An Atlantic article makes the case that some very privileged people don't want to hear from the other side.
Here's a sentence that may surprise many readers: "In general, the most politically intolerant Americans… tend to be whiter, more highly educated, older, more urban, and more partisan themselves."
That's according to a recent article in The Atlantic, which cites the results of a survey conducted by the polling firm PredictWise. The authors were interested in gauging political intolerance—where in the U.S. are people more likely to disassociate from members of the opposite political party?—and were able to assemble a county-by-county index of American intolerance based on poll results.
The findings are certainly interesting. Florida, it seems, is just a horribly intolerant place—or at least contains a large number of intolerant counties—and Jefferson County, New York, is extremely chill. The single-most politically intolerant large county is Suffolk County in Massachusetts, which includes the city of Boston.
It turns out that being white, highly educated, urban-dwelling, and older all correlate with political intolerance. The authors think this might be because such people are best able to segregate themselves into like-minded bubbles where they may never encounter someone who represents a different political tradition. Less privileged Americans, on the other hand, "have more diverse social networks, politically speaking, and therefore tend to have more complicated views of the other side, whatever side that may be."
just like clockwork
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