How did we get here?

Neither major party seems to care about excellence in education — not really, not in a way that translates into serious policy. Democrats have abandoned it for equity theater. Republicans have abandoned it for embarrassingly easy culture war wins. And American students are caught in the middle, their education held hostage by a political system that has forgotten what schools are actually for.

This is a story about how we got to this impasse, and what it might take to get out.

Part I: The Democratic Retreat from Excellence

Democrats were once the party Americans trusted on education. That trust has eroded, and it’s worth understanding why.

The progressive education reform movement has become laser-focused on equity — specifically, on closing achievement gaps between demographic groups. On its face, this sounds reasonable. Who could object to helping struggling students catch up? But in practice, this focus has come at the expense of effective pedagogy and educational excellence. Worse, many of the reforms pursued in equity’s name actually reproduce the patterns of injustice they claim to address.

The Moral Logic of Progressive Education Reform

To understand how progressives think about education policy, you have to understand their moral framework. For progressives, excellence measures — absolute gains in student learning — don’t have what Freddie deBoer calls “social justice valence” unless they also address relative disparities. A reform that raises all boats equally leaves the achievement gap unchanged, and therefore fails to address the underlying injustice progressives care about.

This creates a strange asymmetry. Progressives cannot applaud excellence measures unless they also close gaps. But they can applaud apparent equity measures even if they don’t improve learning at all. The social justice framing is morally primary; gifted students are already doing well enough and are not objects of serious concern.

The result? Excellent students get abandoned. Gifted and talented programs are cut. Selective admissions are eliminated. And the focus shifts entirely to reducing disparities — even when the methods used to reduce those disparities don’t actually help anyone learn.

Biting the Hand That Feeds

There’s a bitter irony at work here. The most educated progressives — the ones driving these reform efforts — are themselves insulated from the harms of the bad pedagogy they support.

As the parties have become more polarized by education level, progressives are increasingly those who did well in school, often effortlessly, often because their parents were also highly educated and supported learning at home. It is easy for these reformers to take pedagogy for granted. If they or their children could already read well before entering school, they may not see the failure of whole language instruction for children who don’t learn what they need at home.

This is the central tragedy of progressive education reform: the people making the decisions are precisely the people least affected by them. They can afford tutors when public schools fail. They can move to better districts. They can pay for private schools. The costs of their experiments are borne by the families who have no such options.

Constructivism: The Theory That Sounds Good, But Isn’t

The pedagogical theories progressives are drawn to sound like equity wins that also help learning. They do neither.

Consider Jo Boaler’s approach to math instruction, which deemphasizes memorization of basic facts and promotes open-ended “discovery” learning. Or Lucy Calkins’ whole language approach to reading, which rejects systematic phonics instruction in favor of having students “discover” reading through exposure to literature. Both approaches are marketed as more engaging, more creative, more equitable than traditional methods.

The problem is that they’re not backed by the science of learning. Decades of rigorous research show that explicit instruction — clear, systematic teaching of foundational skills — produces better outcomes than constructivist approaches, especially for struggling students. The students who can “discover” mathematical concepts or “pick up” reading naturally are the ones who already have strong foundations built at home. The students who most need structured instruction are precisely the ones most harmed when it’s withheld.

And so the methods marketed as equitable actually widen achievement gaps. Wealthier students can afford better instruction outside of school; poorer students cannot. The progressive education establishment has spent decades promoting approaches that systematically disadvantage the students they claim to care most about.

When “Equity” Isn’t About Achievement

When progressives aren’t focused on equity in academic achievement, they’re often focused on other kinds of equity in the school setting — which frequently manifest as culture-war issues that are wildly out of touch with median voters.

Discipline. Progressive educators have pushed hard for “restorative justice” practices that minimize suspensions and expulsions. The theory is that traditional discipline disproportionately affects minority students, and that restorative approaches are both fairer and more effective at changing behavior. The reality is much messier. Many restorative justice implementations have led to chaotic classrooms, with teachers unable to remove disruptive students and struggling students unable to learn in the resulting environment. Parents — including minority parents — consistently support stronger discipline than progressive reformers advocate.

Curriculum. Progressive educators have pushed for curricular changes involving critical race theory, ethnic studies requirements, and “culturally responsive pedagogy.” Whatever the merits of these approaches in principle, in practice they often arrive as mandates that districts must implement before addressing basic reading and math deficiencies. When parents are worried about whether their kids can do arithmetic, telling them the curriculum now includes mandatory modules on systemic racism reads as tone-deaf, at best. It makes parents question whether the district has their children’s best educational interests at heart.

Admissions. When Harvard’s admissions office described Asian applicants as lacking personality, we saw how elite institutions can violate civil rights while claiming to promote equity. The pattern of discriminating against high-performing Asian students in the name of diversity has been replicated at selective high schools across the country — from Stuyvesant in New York to Thomas Jefferson in Virginia. These policies paper over old racial myths with new ones, all while claiming the mantle of social justice.

The Political Consequences

The political consequences of this approach have been severe. Democrats have hemorrhaged trust on education — an issue that was once a pillar of their electoral coalition. David Shor and other Democratic strategists have warned for years that the party’s education positions are electoral poison, but the warnings have largely gone unheeded.

The teachers’ unions — major players in Democratic fundraising and organizing — have been consistent advocates for many of the most unpopular progressive positions, from keeping schools closed during COVID to defending curricula that parents find alienating. Democratic politicians, afraid to punch left, have generally deferred to the unions rather than to the median voter.

The result is a doom loop. Progressive education policies alienate parents. Parents flee to charter schools, private schools, or the suburbs. Public school enrollment declines. The political coalition that supports public education weakens. And the institutions that remain double down on the very approaches that caused the flight in the first place.

