Blue states smarter than red states?

[constanze]

Link to column

Isn't part of intelligence the ability to accept and evaluate facts contrary to belief? And don't authoritarian personalities, who strongly self-identify as Republicans / conservatives, in many studies have much more problems accepting contradictory facts than people who identify as Democrats or Liberals?

Last report I found on this matter:

Steve Benen quotes the pollster’s analysis — “Democrats trust everything but Fox. Republicans don’t trust anything but Fox.” — and notes, correctly, that this is “epistemic closure.”

[gamerunknown]

More importantly, does it matter? Intelligence tests have been plagued with problems from their inception, Yerkes and Eysenck being prominent proponents and racists. Gould, Baron-Cohen and Gardner have all published works that should lead one to question their profusion. For example, Gardner says intelligence is related to the socially useful works that one produces: two of the youngest professors in the world, Nietzsche and Enoch Powell, wouldn't qualify under that definition (at least in my view).

[Toilet & Bowels]

I've often wondered if there is greater correlation between emotional intelligence (or ability to empathise, etc) in whether people vote left or right, I would have thought there's some likelihood that higher EI = more left, obvioulsly there would be other factors such influencing people voting choices than that, but I wouldn't think that average IQ wouldn't differ much between red or blue states, e.g. for every person voting republican against their own interests, you have a greedy smart guy who is only interested in his own needs. Though obviously you could say that a greedy smart person is also dumb for not realising that the overall wellbeing of society is in his own interest.

[Cartoonacy]

As a conservative and a very active longtime member of Mensa, my personal observations have been that the liberal and conservative factions are both well-represented among those with high IQ scores. The number of libertarians I've met at Mensa events is much greater than I've found anywhere else.

[gamerunknown]

Though obviously you could say that a greedy smart person is also dumb for not realising that the overall wellbeing of society is in his own interest.

They may be physically incapable of making that realisation. Some high functioning Asperger's syndrome people are capable of making the connection, but psychopaths and autists that can be highly capable in other respects can never grasp the totality of the consequences of their actions (under game theory, say).

James Randi had a great interview that I can no longer find; he said that he aced the Mensa admission exams and was invited to speak at an event, but when he addressed religious claims with the same irreverence he applied to other supernatural ones, he was coldly received. So, he never went back.

[Maddux]

Cecil rightfully makes a small aside questioning what IQ tests are even truly testing. To take that further, using standardized tests that measure quality of education (SAT and ACT) is a terrible measure of intelligence. I've known plenty of people who scored well on their ACT (the test given in my state, which is, for the record, a red one) that couldn't reason their way out of a wet paper bag.

More troubling than methodology, though, is motivation. It seems that the only people trying to prove that one group is "dumber" than the other is already safely entrenched on their side of the political spectrum. It's one thing to conduct research to prove something you think might be true; but it's another thing to conduct research for which your own self worth is dependent upon a particular outcome. You will inevitably come to the conclusions you assumed to be true to begin with.

[Argos Watch]

I believe the red state/blue state issue is a bit of a contrived phenomena that makes it easy for talking heads to generalize (and to add credence to the value of the electoral college as a means of selecting a president).

If you look at the data at a more granular level (by county for instance) it seems that the split is urban vs rural not Nebraska vs California. Dense populations seem to be blue, suburbs purple and rural areas red. San Fransico and LA show blue but look at the rest of CA and it really looks like a red state.

Causality to the distribution is a different issue. My crackpot theroy is what I call the 911 Effect - If you can call 911 and someone reliably shows to bail you out of your predicament in less than 2 mins 'Big Government' works and you vote Blue. If your response time for a 911 call is 20 min to an hour your trust is more on self reliance and Smith & Wesson so you vote 'Gun Rights' and Red.

Now a discussion on urban vs rural intelligence might have a different outcome from the 99 to 99.5....

[Irishman]

There's an inherent problem that intelligence and education are not equivalent. The SAT in particular is a strong measure of education, but not necessarily of intelligence. It's a softer correlation there.

Same thing with looking at culture groups of urban vs rural. For every gun totin' down home redneck with three teeth and a drawl, there's a gun totin' urban hoodlem with gold teeth and ebonics.

