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
- Urban liberal intellectuals
- Feminists
- 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.