Meanwhile, the Southern states that have embraced evidence-based literacy instruction are seeing real gains — gains that serve as a political embarrassment to blue states that should be outperforming them. This is how issues and institutions transform from reliable political architecture into ammunition for one’s opponents. Chris Rufo doesn’t have to be a good batter when Democrats keep serving up wiffle balls!

Part II: The Republican Absence of Vision

Republicans have had easy pickings. Rejecting bad progressive ideas has required no serious thought about what should replace them.

When conservatives reject the DEI focus in education, they can claim to be re-centering excellence as the guiding goal. When they reject progressive culture-war overreaches, they can claim classrooms are for learning, not politics. But this rhetorical positioning allows Republicans to appear pro-excellence without actually advancing the policies, pedagogical techniques, and curricular changes that matter.

Winning by Saying No

Consider the political arithmetic. (I’m sorry this is so clunky, I’m really not a math guy. Metaphors, though!) When Democrats introduce a bad idea, we go from zero to minus-x. When Republicans defeat that bad idea, we go from minus-x back to zero. Republicans can claim victory — they stopped something harmful! — without having accomplished anything positive in a cumulative, genuinely progressive way.

But American education wasn’t some excellence utopia before DEI. The same constructivist pedagogies that progressives now wrap in equity language have been undermining student learning for decades. The same ed-school orthodoxies that produce today’s “culturally responsive” curricula produced yesterday’s “whole language” instruction. Defeating the latest progressive fad is necessary but nowhere near sufficient.

Republicans don’t have to outrun the bear. They just have to outrun Democrats. And right now, Democrats are making that very easy.

The School Choice Escape Valve

The positive vision Republicans do offer is school choice — vouchers, charter schools, education savings accounts. The theory is that market competition will drive improvement: parents will choose better schools, forcing bad schools to improve or close.

There’s something to this. The ability to exit a failing school is valuable, and competition can spur innovation. The One Big Beautiful Bill’s new national voucher program represents a significant expansion of this approach.

But school choice alone doesn’t solve the underlying problems. Charter schools and private schools draw from the same pool of teachers trained in the same ed schools with the same bad pedagogical theories. Many charter schools use the same constructivist curricula as the public schools families are fleeing. The escape valve lets some families get out, but it doesn’t fix the pipeline.

And school choice, as currently implemented, risks abandoning the students stuck in dysfunctional public schools. Not every family can navigate voucher programs or find transportation to better schools. The market vision, in its enthusiasm for choice, can become indifferent to those who have no good choices available.

The Southern Surge as Exception

There is one genuinely positive development on the Republican side: the Southern literacy surge. States like Mississippi and Alabama have adopted evidence-based reading instruction — systematic phonics, explicit teaching, regular assessment — and seen dramatic improvements in student performance. We can thank Karen Vaites for comprehensive coverage of this genuinely positive development.

This is what a positive vision for education actually looks like: identify what works, implement it systematically, measure the results, and adjust. The Southern states did this not by fighting culture wars but by taking the science of reading and curricula implementation expertise seriously.

If more red states adopt this playbook, it could represent a genuine transformation. But so far, the Southern Surge remains an exception. Most Republican education policy remains defined by what it opposes rather than what it represents.

Part III: The Trump Distortion

Into this already dysfunctional landscape has come the Trump administration, whose approach to education policy has been ... aggressive.

Burning It Down

The administration’s approach to the Department of Education has been less reform than demolition. DOGE-initiated cuts gutted the personnel needed for basic functions — like producing the annual Condition of Education report that Congress has required since 2002. Whether these cuts were legally valid is now beside the point; you can’t wave a magic wand to reconstitute departed researchers and statisticians.

The administration has conflated two different goals: making government more efficient and eliminating progressive policies. These overlap in places but are not the same thing. Cutting the staff who compile education statistics does nothing to advance any conservative policy goal; it just makes it harder to know what’s happening in American schools.

DEI as the Only Issue

The administration’s fixation on DEI has crowded out attention to everything else. Fighting with universities over diversity statements, investigating admissions policies, threatening funding cuts — these actions dominate the education news cycle.

Meanwhile, the education establishment has responded by doubling down on DEI practices, sometimes openly defying new regulations and state laws. The result is a mutually reinforcing spiral where both sides treat DEI as the only education issue that matters.

The tragedy is that many Americans are sufficiently disgusted with elite education institutions that they’re content with “burn it all down” as a result. When Harvard and Stanford have spent years promoting policies that seem designed to alienate ordinary parents, schadenfreude at their difficulties is understandable. But “own the libs” is not an education policy. The question of what should replace the current system remains unanswered.

Part IV: What’s Being Left on the Table

Both parties are leaving enormous political opportunities on the table.

Polling consistently shows that Americans — including majorities of all minority Americans — support gifted education, acceleration for advanced students, and rigorous academic standards. They support discipline policies that keep classrooms orderly. They want their kids to learn to read and do math. These are not controversial positions among actual voters, even if they’re controversial among education policy elites.

The party that credibly commits to evidence-based instruction, high standards, and meeting students where they are — rather than where ideological frameworks say they should be — has a significant political opportunity. The party that actually delivers results, as Mississippi has for reading, will have a compelling case to make.

The Stakes Are Higher for Democrats

The stakes are asymmetric. Democrats control the institutions that drive education policy and research: the ed schools, the teachers’ unions, the professional associations. This gives them both more responsibility for the current mess and more capacity to fix it.

But it also means that the ideological capture of those institutions constrains what Democratic politicians can advocate. Ed schools remain captured by constructivist theories. Unions remain committed to policies that protect member interests over student interests. Critical education theories have become the default framework for thinking about schooling in progressive spaces.

For Democrats to credibly reset on education, they would need to confront these institutional interests. That’s politically difficult — but the alternative is continued erosion of public trust in public education.

The CEP Vision

This is where we come in. The Center for Educational Progress has been developing a positive vision for educational excellence that either party could adopt:

Meet students where they are. This means ability grouping, acceleration for advanced learners, and remediation for those who need it. It means abandoning the “one-size-fits-all” model that holds back fast learners and fails to support struggling ones.