[Maddux]

Originally Posted by Irishman

For every gun totin' down home redneck with three teeth and a drawl, there's a gun totin' urban hoodlem with gold teeth and ebonics.

And even these statements are gross generalizations. Not nearly every rural midwesterner is a gun-toting, bootlegging, government hater. And not nearly every low-income, inner city youth is a gang-banger. Not trying to call you out, just furthering your point. People are far more varied than any partisian pundits like to think and people vote blue or red for lots of different reasons.

My in-laws pack heat regularly but might as well bleed blue. My family doesn't want a gun within 100-ft of their home but votes red. And I consider them all reasonable, intelligent and well meaning. Generalization doesn't do anybody any favors.

[Fear Itself]

I have always wondered if there was a correlation between abuse as a child, and political leanings as an adult. Never seen any statistics on it though.

[Cartoonacy]

Originally Posted by Argos Watch

Causality to the distribution is a different issue. My crackpot theory is what I call the 911 Effect - If you can call 911 and someone reliably shows to bail you out of your predicament in less than 2 mins 'Big Government' works and you vote Blue. If your response time for a 911 call is 20 min to an hour your trust is more on self reliance and Smith & Wesson so you vote 'Gun Rights' and Red.

I've had a similar 'crackpot theory' for awhile, but with a slight variation. I think that most people to whom it's natural to phone for a building superintendent, a plumber, an electrician, or a car repairman when something breaks down tend to vote Blue, because they're used to getting other people to take care of their problems; while those who are used to fixing things themselves tend to vote Red. That's just a rule of thumb, though, and I'm a counterexample myself: a mechanically inept conservative.

[Merneith]

You all are missing the real problem with that article. Cecil thinks Illinois is paradise on earth?? Clearly, the mob has gotten to him.

[a35362]

Originally Posted by Merneith

You all are missing the real problem with that article. Cecil thinks Illinois is paradise on earth?? Clearly, the mob has gotten to him.

Ouch! Hey, now.

[Fear Itself]

In Chicago, Cecil gets to the mob.

[gamerunknown]

Here are a few other theories as to political allegiances.

Strict Father Framing.

Attribution Error.

Just World Hypothesis.

I don't pretend impartiality there .

[Zaklog]

If you consider yourself liberal and "open-minded" and seriously consider this hypothesis (viz. liberals are, as a group, smarter than conservatives) a possibility, you need to reconsider your definition of "open-minded." I don't think it means "smug and condescending to anyone not holding the accepted opinions."

Even outside of this particular topic, I'm seriously annoyed at what that word has turned into today. Just examining the word itself, it looks like it should mean willing to listen to other people's opinions and question your own views. In common usage today, it appears to mean holding a particular set of beliefs, primarily socially liberal ones.

^ Constanze, if you seriously think that liberals are inherently better at reconsidering their own beliefs, I don't think you know much about human nature. And yes, I will admit that I'm just as prone to irrational defense of my own ideas as anyone, but I don't think any more so.

^ Merneith, I think Cecil's assertion a bit weird also. He's bragging on the politics of Illinois? One of the most notoriously politically corrupt states in the union? Four governors since 1961 have been convicted of major crimes. Everyone together now, When I die, I want to be buried in Chicago, so . . .

[astorian]

First, I find it odd that liberals, who are normally the first and loudest to insist that IQ scores are meaningless and unreliable are so eager to embrace dubious evidence that conservatives have lower IQs than liberals.

So, make up your minds, Lefties: does IQ mean something or not?

Now, what do I (a Republican, Catholic Ivy Leaguer, if anyone cares) think of the intellectual makeup of the two major parties?

Well, before I begin, jot down the name "Fred Dutton" and Google it later, to confirm what I'm about to say.

For many, many years, it was fairly accurate to say "The Republicans are the Party of the rich and the Democrats are the party of the working class." Hence, in the year 1928, I'd wager any objective intelligence test would have shown that Republicans were, on the whole, a lot "smarter" (certainly better educated) than Democrats.

The Great Depression and the New Deal cemented this situation for another few decades. Even in the early Sixties, the Democrats could count on the allegiance of white working class voters all over America. A Polish steelworker in Pittsburgh, a redneck mechanic in Memphis, an Armenian bus driver in Fresno and a Jewish tailor in Brooklyn (none of whom had more than a high school education) ALL identified with the Democrats, whom they regarded as "the people's party."

