Finally, not just the Vietnam War shows more support by the educated. About
the Iraq War, surveys by the Pew Trust found the same pattern. In August 2004,
for example, two-thirds of all Americans who graduated from college favored
keeping troops in Iraq “long enough to bring stability,” while 61 percent with
less than a high school degree favored “a quick pullout.”^20
Table 2 supplies an additional example of nonthinking by the educated and
affluent: they are wrong about who supported the war. By a 9 to 1 margin, the
hundreds of educated people who have filled out Table 1 believed that
educated Americans were more dovish. Thus, the Vietnam exercise suggests
two errors by the elite. The first error that educated people made was being
excessively hawkish back in 1966, 1968, or 1971. The second error they made
was in filling out Table 1.
Why have my audiences been so wrong in remembering or deducing who
opposed the Vietnam War? One reason is that Americans like to believe that
schooling is a good thing. Most Americans tend automatically to equate
educated with informed or tolerant.^21 Traditional purveyors of social studies
and American history seize upon precisely this belief to rationalize their
enterprise, claiming that history courses lead to a more enlightened citizenry.
Respondents to my Vietnam exercise who thrash about claiming that it worked
only for that war or only because less-educated respondents feared having to
fight are still trying to preserve their belief in the mantra that education makes
us wise. The Vietnam exercise suggests the opposite is more likely true.
Audiences would not be so easily fooled if they would only recall that
educated people were and are more likely to be Republicans, while high
school dropouts are more likely to be Democrats. Hawkish right-wing
Republicans, including the core supporters of Barry Goldwater in 1964, of
Ronald Reagan in 1980, and of groups like the John Birch Society, come
disproportionately from the most educated and affluent segments of our society,
particularly dentists and physicians. So we should not be surprised that
education correlates with hawkishness. At the other end of the social-status
spectrum, although most African Americans, like most whites, initially
supported U.S. intervention in Vietnam, blacks were always more questioning
and more dovish than whites, and African American leaders—Muhammad Ali,
Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X—were prominent among the early
opponents of the war.^22