Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

In the political arena itself, Americans have become increasingly polarized.⁵⁰ Most people’s opinions are too shallow and uninformed to fit into a coherent ideology, but in a dubious form of progress, the percentage of Americans whose opinions are down-the-line liberal or down-the-line conservative doubled between 1994 and 2014, from 10 to 21 percent. The polarization has coincided with an increase in social segregation by politics: over those twenty years, the ideologues have become more likely to say that most of their close friends share their political views.

The parties have become more partisan as well. According to a recent Pew study, in 1994 about a third of Democrats were more conservative than the median Republican, and vice-versa. In 2014 the figures were closer to a twentieth. Though Americans across the political spectrum drifted leftward through 2004, since then they have diverged on every major issue except gay rights, including government regulation, social spending, immigration, environmental protection, and military strength. Even more troublingly, each side has become more contemptuous of the other. In 2014, 38 percent of Democrats held “very unfavorable” views of the Republican Party (up from 16 percent in 1994), and more than a quarter saw it as “a threat to the nation’s well-being.” Republicans were even more hostile to Democrats, with 43 percent viewing the party unfavorably and more than a third seeing it as a threat. The ideologues on each side have also become more resistant to compromise.

Fortunately, a majority of Americans are more moderate in all these opinions, and the proportion who call themselves moderate has not changed in forty years.⁵¹ Unfortunately, it’s the extremists who are more likely to vote, donate, and pressure their representatives. There is little reason to think that any of this has improved since the survey was conducted in 2014, to put it mildly.

Universities ought to be the arena in which political prejudice is set aside and open-minded investigation reveals the way the world works. But just when we need this disinterested forum the most, academia has become more politicized as well—not more polarized, but more left-wing. Colleges have always been more liberal than the American population, but the skew has been increasing. In 1990, 42 percent of faculty were far left or liberal (11 percentage points more than the American population), 40 percent were moderate, and 18 percent were far right or conservative, for a left-to-right ratio of 2.3 to 1. In 2014 the proportions were 60 percent far left or liberal (30 percentage points more than the population), 28 percent moderate, and 12 percent conservative, a ratio of 5 to 1.⁵² The proportions vary by field: departments of business, computer science, engineering, and health science are evenly split, while the humanities and social sciences are decidedly on the left: the proportion of conservatives is in the single digits, and they are outnumbered by Marxists two to one.⁵³ Professors in the physical and biological sciences are in between, with few radicals and virtually no Marxists, but liberals outnumber conservatives by a wide margin.

The liberal tilt of academia (and of journalism, commentary, and intellectual life) is in some ways natural.⁵⁴ Intellectual inquiry is bound to challenge the status quo, which is never perfect. And verbally articulated propositions, intellectuals’ stock in trade, are more congenial to the deliberate policies typically favored by liberals than to the diffuse forms of social organization such as markets and traditional norms typically favored by conservatives.⁵⁵ A liberal tilt is also, in moderation, desirable. Intellectual liberalism was at the forefront of many forms of progress that almost everyone has come to accept, such as democracy, social insurance, religious tolerance, the abolition of slavery and judicial torture, the decline of war, and the expansion of human and civil rights.⁵⁶ In many ways we are (almost) all liberals now.⁵⁷