I suspect he doesn't have too much of a problem with someone with a college degree making a bit more than him, but when the college educated start leaving him in the dust, he gets annoyed. Not at the education (which I would still argue that most without a college degree see some benefit in - these folks aren't stupid or uneducated, they simply don't have a college degree), but at the lack of understanding of what all these "smart" folks are doing to them.

No, I think that's exactly wrong. I don't think he gets annoyed that the college educated person is leaving him in the dust, if that's what happens. I think he perfectly understands what the college educated person is doing to him.

The college educated people are restructuring society to favor college-educated people, and disfavor working-class people. Not just capitalists. The college-educated professionals - which includes a lot of progressives - are doing it, too. As college-educated folks grew more numerous, we ended up taking control of most of society's institutions - and the ones we didn't control, we diminished. We took over. We were no longer the smart boffins that were often working for someone who didn't go to college - we were always the people in charge.

We arranged our economy to be more favorable to people who work with information rather than physical things: climate regulation, immigration policy, trade policy. We arranged our institutions so that they're less accessible to people without degrees - listing a degree as a job prerequisite for jobs that don't need them, making sure we hire people with the same backgrounds that we have, shifting decision-making to institutions filled with college graduates rather than working class folks, etc.

This is what progressives fail to understand about right-wing populism - that the "Elite" isn't limited to the Rich Capitalists, but (generally) includes the educational Elite as well. They're part of the problem. A Democratic party that's run by college-educated progressives, that elevates the choices and policy expertise of the college-educated folks, is going to have many of the same problems. There's a very good reason that the old-style Communist purges didn't just go after the capitalists and the bougeousie, but also the academics and intellectuals - because those people have a tremendous amount of power and control, too, and they wield it to advance their interests at the expense of the working class.

The populist offer is to let the working class people, the Common Folk, the hobbits and "deplorables" have a voice in how society is run, rather than leaving it to the technocrats in Brussells or the University Department chairs or the newspaper editors to decide what the "correct" policy is to advance the interest of the working class. Democrats aren't going to rise to that challenge merely by letting the Sanders wing be in charge.