Embrace the science of learning. This means explicit instruction in foundational skills, systematic phonics for reading, practiced fluency for math. It means deferring discovery-based approaches until students have mastered the basics.

Measure what matters. This means regular assessment to inform instruction, honest reporting of results, and accountability for outcomes. It means resisting the temptation to lower standards in the name of closing gaps.

Let every student advance as far and fast as their curiosity and determination will take them. This is the vision we’ve been developing — and it’s a vision either party could champion.

Part V: A Path Forward

Educational excellence should be a bipartisan issue. But right now, both parties have left the field. This creates an opportunity for whichever party is willing to seize it.

For Republicans: “We actually have a positive vision that promotes what we care about — the learning and development of our children. And the pedagogy we support is backed by the research. Democrats claim to be the party of ‘trust the science,’ but in education, that’s clearly false. We are the party you can trust to follow the evidence.”

For Democrats: “We are returning to the positive vision of education that you used to trust us for. Republicans don’t have a positive vision — just criticisms of progressive excesses. We see now that we ignored the science of learning, and that even if our motives were moral, the effects were worse. We still care about disadvantaged children, but now we know the right way to help them learn. We’re righting the ship for all children.”

Either script could work. Everyone seems to be focused on… everything else, though. (And I’m also not a political consultant. Just a lawyer — but not a barred one (yet)!)

American students don’t care about any political posturing. They just want schools that teach them to read, to calculate, to think. They want the chance to advance as far as their talents will take them. Whether they know it or not.

Neither party is currently offering that. But one of them could. Or both! The iron is hot, and the opportunity is there for the taking. Who will strike first?

Thomas Briggs is the (Interim) Executive Director and Director of Operations at the Center for Educational Progress.

We gotta talk about AI as a programming tool for the arts

Chris Ashworth is the creator and CEO of QLab, a macOS software package for “cue-based, multimedia playback” which is designed automate lighting and audio for live theater productions.

I recently started following him on TikTok where he posts about his business and theater automation in general - QLab own the Voxel theater in Baltimore which they use as a combined performance venue and research lab, and the resulting videos offer a fascinating glimpse into a world I know virtually nothing about.

This latest TikTok describes his Claude Opus moment, after he used Claude Code to build a custom lighting design application for a very niche project and put together a useful application in just a few days that he would never have been able to spare the time for otherwise.

Chris works full time in the arts and comes at generative AI from a position of rational distrust. It's interesting to see him working through that tension to acknowledge that there are valuable applications here to build tools for the community he serves.

I have been at least gently skeptical about all this stuff for the last two years. Every time I checked in on it, I thought it was garbage, wasn't interested in it, wasn't useful. [...] But as a programmer, if you hear something like, this is changing programming, it's important to go check it out once in a while. So I went and checked it out a few weeks ago. And it's different. It's astonishing. [...]

One thing I learned in this exercise is that it can't make you a fundamentally better programmer than you already are. It can take a person who is a bad programmer and make them faster at making bad programs. And I think it can take a person who is a good programmer and, from what I've tested so far, make them faster at making good programs. [...] You see programmers out there saying, "I'm shipping code I haven't looked at and don't understand." I'm terrified by that. I think that's awful. But if you're capable of understanding the code that it's writing, and directing, designing, editing, deleting, being quality control on it, it's kind of astonishing. [...]

The positive thing I see here, and I think is worth coming to terms with, is this is an application that I would never have had time to write as a professional programmer. Because the audience is three people. [...] There's no way it was worth it to me to spend my energy of 20 years designing and implementing software for artists to build an app for three people that is this level of polish. And it took me a few days. [...]

I know there are a lot of people who really hate this technology, and in some ways I'm among them. But I think we've got to come to terms with this is a career-changing moment. And I really hate that I'm saying that because I didn't believe it for the last two years. [...] It's like having a room full of power tools. I wouldn't want to send an untrained person into a room full of power tools because they might chop off their fingers. But if someone who knows how to use tools has the option to have both hand tools and a power saw and a power drill and a lathe, there's a lot of work they can do with those tools at a lot faster speed.

Tags: theatre, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, tiktok, ai-ethics, coding-agents, claude-code

Hello there! 😀

In 2025, academics Stuart Turnbull-Dugarte and Markus Wagner published a very fun paper showing how people love projecting their own politics onto fictional characters. Unsurprisingly, everybody tends to think that the good guys agree with them politically and the bad buys support the other side.1

I could spend this whole article arguing about whether Homer Simpson is a MAGA Trump supporter or not, but we don’t have to rely on vibes alone. We know roughly how old characters in The Simpsons are, whether they work, their education, income, religion, race, family situation etc. For those demographics, we have decades of real survey data on how people like that actually voted.

If there’s one thing I like more than political data analysis, it’s The Simpsons.2 So, this piece is me finally getting to live out the dream of combining the two. Using American National Election Studies (ANES) data, I model how characters from The Simpsons would have voted in every US presidential election since 1972.

It sounds silly, but it also turns out to be very revealing about US politics. When you track Homer, Marge, Mr Burns and the rest across time, you learn how the demographic coalitions of the Democratic and Republican parties have often completely rearranged themselves over the last 50 years.3

Homer Simpson

• Male

• White

• Age 38

• Some college education

• Working

• Lives in a union household

• Homeowner

• Married

Homer looks like the typical swing voter in the 20th century. For his demographic profile, the predicted vote share mirrors the country as a whole in this period. In 1976, Jimmy Carter won 50.1% of the national vote to Gerald Ford’s 48.0%. Among Homer’s demographic, Carter edges it 51.6% to 48.4%. In 1984, Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory is slightly exaggerated: Reagan wins 58.8% nationally, but 62.4% among Homer’s group.

