I get that this isn't the point of the post, but your passing assertion that "intelligent people are much more likely to reject religion because it is fundamentally irrational" demonstrates a cringily shallow engagement with a massive topic.
I also think Hanania is conflating intelligence with educational attainment. I had a friend in high school who slept during APUSH and smoked all of us on the SAT. She had a different set of priorities. It was a humbling lesson for someone who had prided themselves on “intelligence” when “doing school” was the task I was actually doing - being compliant, taking the “right” courses, etc. . Academics don’t understand that their kind of intelligence is narrow and in the humanities being burnt down by despair and identity politics. It’s why I went to languages from English 35 years and left grad school. It was clear then that truth-seeking and shared reality was being replaced by tribal allegiance 😓 and ultimately the will to power through intimidation.
Men are leaving academia because it’s becoming “doing school” instead of allowing debate and argument. Women, we need to acknowledge our role in this and work to combat it in young women - saying “sorry” constantly while shutting down people you disagree with and weaponizing fragility and weakness will not serve us well in the long term - throwing paint or food on van goghs is the height of fruitless activism - it’s literally a temper tantrum - the ways men have to control their violence we have to control our crazy - that’s being a functional adult
As a minority in Iran, I have learned a lot from your essay and it astonishes me how accurate you know the situation here in tandem with increasing the desperate feeling of an underdog against the tyrannical theocratic ruler of iran.
The issue with the first paper, "Are Cultural and Economic Conservatism Positively Correlated? A Large-Scale Cross-National Test", is that it pools the nations that are either under Western cultural or economic hegemony , or that have elites who are, with the rest of the world, so with regards to the high income anti-correlation with social conservatism, the WVS wave plots 5 and 6 are inconclusive. The paper did not publish a separate correlation wave for attitudes and household income for non-Western nations only, and, given that OnlyFans subscribers are usually those having hard time to find sex, one might provide a similar analogy and suggest that pro-business attitude is not equal to being in the highest income.
In addition, there are other factors, like source of income, that might influence the respondents' opinions. An employee of Microsoft Research Asia probably would have a slightly more pro-Western attitude than someone who works in one of the National Key Laboratories. Education abroad, and many, many, many other factors might play a role as well.
The authors themselves warn us against making the conclusions that Richard makes:
"The present results do not, of course, provide evidence of causal influences, such as influences of development, societal progressivism or political engagement on attitude structuring, or influences of social class and needs for security and certainty on political attitudes. With regard to nation-level relationships, development and culturally progressive values are associated with other cultural, structural and institutional characteristics that could be the driving influence..."
Richard's conclusions might or might not be true, but without the separate analysis done for non-Western nations that takes into account at the very least the location of one's educational institution and their source of income, as well as whether Western media were widely accessible to the children within their social strata during their formative period, in conjunction with their current age, he goes too far with his conclusions.
With regards to the second paper, "China’s Ideological Spectrum", the correlation between social liberalism and market values, which even Richard acknowledges as incidental, leads to another hypothesis: in our global age, everyone has access to the workings of the elite minds of the dominant civilization, which is the Western one, and smarter people, as smart as they are, are still subject to the herd mentality, except that their herd is "smarter people". Its worth acknowledging that the polls in China that this paper cites took place not so long ago, and the current business elite was brought up in Deng Xiaoping's climate of openness to Western influence. It would be interesting to hold the same survey about 10 years from now, when the entrepreneurs brought up during Xi's time will take over.
Overall, in order to remove confounding variables with a sufficient degree of certainty, one might need to hold a survey in a country that is totally isolated from Western influence, like DPRK, but at the same time has a relatively free inner discussion on the matters of social conservatism, which might not exist today. Even in places like Burkina-Faso, the elite is attracted to what they perceive as the best, so they send their children in places like if not France and USA, then Russia, where they get the attitudes of Western elites from their peers -- children of Russian elite who were educated in the West.
In conclusion, I'd like to add that most likely Richard's assessment that the US conservatives oppose homosexuality and abortion for all the wrong reasons is likely to be true, however, extrapolating this to the entire humanity seems like a very big stretch.
The issue with the USA has always been that its two party political system has conflated two usually orthogonal value scales into one, thereby masking any meaningful correlations.
