Episode Summary
“I love the poorly educated,” Donald Trump famously boasted in early 2016 as he started racking up victories in the Republican primary election. It was an unintentionally hilarious thing to say, but it pointed to a truth that’s since became undeniable: People with less education are more likely to vote for Republicans.
Trump has almost certainly never heard of the 19th century philosopher John Stuart Mill, but the disgraced ex-president’s enthusiasm for the poorly educated echoes something that Mill said on the floor of the English parliament in 1866 that “stupid persons are generally conservative.”
What if Mill was right? Since 2016, it’s become commonplace to think of educational attainment as a sort of proxy for Trump voting among white Americans, but what if there’s something even deeper at work?
Republicans don’t want to hear this, but there’s a pretty long-standing body of social science research that indicates people who have right-wing attitudes, particularly regarding religion and epistemology, appear to have lower cognitive capacity.
Thinking about this topic can be uncomfortable, but it’s important because understanding that political movements are just as much about psychology as they are about ideology can help us understand the enduring appeal of someone like Trump who is flagrantly stupid, corrupt, and deceitful. I also feel like I can discuss this given my personal history as a former Mormon fundamentalist and Republican activist.
Our guest in today’s episode to discuss is Darren Sherkat, he’s a professor of sociology at Southern Illinois University where he focuses the relationships between ideology, cognition, and religious belief. He’s also the author of “Changing Faith: The Dynamics and Consequences of Americans' Shifting Religious Identities,” and another book which will be forthcoming on these topics.
The video of this discussion is available. The transcript of audio is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text.
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Audio Chapters
00:00 — Introduction
02:19 — Why discussing cognition in a political context is not unfair or deterministic
08:51 — In the 1970s, Republicans were the party with higher verbal ability
10:10 — How the "Southern Strategy" remade the Republican party cognitively
13:01 — Why "poorly educated" is a better term than "uneducated" in this context
14:56 — How religious fundamentalism inhibits sound thinking at individual and the communal levels
20:02 — Cognitive capital and social capital
23:44 — Theodor Adorno's "authoritarian personality" research included cognition
30:46 — Why cognition is a better predictor of Trump support than education
35:38 — Abductive reasoning versus empirical reasoning
44:23 — Trump is an ideal candidate for less-intelligent people
50:58 — Why Ron DeSantis, JD Vance, and intelligent reactionaries have trouble copying Trump
54:53 — Public education as the cornerstone of democracy
01:00:19 — Non-religious Americans need to start advocating for themselves
01:03:00 — Conclusion
Audio Transcript
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So, these are some very sensitive topics to people that we're going to be discussing here today. It's no fun for people to discuss cognitive ability and political ideology if you are the group assessed to have lower cognition at least outputs. But before we get into that, though, I did want to ask you—and to clarify that because the brain is a highly plastic organ and cognition is a form of exercise, these are not necessarily judgments that are set in stone, if you will. And this research is still just beginning in a lot of ways, right?
DARREN SHERKAT: [00:03:00] Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think that we've had kind of a disjuncture between the kind of genetic model of cognition and the more environmental model of cognition. And it's not been very sociologically informed about how do processes of politics and religion and other factors influence individuals. Instead, it's been individuated that it's an assumption that this is a product of the individual rather than their social origins and their social settings.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And people's environment and also their own behavior, it can modify what their cognitive outputs are.
SHERKAT: Absolutely. I mean, we're seeing this mostly in our gerontological research about, kind of use it or lose it. That if you don't think about things in systematic ways, then your brain will not operate as it should in an ideal [00:04:00] way.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And also, I have to also say that, myself as a former fundamentalist Mormon and former Republican activist, this is me talking about my former self. And I can say, when I reflect back on my earlier life, when I had these belief systems, they did inhibit my ability to think clearly and to fully perceive the world accurately. That actually was something that, that did inhibit me.
So, I did want to kind of mention that before we get further into it. But before we get into your research here, tell us about your background on these matters, your overall academic background,
SHERKAT: Personal background or academic background?
SHEFFIELD: Academic background.
SHERKAT: I came to research American fundamentalism, American religion largely because we didn't really know much about it back in the eighties and [00:05:00] nineties when the second wave of the new Christian right came up we didn't even know how many. conservative Christians there were, and so I really came through it through religious demography and looking at how many of these people are there that are fomenting these political movements, and at the time they were still not identifying as Republicans.
Back in the early 90s, many of them voted Republican, but they didn't identify as Republicans, and that's shifted over time. So gradually I came to do more political research that was more partisan in a sense that it paid attention to things like party politics. And that's where some of my research has been going in the last decade or so.
And I'll be presenting a paper at the I'm going to be having a number of sociology of religion meetings here in the next few weeks that examines these kind of cognitive issues by party and how religion plays a role in that looking at the measures of [00:06:00] cognitive sophistications that I have available, which are related to verbal ability and vocabulary.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And then like, what's your so you were a sociologist by academic training. Yes,
SHERKAT: yes. I had a PhD at Duke in the early nineties.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Before we get into, the specific findings of the studies that you're just referring to you were using a metric that people maybe may not be familiar with the idea of using verbal ability as a proxy for cognitive ability. So how, how does one measure verbal ability in the research that you're doing, that you're relying on?
SHERKAT: In the General Social Survey, they followed a lot of educational research that uses a standard 10 question vocabulary examination. And it's widely used to measure vocabulary in the English language. And [00:07:00] there are variants of it for other languages that educational psychologists have also used.
