Republicans are increasingly hostile toward educational institutions, professors, and students in national and state politics, with conservative media portraying college campuses as hotspots of radical leftism while Republican politicians rhetorically and financially target universities. Intellectual opinion journalism has become more influential among liberals over time, exemplified by new online ventures and permeability between media and academia, while traditional venues for conservative intellectual discourse have lost influence to more populist and conspiratorial platforms. As a consequence of these developments, Republican voters no longer trust mainstream media and research to deliver nonpartisan information, preferring to accept and promote the claims of overtly ideological alternative sources. Republicans no longer trust scientists or universities either, with each taking on a more proactive political role. Slow liberal cultural advance is also apparent in nonprofits and advocacy organizations, increasingly aligning more institutions with Democrats. The information environments on each side thus reinforce their diverging electoral and governing trends.

This is a book about change – both political and social change. Over the past several decades, well within the firsthand memory of many living adults, the United States has experienced a series of overlapping social revolutions. Nearly every aspect of American life has been transformed: from the quality of citizens’ economic and educational opportunities to the ethos and leadership of major institutions, and from the demographic composition of the American public to the prevailing norms of culture, language, and behavior.

Government action was not the sole cause of these developments, and their consequences likewise extend far beyond the realm of politics. But ideological debate and partisan competition in America have come to separate those who have accepted or welcomed change from those who have found it costly or alienating.

Democrats prize experts in staffing the Executive Branch while Republicans prefer political operatives and media spokespersons. But across the issue spectrum, policies are increasingly complicated and technical, requiring knowledge of many previous rounds of institution-building and policymaking. New social problems require remixing of complex policy tools, often led by research and experts. Addressing climate change and public health, for example, requires professionalized expert workforces and technical analyses. Even seemingly value-based areas of policymaking such as economic development and racial discrimination increasingly require subject-matter experts and formalized training. And the issue of higher education itself has increasingly divided the parties. Chapter 6 documents how each policy area is increasingly dominated by complex proposals from liberals accompanied by conservative suspicion of expert-led governance. Policy knowledge and evaluation capacity have become increasingly tethered to the Democratic Party, with believably nonpartisan expertise now in short supply.

Increasing educational standards in the workforce have increased the use of experts throughout the economy, leading to processes that more closely resemble bureaucracies and stakeholder policymaking, with an increasing emphasis on culturally liberal values such as diversity, representation, and social responsibility. The guiding industries and workforces of the scientific and technology sectors have enabled a technocratic ethos in government and industry. But public opposition to technocracy and skepticism of meritocracy is growing among voters, allowing conservatism to brand itself as an opposition movement to the extension of government reach and the associated prevalence of “politically correct” messages and practices across educational institutions and in the workplace. The polarized American brand of politics pervades internal debates across organizational sectors, enlarging the scope of activist politics beyond campaigns and government, especially where educational and cultural divides are strongest. The distinct styles of the culture war’s two conflicting sides have become more dissimilar at the national, state, and local levels, even in ostensibly apolitical arenas.

Since 2008, Democrats have replaced much of their previous strategic defensiveness, going on offense in the culture war. Under Trump, Republican cultural appeals shifted their emphasis from religious-based moralizing to ethnonationalist and antifeminist resentment. A thermostatic backlash to Trump’s conservative policies further advanced popular liberalizing social trends during his presidency. But each leftward advance brings counterattacks. Democratic goals often require complicated national direction and implementation, which can be effectively demonized. Social activism on the left increasingly operates within prominent social institutions, reducing demand for the construction of explicitly liberal-aligned alternative institutions while heightening institutional skepticism on the right. These dynamics have reached the topic of democracy itself, with academics arguing that they must highlight risks raised by the American right and Republicans seeing scholars moving toward the rhetoric of Democratic politicians.

