LEAST TOLERANT: EDUCATED WHITE LIBERALS.

Here’s a fascinating story from The Atlantic: a map of American political prejudice. Guess where researchers found that the most politically prejudiced people live, and who they are? Read on:

In general, the most politically intolerant Americans, according to the analysis, tend to be whiter, more highly educated, older, more urban, and more partisan themselves. This finding aligns in some ways with previous research by the University of Pennsylvania professor Diana Mutz, who has found that white, highly educated people are relatively isolated from political diversity. They don’t routinely talk with people who disagree with them; this isolation makes it easier for them to caricature their ideological opponents. (In fact, people who went to graduate school have the least amount of political disagreement in their lives, as Mutz describes in her book Hearing the Other Side.) By contrast, many nonwhite Americans routinely encounter political disagreement. They have more diverse social networks, politically speaking, and therefore tend to have more complicated views of the other side, whatever side that may be.

We see this dynamic in the heat map. In some parts of the country, including swaths of North Carolina and upstate New York, people still seem to give their fellow Americans the benefit of the doubt, even when they disagree. In other places, including much of Massachusetts and Florida, people appear to have far less tolerance for political difference. They may be quicker to assume the worst about their political counterparts, on average.

White, highly educated people are the most politically intolerant in the entire country. These are the people who congregate in Boston, New York, and Washington. I would love to see the demographic breakdown of who the decision-makers in major-media newsrooms are, as well as in other US institutions. We know from other demographic data that the more educated you are, the more likely you are to be liberal.

To be fair, the Atlantic knows quite a bit about leftist intolerance.