When did that change? Well, it STARTED to change in FDR's administration. Even though working class America regarded the New Deal as a godsend, the administration itself was filled with liberal intellectuals and Ivy League technocrats like John Kenneth Galbraith- folks who saw the New Deal NOT as a way to save capitalism but as the first step toward a socialist state that would be run mostly by people like themselves.

In 1952 and 1956, we saw the results. The Democratic nominee was Adlai Stevenson, the darling of the liberal, intellectual wing of the party. What happened? The white working class didn't warm to him, and voted for Eisenhower!

Over time, liberal leaders of the party started to view the white working class as disloyal and unreliable. Between 1968 and 1972, Fred Dutton, among others, made a conscious decision to abandon the white working class completely and build a new coalition around

1) Urban liberal intellectuals
2) Feminists
3) Impoverished ethnic minorities.

That's REMAINED the Democratic coalition ever since.


So... given the demographics of the new Democratic coalition, should we expect the Democrats to be smarter or dumber than Republicans? The answer is (drumroll)... BOTH!

Look at it this way- a Sociology professor at UCLA will almost certainly vote a straight Democratic ticket, but so will a welfare Mom in Compton.

The Dems get the very rich AND the very poor. They get the PhD's AND the illiterates. The GOP gets the middle class, the upper middle class, and the people who ASPIRE to being upper middle class.

[Una Persson]

While investigating some of the articles behind the column I did come across many folks who felt like the actual discriminator in intelligence was fundamentalist religious beliefs. Namely, that people of any religion who have fundamentalist religious beliefs tend to be much less intelligent than those without, and it happens that more fundamentalists identify as conservatives. In fact I found one paper which found in their terms of intelligence, the smartest to dumbest persons were:

* weakly-religious or atheist conservatives
* weakly-religious or atheist liberals
* strongly religious liberals
* strongly religious conservatives

But I thought there was no statistically significant difference between the first three categories. I need to see if I can find that citation.

Nonetheless, this might explain somewhat the effect I see in my field. I work in a field where about 95%-99% of the people are Republicans, and pretty much all of them I would call "strongly conservative" Republicans. Yet the average degree level is a Masters, with a good selection of multiple-MS and PhD degrees, and Engineering is one of the absolute most difficult degree programs there is. Even the people with Bachelor's degrees typically have 2 or more of them and are definitely sharp. So these people aren't exactly "dumb;" in fact I would wager that half of all my co-workers probably could qualify for Mensa, and I know that maybe a tenth of them are already in it or some equivalent organization. This begs many questions, such as "why did they, in an office poll, vote 55-1-1(abstained) in favor of Bush over Kerry?"

[gamerunknown]

According to Chomsky's description, it wasn't necessarily the case that being working class entailed ignorance: it correlated to a lack of state education most likely, true...

[Zaklog]

^ Astorian, thank you for an excellent, fair brief political history. That's probably the coolest, fairest assessment of the situation I've seen yet. The only thing I need to mention about that is that "intelligent" and "intellectual" are not synonyms (at least to my mind). Intellectuals are the people in universities, publishing, and a lot of the major media. Intelligent people can be found just about anywhere.

Holding an M.A. in English (and trying to read widely in other areas), I think I'm fairly intelligent. I have to say that no matter how smart you are, being a social conservative in academia (at least the humanities), you're always at least a little uncomfortable. How or why universities became predominantly liberal, I don't know, but it's definitely there, and no, the answer is not that conservatives (or religious people) are stupid.

[Fear Itself]

Originally Posted by Zaklog

How or why universities became predominantly liberal, I don't know, but it's definitely there, and no, the answer is not that conservatives (or religious people) are stupid.

None of them?

[Beer Money]

None of the researchers you cited differentiated the minority or non-English language speakers in Mississippi. Additionally, the other red states have large hispanic populations that distort the population versus SAT takers. The factors for determining the intelligence of different groups or political parties is easy. They are all sheep that follow different misguided sheperds.