>If you only knew about American politics, you might think that support for say lower taxes, restricting abortion, and having a tough immigration policy are a natural combination, but it’s quite rare.
Of course. How the hell did Americans came up with one ideology that is permissive of personal behaviour and restrictive of economic behaviour, and another that is restrictive of personal behaviour and permissive of economic behaviour? This is such an unlikely combination. Why not be generally permissive or generally restrictive as a basic mood, vibe and mindset?
Well I do have an answer to that. What matters is whether capital is domestic or foreign. If it is domestic, nationalists like it, if it is foreign, nationalists dislike it.
Imagine a version of America where all large businesses are Mexican owned, have Spanish names, you have to learn Spanish to get a white collar job, it is fashionable at work to call meetings reunións etc. I think Republicans would very quickly find their inner dirty Commie lol.
Re the 2023 Pew study I don't think there is a relationship between finishing higher education and intelligence; these days the universities in the West are like madrassa's or indoctrination factories for memorizing left-wing pieties. The outcome that the majority of all graduates lean left or even hard-left is not surprising but not an indication of their intelligence, rather the opposite. The really independent and creative thinkers (in particular the highly and profoundly gifted segment with IQ's well over 140) will finish their courses but feel soiled and disgusted by the process. Also, the fact that the elites in certain countries are able to force legislation on the citizenry that the latter opposes, which the author seems to approve of, shows that the democratic systems in those countries are not functioning and that they resemble oligarchies instead. Hence the populist revolts all over the West.
1) our deepest political divisions boil down to our interpretations of masculinity. Conservatism boils down to "be aggressive for your tribe".
2) Elites simply don't do masculinity as aggressively as the plebs. They like to solve problems with brains.
Yes, Pareto pretty much summed it up with lions vs. foxes. Education turns people into foxes who simply do not think a frontal assault is the best way to win, it is better to outsmart your opponents. For example this is why foxes are okay with men being gay - the issue has never really been who is having sex with whom, "gay" was always proxy for less masculine, less aggressive. For the foxes it is okay - just be smart. They are okay with women leaders because they do not think the job of a leader is to aggressive ram down decisions in everybody's throats. They also don't think you win by having a lot of kids, you win by having well educated kids.
1)Richard Hanania is a power-worshiper. This is why he went from being Pro-Russia to Pro-Ukraine. When it looked like Russia was on top and would quickly take Ukraine, he supported Russia, but when it turned out that wouldn't be the case, he changed his mind. It wasn't because he had a moral epiphany about the Ukraine war. This Power-worship instinct is why he has contempt for GOP voters. He recognizes that GOP voters are less deferential to elites than Democratic voters are and that greatly angers him, so this is why he takes great pleasure in writing about how dumb Conservatives are.
2) The main reason that liberals have woke positions on social issues is that liberals are more hypocritical than conservatives. For example, many,many white Liberals will constantly talk about the greatness of diversity but send their own kids to very white private schools and have as little interactions with black people as possible in their personal lives. Conservatives, on the other hand, reject such hypocrisy and advocate policies that more resemble their own personal lives.
3) Pro-Life conservatives tend to not be the dumb hillbilly with missing teeth and instead tend to either be solidly middle-class or upper-class with a degree in a real practical subject or a very industrious blue collar worker.
4) Elite liberals love to cosplay as international cosmopolitans but they can be just as nationalist(if not more)than conservatives under certain circumstances. Just look at Russiagate. Russiagate was pure nationalist hysteria by anti-Trump Liberals.
5) Pinochet Chile and Franco Spain were relatively stable compared to countries with left-wing dictatorships. The fact that both countries were able to transition into democracy without much bloodshed, unlike the many conflicts that emerged in Europe after the end of the Soviet Union, is an argument in favor of Right-wing politics over left-wing politics.
6) I think it's very telling that the more rigorous an academic field is, the less liberal it is. For example, it is likely that if you come across a Sociology professor and a Physics professor, both will be Democrats, but if one of them is a Republican, the Physics Professor will most likely be the Republican. also the case that Republican college graduates are more likely than Democratic college graduates to have Stem Degrees. You'll have a hard time finding a Republican in a comparative literature class, but you'll find a good amount in an engineering class.