So it's a pretty standard measure that correlates about 0. 66. With measures of IQ using the kind of revised Stanford and stuff like that indicators. So it's, it's not exactly the same as the IQ type measures that some people use. And it's of course different from things like the armed forces qualifying tests, which is also been used as measures of intelligence.
But it, it does measure something that's very specific where it's. Detached from any concept we might have of what whatever raw intelligence means, whatever psychologist or educational psychologist may be interested in but it has a pretty profound influence on people's lives on their ability to do things like read the New York Times or navigate a complex argument in a paper or something like that.
SHEFFIELD: [00:08:00] Or understand how to fill out a form properly or things like that. You have to lower it and
SHERKAT: it can be bad.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. So the GSS has done this and the variable for those who are into that sort of thing is called word sum. If anybody wants to look that up on your own. But so how, how long have they been asking that particular question?
SHERKAT: They insert that in the second year of the general social survey in 1974. So some of my research in my book, I look at differences in party, lines along party lines, political party lines, and their scores on this verbal score since 1974. So for 50 years, we have data comparing Republicans and Democrats and independents on this measure of cognitive skill.
In the 1970s, Republicans were the party with higher verbal ability
SHERKAT: And one of the things that my research shows is that Republicans, as we would expect, starting out as elites, had higher levels of verbal ability in the [00:09:00] 1970s, all the way up through the early 1990s, when the Democrats and Republicans kind of converged. Since the 1990s, the Democrats scores have gone up, and the Republicans scores have gone down.
This is only focusing on white Americans, by the way. There's a different process and a different connection between politics and religion and cognition for African Americans, Black Americans, and Latinos. And we don't really have enough Asians to, you know analyze them separately, at least effectively except for in the 21st century.
We've got enough in the later years of the General Social Survey, but not enough in the earlier year.
SHEFFIELD: You're keeping the data consistent and also kind of filtering out any sort of racial or linguistic bias, which might be implicit in the test. By focusing only on, on white [00:10:00] voters or sorry, white respondents in the study.
As you were saying, the, the, the scores for the parties kind of started to they crossed in the, in the nineties.
How the "Southern Strategy" remade the Republican party cognitively
SHEFFIELD: But religion was the, was, appears to be the, the reason why it was. Cause the Republican party, as, as you said, was not principally a vehicle for Christian supremacism that it currently is today, but there was a process over time, right?
SHERKAT: Especially identification. A lot of this has to do with the transformation and the reshuffling of party identifications that came after Nixon's southern strategy. The Southern strategy, which brought all these white Southerners into the Republican party, brought with it their fundamentalist religion, their adherence to mostly Baptist and Pentecostal denominations and lower tier Methodists, not high brow Methodists that you find in other types of [00:11:00] places.
And because of that, that had an effect on their cognition. And the cognitive composition of the Republican party add to that also is we saw a transformation of education in the South that was a result of desegregation that many of white Southerners began abandoning public schools or influencing content of public schools more substantially in a way that hindered their adherence ability to Access new information.
I mean, we all have to access new things to learn new things or even retain the things that we may have learned before. And this kind of implosion, a social implosion led to this kind of crossover. Between Democrats and Republicans, but what's interesting, this is something that I presenting I may not have told you about before because I haven't fully analyzed it until just this week is that [00:12:00] the Republican deficit remains even controlling for religion in the 21st century. And so if I just the last decade of the general social survey, look at this, yet there are profound differences by religion, as I showed papers, but the religious factors did not explain away. The Republican deficit, and that's kind of fast, and I'm still trying to grapple with what does this mean in the 21st century that they've, they've essentially, it's an additional burden cognitively, apparently to be a Republican even above and beyond the fact that many of them are sectarian Christians or biblical fundamentalists, and they tend not to be secular individuals or non identifiers.
And so that, that was, is kind of still something I'm trying to grapple with as I finish off this [00:13:00] paper for the meetings.
Why "poorly educated" is a better term than "uneducated" in this context
SHEFFIELD: Okay. Well, yeah, well, let's get into that. After we talk about the, your earlier research, definitely want to, for sure. So to preface further, I mean, Donald Trump himself did explicitly state, I love the poorly educated.
And so, this is not you being a meanie this is you studying a thing that Donald Trump himself invited people to talk about, right?
SHERKAT: Well, and Trump is right that it's not just the uneducated, but the poorly educated, what I show in my other papers is that this transcends education levels. And in fact, kind of extrapolated for other media sources. It's worse for the more educated. a more profound effect on verbal ability among people who graduated from college.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And there was a recent study that kind of did [00:14:00] show that with regard to fact checking, for instance. So like when, when Donald Trump voters were shown a label on tweets that he made while he was the president that were saying the, the statements are misleading or have been disputed or something like that, that people, as their political knowledge increased and they were Trump supporters, they were more likely to believe that his lies if they were labeled as lies rather than less. So it was a, it's a, it's a fascinating finding.
So, but to go back to your, your earlier studies though.
So let's go back to the first study that you did on this, that was a more politically oriented that you Looked at 2016 vote or preference of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and you had a number of different findings With regard to verbal facility.
So talk about some of those findings that you had there.
How religious fundamentalism inhibits sound thinking at individual and the communal levels
SHERKAT: Well, one of the things that that begins [00:15:00] to examine is first the effect of religion on Trump vote, which is pretty profound. And also though the effect of cognitive ability and cognitive ability as you move in into the equation in the initial baselines has a very strong Positive, negative, excuse me, relationship with voting for Donald Trump, even controlling for educational attainment, region of the country, rural, urban residency I focus on white voters in this paper also.
