My take is that the conservative right has been taken over by an extreme religious element that has actively withdrawn from engaging with education, science, and non-religiously-affiliated institutions. Everything is extremely filtered and anything mainstream is to be avoided at all costs. So where are people from other ideologies supposed to come from if they're brought up to withdraw to their own parallel no-differing-views world?

Seriously, engineers and (hardish) scientists often go through universities with little exposure to preachy liberal art professors, and they still mostly come out as liberals.

>For Frank, the central defining tendency of the modern Democratic Party is its domination by “professionals,” the highly-credentialed, data-driven Best and Brightest that Obama stuffed his cabinet with.

I can understand having a different criteria for selection, but that doesn't seem to be the message. They can't really want willfully ignorant, under-performing, yet popular.

Please read the book. You want the best and brightest writing the policies, but you need them working on behalf of the working-class in general, through an exercise of broadly-based working-class power inside the party. Otherwise, you just get what we have, which is the best and brightest writing policies that favor the best and brightest above everyone else.