1) Interesting. Karlin is the same. Is this a trend?
2) Not true - they truly diversify their own workplaces, for example. Hollywood used to be such a jewish liberal fiefdom and look at it now. They basically handed it over. They just like good schools which blacks often cannot afford. There is hypocrisy but not that much and conservatives are hypocrites too, look at Trump's sex life or the strange phenomenon of conservative places having high levels of teenage pregnancy.
3) Could be, dunno. I don't think pro-life is that much central these days. Anti-DEI is central.
4) That is not nationalism, that is anti-authoritarianism, loathing for an *ideological* enemy. There is very little "national" difference between Russia and Ukraine, they are both a bunch of Slavs speaking closely related languages and drinking vodka, but a huge ideological, political, moral difference.
5) Bitch please. Soviet type leftwingness is DEAD. Everybody on the left understood that was a huge mistake. Solzhenitsyn 's Nobel Peace Prize was a clear admittance of that. Tankies are regularly criticized and ridiculed on the left. Everybody wants individualist leftism now, basically pushing human rights on and on. This is not a thing. You are fighting dead ghosts. Lyotard said 45 years ago: grand narratives like Marxism are dead. Now there are only micronarratives, personal stories. Now leftism is all about the individual.
6) true, but can also be interpreted differently: the less empathy you need for a field, the less liberal it is. liberal politics is essentially empathy. Also in the social science empathy is considered a valid method: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verstehen because it is about humans, not atoms, so it is not based on the same kind of rigor. The same kind of rigor would just objectify people and not understand them as agents. To give you an example, imagine a warlord trying to predict what the enemy warlord is gonna do. How is he gonna predict it? By putting himself in the other guys shoes. "What would I do in his situation?" Empathy. The goal of science is prediction and in human matters, empathy is a method for that.
1) I don't know much about Karlin, so I can't comment about him
2) I don't deny that Liberals value diversity in the workplace to a certain point). With regard to schools, you are vastly understating the hypocrisy of white liberals. For example, during the era of busing, there were liberal politicians who advocated for forced busing but avoided forced busing for their own kids by sending them to private schools. I don't deny there are conservatives that are hypocrites, but Donald Trump has never pretended to be a social conservative, so his sex life doesn't make a hypocrite.
4)It was very much nationalist hysteria. Elite Liberals were shocked by the election of Trump and thus convinced themselves that it was because foreigners and Trump was himself a foreign agent. That is pure Nationalist Hysteria.
5) Richard Hanania used right-wing dictatorships during the Cold War to claim that conservative control is unstable. I responded by showing that the actual history of the Cold War proves the opposite
6) A claim of Hanania is that Conservatives are stupid, and I decided to use academia/ conservative college students to show the problems with that claim. There are plenty of other examples that I could have used, such as the fact Republican voters are less dependent on a college degree than Democratic voters are in order to make a good living.
The bureaucratic elite of China were kind of notoriously conservative. It's probably sunk cost fallacy. You had to bust butt to pass exams to get into the bureaucracy and once you are there all your status, wealth, and authority is dependent upon the continued existence of the bureaucratic structure.
So I think in an environment that is already at least *somewhat* liberal, yes, elite human capital tends toward liberalism because they are by definition people who succeed in a liberal environment. But they are always protective of their prerogatives, which lends them to support institutions they control against change, which is a species of conservatism. This is one thing that is going on with academia right now. Some emeritus tenured professor of like Africana studies or whatever is not going to be particularly keen to see the system overturned by introducing market reforms or creating a free speech studies program or something. It's also why landed gentry clung to their prerogatives like ticks on a dog and in the end could only be supplanted by revolutionary violence. They arguably kept the world stagnant for close to 5000 years.
I think elites are just humans. They want autonomy for themselves so they can amass status and ease and security. But once they have those things, they will fight to uphold the systems that give them those things. If they are smart they will probably, yes, support some level of meritocracy as meritocracy helps smart people succeed. But I think their attitude will shift the instance some guy smarter than them shows up to take their role or invents a thing that will replace them. Go ask the average white American software engineer how they feel about H1B1 visas or the average successful artist how they feel about AI art generation.