But then when I add in religiosity and specifically biblical fundamentalism versus secularism. And. Identification with sectarian Protestant denominations, the effect of verbal ability goes away, suggesting that it's working through and with [00:16:00] sectarian identifications and fundamentalist beliefs to influence or increase support for Trump votes among people who have cognitive deficits.
The religion gets them there somehow.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, and, and specifically in terms of the numbers, I mean, you found that of the people who missed, so there's 10 questions in the, in the word sum variable that of the people who missed all 10 questions. So in other words, they couldn't identify the meaning of of a specific word of the people who missed all 10 questions, 73 percent of them said that they were going to vote for Donald Trump,
SHERKAT: That they had voted. Yeah. For Donald Trump.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. That they had.
SHERKAT: Yeah. And that's, I think what you're quoting or reciting is my predicted probabilities from the baseline models.
And that's controlling for education region and stuff like that. So it's even a [00:17:00] higher because, presumably those, those people do have lower levels of educational attainment. They're more likely to be people from rural areas or from the south where language and dialect are different. And so there can be expected to score a little bit lower.
So, the empirical. Scores for somebody who would actually be a zero, just all the zeros among whites is, is a little bit higher than that. Higher than 73?
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, and, and it's, yeah. So the 73 is. You were arriving at that by, by control. Yeah. And other things like that. Yeah.
And so, so, I think though , the finding that you've had with this, it, it may seem a bit shocking to people who are new to this type of research. But on the other hand, you've got to think about how the recent news events have shown you that these educational deficits you can see them being created in Republican regions of the [00:18:00] country, but where they're going after a specific textbooks or saying we don't want schools to teach anything about, racist actions by, historical American historical figures, or we don't want to teach about that homosexuality is biological or, they don't want to, like that it's not, that it's not a sin or, whatever it is.
Like you can see this happening, these structures of, of tearing down and you can see the tearing down of education happening with your own eyes, like this is not a supposition on your part.
SHERKAT: No, I mean, and all of this is consequential because it reinforces that kind of social implosion. That is what drives the low levels of cognitive ability and sophistication among religious fundamentalists and sectarians. They think that people who are outside their group are evil and that anything that they say or produce or write [00:19:00] Is something that you should avoid and burn not something that you should engage and see that if you can understand it or why you disagree with it, even articulating that type of disagreement is is virtually impossible when you've never engaged with something.
It's like it's a foreign language and that. Has consequences that eventually, if school children are not exposed to the big words throughout, the first 12 years here, they are an adult and they can't read the New York times. And, but that's okay. Cause New York times is evil and you're not supposed to be engaging with evildoers.
And that puts you in a situation where your cognition is limited. And you think about those things and it's like anything else. So if you don't do it and you don't practice it and you don't engage it, you're less able to do it. I mean, I always have to give myself, calculus refreshers when I have to teach graduate statistics because [00:20:00] I don't really remember all the time.
Cognitive capital and social capital
SHERKAT: That's the other thing about especially these verbal measures. of cognition is that in fact, one of the great findings that came out of this word, is that you don't decline after you stop education. In fact, you get better at verbal ability. Long into your life course, there's debate in the literature about when do you start losing it, but you're certainly better off when you're 60 than when you're 18 on these measures of verbal ability because you learn more things, but you only learn more things if you're exposed to something that you don't know. And if you avoid things that you don't know because you're trusted, you don't trust the information sources and that you're taught that it's evil, then you don't experience that growth. And so in my first paper, I deal with that in the 2011 paper in social science research in more detail, because in sociology, that was our big finding [00:21:00] that, hey, wow people don't really lose it until later in life. And. What I found was that people who come from fundamentalist backgrounds don't gain as much with age and meaning that they're not learning as much as they go along as, as other people normally do, because they're iterating the same types of information.
The same Bible verses, the
same explanations for why things are true or false, and
that hinders them in their cognitive development. Other research actually shows how this has profound negative effects in the aging population. Uh, Henderson uh, Cheryl, I think her name, by her first name University of South Carolina has a really great paper on that, about how cognitive loss. Is forestalled by not being in fundamentalist religious groups. That among [00:22:00] fundamentalists, decline comes more steep. And that's that's one of the big findings from this.
SHEFFIELD: and this concept that you're talking about here, people accept the idea that there is social capital that that is a thing that exists among goals. And what you're saying is that this is cognitive capital, largely is what you're saying.
SHERKAT: Yes, that's an interesting way of putting it, but it's true. And you develop it, just like you develop social capital by connecting with other people. You develop cognitive capital by connecting with other ideas and connecting with new things. And those two are related. Because who you're connected to determines what you're going to learn, and whether you're going to learn anything. Because if you're only connected to people who know the same things you know, then you're never going to learn anything. Because you know everything they know, and they know everything you know. And so it's just, it might feel comfortable that you're in this homogeneous environment. The homophily really drives that.
You [00:23:00] like being around people who are like you. But you don't necessarily learn anything from people who are like you. If you all know the same things. I learned more from my friends in zoology. I'm going to learn from my friends in sociology. That's just the way it is. We pretty much know everything that each other knows in our own little silo. But if we meet people and connect to people outside of that, then it improves our cognition. We learn new things or remember new things. High school. College biology or chemistry were a long time ago, and so I don't really remember all those things unless I connect with use those things Basis
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Theodor Adorno's "authoritarian personality" research included cognition
SHEFFIELD: And now you and your research here, it's not, not something unfortunate that has been done a lot, maybe recently. Or just except for you and maybe a handful of people, other people, but it was something that was pretty. A lot more common after [00:24:00] World War II, with the research of Theodore Adorno and some other people who followed after him and the idea of the authoritarian personality.
