Every word that crosses the teleprompter at the Democratic National Committee is vetted by the party, and so it is a Kamala Harris-approved message when a congresswoman attacked Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) for going to Yale (after attending Ohio State and joining the Marines).

This line of attack is revealing in a thousand ways, and conservative columnist Megan McArdle had the sharpest critique of it.

The anti-Yale line is interesting, in part, because attacking Vance as an intellectual is a part of the Democratic ticket’s messaging this year.

If you’ve been following politics for more than a few months, this is funny because the story of American politics over the past 25 years is a story of Democrats increasingly becoming the party of academia and the hypereducated, while Republicans are increasingly becoming the party of the working class.

This realignment, in fact, has been at the heart of liberals’ self-satisfaction and at the heart of their disdain for the Right.

Conservative-turned-liberal Bruce Bartlett wrote an article headlined “The GOP’s Murderous Anti-Intellectualism,” in which he made this argument:

“They know that a quality education will tend to make people dismiss the wrong-headedness and excessive simplicity of the conservative worldview, because education encourages critical thinking, open-mindedness, and truth-seeking. Therefore, conservatives and Republicans have long denigrated college professors, intellectuals, and others among the well-educated class in order to undermine and dismiss their ideas….”

This exact critique can apply to the DNC’s convention script and to the Democratic ticket’s campaign theme: Walz and Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH) know that an Ivy League education will tend to make people dismiss the wrong-headedness and excessive simplicity of the liberal worldview. Specifically, they know that studying philosophy encourages “critical thinking, open-mindedness, and truth-seeking.”

In 2022, a Harvard scholar wrote, “those who are anti-intellectual tend to be supportive of populism, including Trump in the U.S.” These anti-intellectuals are very bad, according to this paper:

“Anti-intellectualism — a distrust of intellectuals and experts — has had a significant political presence in the U.S. and globally, especially in recent years. Anti-intellectualism drives support for phenomena such as populism, a rejection of scientific consensus, and health and science misinformation endorsement. Therefore, discovering what drives someone to be more anti-intellectual is highly important in understanding contemporary public opinion and political behavior.”

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A CNN columnist wrote earlier this year that “Ivy League institutions are a favorite target for the new Trump populist right and reflect the evolution of the Republican Party in recent years away from its own elitist roots.”

The national news media overwhelmingly comes from the academic elite, and so for them, it has been enjoyable to watch the GOP become anti-intellectual and the Democratic Party become the party of the Ivy League and advanced degrees. Now that Democrats are running against the academic elites, one wonders how the news media will handle this awkward situation.