"Cornered in your own country" or "enrichment of your whole life"?

Research on ethnocentrism, individual liberty, immigration and law enforcement typically shows that the higher and lower educated are pitted against each other on these aspects. These issues are held to go together in a broader opposition between authoritarianism and libertarianism, one that has led to a ‘new political culture’ that has increased in salience in the last decades. But apart from their mutual association, it is not exactly clear how attitudes on these diverse topics are coherently united. Employing a focus group method, this study analyzes the way higher and lower educated natives talk about ethnic/cultural diversity, which results in two empirically informed ideal typical worldviews. It shows that attitudes regarding the new political culture are grounded in more fundamental differences pertaining to what culture is and how cultural differences are to be dealt with. The results are discussed in the light of the debate about the ‘causes’ of contemporary cultural conflict.