[Zaklog]

^ Fear Itself, yes, there are obviously stupid conservatives, just as there are obviously idiotic liberals. (An excellent example would be the guy who published the article concluding that the entire state of Mississippi had an average intelligence of 63. Yes, the entire state is mentally retarded, that makes perfect sense.)

My point is that conservatives are not, as a whole, stupider than liberals, nor vice versa. I mean, (and I direct this not necessarily to you FI, but to whoever makes the original argument) listen to yourself a minute: The only possible reason someone could disagree with me is because they're simply stupid. How unbearably smug is that?

[Fear Itself]

Originally Posted by Zaklog

An excellent example would be the guy who published the article concluding that the entire state of Mississippi had an average intelligence of 63. Yes, the entire state is mentally retarded, that makes perfect sense.)

I don't think you understand how averages work.

[dfp0]

I would have been interested in other correlations, such as "Do red states tend to have lousier school systems than blue states? If so, why?"

[gamerunknown]

According to Savageau 1993 (well, according to wiki): "An inverse correlation has been noted between teen pregnancy rates and the quality of education in a state.".

There is no evidence that abstinence education is effective, yet every Republican candidate in the 2000 presidential elections supported it (aside: Ron Paul has been in the three Republican challenges in the past twelve years... must be nice to be a millionaire!).

[Zaklog]

^ Fear Itself, yes, I do understand how averages work, but for the mean (add all values, divide by number of measurements) to be 63, that would basically have to mean the state is mostly populated by functionally retarded people. The only alternative would be that they would have a general population of at least functionally normal intelligence and, for some unexplained reason, an unusually high number of almost brain-dead people.

"Borderline intellectual functioning," in which a person is basically just functional to take care of themselves, runs from 70-85. A statewide average IQ of 63 would mean that almost everyone is mentally retarded. If I'm wrong, please show me a set of numbers that makes sense here. Kanazawa's smug political prejudices led him to not just state, but professionally publish, a claim that is ludicrous on the face of it.

[gamerunknown]

^ A state with a significant minority of individuals that were comatose and thus registered a zero or near zero IQ (say 10% of "respondents").

One has to acknowledge such technicalities when dealing with statistics.

[elfkin477]

Originally Posted by Fear Itself

I don't think you understand how averages work.

I think he does.

In order to get an average as low as 63 there must be a huge number of people with IQs below 75 in the state. 85% of mentally retarded people have IQs of at least 50, so it can't be that there are a great number of people with extremely low IQs dragging the average down...unless we're going to stipulate that most of the moderately and profoundly retarded individuals in the US live in Mississippi.

[gamerunknown]

Oh, to follow on from the education comments, I believe that no current Republican senator believes in anthropogenic global warming, over which there is a pretty overwhelming scientific consensus.

Several Republican presidential candidates have voiced doubt about evolution too, with Newt Gingrich being the most solidly in support of science.

[JRDelirious]

Originally Posted by Zaklog

^ Merneith, I think Cecil's assertion a bit weird also. He's bragging on the politics of Illinois? One of the most notoriously politically corrupt states in the union? Four governors since 1961 have been convicted of major crimes. Everyone together now, When I die, I want to be buried in Chicago, so . . .

I found it a delightful way to use irony to point out the fallacy of presuming that the particular politics of a state correlate necessarily and directly to more smarts, higher quality of life, or a prevalence of wisdom.

As he himself says in the column: "a conservative researcher would have said to himself, maybe there's something wrong with my methodology, but Kanazawa, being the bold liberal thinker, didn't"; here he's openly throwing the caricature back in the faces of its advocates.

[qazwart]

First of all, there are lots of smart conservatives. Just ask Newt Gingrich, and he'll be happy to name one. (rimshot!).

Okay, enough of that. What the heck do we mean by Liberal vs. Conservative anyway? We can talk about a dozen or so key issues and one side is liberal while the other is conservative. But, in reality, many people will stand one way on one issue and another way on another issue.

This overriding concern with labeling everybody is hurting us.

Let's say I consider myself conservative, but support something many of my fellow conservatives don't support. Let's say I agree food stamps are a good idea. People shouldn't starve because they don't have the money to buy food. Maybe I feel that way because because God told us to feed the starving.

