And what happened to smart, well-educated liberals?
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.
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.
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.
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.
^ 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.
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.
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
No, it doesn’t. It raises many questions. (Questions to which I would love to know the answers!)
Powers &8^]
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 (Study Shows Conservatives May Enjoy Humor More - The New York Times) 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.”
^ 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.
Here’s a point that seems to be missing in this discussion: talking about the relative intelligence of red and blues states is utterly missing the point. It isn’t really about whether blue or red states are smarter, it is whether liberal or conservative people are smarter. This may seem an obvious point to state, but it is important, because the red/blue state split isn’t even a second-order approximation of the real question; it’s a third- or maybe even fourth-order approximation.
The first assumption is that conservative/liberal maps well to Republican/Democrat, i.e. red/blue. I’m not convinced that that correlation holds up that well in general, and particularly not with respect to intelligent people. Even those who identify with one of the major political parties should be less likely to simply tow the party line, by virtue of their superior reasoning ability.
(Actually, I think really intelligent people tend to be Libertarian; the fact that I am is, of course, totally unrelated to the truth of that statement. Since there has never been a viable Libertarian candidate for president, these people will generally vote for whichever of the major parties’ candidate seems less odious, making the correlation between vote counts and intelligence that much more tenuous.)
That’s the first problem with the red/blue approximation. The second one is, if we grant that there is an exact correlation between the parties and the ideologies, what does mean for a state to be “red” or “blue”? Even states that are heavily biased one way or the other have a significant fraction of the other side. In the 2008 election, both parties received between 40% and 60% of the vote in 31 of the 50 states; 2004 had similar results. In 2000, it was 35 out of 50. So it isn’t like there is a huge preponderence of one ideology over the other even in states that are reliably red or blue.
The third problem is that there is a set of people who vote, and a set of people who take intelligence tests, and these two sets are not the same. Is there an intelligence skew for those who vote versus those who don’t, or conversely, an ideological skew for those who tend to take intelligence tests (not necessarily do well on them, just take them)? And if so, what is it? I, for example and all modesty aside, am a very smart person (I work for a leading company in a technical field, and if I wasn’t very smart, I couldn’t do my job). Yet I’ve never voted, and never will. My perception is that the differences between the candidates and parties are miniscule to the point of non-existence. Also, despite encouraging cries of “every vote counts”, I think what the 2000 election showed us is that there is enough inherent sloppiness in the process that a given individual’s vote is basically meaningless: in any situation where the overall vote is actually close enough for individual ones to matter, both parties will resort to cheap legal maneuvering to get what they want rather than honestly seek the truth. There is too much at stake (for the political parties, anyway) for them to do otherwise. In other words, I’m postulating that higher intelligence will generally correlate to a lowered likelihood of voting, since a smarter person is much more likely to see how pointless the process really is.
Just for fun I put some numbers together. Suppose that people holding Ideology X average 100 points of IQ, whereas those holding Ideology Y only average 90. Suppose further that we have two states, one of which voted 55% for X’ (the candidate nominally associated with X) and 45% for Y’, and the other, the reverse. Doing the calculations, the first state will have an average intelligence of 95.5%, and the second, 94.5%. That 10-point difference virtually disappears in the wash.
So, even if red/blue correlated perfectly to conservative/liberal, and even if we had a known correlation between the voting public and those who take intelligence tests – even making those two huge assumptions, you aren’t going to see a big difference between the different states. And if my “smarter == less likely to vote” theory holds, then blue states having higher IQ test scores may actually indicate that people who vote blue are less intelligent, since those higher IQ scores are coming from a different, and smarter, slice of the population than those doing the voting.
Utter nonsense. There are more than enough conservative media outlets, politicians, think tanks, and just general public around to make the conservative case.
The real problem is that liberals just don’t like to think about the fact that there are people out there who think evolution is a myth but the Bible isn’t.
Powers &8^]
I wish people wouldn’t keep falling into the same mistakes every time this type of discussion comes up.