It makes me think of Napoleon. He was disdainful of traditional authority like the church and nobility because he (correctly) understood he was smarter than the old elites. And, yet, he was still a king and thoroughly illiberal when it came to threats to his own power. He had very parochial ideas about economics for one thing and a deep saltiness about Britain's just better navy and economy.
Are some parts of social conservatism smarter than other parts?
I noticed no mention of guns here and few mentions of abortion. For that matter, large corporations have been quick to adopt loud expressions of social liberalism but slow to shout "We're pro-abortion!"
Details, schmetails, facts, schmacts. More general factors make conservatives less likely to belong to a cognitive elite. If we zoom out, a conservative feels shipwrecked by a perceived rift in history and must transgress against a current order to recover a lost identity. Policy specifics are variable and context-dependent. For example, Putin, while nominally an unimaginative communist bureaucrat, is reactionary because the collapse of Communism is foundational to who he is. Wherever the spirit of Janus is present -- the god of portals, gates, doors, beginnings, endings, transitions -- conservatism is always nearby, trying to look backward and forward at the same time.
This has two corollaries. One, a conservative is someone who is fundamentally not redpilled. There is always a red pill someplace that they do not want to take because it means consigning something beloved to the abyss of the past -- religion, commerce, state, family, culture, gender, whatever. Liberalism, in contrast, has the spirit Stendhal attributed to Danton: La vérité, l'austère vérité. Take all of the redpiils. Secondly, a conservative is someone who feels like they are fighting against history, either by being doomed, implementing a holding action, or attempting a restoration. They are, by definition, bitter clingers, necrophilic in Fromm's sense; the inability to respond creatively to life, whether by nature and/or circumstance, drives them to conservative politics. Both of these factors, ceteris paribus, select against intelligence, though this is an empirical generalization and not something necessary and law-like.
"Liberalism, in contrast, has the spirit Stendhal attributed to Danton: La vérité, l'austère vérité. Take all of the redpiils."
Thought it might be a bit strange that verity always points towards more and more equality. Is the world really as simple that every reality and truth always points towards "just treat everybody equally" ?
Second question: if it is so, why do we need super smart people to figure this out? This looks like an extremely simple idea.
The third part is that it is egalitarianism about many things but not all things. Sex, gender, sexual orientation, race and partially money. But not so much egalitarianism about money. And no egalitarianism over who has a say - the educated do, the uneducated do not. So actually it gets not very consistent.
1) On its surface, liberalism isn't necessarily connected with equality. As is well-known, Locke himself was a large shareholder in the Royal African Company. So, we would need a stronger argument to prove such a connection, as if egalitarianism is latent within liberalism, as if ideas from the ancient Sophists to the Logical Positivists are democratic because knowledge is somehow accessible to all.
Even if we grant this for the sake of argument, I'm not sure it proves much. Liberalism is about other things. Conservatism believes in an organic society, whether it be nation, culture, religion, or race, while liberalism, going back to Locke, has an instrumentalist interpretation of the state. Liberalism will always have a bit of slackness, making room for plurality or agonistic politics. Inconsistency is built into the doctrine -- it is a feature, not a bug. This interlocks with the meliorism and adaptationism of liberalism, the acknowledgment that applied knowledge can fix certain problems, which contrasts with the static conservative idea that the world is a vale of tears.
2) Yes, liberalism is a prosaic doctrine. Capital-M Meaning, the sublime, and worries about the world turning gray and filling up with NPCs is a conservative thing. See Burke -- his aesthetics, not his politics.
3) I agree with this, but I don't equate liberalism with egalitarianism. I have what Geert Hofstede might describe as low "power distance" and generally prefer horizontal over vertical relationships with other people, but it isn't an end in itself. See point 1.
Maybe this idea is somewhere in the comments already, but high IQ may simply enable a higher varience of views. Nothing listed here as socially liberal is actually ingrained on a century-scale anywhere, maybe check back after a few generations of a mostly atheist England, with prominent gay individuals in media continuously to ~2080, or in Russia with it’s level of abortions out to a post-Soviet century.
