Some of you have been sending me evidence for the Democrats: The Party Of The Rich file. Check this out:
1. Phillips Andover Academy, the posh New England prep school that once educated the children of the Republican elites, has now flipped:
Andover Academy has changed, reflecting national political trends. Instead of the children of the nation’s GOP corporate leaders, the school now educates the children of a professional, and largely Democratic, elite.
History teacher Anthony Rotundol said the students “tend to come from households that are more liberal than the voting public in general. . . . They tend, by and large, to come from the social groups that are most likely to support the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. The predominant class of the place and the predominant tone of the place is the kind of educated upper middle class.”
At the new Andover, no longer a male-only school, there is the Academy Gay/Straight Alliance, which holds an “annual festival of rainbow colors, drag dancing, and open discussion . . . to celebrate the gay and lesbian community.” The Brace Center for Gender Studies examines “the complex issues related to gender, including sexuality, race and ethnicity.” The Office of Community and Multicultural Development is “committed to raising awareness and encouraging sensitivity to differences of culture, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class, and geographical origin.”
2. Tom Edsall at The New York Times writes a really interesting piece about how the Top 20 Percent lives. Excerpts:
For years now, people have been talking about the insulated world of the top 1 percent of Americans, but the top 20 percent of the income distribution is also steadily separating itself — by geography and by education as well as by income.
This self-segregation of a privileged fifth of the population is changing the American social order and the American political system, creating a self-perpetuating class at the top, which is ever more difficult to break into.
More:
Political leverage is another factor separating the top 20 percent from the rest of America. The top quintile is equipped to exercise much more influence over politics and policy than its share of the electorate would suggest. Although by definition this group represents 20 percent of all Americans, it represents about 30 percent of the electorate, in part because of high turnout levels.
More:
Move forward to 2008 and 2012. In 2008, voters from families making $100,000 to $200,000 split their votes 51-48 in favor of John McCain, while those making in excess of $200,000 cast a slight 52-46 majority for Barack Obama.
At the same time that lifestyle and consumption habits of the affluent diverge from those of the middle and working class, wealthy voters are becoming increasingly Democratic, often motivated by their culturally liberal views. A comparison of exit poll data from 1984 and 1988 to data from the 2008 and 2012 elections reveals the changing partisan makeup of the top quintile.
Here’s the cherry on top:
At the same time, the priorities of the truly advantaged wing — voters with annual incomes in the top quintile, who now make up an estimated 26 percent of the Democratic general election vote — are focused on social and environmental issues: the protection and advancement of women’s rights, reproductive rights, gay and transgender rights and climate change, and less on redistributive economic issues.
Do read the whole thing. It’s fascinating — and terrible news for Republicans, given that their donor class is about as likely to share the downscale party members’ interest in social conservatism as the Democratic donor class is on income inequality.
3. Yale University’s president announced yesterday that the university plans to keep the name of Calhoun College, despite its connection to a leading Confederate, but it will do away with the title “master” for its heads of colleges, even though the term comes from the Latin magister, because slavery. Of particular interest is the name of one of the school’s new residential colleges. From his letter to alumni:
The northern-most college, sited closest to Science Hill, Pauli Murray College will honor a Yale alumna (’65 J.S.D., ’79 Hon. D.Div.) noted for her achievements in law and religion, and for her leadership in civil rights and the advancement of women. Pauli Murray enrolled at Hunter College in the 1920s, graduating in 1933 after deferring her studies following the Great Depression. Later, she began an unsuccessful campaign to enter the all-white University of North Carolina. Murray’s case received national publicity, and she became widely recognized as a civil rights activist.
A graduate of Howard Law School, Murray had an extraordinary legal career as a champion of racial and gender equity. United States Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall cited her book, States’ Laws on Race and Color, for its influence on the lawyers fighting segregation laws. President John F. Kennedy appointed her to the Committee on Civil and Political Rights of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women.
Awarded a fellowship by the Ford Foundation, Murray pursued a doctorate in law at Yale in order to further her scholarly work on gender and racial justice. She co-authored Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII, in which she drew parallels between gender-based discrimination and Jim Crow laws. In 1965, she received her J.S.D. from Yale Law School, the first African-American to do so. Her dissertation was entitled, Roots of the Racial Crisis: Prologue to Policy. Immediately thereafter, she served as counsel in White v. Crook, which successfully challenged discrimination on the basis of sex and race in jury selection. She was a cofounder, with thirty-one others, of the National Organization for Women.
Murray was a vice president of Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina; she left to become a professor at Brandeis University, where she earned tenure and taught until 1973. She was the first person to teach African-American studies and women’s studies at Brandeis.
The final stage of Murray’s career continued a life marked by confronting challenges and breaking down barriers. At age 63, inspired by her connections with other women in the Episcopal Church, she left Brandeis and enrolled at the General Theological Seminary. She became the first African-American woman ordained as an Episcopal priest.
Pauli Murray represents the best of Yale: a preeminent intellectual inspired to lead and prepared to serve her community and her country.
The Yale president left out this interesting bit of Anna Pauline “Pauli” Murray’s biography:
Murray struggled with her sexual and gender identity through much of her life. Her marriage as a teenager ended almost immediately with the realization that “when men try to make love to me, something in me fights”. Though acknowledging the term “homosexual” in describing others, Murray preferred to describe herself as having an “inverted sex instinct” that caused her to behave as a man attracted to women. She wanted a “monogamous married life”, but one in which she was the man. The majority of her relationships were with women whom she described as “extremely feminine and heterosexual”. In her younger years, Murray would often be devastated by the end of these relationships, to the extent that she was twice hospitalized for psychiatric treatment, in 1937 and in 1940.
Murray wore her hair short and preferred pants to skirts; due to her slight build, there was a time in her life when she was often able to pass as a teenage boy. In her twenties, she shortened her name from Pauline to the more androgynous Pauli. Murray pursued hormone treatments in the 1940s to correct what she saw as a personal imbalance, and even requested abdominal surgery to test if she had “submerged” male sex organs.
The reader, a Yale alumnus, who sent me this item remarks:
Isn’t this such a perfect choice for our day and age: the complete subversion of traditional religion (particularly Christianity), sex-gender, and sexuality, all in one package? Could there be a more perfect sign of our present ‘elite’ cultural crisis, a more symbolic thumb in the eye?
Indeed.