Now, I watch the news and learn that such a view is considered liberal. Well, I'm not a liberal., and I start to re-evaluate my position. Maybe Fox News is right and food stamps are just an excuse for lazy people who are on drugs not to take responsibility for their lives. If people want to eat, they should get a job.

Not long ago, we were able to understand that if someone disagrees with us, it doesn't mean their mislead, stupid, a socialist, or that they like Hitler. It allowed us to try to understand their point of view and maybe even incorporate their feelings and concerns into our beliefs. Maybe that's what marks you as intelligent. Maybe that's why the purple states rank higher than the solid red or blue ones.

[SenorBeef]

Originally Posted by Zaklog

If you consider yourself liberal and "open-minded" and seriously consider this hypothesis (viz. liberals are, as a group, smarter than conservatives) a possibility, you need to reconsider your definition of "open-minded." I don't think it means "smug and condescending to anyone not holding the accepted opinions."

So to be clear, in order to be open minded, you have to automatically dismiss a hypothesis without examination, and if you were to attempt to examine it with evidence, that would make you closed minded?

^ Constanze, if you seriously think that liberals are inherently better at reconsidering their own beliefs, I don't think you know much about human nature. And yes, I will admit that I'm just as prone to irrational defense of my own ideas as anyone, but I don't think any more so.

Part of what constitutes conservatism is a bias towards the status quo, so it's not unreasonable to postulate that conservatives are people who are less willing to challenge their default views.

You are essentially admitting in this post that you're closed minded to the possibility that there may be differences between groups - which is fairly typical - but unaware of the irony that you think this makes the people you're criticizing the ones who are closed minded.

[Chronos]

Several things that astorian said call for responses. First of all, and this is a general point, of course I consider my political views smarter than the views opposed to them. I would expect that everyone would think this. If I considered the opposing view smarter, I would hold that view instead. Now, it may well be that I'm mistaken on some of these points (and certainly, someone is), but that doesn't mean that I don't honestly hold that view.

With that out of the way:

First, I find it odd that liberals, who are normally the first and loudest to insist that IQ scores are meaningless and unreliable are so eager to embrace dubious evidence that conservatives have lower IQs than liberals.

So, make up your minds, Lefties: does IQ mean something or not?

Everyone agrees that IQ means something. There are a fairly wide variety of tests that measure IQ, and they have excellent stability in a given individual and correlation with each other. This is good evidence that there is some real psychological trait that's being measured by all of these tests. Now, just what that trait is, and whether it warrants the label "intelligence", that's much more debatable.

For many, many years, it was fairly accurate to say "The Republicans are the Party of the rich and the Democrats are the party of the working class." Hence, in the year 1928, I'd wager any objective intelligence test would have shown that Republicans were, on the whole, a lot "smarter" (certainly better educated) than Democrats.

I suppose it's fair to argue that the rich are, in at least some sense, "smarter" or at least better educated than the poor. But just because the Republicans are the party of the rich, does not imply that most Republicans are themselves rich. There have always been and will always be significantly more non-rich than rich, by any reasonable definition of "rich". So a party of the rich, in order to have any political significance at all, must also count a large portion of the non-rich among their numbers. Just what portion that is has changed with time, of course, but it's always been necessary for the party of the rich to court some other large demographics. And even if the handful of the rich in the party are intellectually superior in some way to the general population, it's going to be lost in the noise compared to all the other members of the party.

When did that change? Well, it STARTED to change in FDR's administration. Even though working class America regarded the New Deal as a godsend, the administration itself was filled with liberal intellectuals and Ivy League technocrats like John Kenneth Galbraith

If the Republicans at this time were the smarter (or at least, better-educated) ones, then how did the liberals end up with the intellectuals and technocrats?

The Dems get the very rich AND the very poor. They get the PhD's AND the illiterates. The GOP gets the middle class, the upper middle class, and the people who ASPIRE to being upper middle class.

The very poor are split between the parties. The Democrats mostly get the urban poor, while the Republicans mostly get the rural poor. Neither party has a monopoly on poverty.

[gamerunknown]

But just because the Republicans are the party of the rich, does not imply that most Republicans are themselves rich.

There's another conception: that the Democrat and Republican parties are the two wings of the American business party. A majority of Barack Obama's campaign funds in 2008 came from corporations if I recall correctly and his campaign won marketing awards.