It would then take some thought to question such positions, but say once England is so settled as atheist then it’ll just be the mean view of dudes at the bar. Democracy is a good example - not even the morons who think Tucker is right about Jan 6th would actually answer a survey supporting Patrick Deneen’s post-liberalism sympathies for fuedalism, a very stupid but very galaxy brain position. They’de say they should be allowed to vote, because that’s the impression you get if you just sorta hang out in the US.
At a correlation of <0.2, the signal can be real but only requires very boring explinations.
Do you have any evidence that, if liberals skew higher in IQ, that those higher-IQ individuals seek out public positions and became part of the political landscape (other than as a voter or individual contributor of funds?) I ask this because politics is a strange landscape and having worked with many bureaucracies and legislators, I find that high-IQ people may start in government positions but quickly move on because they are not always as lucrative and the structure of the organization themselves attempts to weed out meritocracy for what we call a "schedule" of pay, or power, or whatever means must be shared by the many, meaning a higher-IQ person would be foolish to stay in politics and/or government (unless they are corrupt). Also, contemporarily, sticking your head out too far in the political game means you're likely to get it chopped off when people go digging into your past. Many people have suggested to me that I run for office, and I lean left, but I've decided not to do it. I believe Republican voters wouldn't care about my past, but liberals voters will, my intelligence and experience be damned. I don't want to sacrifice everything just to make things better for other people. While I know that attitude might offend those reading my post, I don't find the sentiment itself to be unusual. It's what keeps most people on the sidelines.
Is there any chance that, even though liberals have higher-IQs, the nature of human society has disqualified them from participating? As backwards as this may sound, my admittedly subjective observations of govt at work suggest only the bulls and the dogs win at politics and in society, not the sly and cunning, IMO. Bulldozing gets stuff done, not wittiness. I'm not sure having an IQ-advantage really matters in democratic arenas where the structure of institutions attempts to blot out individual achievement and create rivalries within the democratic structure itself, meaning you'd just have higher-IQ people spinning their wheels in non-ending, yet purposefully designed tug-o-wars. Wouldn't the higher-IQ people drop out? Wouldn't they prefer to be paid off by higher paying private gigs that let them maintain their privacy? Sure, their influence is curtailed, but that's also a matter of marketing, really. People who work at Tesla really think they're saving the world, and some of them are the smartest people to ever walk the Earth. Higher-IQ sometimes means a bigger imagination, and a bigger imagination, IMO, often leads to bigger delusions that suck up and consume that IQ in low-chance ventures that lead to perpetual failure and an inability to translate intelligence to reality.
1)Richard Hanania is a power-worshiper. This is why he went from being Pro-Russia to Pro-Ukraine. When it looked like Russia was on top and would quickly take Ukraine, he supported Russia, but when it turned out that wouldn't be the case, he changed his mind. It wasn't because he had a moral epiphany about the Ukraine war. This Power-worship instinct is why he has contempt for GOP voters. He recognizes that GOP voters are less deferential to elites than Democratic voters are and that greatly angers him, so this is why he takes great pleasure in writing about how dumb Conservatives are.
2) The main reason that liberals have woke positions on social issues is that liberals are more hypocritical than conservatives. For example, many,many white Liberals will constantly talk about the greatness of diversity but send their own kids to very white private schools and have as little interactions with black people as possible in their personal lives. Conservatives, on the other hand, reject such hypocrisy and advocate policies that more resemble their own personal lives.
3) Pro-Life conservatives tend to not be the dumb hillbilly with missing teeth and instead tend to either be solidly middle-class or upper-class with a degree in a real practical subject or a very industrious blue collar worker.
4) Elite liberals love to cosplay as international cosmopolitans but they can be just as nationalist(if not more)than conservatives under certain circumstances. Just look at Russiagate. Russiagate was pure nationalist hysteria by anti-Trump Liberals.
5) Pinochet Chile and Franco Spain were relatively stable compared to countries with left-wing dictatorships. The fact that both countries were able to transition into democracy without much bloodshed, unlike the many conflicts that emerged in Europe after the end of the Soviet Union, is an argument in favor of Right-wing politics over left-wing politics.
