<i>To be frank, I think it&#x27;s because those who are highly educated often believe they know what&#x27;s better for a person than the person does; economically &amp; politically speaking.</i><p>I&#x27;d say it&#x27;s more that they think they know better than <i>tradition</i>. They have the best reasoning skills and the most formalized evidence, which are <i>of course</i> better than generations of trial-and-error and heuristics and stacked biases.<p><i>In terms of acceptance of minorities, especially (gay, trans or just ethnic) I think that liberal mindset comes from an academic need to include minority opinions into discussion.</i><p>With the history of things like women having to write under male pseudonyms and people with the wrong opinions getting shut out (&quot;scientific progress happens one funeral at a time&quot;), this probably comes from somewhere else. I&#x27;d say it got fashionable somehow and then got stuck in a positive feedback loop.