Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

I'm an upper-middle class, over-educated professional expert, and I'm strongly liberal for selfish reasons: mostly, I want to live in a climate of social peace, and would prefer to be surrounded by people who foster a mood of solidarity and benevolence, rather than a cut-throat and ever-worsening competitive mindset.

So sure, one way is to protect myself and those I love behind a gated community. But that's pretty much voluntarily throwing myself to jail, I'd rather make it less necessary for others to be aggressive against my kin. I believe it requires more (and smarter) redistribution.

Another reason why it's my selfish interest, as a professional expert, to continuously reshuffle wealth, is that my social value resides in what I know and in my ability to learn, not in my family's accumulated wealth. Stabilising accumulated wealth, especially across generations, would make it harder to use my skills in order to climb higher on the social ladder.

Is my education a factor in this view? Probably.

* It helps me grasping some sociological insights which ought to be obvious. For instance, while hearing political speeches about wealth (re)distribution, I stay aware that the property laws are a social construct that must be agreed upon and can be altered at will by society, not a natural (let alone a God-given) law.

* It exposed me to a lot of competition, in school then at work, and although I've been a winner on average, I aspire to more fulfilling activities than turning others into losers. I have no revenge to take on others people, I don't enjoy crushing them.

* Having gone from penniless undergrad to minimum-wage PhD student to well-paid junior then senior specialist, I've experienced a variety of wealth levels. As a result I'm convinced that once basic needs are addressed, monetary incentives don't work the way Adam Smith' sycophants pretend they do. Money's meaningful as a way to keep score, and to compare myself among my social peers; but taxes don't affect that much, as long as they don't reverse relative wealth between potential peers.

What do you think Liberal means? In the UK, as well as in the USA, it generally doesn't mean "the market solves everything" (You might be thinking of Libertarianism[1]).

The article explicitly references redistributive economic views, quite the reverse of the market-centric view you attach to the label.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism

"Libertarianism is wedded to an epistemological humility...we know we don’t know as much as we think we know."

I'm not exactly sure. Perhaps because they're simple, rational, and can be universalized.

I have also considered this question, my answer is that the party on the "right" will have a core mission of maintaining the power and wealth of the powerful and wealthy.

This is, unsuprisingly, not a great vote winner for the masses. So around this core mission they need to build a platform, and so they pick the easiest way to attract voters to this cause up until the point when they get a majority that's able to actually fulfil the core mission.

This explains lots of interesting things about politics. Why do the right hate foreigners, gays, athiests, muslims, transexuals etc. Why do they love patriotisms and wars and the good old days? Is there any obvious link between "good business" or "small government" and hating gays? The basic answer is that it's a cheap way to rally people to your cause.

Nowadays it's common for right wing people to be openly gay, when for a long time they had to be hypocritical and keep it secret while attacking their own community. But cleary there's no direct link between sexuality and political orientation, the party just decided to start a culture war against a powerless minority for their own profit and some people ended on the wrong side of the line.

Just think Buzzfeed but for politics, they want your click/vote, and they'll plumb the depths of human psychology to find out what they need to say to get it.

Corbyn is like the anti-buzzfeed. Dry boring headlines about what's actually important. Let's try pacificism, and consider that perhaps the people who died on the other side of our wars were actually human too.

So I would say it's irrational, most people are if they don't put time and effort into not being. And if someone has a financial interest in you not being rational, they have a good head start and some obvious levers to push to get what they want.