I think by “conservatives” Mill meant king-and-country Tory-type conservatives. Traditionalists. Like todays paleocons and theocons and, to some lesser extent, bizcons and neocons.
Progressivism just means you favor reform. The people who pushed for prohibition were progressive and so were the people who pushed to repeal prohibition.
The point is that whatever “liberal” meant in the 1930s is not what it means today. The study claims that people who identify themselves as liberals today are smarter than people who identify themselves as conservatives today.
The second link in the OP gets me to a page where I can access a PDF of the whole article.
The methodology in the study is pretty simple. Subjects are first questioned about their religion, political views and fidelity, and then those results are compared with results from a verbal skills test. The rest of the study is just the authors theorizing about their results.
If anything is suspect it might be the way they measured intelligence, but I don’t know enough about IQ tests to confirm that.
If you have the time, would you mind copying and pasting the study’s definition of the term “liberal”? If a liberal for purposes of this study boils down to “people who checked the ‘liberal’ box as opposed to the ‘conservative’ box,” I’m going to question the intelligence of the researchers. I don’t think the term “liberal” in and of itself is subject to such a precise definition that we can know what it means when someone checks that box.
Sounds like fair definition for fiduciary liberalism. Doubtlessly, some conservatives will protest the insinuation that they don’t care about the welfare of others, but if they don’t support the extra step of contributing more resources via taxes, then they shouldn’t have a problem with not being included as “liberals.”
They shouldn’t be. Why would they want to keep the status quo if they were doing badly under it? The only reason they cling to traditionalism, is because traditionally, they were much better off than everyone else, and that’s how they wanted to keep things.
Here’s an articlewhich posits that it is not a particular position that one holds as much as it is that people who depart from cultural norms have higher IQs. For example, Christians in Japan have better education than the atheists (the prevailing norm in Japan). I can easily see why, for example, a free marketeer in Cuba would likely be smarter than his/her peers, and a communist in University of Chicago would be smarter than his/her peers.