It's more likely to be related to culture and political structure than education is my guess. Unless, maybe, we want to use a different definition for education than just degree attainment. For example, Finland has lower attainment rates for bachelor degree equivalents than the US. This would seem to disprove your point.

The real issue is the two party split and urbanized distribution. The way the voting works and the structure of the houses means that once you reach about 85% urbanization the rural areas won't matter. We can see this at many state levels that mimic national political structure. We have multiple nations within our county, with the biggest divide probably being between urban and rural. So all you have you have to do is promise the rural group who feels they are increasingly marginalized a candidate who will look out for their interest. The specifics of those promises don't really matter because in the 2 party system it's us vs them more than actual policy positions. You will find a much bigger difference looking at the urbanization based metrics than you will at the roughly 10pt difference in who people with bachelor degrees voted for.

Edit: why disagree?

Switzerland. Power is extremelly distributed between municipalities, cantons and, in the Federal Government, there are 7 equal ministers. The system is not only robust by definition, but encourage dialogue and citizens participation in politics at every level through popular vote, educating people during centuries.

Germany. The country was designed to be incredibly hard to takeover from the inside.

Central government is weak, even if AFD would takeover the chancellorship there are few measures that would immediately allow them to intervene in the federal states or „Länder“, much much less than in the US e.g. unless there is war there is no way to use the military to force compliance.

You would have to take over the country 17 times, and since the elections are not synchronised you would have to convince everybody all the time that this is good idea.

Individual German federal states could be taken over much easier, Thuringia probably will be the first in 2028.

The biggest weakness than is that the legal prosecution on German federal state level is under control of the executive and could be used to prosecute political adversaries. But if this goes to far the remaining parts of the country could vote to takeover the executive if there was a breach of the constitution.

Expanding on this, Vlad Vexler offers a broader framework here:

https://www.youtube.com/live/hgPGPZRQdaU?si=4W0z1vkk2bfnueJZ

His analysis complements the crucial discussions elsewhere in this thread about the economic details (reserve currency risks, the tariff math) and specific geopolitical impacts, by focusing on the political drivers; the nature of post-truth populism, underlying societal weaknesses, the challenge of maintaining civic coherence in the midst of it all, etc.

The allies tried to make Germany robust against this.

Doesn't matter how intelligent or educated or homogenous culturally the Finns are...if Russia were to decide to invade.

Domestic political antifragility means nothing if you're not anti-fragile in terms of the outside world.

It's called the anarchic global system for a reason. The only thing enforcing norms is power and the fear of it.

Antifragility would be the EU finally forming a real union. As someone living in Finland, I'm not holding my breath that happens in our lifetimes. If you take a sample of average, non-cosmopolitan Europeans, they can barely even communicate with each other in the same language. Let alone come to agreements on who's going to pay for each others bloated social welfare expectations.

The EU is the very definition of Fragility. While Finland has made far more rational decisions than its EU neighbors (having correctly prioritized energy security, military, and technology), it doesn't matter because size is more important.

You can look at countries that have remained democratically stable for a long time. The UK and Switzerland come to mind. I live in the UK and we have an odd system that I used to consider a bit of a gimmick for the tourists to take photos of but appreciate more these days. Basically the fact that we have a king but with severely curtailed powers delegated to the elected folk makes it very hard for one of them to appoint themselves effectively king, especially as the military all swear allegiance to the actual king (or queen).

It's partly effective because they system wasn't really designed but evolved out of a lot of bloody power battles, going back to at least 1215 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta

I used to think it was silly but if you look at rival European powers they had Russia with Stalin, Hitler in Germany, Napoleon in France, Franco in Spain, Mussolini in Italy etc. The UK is one of the very few which avoided having a dictator.

[Edit - I was kind of talking about the wrong thing - avoiding dictators rather than Trump types]

It would also help to have a population without a deep-seated beef going back to the civil war. You arguably have two separate 'America's split down that historical line that might not ever see eye-to-eye and, just like the US itself has installed dictators or favourable governments by funding disruption abroad, it is open to be exploited the same way.