And, and he did talk about cognition and, and verbal faculty in his In his research as well, right?
SHERKAT: Yes, yes, and there certainly was this big push after World War two with some of the critical theorists of Adorno some of his research really was tossed under the table in some ways, in part because of that. I think there was a a big push to remove the cognitive side of critical theory and to ignore some of the things that came from that prior research tradition about, what attracts people to authoritarianism.
And some of that is a result of these cognitive shortcuts that people need to take that if it's hard for you to understand. What's the relationship between [00:25:00] monetary policy and inflation or the rate of unemployment and inflation, then it's easier to say, so and so did it. It's these people that are causing this, because that's a nice, easy way to think about things.
And so cognitive shortcuts are a reason why people might be attracted to authoritarianism. It gives them solace. It gives them an explanation that's easy to understand.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
SHERKAT: if you don't have a lot of capacity to understand, then that's very comforting to have.
SHEFFIELD: It is. Yeah. And, and, and this is, as, as you have found in another paper that, there is a definitely a, a related religious component to this. But and we'll get to the other part later, but one's religious affiliations matter in your research as well, because people who, so you use the term sectarian, you know, in your meaning, what do you, [00:26:00] what do you mean when you say
SHERKAT: Yeah. In mainstream sociology, the word sectarian is used to groups that believe that they have the absolute truth and that other groups are lacking that, and usually that also creates. Tension with broader society. We have people who believe that they have the truth and you don't that can create a problem with other social groups and with mainstream society. But in other places, that's just my definition of sectarianism goes beyond that tension because you can have sectarian groups that believe that they have the absolute truth where they are dominant, so they're not at tension with dominant society, you have no problem being a fundamentalist Southern Baptist if you're in Mississippi. Uh, that's the, essentially that is mainstream society in Mississippi. And so that my definition of sectarianism kind of [00:27:00] addresses that issue people who believe that they know the truth don't need to be told other truths and they don't need to seek other truths. The truth is found in the Bible, in the word of God. And if you're trying to seek other truths, in fact, that may be a evidence pridefulness. That may be a sin to try to find knowledge. Searching for the tree of knowledge is something that's sinful. It's not just irrelevant, but something to be avoided. And in places where sectarians are dominant, it's really easy for them to control all aspects of discourse. So we're seeing this in places like Oklahoma and Texas and Alabama that are instituting a kind of Christian nationalist curriculum in their schools. And what they want is for everybody to learn the same things which are easily consumed truths, they believe about the history [00:28:00] of the United States or the world, about the future, about what's going on, about who is acceptable to associate with. Very importantly, that you're not supposed to come in contact with, you can't build social capital. others. So even while we're putting in Mercedes Benz factories in Alabama, they're engineers from all over the world moving there to work and just then they have to send their kids to school where, um, in many of these places, we're actually seeing the formation of new equipment. The Japanese especially are fond of creating their own schools where they have to go live in South Carolina or Tennessee or Mississippi or wherever Nissan or Honda is putting a plant. Well, the poor engineers that came over from Japan, how are they going to raise their kids? They can't be putting them in these schools.
And so they have to separate themselves, which really [00:29:00] compounds the problem. Is that, even though the South has changed, for example, you can't pick on the South because it's true hasn't really had as much of an impact as it would. Because the original natives of those places, especially the white ones, have segmented themselves and the people who move in feel like they have to separate themselves as well. Another thing this has an effect on, of course, is politics. It's always shocking to look at a continuation of white southern domination in the south, which is now republican solid south. Even in the face of all this migration from outside the South into the South, the New South never really took off in most places.
In fact, it went backwards in places like Tennessee, where it looked like it was going to become, a normal state. Maybe it'd be like what Ohio [00:30:00] used to be. Um, but it's not anymore. It's going backwards. Even though there are all these people who are, new migrants who came there from California, from other places, but yet they feel like they're not even a part, why should I even vote? It comes down to even that, like, what's the purpose? What's the point? Why would I want to associate with all those people? And so we haven't really seen that kind of permeation effect of Cognitive, innovation happen, because of the pressures.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, I guess in Colorado you, you did see that, but yeah, I think you're right about the Southern states. Yeah.
Why cognition is a better predictor of Trump support than education
SHEFFIELD: And now one of the other things in, in, in, in your 2021 paper that you found and, and, and also your more recent ones is that, so I think ever since Donald Trump came [00:31:00] along and he did succeed at getting a higher percentage people without a bachelor's degree, that a lot of people began to use education as a sort of proxy for Trump vote or for intelligence or something like that.
But your research shows that that's not necessarily a good idea. And the, the, the education, while it has some correlation to Trump vote or Trumpiness. It's not the only thing. And in fact, there is a lower correlation than people might might suppose.
SHERKAT: That the cognition matters that really it's and we see this, within universities and things like that and across majors. I mean, why do you major in business? Well, because I don't want to learn too much. I just want to learn just enough so that I can make some money. And it's making money that matters, not taking classes in philosophy, or biology, or sociology, or [00:32:00] whatever.
