Baker, I don't think it's nearly so simple. Many idealistic students shift to the right once they become wealthy. They seek education for the same reason as anyone else - interest and employment. What happens afterwards can shape their views.
People vote for Democrats for all sorts of reasons. I doubt that George Soros and other billionaire Democrat supporters see earning money as a secondary motivation any more than billionaire Republican supporters do.
By the same token, Republicans are not clones either and I am surprised that you bundle up Democrats as all being the same. Lack of familiarity leads to difficulty in telling people apart. I do not have that issue because my father was a fierce right-winger. Nor was he a cookie-cutter voter. He had his own reasons for voting for the Liberal Party, generally related to employment relations.
There are differences, as noted by psychologists:
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/psyc ... als-2018-2
Decades of research have shown that people get more conservative when they feel threatened and afraid.
Threats of terrorism make everyone less liberal – researchers found this was especially true in the months after 9/11. During that time, the US saw a conservative shift, and Americans displayed increased support for military spending and for President George W. Bush.
Americans aren’t the only ones whose political leanings are influenced by fear. A 2003 review of research conducted in five countries looked at 22 separate tests of the hypothesis that fear fuels conservative viewpoints and found it was universally true.
Brain scans show that people who self-identify as conservative have larger and more active right amygdalas, an area of the brain that’s associated with expressing and processing fear. This aligns with the idea that feeling afraid makes people lean more to the right.
I don't understand your question about the local right wingers having "class". They are just people. Mostly I speak with other dog walkers and I can confirm that, despite Trump's loathing of animals, plenty of right wingers love their dogs too.
Okay, I agree that both the Republican Party and the Democrat Party are right wing; it's not a true right/left division. Both parties mostly represent the interests of capital, and they differ in the degree to which they support capital. Still, the idea that Democrats are elites and Republicans are not is a reversal of the truth. The Democrats more strongly support the working and middle class than Republicans, who are more tightly wedded to the "trickle down effect". That was Murdoch, an expert at engaging the prejudices of the masses to manipulate their alliances.
What both parties need to address is the fact that, after resources gush upwards for long enough enough, and trickle back down to the people meanly enough, then inequality becomes so great that the concept no longer works. So, either the wealthy will give a lot of money back through taxes or philanthropy, or they will preside over extraordinary suffering and destruction.
Due to China's pressure, and competition with peers, I suspect the latter will be the case, because if major corporations and their human components are sufficiently protected with advanced technology, what happens to the masses will not much impact them.
So it goes.