There were early signs of populism. In 1992, Ross Perot wins a plurality among Homer’s demographic, even though he comes third nationally. By 1996 (the year The Simpsons runs the “Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos” halloween special of that election) Homer’s voting profile again looks close to the national picture. Bill Clinton wins 49.2% nationally and 45.5% among Homer’s demographic.

The big change comes in the 21st century. From 2000 onwards, Homer stops being a swing voter and becomes a much more reliable Republican. Even in 2008, when Obama won comfortably with 52.9% of the national vote, Homer’s demographic backed McCain 65.0%. By 2020 the gap is even wider. Joe Biden wins the election with 51.3% of the vote, but Homer’s demographic votes 70.1% for Donald Trump and just 27.3% for Biden.

At this point, Homer’s profile looks tailor-made for modern Republican politics: White, male, lower-middle-class, union-connected but not precarious, doing OK but not especially comfortable, living outside big metropolitan centres, and deeply sceptical of elites. This is the Trump voter. Not the poorest Americans, but not the winners of globalisation either. People who have a house, a job and a sense of status, but are worried about losing it.

There is also a cultural element too. Homer is, quite literally, the kind of person a Harvard-educated writers’ room makes jokes about. His tastes are bad, his opinions are blunt and his impulses are unrefined. In the hands of the golden-era Simpsons writers, this was done sympathetically. Homer was the protagonist you were meant to root for, human, with his heart in the right place.

However, in the hands of modern Democratic politicians (who seem to lack even basic emotional intelligence) this same figure becomes something else: an embarrassing problem to be managed or corrected. In short, a deplorable.

That feeling of being mocked by people who think they know better turns politics into a choice between those who sneer and those who at least promise to defend you and your social status.

If you want one book to understand how this happened, I cannot recommend Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland strongly enough. On the surface, it’s a book about Richard Nixon’s electoral success in 1968 and 1972. Underneath that, it’s about how the US split into two broad cultural camps: the “Franklins” and the “Orthogonians”.4

The Franklins are educated professionals, comfortable with expertise, institutions and social change, and increasingly dominant in the Democratic Party. The Orthogonians are lower-middle-class homeowners and workers: people who value order and effort, and who are deeply sensitive to being talked down to.

Over time, the Democrats came to sound and look more like the Franklins. Not just in policy, but in tone, language and cultural signals. As that happened, voters like Homer (Orthogonians who had once been reliable parts of the New Deal coalition) began to drift away, because the party stopped feeling like it was on their side. That slow cultural realignment was something Nixon first exploited and later Republicans perfected.

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Marge Simpson

• Female

• White

• Also aged 38 (they were in the same school year)

• High school education

• Homemaker

• Lives in a union household

• Homeowner

• Married

Like Homer, Marge is a swing voter through much of the 20th century, even if she tended to lean a little more Democratic. In 1976, Jimmy Carter won 50.1% of the national vote, but Marge’s demographic backed him by 54.9%. In 1988, Michael Dukakis won just 45.7% nationally, yet Marge’s demographic voted 55.1% for him.

There are limits to this, though. Despite Lisa suggesting Marge voted for Carter again in 1980, her real-world demographic tended to not. That year, Ronald Reagan won 50.7% nationally, but Marge’s demographic voted 54.6% for Reagan.

However, like Homer, she was still very much a swing voter, responsive to context and candidates rather than locked into a party. As with Homer, though, the big shift comes in the 21st century.

From 2000 onwards, Marge’s demographic moves sharply to the right. The most extreme example is 2016 where Donald Trump won 46.1% of the national vote, but 77.2% of people like Marge.

Why did Marge become so Republican in the 21st century? I think the key is that “high school-educated homemaker” means something very different in 1972 than it does in 2024. In the late 20th century, this category covered a large and socially broad slice of the population. Many women left school at 18, did not work full-time after marriage, and households could survive on a single income. That meant Marge’s demographic included a wide range of women with a, therefore, wide range of political views.

Over time, educational expansion and women’s increased participation in the workforce dramatically shrink this group. By the 21st century, being a high school-educated homemaker is no longer typical. It is now coded with cultural conservatism, traditional gender roles and Republican identity.

In modern terms, Marge Simpson looks a lot like a “trad wife”.

That helps explain the sharp rightward turn after 2000. In 2020 and 2024, however, Trump still wins this group comfortably (68.8% in 2020 and 62.2% in 2024) but the Republican margin clearly narrows. Marge remains disproportionately Republican, albeit less so.

Marge is also now cross-pressured. Her education level and work status pull her towards the Republicans, but her race and gender now pulls her in the opposite direction. Since 2016, White women in particular have shifted away from the Republican Party and towards the Democrats. In 2024, when the Democratic presidential vote fell nationally, it rose among White women.

Marge is a neat encapsulation of that tension. At the moment, the Republican pull still wins out, but it’s weakening.

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Mr Burns

• Male

• White

• Age 75+

• Working

• Homeowner

• Unmarried

• Lives in a non-union household

• College education

• Household income in the 96th to 100th percentile

Before looking at Mr Burns’s voting profile, there’s an important caveat that the ANES data does not include a variable for business ownership. If it did, it would almost certainly push Burns further towards the Republicans and reduce his Democratic vote share.

With that in mind, the results are still striking.

Yep, Mr Burns is now a Democrat!

Until very recently, Mr Burns was overwhelmingly Republican. In 1972, his demographic backs Richard Nixon by 89.9%. In 1984, Ronald Reagan wins 83.7% of this group. Even the early 21st century, Mr Burns’s demographic votes 83.1% for John McCain in 2008.

This is exactly what you would expect. For decades, White, college-educated, very high-income voters were the backbone of the Republican Party. That was true when The Simpsons first aired in 1989, and it remained true throughout the show’s golden era.