The goal is not really to learn. The goal is to get a degree, and we're going to fend over backwards here at the academy to make sure that you get your degree and that we get our money. Um, but, it's not really to learn. And so there's this huge gap between the kind of cognitive structures that develop among people who have different goals for education and different experiences within education, that it all becomes just a practical matter. And because of that, just knowing some, whether somebody has a college degree doesn't really get us anywhere. And the same thing with among people who don't have a college degree. That's the other thing is it works on all sides of the equation. That there are a lot of people for many, many reasons who don't go to college. And some of them are very smart and one are, are very motivated to learn things. And [00:33:00] those people gravitate away from. Kind of authoritarian explanations and simplistic explanations. And instead they actually try to understand what's going on. Why am I here? Why, you know, I'm a plumber, I'm doing my job, but I don't have to just listen to Rush Limbaugh or whoever's taking his place, uh, while I'm doing my work, I can listen to NPR or, and I can converse with
other people.
Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And it's also, the idea of, I mean, there's, there's a tremendous irony in that the QAnon movement in particular, or anti vax people will often say, do your own research, but in fact, they don't know how to do research. They don't know what research looks like.
And this is, it's not a, it's not a phenomenon, related to educational experience or anything that, you know, if the. It's related to epistemology that if you think [00:34:00] that what research is, And like, you see this a lot. I saw this when I was a Republican activist, a lot that people would, they wouldn't bother to con to try to confirm story tips that they had received.
If they confirmed their bias they would just automatically. So like I had a, I, there was a guy that I worked with I had gotten a tip. During the Obama administration about how our tipster was saying that the Obama administration was discriminating against Republican car dealers in the cash for clunkers program.
And the thing is demographically car dealers are overwhelmingly Republican.
SHERKAT: Are there democratic car dealers,
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that's right. And so, but I didn't know that at the time. And so I said to my colleague, hey, I don't have time to look at this right now. This could be a really sensational story if you can confirm it, but it definitely need we need to look at that.
And he just went and published a story. [00:35:00] With without even bothering to do it and I said to him I said why why did you and then he had to retract it Because it would turned out to not be true Because if
SHERKAT: Democratic dealers,
SHEFFIELD: yeah, that's right. If you're discriminating against Republican car dealers, then you're not gonna have a program period And so, so he had to retract his story and I said, why, why, why did you do that?
And he said, well, everything you gave me, that was enough to go with right from what you gave me. And I said, no, it wasn't. And I explicitly told you it wasn't. But you know, it didn't matter because. For, for the,
Abductive reasoning versus empirical reasoning
SHEFFIELD: for a lot of people who come from, and this colleague of mine was very, very religious and fundamentalist that they, they don't use.
Empirical logic they use, they use abductive logic. So a thing is true if it's seems close enough to me. And, and, and, abductive reasoning [00:36:00] is useful in, in our regular daily lives. So, if we're driving down the street, In a neighborhood and the last time we were in that neighborhood, there was, some crazy person jumped in front of your car.
When you come to that neighborhood again, you're going to remember that experience, right? And even though it's not likely that that person is going to be there, you're still in the back of your mind. You're going to think, Oh, I have to be a little careful here because that asshole might run in front of my car again.
So, so that's abductive, you know, uh, habitual reasoning and it works for a lot of circumstances, but it doesn't work for understanding and proving reality and improving your perception and, and refining your ideas. And that's, I think is the root of the, is the issue that we're talking about here. What do you think?
SHERKAT: Yeah. I mean, I agree. If you're talking about research especially, it's like, yeah, you can use that type of reasoning if you're a researcher. If I see something like I just did trying to [00:37:00] make my statistics exam where, oh no, that's not right. Why is it not right? Because it doesn't fit what I think. But that's because I've been using the same database for, 40 years now. And when I see something that doesn't fit my perception of how the research should turn out, then I need to like run the cross tabs and make sure I didn't screw up a code or something like that. But then I'm improving my own research. That's only because I do it. If I was doing research in biology and trying to test for genetic evidence of hellbenders in some stream in Southern Illinois, I wouldn't know for the first, how to start, I'd be having to ask, well, do I swab this? Should I use gloves? I guess I probably should. Um, how do I even do this type of research? It's not something that I'm able to navigate using my own experiences [00:38:00] and any biases that I might have wouldn't bring anything. to the table and doing a better job at doing that study. And that's that's the problem is that people don't understand their incompetencies that in doing whatever type of research it might be. And it's kind of fascinating and dangerous that people are applying that to things like medical research and the anti vax stuff is just now out of control. Let me know. Genuinely worried, we're already seeing it. We're already seeing measles outbreaks. We're going to see polio outbreaks in the next decade in the United States.
It's just amazing, that people think that they can somehow look at a website or something that popped up on their phone.
SHEFFIELD: Or watching YouTube video.
SHERKAT: yeah,
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, okay. So, but just, going back to the [00:39:00] partisanship question, so a lot of people have come up with studies to try to say, well, this, this demographic tendency, it correlates the, to whatever, whatever percentage they find.
So, you, in your studies, you were looking at a lot of these different variables that were a predictor of Trump votes. So some people believe that. A Trump vote is predicted most by education or by I mean, obviously Republican partisanship is the obvious easiest indicator, right?
So, but of the immutable characteristics in your research, what can you just kind of go down the numbers here of which ones were the biggest predictors in your findings?
SHERKAT: well, in the baseline, and this is the tough part is, as you mentioned, partisanship predicts party votes. And
so that's something that absorbs a lot of what the real action is. It's like, well, why are you a Republican? Well, that's driven by some of [00:40:00] these other background factors as well. And so it becomes complicated in getting, how are these factors interconnected? And among even something like cognitive ability, which I view as mostly being socially produced, not being something that's simply innate. But it's a function of your social position, where you grew up, and your socialization, as much as, at least, as it is something about innate cognitive architecture, or something like that. And so, Certainly verbal ability is one of those things and as is education, uh, region of the country is another one. We've seen that in part because of the unfolding of partisanship with the collapse of the democratic solid south. And the emergence of the Republican solid South, that's going to drive our Trump vote pretty profoundly. Religious factors is another thing that's, it's when you say [00:41:00] immutable, that's, that's something that continues on after controlling. For other factors and religious fundamentalism played a very big role. And on the other negative side of it, religious secularism, this is something that the Notre Dame group has been big on the secular search.