Increasing educational standards in the workforce have increased the use of experts throughout the economy, leading to processes that more closely resemble bureaucracies and stakeholder policymaking, with an increasing emphasis on culturally liberal values such as diversity, representation, and social responsibility. The guiding industries and workforces of the scientific and technology sectors have enabled a technocratic ethos in government and industry. Public opposition to technocracy and skepticism of meritocracy is growing among voters, allowing conservatism to brand itself as an opposition movement to the extension of government reach and the associated prevalence of “politically correct” messages and practices across educational institutions and in the workplace. The polarized American brand of politics now pervades internal debates across organizational sectors, enlarging the scope of activist politics beyond campaigns and government, especially where educational and cultural divides are strongest. The distinct styles of the culture war’s two conflicting sides have become more dissimilar at the national, state, and local levels, even in ostensibly apolitical arenas.

The biggest change in the party coalitions since the 1980s has been the movement of high-education whites into the Democratic Party and the defection of low-education whites to the GOP. Drawing on evidence from opinion surveys, election returns, and demographic data, Chapter 3 documents the parties’ changing voters and geographic constituencies. These trends continued in the 2020 election despite Democratic efforts to reverse the party’s declining popularity among noncollege whites, with some signs educational divides will spread to other racial and ethnic groups. Candidates, activists, political appointees and staffers, judges, party leaders, and campaign workers all demonstrate the same increasing divisions as rank-and-file voters. Democrats may suffer electorally because the Electoral College and apportionment of the Senate grants noncollege whites disproportionate voting power, but college-educated citizens punch above their weight in other forms of influence: as thought leaders, interest group activists, educators, media figures, scientific experts, candidates, political professionals, lawyers, and financial donors.

Global trends in the rich world, filtered through America’s unique two-party system, have transformed each party’s coalition and reinforced contrasting views of expertise. Although the rise of social issues and the rising importance of education are transnational, they raise unique challenges for each major American party. Each side has responded by shifting its agenda and public image. Democratic politicians have balanced their instinctive reluctance to alienate culturally traditionalist voting blocs against internal pressure from party members for a socially progressive, intellectually erudite, and demographically diverse party leadership. Republicans have been compelled to defer to a popular conservative media apparatus that promotes aversion to social transformation and hostility to claims of expertise by nonconservative authorities. Barack Obama (the wonky advocate of social change) and Donald Trump (the plain-spoken, nostalgic nemesis of experts) both personify their respective parties. These party leaders repel as well as attract, reinforcing our two-sided politics.

Sonia Sanchez is known for her contributions as a poet, activist, dramatist, educationist, and a champion of African American culture. She is regarded worldwide as “a living legend,” a revered female writer of the Black community (Wood 2010, xi). Like Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Jean Toomer and Margaret Walker, with whom she is compared, Sanchez has opened a “space in American letters where the racial self may be heard, affirmed, and strengthened” (Andrews, Foster, and Harris 1997, 643). Her poetics and politics are inseparable. As she recalled in 2000: “The cultural thing, I think, was the existence of us as black folk in a place that did not speak well of us, a country that not only had enslaved us but afterward had ignored us—had segregated us and conspired to keep us from learning even the simplest things” (Sanchez and Kelly 2017, 1034). Sanchez, alongside her fellow revolutionary Black Arts poets, frequently saw her activism questioned: “[People asked,] Why do you agitate? You have brains, talent, education. You can find a nice comfortable niche and forget about others” (quoted in Randall 1970, 9). But to find a nice comfortable niche was to negate or compromise her blackness and to forget about the systematic discrimination of African Americans, her “brothers” and “sisters,” who were deprived of a comfortable niche.

Sanchez's lifelong sociopolitical activism has earned diverse praise. Nicole Moore (2010, 2) argues that Sanchez “infuses her writing with the type of historical and cultural significance and power that makes each word sharp as a razor blade and as hard as any Tupac [Shakur] lyric.” Essence magazine has called her poetry “a must for all readers,” while writer, poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou, has called Sanchez “a lion in literature's forest” (Leopold 2013, para. 4). Reflecting on herself, Sanchez says, “[a]s a poet, I know that I have sharp words” (quoted in Ballin 2015, 3). The self-appraisal is not unlike Oodgeroo's view of her poetic purpose: “I’d rather hit them with my words than pick up a gun and shoot them” (quoted in Fox 2011, 62). In his introduction to Sanchez's Home Coming, Don L. Lee (1969, 7–8) argues that “Sonia wants us to/live & to/live is not synonymous with to/exist.