Then something changes. After 2008, Republican support collapses. In 2012, Mitt Romney still wins a majority, but it drops sharply to 57.4%. Donald Trump then accelerates the decline. In 2016, Mr Burns’s demographic gives Trump just 50.8%, by 2020 that falls to 34.0% and, in 2024, it reaches a low of just 19.1%.

From 2008 to 2024, Republican support among this group drops by roughly 64-points. Even allowing for the missing business-ownership variable, the direction of travel is unmistakable.

What Burns shows is just how changed the politics of White, college-educated, high-income voters have become. For much of modern American history, this group was synonymous with Republicanism. Today, it’s one of the Democrats’ strongest constituencies.

Donald Trump’s style, rhetoric and disdain for institutions are highly effective at mobilising lower-middle-class voters like Homer. He speaks in plain language, treats politics as a personal fight, and frames conflict in terms of winners and losers rather than processes and norms. For voters who feel ignored, talked down to, or culturally sidelined, this reads as authenticity. At the same time, that same style actively repels people like Mr Burns. Wealthy, college-educated, institutionally embedded voters are comfortable operating within elite norms, not burning them down.

There is a useful parallel inside The Simpsons itself. When Mr Burns meets Larry (his biological son) he is deeply embarrassed, because Larry does not behave like the elite. He is uncouth, loud, unpolished, indiscreet and incapable of operating within the social codes Burns takes for granted. Burns ultimately rejects him not because Larry threatens his wealth, but because he threatens his sense of status.

Trump plays a similar role in American politics. He may promise tax cuts and deregulation, but his manner, language and disregard for institutional etiquette make him feel like Larry Burns in the Oval Office. For voters like Mr Burns, that is intolerable.

This realignment is not just about Trump, but also about how the Democratic Party has changed. By 2016, there was no serious risk that a Democratic victory would produce some fundamental or irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of the working-class. The party was culturally liberal but economically cautious, rhetorically pro-redistribution but institutionally deferential. Its leadership was deeply intertwined with professional, financial and legal elites.5

That matters for voters like Mr Burns, because supporting Democrats no longer carries a credible threat to their material interests. In fact, the Democrats increasingly look like the party of global integration, and technocratic management, which are things that suit high-income, highly educated voters perfectly well.

In The Simpsons’ early years, Burns’s politics were obvious and stable. Today, they are also obvious and stable, but in the complete opposite direction. In a single generation, one of the most reliable Republican demographics in American politics has crossed the aisle.

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Ned Flanders

• Male

• White

• Age 60

• Working

• Homeowner

• Married

• Lives in a non-union household

• Protestant

• Attends church every week

Some things in American politics really haven’t changed, though. White Protestants who attend church every week remain one of the most solidly Republican groups in the electorate. When we model Ned Flanders’ demographic profile across elections, the numbers barely move over half a century. In 1972, this group backed Richard Nixon by 90.2%. Forty years later, in 2012, they backed Mitt Romney by 89.7%.

There’s a modest softening in the Trump era. Republican support falls to 84.1% in 2020 and 76.9% in 2024. But, even after that decline, this remains one of the most reliably Republican demographics in the United States.

Most books on religious voting tend to focus on White evangelicals, which can be misleading in Ned’s case, because Ned is a mainline Protestant. The distinction matters, because mainline Protestants are often more institutional and historically more politically swing-y.6

Despite this, Ned is still a good example of a socially conservative religious voter. This is the story told, from different angles, in Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory and Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne.7 They agree on the core point: conservative Christianity became politically mobilised in response to cultural change. From the 1960s onwards, a series of Supreme Court decisions and congressional actions pulled religious Christians into politics. School prayer, abortion, sexual permissiveness, gay rights and the broader cultural liberalisation of American life convinced many church leaders that neutrality was no longer an option. Politics became about defending a moral order.

That mobilisation facilitated the Republican Party’s strategy of “fusionism”: a coalition that combined social conservatives, free-market capitalists, and military hawks. Each group got something it cared deeply about, and together they formed a durable winning bloc.

Ned fits cleanly into that coalition. As a devout Protestant, social conservatism is central to his identity. As a small business owner, he is also naturally sympathetic to free-market capitalism and suspicious of regulation and unions.

If there’s movement here recently, it’s at the margins. The Trump-era does introduce some discomfort among gentler, more civically minded Protestants, but not enough to break the bond. For voters like Ned Flanders, the Republican Party remains the natural political expression of their values and has been for a very long time.

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Carl Carlson

• Black

• Male

• Age 35-44

• College education

• Working

• Lives in a union household

• Unmarried

If Ned Flanders is the most stable Republican, Carl Carlson is the most stable Democrat. The lowest Democratic vote share for Carl’s demographic is 91.9%, in 1980. The highest is a near–North Korean 99.6% in 2008, Barack Obama’s first election.

Unlike Homer or Mr Burns, there is no real “turning point” here. Carl is college educated, is in a union and has a master’s degree. All of those traits correlate with Democratic voting, but the main driver is race.

In Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird’s Steadfast Democrats, they argue that Black political unity cannot be understood in purely ideological terms. Instead, it’s rooted in the specific social experience of being Black in America.8 As they point out, Black Americans are, by a large margin, the most politically unified racial group in the United States. Since the civil rights era, between 80-90% have consistently identified as Democrats. This is especially striking because nearly a third of Black Americans identify as ideologically conservative.

White and Laird argue that centuries of slavery, segregation and discrimination forced Black Americans to develop unusually strong social bonds as a means of survival and resistance. Those bonds did not disappear after the civil rights movement, but continued to produce and enforce political norms. One of those norms was the expectation that supporting the Democratic Party is part of the collective struggle for equality.

In this framework, party choice is not just an individual preference. Black voters are uniquely influenced by the social expectations of other Black Americans to prioritise the group’s long-term interests over short-term ideological alignment. Supporting the Democratic Party becomes a way of affirming group solidarity in the face of ongoing racial inequality.