Gosh, I'm blanking on this guy's name. I'm about to sit on a panel with him next week. Speaking of cognitive ability David Campbell in his book, Secular Surge details, the increasing importance of secular Americans in political participation and voting, uh, which is something that's pretty new as they document in that book, uh, used to be, if you weren't religious, you went and hid in a hole somewhere and you weren't invited to political events and you weren't welcome at political party events and to support candidates. And that's beginning to change. I mean, we saw the real clicker with Obama making the first mention of, well, [00:42:00] maybe there's some Americans who aren't religious and they can be a part of this too. And that didn't that, that was a real step for creating a potential secular movement. That can counter the religious fundamentalism that drives a lot of the authoritarianism, uh, that's going on now. The, Robert Jones new report out from his group, the PRI group, and, uh, it looks, it's very interesting. I'm not a fan of their data in some ways, but I love their analyses and I love their measures and their kind of reformulation of Adorno's right wing authoritarianism scale, which I thought was pretty interesting. Thing that they did in that new report, but those are some of the things that are really driving it and our million dollar question is now, will this continue? Is this, one of the things Jones talked about was Trump is [00:43:00] a totem, that if he becomes a totem, it's really hard to criticize him in any way. He's not just a person. Well, if the totem goes away, do we stop believing in the totem? Or does it continue? Or maybe the totem isn't really relevant. And what matters is really this right wing authoritarianism that's been generated by this movement. And it's easy to continue, because the movement doesn't want complex answers to complex problems.
SHEFFIELD: of compromise. Yeah.
SHERKAT: No, we're to comprehend, they want the strong leader, and that's why they want the strong leader. And so if Trump goes away, however that might happen, then maybe somebody could easily replace them. But,
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
SHERKAT: and that's the question, is will this kind of orientation continue? And we don't really know. Because another thing with the Right Wing Authoritarianism [00:44:00] Index, and for people who believe these things, is if we were to go back to normal politics again, maybe they would just simply be disinterested. That, oh, that's just a bunch of politics, I don't pay attention to that stuff anyway. And that's true for a lot of them. And a
lot of them did, Participate, and they weren't interested in
SHEFFIELD: Before Trump. Yeah.
SHERKAT: before.
Trump is an ideal candidate for less-intelligent people
SHERKAT: And now here's the frightening part in my new paper that I'm just finalizing the analyses on one of the things, and this is kind of common to the book that I see is the least cognitively proficient people are the independent. And there's a lot of them.
SHEFFIELD: There are,
SHERKAT: And so if they're more easily mobilized, that's a real threat that, you know, it makes you think [00:45:00] anti democratic thoughts when you see what these percentages might do. We were just looking at this in my statistics class this week, it's, it's 34%. It's this huge group of people who seem more likely to be swayed towards authoritarianism than they would towards democracy. However, that's envisioned.
SHEFFIELD: yeah. And, and, and the reason for that being that, to go back to what you were saying about cognitive shortcuts, the easiest possible political shortcut is to say, well, I'm not part of either party. I'm above it all. I'm smarter than them.
When in fact, you, you know, less. Then the partisans do on either side, and we see that with the undecided voter surveys that people who are, who are at this point are, there's this sliver of depending on the survey about. Between 10 to 15% or so [00:46:00] of people who say that they don't know who they would vote for, or their, their vote is subject to change.
Those are the people who are the least informed, who have the least knowledge about anything related to their choice.
And so for them, that is why somebody like Donald Trump actually is-- a lot of times I see people say that, Oh, Donald Trump is a, he's a weak Republican candidate, but in many ways he's a stronger candidate because he does, I mean, he speaks at a third grade level. Like that's in his output is it's, it's, it's been measured. He's the lowest Speaking, grade level candidate of any person in national politics ever since these rating ease skill measurements were invented. So for somebody who does have low levels of cognitive sophistication, he's actually an ideal candidate for that.
SHERKAT: No, and maybe it can continue after that as well. What I'm [00:47:00] hopeful of, because this is the other side of this, is that a lot of what that reflects is that for people who have low cognitive ability they just really can't understand politics and that they don't care. They're disinterested. And they'd rather talk about football or baseball or Beyonce or whoever, celebrity attention, watching television. And so it becomes less about Adorno and more about Horkheimer, in a
sense. It's, it's Disney. It's the distractions
that, for the critical theorists, they thought that was bad because it meant the working class wasn't going to participate. But if you take a additional critical step beyond that, well, at least they're not becoming Nazis. They're watching Donald Duck, or Marilyn Monroe, and that's might reduce the threat.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and it's okay. So, but it is cause I mean, to go back to, to go back to what you were saying about, these, these [00:48:00] lower cognitive, non participating individuals, like it is in fact the case that, they did not participate in voting. Donald Trump, the reason that he was able to, so the Republican party, demographically speaking is not, they all, all they've done is lose sort of dedicated voters over time, whether through whether it's through their voters dying off.
So like even white evangelicals, for instance, as a share of the population, They have declined nonstop about since 2004 or so like that. So we've got about 20 years where they have declined as a share of the population, but as the share of the electorate, they've remained the same. And, and, and they've remained the same because.
