![]() ![]() ![]() Vance proclaimed that “the professors are the enemy,” while in Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis and his allies actively threaten academic freedom. Today, Republicans have crossed the line from criticizing to demonizing higher education. Instead, they were the educated elites (including many immigrants) who were thriving in the new economy, as well as the political leaders from both parties who didn’t do anything to help. ![]() As white working-class Americans struggled to make sense of economic and cultural change, listening to Limbaugh and other talk shows let them know that “they were not alone.” For these Americans, the people responsible for their problems were neither the CEOs offshoring jobs and putting profit above American workers nor the Republicans decimating unions and embracing free-market fundamentalism. But Bunch’s story ultimately is about culture, not economics. The story begins with the real economic dislocations that accompanied globalization and increased the earnings gap between Americans with and without college degrees. They are not wrong to sense that “the American way of college went off the rails,” Bunch concludes. Rather than dismiss the concerns of Limbaugh’s listeners, Bunch takes them seriously. There was something about what colleges did that convinced many of Limbaugh’s listeners that, in journalist Will Bunch’s words, “nothing in America made sense anymore.” And it was this confusion, Bunch argues in his new book, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics- and How to Fix It, that produced the biggest divide in American politics, between those with and without college degrees. TALK-SHOW HOST Rush Limbaugh, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom under former president Donald Trump, relied on his listeners’ resentment of college-educated folks throughout the 1990s to stoke the fires of culture war. ![]()
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