Democrats See MAGA Movement As a Peasants’ Revolt

The commentariat has made much lately of the fabled “diploma divide” in our politics and the propensity of “highly educated” voters to cast their ballots for Democrats. Their fascination with this statistic reveals a belief that the modern conservative movement – “America First,” “MAGA,” whatever you want to call it – is little more than a peasants’ revolt against the so-called elites who now dominate most of our institutions.

Democrats have never been particularly good at masking their disdain for Americans who don’t share their progressive sensibilities. Perhaps the most infamous example is Hillary Clinton’s 2016 remark about “deplorables.” But Barack Obama also smeared voters who are “bitter” and “cling to guns or religion,” while Joe Biden called Trump supporters “garbage” and various other Democrats have slandered Trump and his supporters as “racist” and “fascist,” ad infinitum.

The clear pattern that emerges is that liberal elites simply think that they are better than everyone else and thus have an inherent right to rule over them. This sentiment is why Sarah Longwell, publisher of the Bulwark, appeared recently on the Radio Atlantic podcast and declared: “The Republican Party has to be defeated, and I think MAGA specifically, I want to defeat it and then salt the Earth with its ashes.”

Such vitriol is the product of sheer loathing for ordinary Americans and reflects real fear that the Republican coalition is now building on the working-class base that defected from the Democrats in 2016.

Democrats hope to replace those voters with college-educated voters. But there’s a problem with that plan – college-educated voters are not all trending Democrats’ way. According to a Pew Research Center analysis, college grads went for the Democrat presidential nominee by 21 points in 2016 and 24 points in 2020, but only 16 points in 2024.

Even among white college grads, Democrats’ advantage declined from 17 points in 2016 to 15 points in 2020 and then 12 points in 2024. Meanwhile, Trump’s advantage among non-college educated voters steadily grew from seven points in 2016 to eight points in 2020 and 14 points in 2024.

The only educational group among whom Democrats enjoyed a consistently large advantage was voters with postgraduate degrees. They won this cohort by 37 points in 2016, 35 points in 2020, and 32 points in 2024.

In short, Democrats have bet the house on courting voters with advanced degrees – particularly those in nebulous fields such as “gender studies.” These degree-collectors took out loans for exorbitant sums to buy diplomas with no real economic utility. This is why we have as of late seen a groundswell of support within the Democrat Party for student loan forgiveness and “tax the rich” schemes that would redistribute wealth to this impoverished class of advanced degree holders.

The number one concern of this group of voters is locking the rubes out of power – starting with Donald Trump who, despite being a New York billionaire, has more than any other politician in recent memory channeled the frustrations of the working class.

Consequently, if the Democrats retake the House in November, they will impeach the President again. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), who would likely become Judiciary Committee chairman, recently told NBC’s Meet the Press that Trump has “undoubtedly” committed impeachable offenses. This echoed a press release he issued last year discussing impeachment:

“Impeachment is a critical means of political and constitutional self-defense that the people have available to use against a lawless president who acts like a king and commits high crimes and misdemeanors against the people.”

Raskin was, of course, a major driver of the two previous Trump impeachments and was the lead House manager in the second Senate impeachment trial. The second trial was so farcical that Chief Justice John Roberts, who would normally preside over such proceedings, refused to participate.

A third impeachment would likely be just as ridiculous, but securing a conviction wouldn’t really be the point. The real object of the game would be to crush the morale of the peasants’ revolt against the brave new world established by the Obama and Biden regimes and only interrupted by Trump.

It is difficult to overstate the shock to the system that was caused by Trump’s 2016 victory. Hillary Clinton was Obama’s anointed successor, and she was meant to serve her two terms consolidating Obama’s nascent one-party autocracy. Thus, when the hoi polloi got above themselves and put Trump in the White House, his destruction became the primary objective of Washington’s self-appointed optimates.

The evidence for this was released to the public by then-Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard on July 18, 2025:

“The issue I am raising is not a partisan issue. It is one that concerns every American. The information we are releasing today clearly shows there was a treasonous conspiracy in 2016 committed by officials at the highest level of our government. Their goal was to subvert the will of the American people and enact what was essentially a years-long coup with the objective of trying to usurp the President from fulfilling the mandate bestowed upon him by the American people.”

After months of investigation into the conspiracy, DNI Gabbard discovered that President Obama ordered DNI James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, Secretary of State John Kerry, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and FBI Director Andrew McCabe to manufacture a fraudulent Intelligence Community Assessment based on the notorious Steele Dossier. This bogus assessment was used by these people as the basis for launching a years-long attempt to destroy Donald Trump’s presidency.

The same assessment was also used as the basis for the infamous Russia Hoax and the interminable Mueller investigation – which never found a scrap of evidence that Trump or any of his associates had colluded with Vladimir Putin to somehow rig the 2016 presidential election.

Despite having been thoroughly debunked, sections of the dossier were nonetheless used by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as the pretext for launching the first impeachment inquiry and the 2020 impeachment trial. DNI Gabbard wrote this about the Obama cabal:

“Their egregious abuse of power and blatant rejection of our Constitution threatens the very foundation and integrity of our democratic republic. No matter how powerful, every person involved in this conspiracy must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, to ensure nothing like this ever happens again. The American people’s faith and trust in our democratic republic and therefore the future of our nation depends on it. As such, I am providing all documents to the Department of Justice.”

All of which, oddly enough, brings us back to the diploma divide. What do Barack Obama, James Clapper, John Brennan, Susan Rice, John Kerry, Loretta Lynch, and Andrew McCabe have in common? They are all “highly educated” elites with advanced degrees from Ivy League universities.

William F. Buckley famously said, “I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.”

Buckley was obviously on to something. It is hardly a secret that most elite schools have become leftist indoctrination camps and their diplomas are nothing more than participation trophies. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) graduated from Boston University with a B.A. in international relations and economics. Have you ever heard her discuss either topic without laughing aloud?

If the MAGA movement is a peasants’ revolt, power to the hoi polloi. The republic can’t stand any more “elites” like Barack Obama, Joe Biden, or their bumbling enablers.