Carl embodies this dynamic. He is educated, employed, union-connected and socially integrated. However, his political behaviour is almost entirely fixed. This is not because he has never changed his views, but because race (and the social meaning attached to it) remains the most powerful political identity shaping his vote.

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Abe Simpson

• Male

• White

• Age 75+

• High school education

• Retired

• Unmarried

On the surface, Abe looks like a fairly typical Republican voter: an older white male without a college degree. In 1972, his demographic backed Richard Nixon by 73.9% and in 2016, it backed Donald Trump by 65.9%.

But Abe’s voting profile has an interesting wrinkle. Between roughly 1988 and 2000, his demographic becomes noticeably more Democratic than before or after. In 1992, Bill Clinton won 43.0% of the national vote, but won 50.0% among Abe’s demographic. In 2000, Al Gore won 48.4% nationally, but 53.6% among this group.

To understand why, you need to separate three things that are often confused: age effects, period effects and cohort (generational) effects.

• Age effects are about where you are in the life cycle (i.e. how old you are).

• Period effects are about what is happening at a particular moment. Recessions, scandals or popular leaders happen to everyone at once.

• Cohort effects are about when you were born (i.e. what generation you are part of).

When we look at voters aged 75+, the age category stays the same, but the people inside it change from election to election. From the late 1980s through to 2000, the 75+ group was dominated by the “Greatest Generation”.

Generations formed by the same historical experiences often carry those political instincts with them for life. This generation grew up under Republican President Herbert Hoover, whose administration became synonymous with economic collapse. They then experienced the New Deal and victory in World War II under the Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt. As a result, the Greatest Generation developed a durable attachment to the Democratic Party that did not fade with age.

Political scientist Patrick Fisher has studied these generational effects in detail. He finds that, late in their lives, members of the Greatest Generation actually became more supportive of Democratic presidential candidates than they had been earlier.9

Fischer concludes:

At the end of the Twentieth Century, in fact, it was more accurate to view the country’s oldest citizens—the Greatest Generation—as voters whose memories of the Great Depression and World War II lead them to have a lasting faith in the government activism and those more supportive of the Democratic Party. In the 1996 and 2000 presidential elections, for example, the oldest Americans were actually the age group most likely to vote Democratic.

That is what we see in Abe’s data. Once the Greatest Generation begins to pass out of the electorate, the 75+ group changes. It becomes dominated by cohorts shaped less by the Depression and New Deal, and more by post-war prosperity, Cold War conservatism and later cultural backlash. Abe’s demographic shifts back towards the Republicans.

The lesson here is that age matters, but generation can matter just as much. Abe Simpson’s voting record is a reminder that voters carry the political imprint of their formative years with them, and that when generations move through the electorate, the politics of “old age” can change completely.

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Waylon Smithers

• Male

• White

• Age 35-44

• Working

• Unmarried

• College education

• LGBT

There is the limitation that the ANES only begins asking about sexual orientation in 2008, so we can only observe Smithers’s true demographic profile from that point onwards. Even with that constraint, the picture is clear.

Like Carl, Smithers is a staunch Democrat. From 2008 onwards, his demographic votes overwhelmingly for Democratic presidential candidates, with very little variation. The Democratic vote share ranges from 84.3% in 2012 to 88.1% in 2020.

This is not just about party voting. Being LGBT is associated with a broader cluster of left-leaning political beliefs. Political scientist Philip Edward Jones shows that LGBT Americans are distinctively more liberal than otherwise similar straight respondents. Across multiple surveys, LGBT respondents are more supportive of government-provided health insurance, more strongly opposed to the death penalty, more likely to oppose Donald Trump’s travel ban, and more likely to oppose Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court.10

The obvious explanation can sound trite, but it’s also true: people tend not to vote for parties that threaten their civil rights.

For LGBT voters, the Republican Party has, for decades, been associated with opposition to same-sex marriage, restrictions on gender identity, and a broader politics of moral regulation. That creates a powerful and durable incentive to support the Democrats, even for voters who might otherwise be cross-pressured by class, income or education.

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It’s Not 1989 Anymore

The Simpsons first aired as a full episode with Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire on 17 December 1989. At that time, many groups (like Homer, Marge and Abe) were genuinely up for grabs, whilst others (like Mr Burns) were seemingly not.

Over the past 37 years, some demographics are broadly similar. Carl is still a rock-solid Democrat and Ned remains a reliable Republican. Others, however, have moved dramatically. Homer drifts from archetypal swing voter to a core part of the Republican base. Mr Burns flips entirely, from caricatured plutocrat Republican to dependable Democrat. Marge has had her politics reshaped by education, work and gender in ways that did not apply in 1989. Even Abe’s story turns out to be less about old age than about which generation happens to be old at a given moment.

These shifts reflect deeper changes in American politics: the collapse of class-based voting, the rise of cultural and identity politics, the sorting of parties by education, and the importance of race, religion and social status in shaping political loyalty.

A lot can change in 37 years.

Demographics can shift just as much as certain shows can decline in quality…

In the last few months, the governments of Australia, France, Denmark, India, England, Norway, Spain, and the United States all instituted, introduced, or began to debate laws that would ban teenagers from accessing social media due to its alleged effects on the mental health of young people. Simultaneously, public outlets began to realize that most scholars don’t think social media has virtually any negative health impacts at all. Too little, maybe too late.1

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But like the politicians behind this wave of legislation, let’s temporarily ignore the evidence. In fact, I want to make up some data from scratch.

For instance: did you know that daily social media use increases the likelihood a child will commit suicide by 12-18%? Or that teenagers are far more likely to visit the ER for psychiatric problems if they have an Instagram account? Or that a child’s amount of social media use, past a certain threshold, correlates exponentially with poorer sleep, lower reported wellbeing, and more severe mental health symptoms?

If that was all true for social media— and again, none of it is — you and I both would agree that people under 16 or so should not have access to platforms like Instagram or Snapchat. Imagine allowing your child to enter any system that would make them 12-18% more likely to kill themselves. That would be insane. You wouldn’t let your kid anywhere near that system, and the public would protest until it was eliminated once for all.

