patrick.net

Maybe the battle is between those who unfairly benefit from credentialism, and those who don't.

Liberals defend their credentials which allow them to exploit those who don't have the same credentials. Credentials create monopolies, the ability to set high prices regardless of quality of service. It is a way to defeat free market competition.

The funding of universities depends entirely on the demand for their degrees, which they control. Their biggest horror would be a system where anyone could take tests to prove competence in a subject without paying for the years of classes and subjecting themselves to obedience to professors.

Thatcher and Trump refused to give the automatic respect many academics feel is their due. They gave the impression that they could see right through us, an uncomfortable feeling.

- Thomas Frank

Most of academia is less about learning than about paying for a paper proof of status and conformity. Non-conformists are expelled from schools, or failed out. Most teachers do not like their authority to be questioned. Bosses like the academic proof of conformity when they hire. The most "educated" are the most obedient.

Trump was a threat to their credentials and therefore a threat to their incomes and status.

The academic elite need a reason to hate those threatening themselves, therefore they use imaginary "racism", to which there is no defense. The accusation is the conviction.

Then they don't need to worry about the real class problem, which is independent of race. They would be uncomfortable looking at class, because they'd have to look at themselves and their unearned class privileges.

So their faith in the injection is faith in the "expert class" of which they are members, and they demand that the hoi polloi submit to it as an expression of the elite's power and prestige.