6) I think it's very telling that the more rigorous an academic field is, the less liberal it is. For example, it is likely that if you come across a Sociology professor and a Physics professor, both will be Democrats, but if one of them is a Republican, the Physics Professor will most likely be the Republican. also the case that Republican college graduates are more likely than Democratic college graduates to have Stem Degrees. You'll have a hard time finding a Republican in a comparative literature class, but you'll find a good amount in an engineering class.
I get that this isn't the point of the post, but your passing assertion that "intelligent people are much more likely to reject religion because it is fundamentally irrational" demonstrates a cringily shallow engagement with a massive topic.
I also think Hanania is conflating intelligence with educational attainment. I had a friend in high school who slept during APUSH and smoked all of us on the SAT. She had a different set of priorities. It was a humbling lesson for someone who had prided themselves on “intelligence” when “doing school” was the task I was actually doing - being compliant, taking the “right” courses, etc. . Academics don’t understand that their kind of intelligence is narrow and in the humanities being burnt down by despair and identity politics. It’s why I went to languages from English 35 years and left grad school. It was clear then that truth-seeking and shared reality was being replaced by tribal allegiance 😓 and ultimately the will to power through intimidation.
Men are leaving academia because it’s becoming “doing school” instead of allowing debate and argument. Women, we need to acknowledge our role in this and work to combat it in young women - saying “sorry” constantly while shutting down people you disagree with and weaponizing fragility and weakness will not serve us well in the long term - throwing paint or food on van goghs is the height of fruitless activism - it’s literally a temper tantrum - the ways men have to control their violence we have to control our crazy - that’s being a functional adult
As a minority in Iran, I have learned a lot from your essay and it astonishes me how accurate you know the situation here in tandem with increasing the desperate feeling of an underdog against the tyrannical theocratic ruler of iran.
So thank you.
Thank you! Good luck in your struggle.
The issue with the first paper, "Are Cultural and Economic Conservatism Positively Correlated? A Large-Scale Cross-National Test", is that it pools the nations that are either under Western cultural or economic hegemony , or that have elites who are, with the rest of the world, so with regards to the high income anti-correlation with social conservatism, the WVS wave plots 5 and 6 are inconclusive. The paper did not publish a separate correlation wave for attitudes and household income for non-Western nations only, and, given that OnlyFans subscribers are usually those having hard time to find sex, one might provide a similar analogy and suggest that pro-business attitude is not equal to being in the highest income.
In addition, there are other factors, like source of income, that might influence the respondents' opinions. An employee of Microsoft Research Asia probably would have a slightly more pro-Western attitude than someone who works in one of the National Key Laboratories. Education abroad, and many, many, many other factors might play a role as well.
The authors themselves warn us against making the conclusions that Richard makes:
"The present results do not, of course, provide evidence of causal influences, such as influences of development, societal progressivism or political engagement on attitude structuring, or influences of social class and needs for security and certainty on political attitudes. With regard to nation-level relationships, development and culturally progressive values are associated with other cultural, structural and institutional characteristics that could be the driving influence..."
Richard's conclusions might or might not be true, but without the separate analysis done for non-Western nations that takes into account at the very least the location of one's educational institution and their source of income, as well as whether Western media were widely accessible to the children within their social strata during their formative period, in conjunction with their current age, he goes too far with his conclusions.
With regards to the second paper, "China’s Ideological Spectrum", the correlation between social liberalism and market values, which even Richard acknowledges as incidental, leads to another hypothesis: in our global age, everyone has access to the workings of the elite minds of the dominant civilization, which is the Western one, and smarter people, as smart as they are, are still subject to the herd mentality, except that their herd is "smarter people". Its worth acknowledging that the polls in China that this paper cites took place not so long ago, and the current business elite was brought up in Deng Xiaoping's climate of openness to Western influence. It would be interesting to hold the same survey about 10 years from now, when the entrepreneurs brought up during Xi's time will take over.
Overall, in order to remove confounding variables with a sufficient degree of certainty, one might need to hold a survey in a country that is totally isolated from Western influence, like DPRK, but at the same time has a relatively free inner discussion on the matters of social conservatism, which might not exist today. Even in places like Burkina-Faso, the elite is attracted to what they perceive as the best, so they send their children in places like if not France and USA, then Russia, where they get the attitudes of Western elites from their peers -- children of Russian elite who were educated in the West.