Great. So let’s get rid of school.

I Don’t Like Mondays

Yes, there’s the obvious twist — all the data I just listed is true for the effects of school. The modern education system is probably the single biggest threat to the mental health of children. At the very least, the evidence for its negative effects is unambiguous: the same cannot be said for social media.

The first statistic is the most damning. In March 2020, COVID was born, and students were removed from school. Generally, we view COVID as an absolute scourge upon the mental health of young people. But when children stopped going to school, something interesting happened. Their suicide rates plummetted and remained low throughout the summer. In the fall — when most schools returned to in-person instruction — they started killing themselves again.

You can see the trend in the figure below. Basically, the line shows suicide rates relative to the number of months before and after the resumption of in-person school. The line down the middle indicates that change. Panel A shows suicide rates for teenagers aged 12-18, while Panel B shows suicide rates for adults aged 19-25.

For adults aged 19-25, the resumption of in-person school had no effect on suicide rates. For teenagers, though, it’s a different story.

This data on the effects of COVID — or rather, the effects of escaping and then returning to school — is incredibly telling. The reported shifts appear specifically for adolescents who returned to school, not for their peers who remained at home during the same period. It is causation, not correlation.

But the correlations are interesting too. For decades, researchers have noted the calendar effects on child suicide and mental health visits. From 1990-2019, suicide rates among young people have always dropped precipitously during the summers and spiked again in September. Adults show no such trend.

For English students, stress-related presentations in emergency rooms also rise during school periods and drop during holidays. This is true for both girls and boys across four years of data. Below is a figure showing rates from 2017-2018.

Beyond these clinical statistics, there’s also the simple fact that kids say they find school more stressful than pretty much anything else in their life. A study of 2,000 English secondary school students found that roughly half had skipped class due to anxiety. A 2018 survey from Pew Research similarly found that 88% reported academic pressure as a source of distress; comparatively, only 28% felt distressed by pressure to fit in socially.

In short, school sucks so much that it reliably makes students want to hide at home, visit the ER, and take their own lives. The data has been completely clear on these points for years.

Thanks, Obama

However, the negative mental health effects of school do not seem to have stagnated over the last few years. Instead, they’ve gotten worse. For instance only 43% of teenagers cited school as a significant source of stress in 2009. By 2013, that percentage had nearly doubled, with school identified as by far the largest source of stress in the lives of adolescents. As of 2024, stress from academic pressure remained dominant at around 70%.

During the period when that initial jump in school-related stress occurred, suicide rates for children aged 15-19 suddenly spiked.

Of course, the shocking drop-off in youth mental health around 2012 is a well-known phenomenon: it is usually interpreted as the result of newly widespread social media use and smartphone ownership among young people. This is the basic argument Jonathan Haidt famously makes in The Anxious Generation. In the early 2010s, children suddenly became much less happy. What else could explain this shift other than the influence of social media?

While Haidt’s theory is plausible, the aforementioned survey data makes me very suspicious. If social media was the culprit, we should expect that teenagers started feeling more stressed about (for instance) their appearance or social status.

But they didn’t; mostly, they reported feeling more stressed about school. Intriguingly, this effect was potentially sharper for adolescent females: the exact group that, according to Haidt, suffered the most from the advent of social media.

However, to believe that increases in school-related stress largely account for the onset of the current youth mental health crisis, we would want to identify a seismic change in the schooling system around 2012 that could have plausibly driven the trend. And there was, in fact, such a change: the implementation of Common Core.2

Common Core was a set of educational standards meant to nationalize and clarify the skills that K-12 students should acquire over the course of their schooling. The new standards were notoriously difficult and cognitively rigorous: I recall my mother, at the time a fifth-grade teacher, complaining about the impossible word problems laid out in her new math textbooks.

One consequence of Common Core was that children had to spend much more time doing homework and much less time socializing with their friends. Data from the Pew Research Center shows these time allocation differences between 2003-2006 and 2014-2017. (Apologies for the blurry figure).

Notably, the increased number of students who reported school as a source of angst were primarily stressed about their homework loads. A survey of parents in 2013 also found that 63% said their child experienced “a lot of stress” due to the amount of homework they were assigned. And most importantly, recent studies suggest that the effect of homework load on mental health is non-linear — once the amount passes a certain threshold, the negative impacts suddenly skyrocket.

Am I willing to say that Common Core, rather than social media, was the singular force underlying the heightened destruction of youthful minds? No, I’m not. As Tyler Cowen pointed out in a conversation with Haidt, reducing these mood shifts to one cause or another is a bit like reducing a hurricane to the flapping wings of one particular butterfly.3

Still, it is striking that most discussions of the 2012 mystery tend to ignore what the kids themselves said about it. The children don’t think social media added much stress to their lives; they think the shift has much more to do with the increased rigor of school. Perhaps we should take their opinions seriously.

Extraordinary policies require extraordinary evidence

Okay, fine — school totally blows. But surely, social media can’t be entirely benign. Right?

Maybe, maybe not. Public assurances to the contrary, we don’t really know either way. The main problem is that most studies on the effects of social media fail to distinguish how users are engaging with their platforms. On Snapchat, you can make group chats with your friends and send pictures throughout the day; you can also receive nude pictures from random sex predators. Both forms of engagement would show up in a study as “screen time” or “time spent on Snapchat” — presumably, the latter is bad for mental health, and the former is potentially good. Whether one is substantially more common than the other is an unanswered empirical question.

The data we do have, however, is extremely murky. If you squint carefully, the studies summarized in The Anxious Generation do suggest that social media is somewhat harmful for teenage girls who are already at risk of mental health problems.