This is good evidence that there is some real psychological trait

The stress is mine: I think Gould would have argued that this was reification.

[Fear Itself]

Originally Posted by gamerunknown

There's another conception: that the Democrat and Republican parties are the two wings of the American business party. A majority of Barack Obama's campaign funds in 2008 came from corporations if I recall correctly and his campaign won marketing awards.

It is illegal for corporations to donate directly to the campaigns. Employees of corporations may donate up to $2500 each to the campaign, but 57% of Obama's donations were less than $999, with 34% less than $200.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-me...ge-donors-too/

[Zaklog]

^ SenorBeef, perhaps I phrased things poorly, so I'll try again. Say a person is so certain of their beliefs, so entirely convinced of their own rightness, that the only explanation they can find for why someone might disagree with them is that this person is simply stupid. If I am supposed to call someone with that attitude "open-minded," then I need to take my dictionary, rip it to shreds, and burn it, because words don't mean anything anymore.

So if conservatives are biased towards the status quo, that doesn't mean they're necessarily more rigid in their thinking. It is just as possible to be rigidly, irrationally opposed to the status quo, like the deliberate non-conformist who is ultimately just as driven by norm as those they look down on.

I'm trying to believe, act, and talk like there are intelligent, reasonable people on both sides. But honestly, the more people sling nasty, hateful stereotypes at me, the harder it is to do so. So, yes, if you absolutely want to shut down any possibility of a real discussion, of respectful dialogue, then please keep thinking and saying that your opponents are just obviously too stupid to understand why you're right.

[foolsguinea]

Making it about intelligence misses the point. Or points, as there are several:

Someone can be highly intelligent and working from false knowledge. GIGO.
Not all intelligence is the same. Sociological intelligence is not engineering intelligence.
Not all knowledge is the same. Politico-historical knowledge is not physics knowledge. (We are all ignorant, we are just ignorant of different things.)
Political tendencies are often about moral priorities and intentions, not intellect or knowledge as such.

[foolsguinea]

Each political grouping includes a range of intellects; a range of expertises; cynics, true believers, and everything in between.

What you're really looking at are subcultural groups, within any of which an affiliation with the group and its leader(s) precedes judgment on most issues for most followers. The leaders may be good or evil, knowledgeable or ignorant, smart or stupid. But the followers don't know enough, don't care enough, or don't understand enough to get the difference.

(Which meshes neatly with the premise that swing voters are smarter on average. They at least try to think for themselves, while the knee-jerk loyalists who are knee-jerk loyalists because they're really stupid bring the averages down among partisans.)

[astorian]

Originally Posted by Chronos

If the Republicans at this time were the smarter (or at least, better-educated) ones, then how did the liberals end up with the intellectuals and technocrats?

Historically, smart, well-educated conservatives have gone into businesses where they hoped to make money. Smart, well-educated socialists have congregated in academia.

The New Deal recruited heavily in academia.

[Chronos]

Historically, smart, well-educated conservatives have gone into businesses where they hoped to make money. Smart, well-educated socialists have congregated in academia.

And what happened to smart, well-educated liberals?

[coffeecat]

David Barry said that if your car is broken down in the middle of winter, a Democrat will pull over, try to help you get it started, and in the process accidentally blow up the engine. A Republican will have all the tools and knowledge necessary to fix your car, but will let you freeze to death by the side of the road because he's late for Ugly Hat Night at the country club. That is accurate enough to be hilarious. "Was accurate" I should say, because nowadays, judging by their leadership, a Republican would drive by because he's afraid your car is possessed by demons. Conservatism isn't inherently dumb: Barry Goldwater and William F Buckley were not stupid. But we don't have them anymore. Instead we have Sarah Palin.

To prove that most conservatives are stupid and not just prominent ones, get back to me with a good way to measure the intelligence of millions of people.

[Acsenray]

Originally Posted by coffeecat

Conservatism isn't inherently dumb: Barry Goldwater and William F Buckley were not stupid. But we don't have them anymore.

Buckley is not someone we ever needed. He was a disgusting racist. In the 1950s, he defended segregation, Jim Crow, and other racist policies as necessary for civilized white people to protect their culture and society from the corrupting influence of blacks.

