On Wednesday, Yascha Mounk, lecturer on government at Harvard University, wrote a fascinating piece for The Atlantic regarding a new study from Stephen Hawkins, Daniel Yudkin, Miriam Juan-Torres and Tim Dixon, titled Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape. There’s a lot of fascinating material in the report, but Mounk picks out the biggest gem: Americans hate political correctness. Or at least nearly all Americans do, the only exceptions being far-Left progressives.
And who are these far-Left progressives? They’re disproportionately white and upper class.
So much for the narrative that PC protects minorities, and sets them in opposition to the racist white majority.
According to Mounk:
Among the general population, a full 80 percent believe that “political correctness is a problem in our country.” Even young people are uncomfortable with it, including 74 percent ages 24 to 29, and 79 percent under age 24. On this particular issue, the woke are in a clear minority across all ages… Whites are ever so slightly less likely than average to believe that political correctness is a problem in the country: 79 percent of them share this sentiment. Instead, it is Asians (82 percent), Hispanics (87percent), and American Indians (88 percent) who are most likely to oppose political correctness.
The poorer you are, the less likely you are to support political correctness. The more highly educated you are, the more you’re likely to support political correctness.
Fully 97 percent of conservatives hate PC; 61 percent of liberals do, too. But only 30 percent of progressives dislike political correctness. And according to Mounk, they’re highly educated, white and rich:
Compared with the rest of the (nationally representative) polling sample, progressive activists are much more likely to be rich, highly educated—and white. They are nearly twice as likely as the average to make more than $100,000 a year. They are nearly three times as likely to have a postgraduate degree. And while 12 percent of the overall sample in the study is African American, only 3 percent of progressive activists are. With the exception of the small tribe of devoted conservatives, progressive activists are the most racially homogeneous group in the country.
All of which suggests that woke SJWs aren’t the future – they’re the past. Which is good news for the rest of the country.