Republicans Attended Elite Schools & Learned Nothing

Republicans like to call Democrats "elite", knowing it will be taken as an insult for their base voters. But the truth is that as many Republicans in Congress (if not more) attended elite colleges. They just didn't seem to have learned anything from that.

Following is part of an op-ed by Robert Reich: 

The original justification for elite higher education in the United States was to train the future leaders of American democracy. As Charles W. Eliot, who became president of Harvard in 1869, noted, Harvard existed to inculcate the ideals of “service and stewardship.”

Since then, Harvard has produced eight US presidents; Yale, five. (Stanford can boast Herbert Hoover, if it feels compelled to do so.)

Elite universities have also produced a disproportionate number of senators and representatives from both parties. In fact, Republicans elected to the Senate over the last decade are more likely than their Democratic counterparts to have attended Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Stanford.

So how to explain Elise Stefanik, Harvard class of 2006, now the third-ranking House Republican, who recently called the January 6 hearings a “partisan witch hunt,” voted to invalidate the 2020 election, and has repeated Trump’s Big Lie of election fraud?

Or Josh Hawley, Stanford class of 2002 and Yale Law class of 2006, now senator from Missouri, who in December 2020 became the first US senator to announce plans to object to the certification of Joe Biden’s victory, then led Senate efforts to overturn the Electoral College vote count, and fist-bumped the rioters on January 6?

Or Ted Cruz, Princeton class of 1992 and Harvard Law class of 1995, now senator from Texas, who in late 2020 joined in John Eastman’s and Trump’s plot to object to the election results in six swing states and delay accepting the Electoral College results on January 6, potentially enabling Republican state legislatures to overturn them?

And how to explain a new crop of Republican senate candidates?

JD Vance, Yale Law class of 2013, now Republican candidate for the Senate from Ohio, has claimed that there “were certainly people voting illegally on a large-scale basis” in the 2020 election. When asked earlier this year if the 2020 election was “stolen,” he said, “Yeah, I do.”

Blake Masters, Stanford class of 2008 and Stanford Law class of 2012, now the Republican candidate for the Senate from Arizona, has declared in campaign ads that “Trump won.” He promotes rightwing “replacement theory” – that Democrats favor illegal immigration “so that someday they can ‘amnesty’ these people and make them voters who they expect to vote Democrat.”

These alumni of America’s finest institutions of higher education haven’t adhered to their alma maters’ ideals of service and stewardship of American democracy. In fact, they’re actively wrecking American democracy.

Nor can these elite graduates claim they don’t know any better. Most third-graders can distinguish a lie from the truth.

No, these scions of the most prestigious halls of American academe are knowingly and intentionally abetting the most dangerous attack on American democracy since the Civil War.

Whatever did they learn from their rarified education? Obviously, zilch.