​“In six polls conducted this month, Mr. Trump leads among white registered voters without a degree by a margin of 58 percent to 30 percent.” Upshot NYT 26 July 2016.    This explains better than anything else I know Trump’s  strategy.

 He can win  by sweeping these  voters into his camp.

​ He doesn’t need, and knows he will never get, many African-Americans, Hispanics, Latinos, feminists, Ph.D.s ...  to vote for him. He does not need them. In fact, by deliberately alienating them he can mobilize the one co0nstituency he does need, whites, especially males, who have never gone to college. All he has to do is to use their fears to erode their hopes.
Do not underestimate this man. He can win by using this strategy.
But let’s step back and ask what this discrepancy in voting patterns says about the effects of a college education?  Is it possible that college actually do something, after all?  Or is the discrepancy just genetic: the smart kids go to college and the dumb kids stay home to work in a coal mine?  Would that access to college was so perfect that all the bright kids applied,  got admitted to college and got the financial aid they needed to attend.
Or is the explanation socio-economic. Lacking a college education the Trump voters have been left behind in a globalizing, knowledge-based economy?  Careful: remember that in some primaries the median income of Trump voters was $72,000, way above the national median.  These voters may be mad, mistaken, hoodwinked, but they have not  all been “left behind”.
Or –a third possibility – is the explanation educational: something happens in college after all?  Could it be that students learn, even if they major in Business. Communications, or Basket Weaving, to recognize a fraudulent appeal when they hear one?  
It would be revealing to crunch some numbers to determine the relative weight of these factors.  In the meantime, Chilon of Sparta might help.  When asked , “What is the difference between the educated and the uneducated?” he answered, “Good hopes” (Diogenes Laertius Lives of the Eminent Philosophers 1.69).  Think about it.

​Coincidence’:  Up here in our Maine house I was finishing a draft called “Pericles and Athenian Democracy: Thucydides 2.37.1 “  (now posted on academia.edu) when it came time to go to the town meeting here on Westport Island, Maine.  We are metics, or helots, in ancient Greek terms, since we cannot vote here, being legal residents of North Carolina.  We can, however, go to the meeting and listen as the citizens of Westport go through every item on a 41 item agenda, or “Warrant.” 
 
Here’s the convergence that surprised me: what I found reading Thucydides seemed t be replicated in my neighbors at the meeting.  The Funeral Oration, I argued , didn’t put as much emphasis on  decision making as on the effects of  participating in a democracy. That results in citizens who are self-reliant, resilient, innovative, or as Thucydides puts it are “equal to so many emergencies and graced by so happy a versatility as the Athenian.” (2.41.1 Tr. Crawley)
 
I see something similar coming out of the town meeting. I do not want to exaggerate: Westport (a thinly populated island eleven miles long) is no Athens. It’s more like one of the villages or wards throughout Attics, the demes, building blocks of Athenian demo-kratiad. Nor is Westport a model of participation: only about 70 of the town’s more than 600 registered voters showed up for the meeting (three hours on a sunny Saturday morning). But those who did were articulate, forthright, engaged.  Many of the citizens had never gone beyond high school, but the quality of discussion was better than that in many faculty meetings I have seen.  There was very little posturing or grand-standing.  Things could get contentious but people found ways to show their mutual respect.  The decisions reached seemed to me good ones, but more important, those who participated, I suspect, took away some of the qualities I respect among Mainers, not so different perhaps from those Thucydides observed, and (I believe) admired, among the Athenians and others who participated in democracies (Thuc. 7.55.2).
July 2016