In conclusion, I'd like to add that most likely Richard's assessment that the US conservatives oppose homosexuality and abortion for all the wrong reasons is likely to be true, however, extrapolating this to the entire humanity seems like a very big stretch.
My gosh. Hilarious
Classic democrat move. Belittle those who disagree with you as bigoted or stupid. Classy!
The issue with the USA has always been that its two party political system has conflated two usually orthogonal value scales into one, thereby masking any meaningful correlations.
And you believe this paper to be unbiased imperial evidence . Prove it.
>If you only knew about American politics, you might think that support for say lower taxes, restricting abortion, and having a tough immigration policy are a natural combination, but it’s quite rare.
Of course. How the hell did Americans came up with one ideology that is permissive of personal behaviour and restrictive of economic behaviour, and another that is restrictive of personal behaviour and permissive of economic behaviour? This is such an unlikely combination. Why not be generally permissive or generally restrictive as a basic mood, vibe and mindset?
Well I do have an answer to that. What matters is whether capital is domestic or foreign. If it is domestic, nationalists like it, if it is foreign, nationalists dislike it.
Imagine a version of America where all large businesses are Mexican owned, have Spanish names, you have to learn Spanish to get a white collar job, it is fashionable at work to call meetings reunións etc. I think Republicans would very quickly find their inner dirty Commie lol.
Re the 2023 Pew study I don't think there is a relationship between finishing higher education and intelligence; these days the universities in the West are like madrassa's or indoctrination factories for memorizing left-wing pieties. The outcome that the majority of all graduates lean left or even hard-left is not surprising but not an indication of their intelligence, rather the opposite. The really independent and creative thinkers (in particular the highly and profoundly gifted segment with IQ's well over 140) will finish their courses but feel soiled and disgusted by the process. Also, the fact that the elites in certain countries are able to force legislation on the citizenry that the latter opposes, which the author seems to approve of, shows that the democratic systems in those countries are not functioning and that they resemble oligarchies instead. Hence the populist revolts all over the West.
My take
1) our deepest political divisions boil down to our interpretations of masculinity. Conservatism boils down to "be aggressive for your tribe".
2) Elites simply don't do masculinity as aggressively as the plebs. They like to solve problems with brains.
Yes, Pareto pretty much summed it up with lions vs. foxes. Education turns people into foxes who simply do not think a frontal assault is the best way to win, it is better to outsmart your opponents. For example this is why foxes are okay with men being gay - the issue has never really been who is having sex with whom, "gay" was always proxy for less masculine, less aggressive. For the foxes it is okay - just be smart. They are okay with women leaders because they do not think the job of a leader is to aggressive ram down decisions in everybody's throats. They also don't think you win by having a lot of kids, you win by having well educated kids.
7 Points:
1)Richard Hanania is a power-worshiper. This is why he went from being Pro-Russia to Pro-Ukraine. When it looked like Russia was on top and would quickly take Ukraine, he supported Russia, but when it turned out that wouldn't be the case, he changed his mind. It wasn't because he had a moral epiphany about the Ukraine war. This Power-worship instinct is why he has contempt for GOP voters. He recognizes that GOP voters are less deferential to elites than Democratic voters are and that greatly angers him, so this is why he takes great pleasure in writing about how dumb Conservatives are.
2) The main reason that liberals have woke positions on social issues is that liberals are more hypocritical than conservatives. For example, many,many white Liberals will constantly talk about the greatness of diversity but send their own kids to very white private schools and have as little interactions with black people as possible in their personal lives. Conservatives, on the other hand, reject such hypocrisy and advocate policies that more resemble their own personal lives.
3) Pro-Life conservatives tend to not be the dumb hillbilly with missing teeth and instead tend to either be solidly middle-class or upper-class with a degree in a real practical subject or a very industrious blue collar worker.
4) Elite liberals love to cosplay as international cosmopolitans but they can be just as nationalist(if not more)than conservatives under certain circumstances. Just look at Russiagate. Russiagate was pure nationalist hysteria by anti-Trump Liberals.
