An important thing to remember is that education and intelligence, whilst they can be helpful, are certainly no immunity against being a crank. You can meet some truly brilliant people who will collapse into dribbling absurdity once they move out of their specialist area.
This is perhaps one of the great problems with the elites. Adam Smith pointed out that humans are wont to assume that the rich are admirable: intelligent, well-informed, even virtuous, because how else could they succeed? The tragic reality is that they can quite often be a raddled lunatic on other issues, because an eye for brilliance at tax-avoidance to boost corporate profits does not mean a person has anything useful to say about environmental protections or the benefits of the welfare state. And even as we have this vividly demonstrated to us by the deranged ramblings of the White House's billionaire incumbent (a man who thinks being able to remember five words makes him some kind of genius), I'll bet you will still find plenty of people opining "Mike McMoney would make a great president, he's been CEO of Megacorp so he must really understand how things work."
It's true. My dad was a lawyer, and when law didn't work out he went back to university and earned a Masters in History (specializing in Anglo-Saxon law, I believe) with the plan to teach at a university level. In the process of which, he grew disillusioned with academia, and eventually he basically lied his way into a career in IT, where he trained himself and has worked ever since. He's well versed in history, has an interest in literature, and has studied American law and the Constitution. He grew up poor, and says he needed to work to pay for his own school clothes since the age of 6 in his relatives' fish shops and shrimp factories. He served tables after being fired from law.
All of this to say, he has walked many different paths, economic circumstances, and is highly educated. He is the only person in my life who shares my interests in intellectual thoughts and the only one who even wants to have "intelligent" conversations.
He also is an ardent believer that Trump has to be a brilliant man in order to have "become a billionaire in real estate in the toughest market in the world," and he writes off all of Trump's ramblings as intentionally trolling lily-hearted liberals.
Education and intellectual pursuit does not mean that somebody will share the same ideas.
