One huge change re education levels and political divides that isn't talked about enough is that the proportion of adults w/ higher education has gone up by like a factor of 5 since the 50s. The DJT people are in part nostalgic for a time when there were / theatlantic.com/education/arch… 
/ fewer educated people to be encountered in day-to-day life. I grew up in a rural place and the hateful resentment of educated people is so common that it's socially acceptable to express it in numerous ways. A certain type of person chooses to take it as a personal insult /
/ when they encounter someone who uses big words, proper grammar, long sentences, well-constructed arguments and logic, and marshals a wide range of coherent facts. In the olden days, for most people like that, they only experienced this kind of self-created humiliation rarely /
/ but now it's something they're confronted with all the time, not only on TV but in their day-to-day lives. That's what they're really getting at when they're angry at elites: it's just straight up well-educated people they're talking about. They're nostalgic for a time /
/ when you could go about your normal life without encountering people who use words like "encountering" like it's nothing at all; where "that's what my gut tells me" or "I don't know much, but I know this" were good enough to get by in discussions about things like politics; /
/ where actually hard and complex things that take a lot of dedicated and intellectually honest study to understand like, say, postmodernism, or gender politics, were literally unheard of in a normal person's normal engagement with the world. In particular, they are nostalgic /
/ for a past when scholarship was less likely to focus on ethics. That's where the personal chip-on-the-shoulder resentment of educated people links up with the naive "attacks on western civilization" side of things, which includes a lot of college-educated whits in it.
Here's a chart of change in levels of higher education in the US over time from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education…
