Not the rich and the poor, but liberal-progressives and Constitutional traditionalists.
Michael Barone gives us an interesting perspective.
The key factor in this split is politicization of education. Before the 1960s students were taught history, literature, and civics that were little changed since the late 19th century. Since the convulsions of student radicalism in the 1960s and 1970s, our youth have been taught that the United States is an oppressive nation guilty of crimes against humanity.
As I wrote in The Liberal Jihad: The Hundred Year War Against The Constitution:
The liberal-progressive jihad has been most dangerously consequential in education. Radicalized young students fan out across the country and, in turn, radicalize hundreds more when they become teachers.
Liberals adopted the prescription of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and transformed education from a method of developing character and preserving the traditions of society into a value-free methodology. Teaching history was abandoned, or history was re-written under multi-cultural education, so that students could be radicalized to believe that the United States is an evil nation with a sordid past.
Education is a principal battlefield today and it is also the best hope for restoring and preserving the Constitution.
If our federal republic, under a Constitution of limited powers at the national level, is to survive, balance must be restored in education, from earliest grades through college graduate levels. Teaching faculties must be populated by constitutional traditionalists in at least equal numbers to radical leftists. Curricula and textbooks likewise must be rebalanced to present both sides of the argument between traditionalists and liberal-progressive-socialists. Politically-correct speech and behavior codes must be abolished or restructured to recognize students’ First Amendment rights to express views that oppose liberal-progressive-socialism.
Today, after a century and a half of relentless struggle, the liberal jihad has gained effective control of American education, and it holds major redoubts in the media, politics, and the judiciary. Control of education ensures that an increasingly higher percentage of students will enter adulthood as radicalized converts to the religion of socialism. This means that liberal-progressive-socialists will, within another generation or so, control all key elements of the nation. They will then be free to remove final vestiges of the ethos of individualism that gave birth to the United States in 1776. We will have become a fully socialized nation like France, drifting downward toward third-world status, as our economic productivity and inventiveness are slowly crushed under the regulatory controls required to maintain equality of income and wealth. We will all be poorer, but, in accordance with socialist social justice, equally so.
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