigues, and on the other, the old European tyrants reaching out six ways to Sunday to recapture them. As concerning black slavery, it too was a tyrannical white European imposition upon white America through what would be understood today as corporate agriculture. Wealthy European plantation owners! Most white Americans opposed it. Most never participated directly in it. This was the residue of establishment religious fall out from the European dark ages. Those chickens have come home to roost in our generation!
Previously nearly everyone had some connection with some Christian sect or another and were generally tolerant of others who did not completely share their views. But that tolerance was not extended to other tribes, whose homeland was stolen by white Europeans under color of government authorized genecide in which the press, with some exceptions, was absolutely complicit.
Within white American society, bullies were kept at bay, until foreign factions infiltrated our institutions and began lionizing bullies behavior as a way to destroy what they perceived as the extant evil American culture so that they might reshape it into their sense of a better society. Marx and Engles would be one example, but they were not the first to embrace collectivism. It had been tried several times before in America on a voluntary basis and utterly failed every time. Voluntary collectivism has proven to be successful in voluntary occupational co-operatives and in Hutterite Communities, but their government is charitable and Christ-compliant. If you don’t like it you can leave and they will help you to leave with temporary assistance. You can also join them if you are willing to submit to their codes and traditions. Marx was never about anything other than brute compliance forever in a system that smashes everything and everyone who refuses to submit.
Crony capitalism, like crony communism and crony socialism is a world wide problem that must soon be dealt with. Some such, if not many use their famously ill gotten gains to corrupt and pervert weaker minds with sexual fantasies some of which were hitherto unimagined. Enslavement of the mind and soul is far worse than chains of iron, so beware of what you fix your eyes upon! It is the ruination of marriage and family which are the most fundamental building blocks for our species and our social order as it has been known for millennia.