My happiness, thankfully, is not dependent upon your ability to express yourself clearly.
You’re the psychiatrist. I don’t know why you think a bunch of strangers on the Internet are going to be of much help in figuring out why you were an unusually naive teenager.
In my experience, talented people are somewhat more likely to believe in the Ayn Rand-ian idea that talented people do all the work in society and that there is a large population of mooches who benefit from that. That’s not quite the same as saying nerds are conservative, though.
Ever since the OP I’ve been trying to figure out why all of my smart friends from school - I went to a suburban public school and was part of the nerd set - are the most liberal people I know and there doesn’t exist an ounce of conservatism (I’m probably the only one out of dozens who will admit to being religious).
For my group, the smart kids learned science and history and became believers in science and sympathetic to history, and we are liberal in our scientific minds and liberal in our understanding of history as it really happened. Everyone is extremely pro-equality and pro-diversity and just, really, we are LIBERAL.
As for music too these kids are definitely the ones who liked the hardest yet most diverse stuff. Zappa. Industrial. Rap. Prog. Our collective musical taste is mind boggingly diverse and deep. With a definite appreciation of art in all forms.
So anyway, in my experience, the nerds are the ones who are curious enough to learn about the world and have sympathy towards the world and grow up to be Liberals.
Now, I do know one instance of a kid from our school who was Schreech-level nerdy. Awkward and gross. I don’t know his politics but in his late 30s he has become a legit Men’s Rights Activist. I think that’s a whole different mental problem than conservatism 
(joke. I am joking that conservatism is a mental problem)
It seems that the OP’s concept of what a “nerd” is is derived from older television sitcoms and Revenge of the Nerds–a nerd is someone who always wears a 3-piece suit, glasses with tape on the bridge, and a pocket protector filled with fountain pens and a slide rule. If you constrain the definition of “nerd” to fit that type of person, then they might tend more conservative. But that image doesn’t now and never has defined the full range of people who could be considered nerds. You have nerds who are behavioral conservative, you have nerds who are zany freaks.
Here’s an article about the fact that, personality traits and political opinions are not correlated with each other in the sense of one causing the other. There are some genetic and environmental factors which can influence personality traits and which can also influence political opinions. That’s different from personality traits and political opinions directly causing each other:
I think the specifics probably depend on a lot of things, but I would tend to agree with you. My impression of the “popular” kids in high school and college was that they were either the Andrews / Claires or the Benders (to reference Breakfast Club).
The sort who most likely have called liberals “fag” or “homo”.
In reality, the political leanings of my high school classmates seems to cross a broad spectrum that doesn’t necessarily correlate to how “popular” they were 20 years ago. Although I do see somewhat of a correlation between lower education levels and conservatism.
One thing I have noticed is that people who are socially isolated tend to develop fairly weird (sometimes dangerous) political views. Like because they spend too much time alone with their own thoughts which have become embittered by how society ignores them they glom onto some fringe political view that makes them feel empowered. And political views that empower angry loners don’t tend to be healthy ones.
Imagine I made a list of social conservative ideals and social liberal ideals. I’m not going to do that, because they vary over geography and time—even within my own lifetime.
But pretend you have that set of values. That is what defines them.
The problem with what you’re doing is that you are making “living up to your ideals” one of (if not the defining) conservative values. That doesn’t work. Members of each group have their failures and successes.
But in both groups, there are some values that are looser than others. Some trespasses were treated as lesser violations than others, especially when perpetrated by one of the “good kids.” Alcohol use was definitely one of them. Alcohol use is a very traditional (perhaps even conservative) activity in our society.
“Fag” has been a common insult in online gaming since I got into it in the 90s (well before gaming became a popular past time). While there are some SF authors that have explored unusual sexuality, there has been a lot of fan rage when more mainstream SF properties include non-standard sexuality or gender that isn’t ‘hot bi babes’. Same thing when video games include trans characters or same-sex romance/marriage as an option. It’s less common now, but was extremely strong in the 2000s and 1990s when LGBT issues were more of a strong liberal/conservative split.
I’m certainly not arguing that all nerds/geeks/etc are conservative, but if you’re using common general definitions to pick ‘nerds’ (like ‘SF fans who go to conventions’ or ‘harcore gamers’), I think that acceptance of LGBTs and women has been about the same as the general population, not something that ‘nerds’ as a whole are ahead of the curve on. My personal circles don’t run that way, but I select people to hang out with based on similar values, and that’s one of the areas I don’t do much compromise on.
OP, I think that you are reading way too much into your childhood and mistakenly trying to extrapolate universal truisms that don’t hold up under scrutiny.
In your childhood, you didn’t feel like you “belonged”. As a coping mechanism, then, you decided that the dominate social group was one you opposed, thereby saving yourself from feelings of being rejected. In opposing this mainstream group, you aligned with a perceived opposite group.
This is possibly a more universal experience than you’ve originally described.
