Why the GOP Needs the Academic Elite

America's top students may be a tiny percentage of the national vote, but without them the GOP can't develop the policies it needs to govern.

This is part three in a series.  Click here for part 1 and part 2.

OK. So the Republicans might have offended some small academic elites across the country – does it matter?

I think it is too early to say whether it matters directly in terms of demographics and electoral success. The highly educated are a tiny percentage of the country, of course.

However, there is another side to the challenge: one of governance and policy. A party needs a well-educated echelon – call it an elite – to formulate policy to deal with complex challenges. Without the philosophical and academic achievements of the likes of Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman and James Q. Wilson, the Reagan revolution would not have been possible.

Even the Bush administration, which critics tried to portray as anti-academic, benefited enormously from the Ivy League. George W. Bush went to Yale (as did his father) and went on to do an MBA at Harvard – albeit with moderate grades. Donald Rumsfeld went to Princeton. Paul Wolfowitz was at Cornell – though a Democrat at the time. Treasury secretary Hank Paulson started out at Dartmouth, before doing his MBA at Harvard. Chairman in President Bush’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board – and National Security Advisor in the administration of George H.W. Bush – Brent Scowcroft, did his PhD at Columbia. Condoleezza Rice had been a Provost at Stanford, “the Ivy of the West”. Robert Gates, who Obama has retained, went to the College of William and Mary, one of “the Public Ivies”. And David Frum, went to Yale before he got his J.D. at Harvard.

I believe future Republican administrations would also try to draw on such talent to formulate policy. However, the well is drying up. So few of the experts in any given field will in the future be Republican. That is an enormous problem. The intellectual resources directed at finding conservative answers to today’s problems are weakened year by year. If not quite critical yet, thanks to the efforts of an older generation of Republicans, the ramifications of this trend might be dramatic.

Finally, there is a question of identity: If the conservative movement – for whatever reasons – is unable to comprise those who seek knowledge, to improve their own situation and that of their community, what kind of movement is it? Of course, I do not mean to belittle the efforts of small-business owners across the country, or any other group that works hard and contributes to their communities. However, it seems to me that a movement whose ideology flows from personal responsibility, moderation, and a respect for accumulated wisdom, losing this demographic so drastically cannot be a good sign.

Predictably, many Republicans who observe these trends will blame the academics: Leftists, who like to boss people around, who don’t connect with “real” people’s concerns. However, Republicans also like to argue that people are not stupid, and that Democrats should stop talking down to them. That is a fair point. People’s concerns are a reality, and politicians should to the best of their ability try to understand what is reasonable about them. However, Republicans pretend that there is one group that really is stupid, one group that just “doesn’t get it”: Ivy League students.

At least for me, that this one particular group should “get” the country’s problems so much less than everyone else, goes against, well, common sense. And in the end, therefore, the problem in this story might not reside in Tompkins County. The better question might be what is wrong with the Republican Party.