The Republican party has decided to, to mobilize these low propensity, low information voters. And that's what, that is kind of the, the political root of what you, what [00:49:00] we're talking about here today is that they've, they, they found people, who, who agreed directionally with them. And they said, Hey, you should come and vote for us.
Please vote for us. Please vote for us. Please vote for us. And they had their pastors tell them, and they had their, TV shows tell them, and they threw all that. I mean, Donald Trump is making all these appearances on WWE and, going to all these, bro podcasters who talk about nothing, but, MMA You know and just various lifestyle things that these people are not political at all.
And he, that's how they're doing this is they're, they're finding these people that do not participate and, and are low information and they're bringing them out.
SHERKAT: And maybe it's just Trump and that, that again, that goes back to, this is the big question is could this movement survive Trump because basically, mostly, I think these people really don't know anything about politics and they're really not that interested in it, except for how it's involving Trump and it's [00:50:00] fascinating to me.
I mean, I went for 20 years without watching television at all. And it was, just couldn't believe that really somebody had a show where some rich guy fires people and they watched this
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
SHERKAT: was normal. But yet apparently it was the only thing he's ever made money on in his whole life was
television. And, and that's kind of shocking about how popular culture. Can bleed into politics and can bleed into economic relationships in a way that, I mean, this is really kind of straight out of Horkheimer's, like to see the cartoon characters get hit over the head with an anvil because that's how we feel as the working class. And and so you're gawking at something, but then to come to identify with is another kind of step. Yeah, we'll see if it
Why Ron DeSantis, JD Vance, and intelligent reactionaries have trouble copying Trump
SHERKAT: can survive. [00:51:00] Yeah,
SHEFFIELD: note, as, as you alluded to there that, in the elections where Trump was not on the ballot he, the, the Republican party does significantly worse and, and, and it's also the case, when you look at their, The people that, that have, I mean, cause Trump of course did face some, some perfunctory challenge in, in 2024 with Ron DeSantis, but Ron DeSantis has no ability to communicate outside of this right wing religious bubble, he, he has no ability to do that because of this self segregation, because, and of course, Rhonda Sanders is somebody who is, he's got a lottery, he's, he's got many years of education.
He's served in the military. But he cannot communicate to people who don't agree with him. From his background. And so, and then you JD Vance, I mean, JD Vance is the most. Negatively perceived vice presidential nominee in [00:52:00] history of polling and because he has the same kind of outlook as Ron DeSantis, just deeply unappealing, deeply bigoted, deeply offensive and full of resentment and deeply ignorant, but also super silly about it, whereas Donald Trump is deeply ignorant as well.
But he, he doesn't, he doesn't put on errors, right? Like he, he let is letting you know that, well, I'm just, I just say whatever pops into my head and, and I feel good about it, I'm here for the fun. He's having fun while he is doing it.
Whereas Rhon de Sandis and JD Vance, they hate. They hate their fellow Americans and they absolutely hate non Christians and, and, and women, you can see that in every word that they say. But the question is, the, for democracy's sake is, are there people who have that sort of Trumpian vaudeville flair that can, can continue that because it's interesting, I don't think Republicans have noticed that Trump, Trump is actually probably stronger than any [00:53:00] of their, Currently famous politicians.
SHERKAT: I think it really is, is the continuation of these previously uninterested voters as something that Trump got them in, that they got wrapped into Republican politics. And if he's gone, DeSantis is the head or whatever Vance I see them being mobilized by at least those two and that, but Trump obviously has been able to keep them in the coalition which, it's a tough coalition to be in.
I mean, cause really the Republican party is minority party. It's designed to be a minority party. It's the party of the rich and not everyone's rich. In fact, most
people aren't and
SHEFFIELD: it, and it doesn't serve its voters either. Like that's the other, so Trump, he entertain, like they vote for him because he entertains them, not because he serves [00:54:00] them.
SHERKAT: but he did serve them too. That's the other thing. And they didn't, W didn't get abortion banned, you
know,
SHEFFIELD: mm-Hmm.
SHERKAT: and that's what they always go back to. Well, what did they do for me? And, and Trump really means it if he's elected. He'll go ahead with trying to get people's marriages annulled from, because they're gay. He didn't
care. He didn't believe it. I mean, he probably his best friend was Roy Cohn if he had a friend.
But that's he doesn't care about the issue, but he'll go along with it. He'll sign it. If it goes into law. Yeah. He'll revoke people's
marriages. He'll sign an abortion ban. Whereas most other people would be telling, it's probably not good policy.
SHEFFIELD: Or good politics? Yeah.
SHERKAT: Yeah, we're good politics.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. All right.
Public education as the cornerstone of democracy
SHEFFIELD: Well, so maybe just for the future, I mean, we talked about that a little bit, but like from a, from a public [00:55:00] policy and education used to be kind of a strong bulwark against, I mean, ultimately the promise of democracy breaks down when the population is ill informed that's ultimately what happens.
And I mean, like, what, what's your, do you have any thoughts on that
SHERKAT: I mean, this roughly goes back to the beginnings of theorizing about democracy, continuing through the feminist papers and all through it is that without an educated population, you can't expect people to pick leaders that can lead a country to stability and greatness. And that's One of the things that's broken down, and obviously when this happened was with desegregation, not coincidentally this is when the Republican party turned against civil rights for African Americans and they began forming their own schools and they began breaking down laws about education. That you can form your own school and it doesn't have to be regulated. [00:56:00] that you can now and then that you can homeschool y them whatever you want in even my state Illinois, th governing people homeschoo people, nothing,
SHEFFIELD: standardized test? Yeah.
