What did the dumb demographic say to the smart demographic?
Pretty much. Five factors seem to be paramount to Trump support.
https://jspp.psychopen.eu/article/view/750
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Authoritarian Personality Syndrome
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Social Dominance orientation
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Prejudice
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Intergroup contact
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Relative deprivation
All 5 are proxies for authoritarianism and bigotry.
I also find myself wondering if Trump supporters are less intelligent. My experience is that all of the more intelligent people I know do not support him–even among those who support conservative conspiracies. And I’m not all that selective in who I know, as I live in a red state.
It would be interesting if data on their IQ existed. IQ isn’t perfect, by any means. But it is a proxy for intelligence that might be informative. If the data were normalized with figures on how well each group normally does, it might be interesting.
Education might also work as a proxy–again, if normalized based on percentages that normally get higher education. It’s just an interesting question on whether our (me and OP, at least) personal experiences align with the actual data.
If anyone can do that sort of work, I’d love to hear about it.
I’m around a lot of Trump supporters (not necessarily by choice, mind you.) Some of them are really, really smart. All of them have one defining characteristic - the resentment that “THEY are trying to take stuff from me.”
“They” have weapons like raising taxes, and giving money to the undeserving; letting foreigners come in and steal our jobs, or letting corporate America ship those jobs offshore; turning criminals loose on the streets; political correctness (however you want to define it); excessive regulation; taking our guns but forcing us to wear masks; the list is endless. The only thing that matters is that THEY are doing it to us.
Trump’s the guy who understands this, and he’s going to stop THEM from running over us.
Traditional conservatives don’t have this paranoia-fueled mindset. Sure, they don’t want to give up their stuff, either, but they don’t have a zero-sum mindset. Be one of us, work hard, spend wisely and America will be good to you.
But paranoia is a powerful driver. It can be more powerful than optimism.
Conservatism (and liberalism) is based on emotion. Trumpism is based on very negative emotions.
There are some professional Republican politicians interviewed here: The Mood in Trump’s MAGA-Land Ahead of the 2020 Election – Rolling Stone They probably aren’t stupid, but they are emotional. Even the ones who acknowledge that Trump is terrible still hate on the “left wing” media.
On a related note, no matter how angry you get, it’s not a good idea to call opponents in political groups “stupid”. Does anyone remember the deplorables comment?
I am not sure what the typical Trump Supporter’s IQ is and I really would not want to provoque them(1) by claiming they are as stupid as they behave, but I am pretty confident that Trump’s IQ is 88. Because of reasons.
(1) Them: hypocritical snowflaky whiny deplorables I mean
There is very little correlation between intelligence and stupid political beliefs, because political beliefs are often ratiinalised after someone chooses their ‘tribe’.
We all tend to believe what the people who make up our cohort believe, Humans are very tribal. Then once we have settled into our cohort, we use our intellect to rationalize what we already believe. We do that through selection bias, mood affiliation, and other cognitive tricks we ply on ourselves.
In fact, really smart people can believe the craziest things, because they have the intellectual firepower to make up crazy rationalizatiins for what they want to believe. Look at how many medical doctors are cranks. I’ve seen talented engineers who believe in Sasquatch and UFO’s. John Podesta, Hillary and Bill’s long-time political operative(and clearly pretty smart guy) is a UFO conspiracist,
And the universities are full of people who think Marxism is still a good idea. Not even the Russians believe that any more.
Yeah, I’ve known loads of smart people who believe stupid things - they’re religious!
Okay, hear me out. One of the more disturbing effects I’ve seen when talking to these people is, when the subject shifts to religion, so do their thought processes. Specifically, they switch from thoughtful analysis to dogmatic repetition and reflexive disbelief in the opposite - they are sourcing both their facts and their arguments from what they’ve been told and rejecting everything else. (And yes, this is how these people have been taught their religion. I was made to attend for years so I’ve seen it first-hand.) This is less a commentary on the truth-or-not of their beliefs and more about the fact that the way people think about their beliefs, and defend their beliefs, depends on how they got them and how they’re used to thinking about them. And if they way they think about the specific beliefs is stupid, then no amount of base intelligence can stand in the way. Their brains will visibly turn off in order to allow the preprogrammed beliefs and arguments to be employed uncritically.
So yeah, you most certainly don’t have to be stupid to believe, well, anything.
But I’m sure that sometimes it helps.
…Or so your cohort believe.
Haven’t you heard? Most engineering classes today consist of nothing but repetition of Marxist dogma and socialist ideas! Why, even in my course in computer programming, my professor was wont to pointificate:
" The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by *abolishing private property in general"
We even had a test on class struggle and the liberation of the proletariat in my microbiology course.
They’re everywhere! Communists are climbing up my legs! I can see one in the kitchen now, eating my wife’s jam! AAAAGHHHHH!