Originally Posted by National Review, Aug. 24, 1957

National Review believes that the South's premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.

In the 1960s, Buckley supposedly renounced racism, but when he was interviewed on "Fresh Air" decades later, Buckley declined to take back or express regret or second thoughts about his support for segregationism in the 1950s. Buckley served as nothing more than an intellectual veneer for what the modern right sees no reason to cover up.

[rogerbox]

Blue states at least vote smarter. My cite is that red states correlate almost 1:1 with a map of states that get more than they pay into the federal goverment. Conservatives are the real welfare queens.

[Zaklog]

^ Acsenray, I'm not defending Buckley's racist positions. Please do not take this as doing that. Honestly, I don't know enough about them to defend or attack them. I will point out, however, that the starting point for this discussion is the relative intelligence of people with varying political opinions. Buckley may have been a racist [bleep], but he was also intelligent. Isaac Newton was clearly brilliant. He was also horribly petty and vengeful. Intelligence and moral character are not the same.

[Irishman]

Originally Posted by foolsguinea

Political tendencies are often about moral priorities and intentions, not intellect or knowledge as such.

Ding ding ding!

Living in Texas, I have a number of friends who would describe themselves as conservative and vote Republican. Sussing them out, most of them are not raging fundamentalist christians. Some are even atheists or superficial christians*. For them, the issue that pegs is often the fiscal side of responsibility. Responsibility of government, and self-reliance. People should have incentive to work, and work to have nice things, not coast by on the efforts of others. You want a good lifestyle, earn it.

On the other hand, I have a number of friends who self-identify as liberals, and vote and/or are activist Democrats. Some of them are religious, though none are obnoxiously so. To them, the issues that come up relate to the value of human life, the need to keep people from starving, that no one deserves illness and poor health. It's a sense of social responsibility. These people are not welfare riders - many are two income middle class folks with steady jobs.

My impression is that each type approaches the political question with a fundamentally different perspective and different priorities. They're just not on the same page.
-----
* Superficial christian is someone who self-identifies as christian, holds nominal beliefs in God, Jesus, the value of the Bible. They may circulate political glurge heavy on the "God Bless America". But they don't particularly attend church, and you often wouldn't know they're religious beliefs from everyday encounters. They don't force it into every conversation.

Unlike an uncle of mine, who I find it nearly impossible to spend much time around, because everything is an excuse for him to bring up his beliefs, or the Bible, or whatever.

[XT]

Personally, I've found most of the states to be dumber than dirt...probably because so much of the states are made up of dirt, though that's just a theory. Rocks too seem to play a large part of what makes up a state...which might account for states being dumber than rocks. But all of the states I've visited just don't seem all that smart (or even to have either a red or blue tinge that I can detect, to be honest). I've asked states various questions in the past and I don't believe I've ever even gotten an answer.

-XT

[Powers]

Originally Posted by Una Persson

This begs many questions

No, it doesn't. It raises many questions. (Questions to which I would love to know the answers!)


Powers &8^]

[wlinden]

The "liberals" I have spent my life surrounded by are the most closed-minded, arrogant people anywhere. If you don't agree with them about everything, you aren't human.

I recall this Times story (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/04/sc...04tierney.html) where researchers found that conservatives (Gasp!) have a SENSE OF HUMOR.... and resorted to dealing with this threat to their preconceptions by the time-honored method of "torture the data until it confesses."

[Zaklog]

^ Wlinden, was that just an article in the New York Times admitting that certain areas of academia are dominated by liberals and that this just might bias their thinking? I . . . I'm stunned here.

I won't go as far as you on the close-mindedness of liberals, but I do want to point out that a liberal in America has far less need and opportunity to think about the other side's opinions. If he chooses the right circle of friends, he hardly ever has to acknowledge that there are human beings who think otherwise at all. A conservative with conservative friends will still frequently hear liberal ideas from just about any major media source, and I'm not talking about news bias (that's another issue). I'm talking about TV & movies, which, excepting those explicitly made for a religious market, are overwhelmingly liberal. Whether we take the time to think about it or not, conservatives have to at least hear the other side. Liberals don't have this same exposure.