SHERKAT: To, how do you regulate anything just yet would think that would be one form of regulation and sure, maybe there are a handful of homeschooling parents who do a good job.
I've known one, maybe two in my entire life. And that's that's got to be regulated to this. We need people examining what's being taught in these Christian schools. We have high proportions of the population, especially in many southern cities, but not just in southern cities in the Midwest, too. who are going to these Christian academies where they teach David Bartonist history. My own brother graduated from a [00:57:00] fundamentalist Christian high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Very large
one, like division four in athletics, which is all they care about in Oklahoma. And their textbooks and history and civics are frightening. And they're written at like the third grade level. I mean, literally, bullet point, they look like comic books, like large comic books.
And this was something that they gave to high school students. And it's like dumbed down versions of David Barton, if you can imagine that. And that's the kind of curriculum that they're getting from all these fundamentalist outlets that they teach in these schools. They use them in homeschooling. They also use them in all these academies. And there is no regulation. And now it's going even further. Now we have Christian nationalists who are completely co opting the public school system. Such that, we're gonna be teaching the Bible in math class in [00:58:00] Oklahoma. Where I'm from um, and not the schools were already bad enough and there was no attempt.
Here's the other thing that we talk about. And this is a problem for our country. This is one of the biggest problems, but what made America great? We made kids in rural areas, go to school and learn real stuff because we were definitely afraid of the Soviets. And we knew that we had a big, stupid population. And they had to be educated and we forced it down many people's throats because it had to be they didn't want education They didn't think their kids had to graduate from high school. Why you need more than
three years education, That's crazy talk
SHEFFIELD: the Republican party participated in this for that reason.
SHERKAT: Really? They were the ones pushing it. But now we've let the rural areas go entirely I mean, you look, I always [00:59:00] read the obituaries and especially people who are famous scientists and medical people and things like this. And it's astonishing how many of them came from these rural hamlets in the middle of nowhere. They grew up on a farm in Maine or in Tennessee or something like that. And because they had some modicum of education, they could make it, they moved up, they went to college, they got advanced degrees, that's not going to happen, that's not happening. If you're living in rural America, you're going to a high school that probably has zero AP classes in anything. And not history, not English, not calculus, not chemistry. And it's frightening, especially given that you look at our birth rates. Those people have higher birth rates, but yet their children are not being educated. And the educators who go to the rural schools are not the best ones. If you went to [01:00:00] school and you tried hard, became a teacher and you want to work, you don't want to work in some small town in Oklahoma or Tennessee or wherever,
SHEFFIELD: Or a state where abortion is criminalized. Why would you want
SHERKAT: You're not going there. And if you're from there, you're going to leave.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
Non-religious Americans need to start advocating for themselves
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, it sounds like, so it sounds like you're saying that people who do. Believe in sound thinking and science have to start standing up for ourselves more and not be afraid. Cause like there is this undue respect, unfortunately, that society conditions us to impart to religious beliefs.
And people don't understand that it's a good idea perhaps to not talk about people's religion in your When you're conversing with them or, doing, seeing them at a school event or a community event or whatever, like that's a good idea not to talk about religious belief, but there have to be, there has to be a limit [01:01:00] on how far you apply that principle that these beliefs that are fault, that, that say evolution did not happen.
Like there are real, serious, literal consequences. If you do not believe that, like, if you think that evolution is not true, that affects what you think about pandemics that affects whether you, how you think about vaccines, because you have to get vaccinated for flu, for instance, because of evolution, these, these have real, like, there's some people that are non religious that they have this idea that, ah, it doesn't matter. These are just dumb beliefs. Who cares? They have no impact on them, but they do have very real acts and not just only on, voting for Donald Trump. There are many, many other down the line things and you've got to stand up for yourself. I mean, what do you, what's your, what do you think?
You agree with that?
SHERKAT: absolutely. I mean, I think hopefully as the secular segment of society, grows and it's continuing to grow, then we'll have [01:02:00] more of a realization that we have a stake in this too. That we can't just segment ourselves in college towns where our high school's good and in big cities and things like this. And ignore the fact that, well, 20 miles from where I sit is a school that has zero AP classes, a bunch of teachers who are fundamentalist Christians who God knows what they're teaching in their classes, and they have minimal prospects to get better teaching staff, to get more diverse offerings, so that some of these kids Who are smart kids.
That's the other thing that's where we started is this isn't about determinism is some of those kids can be saved. Some of those kids could be the next Nobel prize winners. And they're not going to be.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. If you just open the door for them, we have to keep the door open for [01:03:00] people.
Conclusion
SHEFFIELD: All right. Well, so for people who want to keep up with your work, Darren, what are you, what's your advice for them?
SHERKAT: Oh, just Google Scholar me, I guess. I've been working on some things and trying to get these other set of papers together and then a new book that's still still in development, but it should be gone the next year or two. I've taken on some administrative work this semester, which has gone haywire. So that's, that's, it's a little bit tougher to finish up papers and books. But I'm around.
SHEFFIELD: Okay. And we'll have some links to your, your papers as well. If you
can give me the ungated versions or, ways that we can link it. So,
SHERKAT: I try not to hate you. I'll tell you anything I've got.
SHEFFIELD: Okay, cool. All right. Well, thanks for being here, Darren. That's a good, great conversation.
SHERKAT: Good to talk to you, man.
SHEFFIELD: All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation, and you can always get more if you go to theoryofchange.show. You can get the video, audio, and [01:04:00] transcript of all the episodes.
The science behind why Donald Trump loves the ‘poorly educated’