Mofabio posted:

If you want to learn why this is, it's all in Disciplined Minds.

A brief summary: professionals are quite liberal (pro civil rights, pro gay marriage, etc) on distant issues, non-professionals are liberal on immediate issues (war drafts, worker rights, edit add: trust in democracy). On issues that might conflict with the ideology of their organization, professionals lose their backbone, and non-professionals gain one.

Why: well, most non-professional workers are under constant surveillance, and have their time micromanaged, which obviously generates distrust. Professionals aren't, because a proceduralized workday would conflict with the novel, creative work they're hired to do. So how do you keep professionals on task? Basically, you make them show ideological commitment to the organization. Then you don't have to watch them- they're self-policed.

The book goes into detail about how this ideological commitment gets embedded and how bosses ask for it to be demonstrated. The end result is, professionals range from the non-political (read: still live out the ideology of their organization 8 hours a day) to Ayn Rand devotees.