One can be close-minded to falsehoods and still be intelligent. Its unavoidable that there are at least 2 sides to this, but to hear people say both sides are equally close-minded and dumb belies the fact that for certain things, there is one set of unambiguous facts. One is not dumb is one refuses to consider the idea that 1+1=5. So too with things like global warming and evolution, whose evidence for it is astounding. And if one wants to be against religion, I don’t consider that dumb because religion is an unfalsifiable series of myths
In some things, sure, there are people stupid on both sides. But not everything
So the only reason for the consistent effect proven in serious studies that people who self-identify as conservatives reject evidence against their beliefs while people who self-identify as liberals do so less is smugness?
Let’s take a scenario. Bob and Alice are discussing whether every child should have a pencil.
Bob says “I am for this because all pencils are yellow and cost 1 $, but are useful and easy to find.”
Alice says “Wait a moment, what? Not all pencils are yellow, 1/3 are green and cost only 0.40 $, so I am for giving every child two green pencils.”
Situation 1: Bob says “No, all pencils are yellow. I know this.”
Alice points out studies and shows links, but Bob refuses to accept this and ignores it, dismisses it or impugnes the people who did the studies.
In such a case, a rational discussion is not possible because Bob doesn’t want to accept facts contradictory to his opinion.
To call Bob in conclusion of his demonstrated behaviour therefore close-minded or willfully ignorant is not a slur because he’s conservative or doesn’t agree with Alice. It’s not smugness. It’s an accurate description of a harmful behaviour.
Situation 2: Bob says “I have a hard time beliving that not all pencils are yellow. I only know yellow ones.”
Alice points out studies and show links. Bob checks the sources to be sure they are above board.
Then Bob says “Well indeed some pencils are green and cheaper. I still believe that every child should get one yellow pencil, because yellow ones are easier to see than green ones, and if you give them two, they will loose the spare one.”
Bob doesn’t agree with Alice, but he accepts the facts that Alice pointed out.
Calling Bob a conservative is accurate. But nobody normal would call Bob ignorant or close-minded because he didn’t change his opinion. Alice and Bob would probably “agree to disagree” because they can see that have at least a basis of facts. (Assuming they didn’t devolve into name-calling regardless).
So you completly ignored the link to the study about how conservatives watch Fox News (which has been proven to report false and make up news, and which is right-wing conservative) and nothing else, while liberals watch anything else?
Will you read it and believe it if I link again or do you also prefer to ignore facts if they are against your opinions?
^ Costanze, I explicitly said that I’m not talking about news, which I considered another issue, but about entertainment media in general. Yes, conservatives like to watch Fox. But unless they pointedly consume only entertainment explicitly produced for Christians (which, yes, some do, but is more the exception than the rule) they will be consistently faced with a socially liberal worldview. Again, in general, liberals don’t have to regularly see the other side like this.
And regarding the link you initially put up, my participation in this discussion was initially about the SD column, and I hadn’t earlier read it, not because I didn’t want to deal with facts that contradicted my ideas, but because it wasn’t what I was most interested in jumping in.
I did just read it, and all I can say is I find it . . . disturbing. I can say I don’t think the specifics apply to me. I don’t watch Fox News (which that was primarily about), but that’s mostly because I don’t watch TV news in general. I consider it superficial and, regardless of political ideology, driven by stylistic needs which don’t have anything to do with genuine importance. When I do keep up with current events, it’s usually by way of NPR (not noted for its conservative bent). But, yes, that is . . . disturbing.
I’d like to say more right now, but my seven-month-old is being a bit demanding for attention at the moment.
Shouldn’t Christians be socially liberal anyway? 
^ Not in the United States. There are a few like Father Berrigan, but adherence to orthodoxy is usually more important. Just like there were a few priests like Hermann Lange and thousands that contributed to the attestation.
Depends on to which particular issue you refer. Probably most Christians, for instance, would be opposed to abortion and legalization of prostitution, but you will likely find a good mix of opinion on things like gun control, capital punishment, and health care reform. (Of course all right-thinking people agree on employment of the Oxford comma.)