But on the other hand, a major longitudinal study found that using social media or playing video games more frequently had zero impact on the mental health of adolescents. A prior survey drawing from eight years of data had found that daily social media access had no effect on depressive symptoms. Data from Pew also shows that teens are more likely to report positive than negative experiences from their social media use.

Who’s right? Usually, it comes down to comically subtle arguments about survey methods. But one would think that if social media was truly so harmful — if, as Haidt has argued, it is the planet-sized dragon that flapped its wings and started a depressive hurricane — then there would be both minimal ambiguity and a strong academic consensus around his view. Notably, there is no such scholarly confusion about the effects of school.

Nonetheless, my gut (like yours) says that social media is not entirely neutral. My guess is that one particular form of engagement — doomscrolling through an addictive algorithmic feed — is bad for young brains. If studies could distinguish that activity from acceptable or even beneficial forms of engagement — for instance, forming group chats with your friends — then I think the statistics would be stronger. The benefits of socialization through these platforms is probably disguising the harms of consuming algorithmic slop.

Importantly, many platforms now emphasize content feeds over social interaction. That change is bad, and as some kids themselves have suggested, governments should probably move to regulate it.

Even if this somewhat generous intuition is right, though, the step of banning children from social media entirely is extraordinary and uncalled for. As far as we can tell, there is no clear evidence that usage is generally bad for mental health.

What we do know — or what we should know, at least — is that unimpeachable logic should back up any policy that limits the autonomy of a large and vulnerable population. That is clearly not the case for the present bans on adolescent social media access.

If the same fervor switched over to revamping the school system, however, that justification would exist. Scientists, parents, teachers, and children all agree that modern education is horrifically stressful. If we’re searching for a mental health bogeyman, then we adults should follow our own advice: look up from the phones and start paying attention to the classroom.

Play impactful games, win impactful prizes

So if the harms of schooling are so obvious — and particularly, so much more obvious than the harms of social media — why isn’t anyone talking about it?

To wax anthropological for a moment: when we identify an important but opaque problem that we want to solve, we tend to search for a single obvious and comprehensible solution. Factory jobs are gone? Simple: deport all the immigrants who took them. My cows got sick? Simple: figure out who cursed them and reverse the magic spell. Kids aren’t happy anymore? Simple: stop them from doing the things that seem different from the things we did throughout our adolescence, during which we, of course, were entirely pleased with our lives.

Simple solutions are easy to think about and apply. But many important problems aren’t simple, which means that the simple solutions are often wrong. Social media, like fear of witchcraft and immigration, is yet another all too obvious answer to a much more complicated question: how did our children become so sad?

School is also not the only right answer; as always, the truth is multi-faceted. But the data shows that it is one especially important facet.

Yet we ignore the melancholic elephant in the room, because you can’t pass a bill to ban anyone under 16 from going to school. Nor should you, probably. Making school less awful requires careful research and debate. As evidenced by the ongoing panic over social media, that is not a specialty of politicians, the commentariat or, for that matter, most of the public.

It is, however, a speciality of scientists. And fortunately for us, scientists have identified several changes to school that are about as simple as banning social media, which also come with the added bonus of addressing an actual problem.

Change #1: Start school later

Excessive screen use (I’ll admit it), early school start times, and heavy homework loads contribute to greater sleep deprivation among students. Obviously, sleep deprivation is bad for mental health.

To address it, one easy step is to push back school start times. Many correlational studies note that starting the school day later is associated with students sleeping longer, feeling better, and getting better grades. This is an easy fix that would be widely welcomed by students.

Change #2: Give students less homework

Homework is the greatest source of academic stress faced by students today. As mentioned above, increases in homework load harm mental health at a non-linear rate. This is a good reason to cut homework loads down, since doing so might provide a similarly non-linear boost to the health of young people.

While there is some evidence that spending more time on homework leads to higher levels of academic achievement, we should probably prioritize the reduction of massively negative impacts on wellbeing rather than the increase of small positive impacts on grades and test scores. State policies should set caps on the amount of time students are expected to spend on homework each night, with the acceptable amount increasing gradually across later grade levels.

Change #3 Increase recess and lunch time

Students now receive substantially less time to eat and take breaks during the school day than they did in the 1980s. For instance, after the implementation of No Child Left Behind, 20% of schools reduced recess time by an average of fifty minutes per week. In England, school break times have been utterly slashed since 1996 to allow more time for “learning.” All this, despite the fact that longer recesses and more physical activity both produce happier, healthier, and more academically succesful students.

Many states have mandatory minimums on recess time, mainly for elementary school students: 30 minutes in California, 40 minutes in Arkansas, etc. These numbers are abysmally low, especially when it comes to young children. I always find it slightly tragic when I hear kids say their favorite part of the day is recess. We should indulge those kids, and all the evidence supporting their preferences, by raising the recess minimums and enforcing those rules with all the same vigor that has been applied to the distribution of Yondr pouches.

If you don’t eat yer meat, you can’t have any pudding

Like all good interventions, these small changes would probably have outsized effects. Children would be happier, less stressed, and less likely to kill themselves during school time. That’s great. If these modest proposals received half the attention of the latest moral panic, young people would be far better off.

But schooling is a system, and ultimately, it is the system itself that is ruining the minds of young people. Well before 2012, children were still committing suicide in the fall. Fundamentally, school is not what kids have evolved to do: they’re supposed to play freely with their friends, not spend their childhoods performing for adults under constant supervision.

Yet this is our brave new world. For the last fifty years, adults have opted to put their children in a panopticon. Social media bans are yet another brick in the wall.

I hope we won’t let the greatest threat to the mental health of our children go unaddressed. Nor do I know how to fix it: to truly remedy the system, we’ll need a much larger reckoning. But we can, at least, start bringing it down the same way we built it up: one brick at a time. And to decide which bricks to remove first from the prison, we should maybe consider the opinions of the people we’ve locked inside.4

A look at how I used shape vectors to achieve sharp, high-quality ASCII rendering.