Read on Twitter
There's nothing wrong with this article; the last line is perhaps the most important. But in terms of the Broader Discourse on this point, a lot of folks seem to have unrealistic expectations of what education & knowledge accomplish. (1/n) https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/01/11/ted-cruz-know-better/?tid=ss_tw
The general idea is that fancy Ivy League educations mean that folks like Cruz and Hawley should "know better." Putting aside the elitism involved in accepting that premise, there are a number of ways that it us not consistent with what we know about education & knowledge. (2/n)
Following Converse (1964), we've known for a long time that variables like education and knowledge are associated with a stronger rather than weaker tendencies to hew to an ideological worldview. (3/n)
Moreover, knowledge -- even fairly domain-specific knowledge -- is often associated with more rather than less motivated reasoning in favor of desired conclusions: (4/n) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/pops.12396
Education (and in some cases political knowledge) may also strengthen rather than weaken the influence of group prejudices on policy judgment: (5/n) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0092-5853.2004.00076.x
Lastly, education and knowledge appears to strengthen rather than weaken the link between needs for security and certainty and political preferences, rather than uniformly blocking rigid motivations: (6/n) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/pops.12477
In other words, there's no reason to believe that knowledge of the law & politics, as imparted in the hallowed halls of Harvard Law and Yale Law, will invariably discipline strong identity-based motivations to reach certain conclusions & pursue parochial goals. (7/7)