Instead, you are rigidly assuming that the specific manifestations of this common social adaptation represent a truer meaning. It doesn’t. If you had grown up in a different location, you might have discovered that the more buttoned up “preppy kids” were the dominant social clique, and gravitated towards long hair, black eyeliner, and despondent poetry as your rejection of that culture.
Yeah, I’ll cop to that. Those types of things have definitely colored my conception of what a “nerd” is.
Interesting. That brings to mind my father and my sister. I mentioned in the OP that I haven’t spoken to my father in a while–it’s actually been a little over a year. And the main reason is that he’s become a belligerent left-wing ranter. (Another major reason is that he cheated on my mother and remarried the woman he cheated on her with, who, IMO, has been the major influence in his adopting the views he now holds.) I’ve said in other threads that he’s basically the left-wing equivalent of the type of relative SDMBers tend to complain about, the crazy uncle who watches Fox News and injects his rants about how Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim into heretofore pleasant, innocuous conversations. He simply cannot keep it to himself. It’s like there’s a program running in his brain, scanning all inputs for any possible launching point for a political rant. So you can try to say the most pleasant, inane thing you can possibly think of–“what a nice day we’re having!”–and the program in his brain goes “let’s see… nice day… weather… a-ha, global warming!” And within 30 seconds he’s fulminating about the congressman who, he just read on Salon.com, voted not to enact stronger restrictions on fracking, which clearly indicates somebody’s getting paid off, because politicians in this country are nothing but a bunch of corrupt sellouts to the highest bidder bought and paid for by special interest lobbyists funded by super-rich Republican corporate fatcats who are getting away with paying no taxes because they’ve bought off the politicians who are also in the pockets of the gun-nut lobby blah blah blah, ad infinitum.
Meanwhile, my sister, judging by her “likes” on social media, has also gone in a liberal direction (influenced, I believe, by my father and his wife, but that’s a story for another thread.) But the thing is, I can be around my sister and we don’t talk about politics. I can go over to her house, and she can ask me how work is, and I can ask her how she and her husband like their new house, and I can play with my nieces, and nobody starts ranting about politics. She doesn’t start gratuitously ranting about how white nationalist Trump is destroying America, and I don’t start gratuitously shouting “hail President Trump, savior of white America!” and everybody’s happy.
The point is, that’s not because of a difference in political views, it’s because of a difference in personality types. My father, and the much-maligned Fox News-watching elderly relatives of SDMBers, have similar personalities, even though their views are polar opposites. And my sister and I have similar personalities, even though our views are polar opposites.
It’s not about whether people live up to their ideals, it’s the question of what ideals they hold to in the first place. I hope you will agreed that Wikipedia does not tend to have a conservative bias. With that in mind, here is Wikipedia’s opening paragraph on social conservatism in the United States:
I think that is a fair summary, and it acknowledges that social conservatism is defined differently by many scholars. But even with that in mind, and even knowing that some of the words in that paragraph might have different connotations to different people, I just don’t see people who are OK with premarital sex, underage drinking, and minor vandalism as being consistent with what that paragraph describes. I suppose there could be people who would identify with the above paragraph, but then, in actual practice, look the other way when the football team engages in their highjinks as long as nobody gets hurt; but there’s a difference between that and a person who, if asked, would explicitly affirm that they think premarital sex, underage drinking, and minor vandalism are a-OK as long as nobody gets hurt. I wouldn’t consider the latter type of person a social conservative. Maybe the people you’re thinking of were more like the former. On underage drinking, though, there are parents who will host drinking parties for their under-21 kids with the stipulation that they stay home, figuring that then they’ll at least be safe, and in my experience those tend to be “progressive parent” types.
Alcohol in and of itself, though, I agree, is traditional, and while I wouldn’t say it’s conservative, it’s not liberal either. It’s been around for thousands of years and transcends such distinctions.
Yeah, I can see that.
Another post from a lifelong nerd, stating that this hasn’t been my experience, in the slightest.
I was pretty much a social outcast in high school, and absolutely a nerd (though my expression of nerdiness was interest in science fiction and fantasy, Dungeons & Dragons, and progressive rock music). Most of the “cool kids” in my high school drank heavily, and slept around, but drug use wasn’t extensive (other than a few of the richer ones using cocaine occasionally). The “dopers” were heavy users of pot, tended to listen to metal, and were definitely their own social stratum, separate from the cool kids.
When I got to college, I found, and became close friends with, a group of nerds who shared my interests. For the most part, we’re all still in touch, and have been very successful, including in academic pursuits (from my college circle, we have 4 PhDs and 3 law degrees). And, without exception, we’re all pretty liberal socially, and continue to be, even in our 50s.
Meanwhile, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I’m now in contact with many of my old high school classmates. By and large, they’ve settled down, and are living respectable lives, but Facebook posts show me that most of them wound up being pretty conservative, politically. I avoid political conversations with any of them. 
Also, I, too, see no strong correlation between extroversion / introversion and placement on the liberal / conservative continuum.