5) Pinochet Chile and Franco Spain were relatively stable compared to countries with left-wing dictatorships. The fact that both countries were able to transition into democracy without much bloodshed, unlike the many conflicts that emerged in Europe after the end of the Soviet Union, is an argument in favor of Right-wing politics over left-wing politics.
6) I think it's very telling that the more rigorous an academic field is, the less liberal it is. For example, it is likely that if you come across a Sociology professor and a Physics professor, both will be Democrats, but if one of them is a Republican, the Physics Professor will most likely be the Republican. also the case that Republican college graduates are more likely than Democratic college graduates to have Stem Degrees. You'll have a hard time finding a Republican in a comparative literature class, but you'll find a good amount in an engineering class.
1) Interesting. Karlin is the same. Is this a trend?
2) Not true - they truly diversify their own workplaces, for example. Hollywood used to be such a jewish liberal fiefdom and look at it now. They basically handed it over. They just like good schools which blacks often cannot afford. There is hypocrisy but not that much and conservatives are hypocrites too, look at Trump's sex life or the strange phenomenon of conservative places having high levels of teenage pregnancy.
3) Could be, dunno. I don't think pro-life is that much central these days. Anti-DEI is central.
4) That is not nationalism, that is anti-authoritarianism, loathing for an *ideological* enemy. There is very little "national" difference between Russia and Ukraine, they are both a bunch of Slavs speaking closely related languages and drinking vodka, but a huge ideological, political, moral difference.
5) Bitch please. Soviet type leftwingness is DEAD. Everybody on the left understood that was a huge mistake. Solzhenitsyn 's Nobel Peace Prize was a clear admittance of that. Tankies are regularly criticized and ridiculed on the left. Everybody wants individualist leftism now, basically pushing human rights on and on. This is not a thing. You are fighting dead ghosts. Lyotard said 45 years ago: grand narratives like Marxism are dead. Now there are only micronarratives, personal stories. Now leftism is all about the individual.
6) true, but can also be interpreted differently: the less empathy you need for a field, the less liberal it is. liberal politics is essentially empathy. Also in the social science empathy is considered a valid method: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verstehen because it is about humans, not atoms, so it is not based on the same kind of rigor. The same kind of rigor would just objectify people and not understand them as agents. To give you an example, imagine a warlord trying to predict what the enemy warlord is gonna do. How is he gonna predict it? By putting himself in the other guys shoes. "What would I do in his situation?" Empathy. The goal of science is prediction and in human matters, empathy is a method for that.
1) I don't know much about Karlin, so I can't comment about him
2) I don't deny that Liberals value diversity in the workplace to a certain point). With regard to schools, you are vastly understating the hypocrisy of white liberals. For example, during the era of busing, there were liberal politicians who advocated for forced busing but avoided forced busing for their own kids by sending them to private schools. I don't deny there are conservatives that are hypocrites, but Donald Trump has never pretended to be a social conservative, so his sex life doesn't make a hypocrite.
4)It was very much nationalist hysteria. Elite Liberals were shocked by the election of Trump and thus convinced themselves that it was because foreigners and Trump was himself a foreign agent. That is pure Nationalist Hysteria.
5) Richard Hanania used right-wing dictatorships during the Cold War to claim that conservative control is unstable. I responded by showing that the actual history of the Cold War proves the opposite
6) A claim of Hanania is that Conservatives are stupid, and I decided to use academia/ conservative college students to show the problems with that claim. There are plenty of other examples that I could have used, such as the fact Republican voters are less dependent on a college degree than Democratic voters are in order to make a good living.
The bureaucratic elite of China were kind of notoriously conservative. It's probably sunk cost fallacy. You had to bust butt to pass exams to get into the bureaucracy and once you are there all your status, wealth, and authority is dependent upon the continued existence of the bureaucratic structure.
So I think in an environment that is already at least *somewhat* liberal, yes, elite human capital tends toward liberalism because they are by definition people who succeed in a liberal environment. But they are always protective of their prerogatives, which lends them to support institutions they control against change, which is a species of conservatism. This is one thing that is going on with academia right now. Some emeritus tenured professor of like Africana studies or whatever is not going to be particularly keen to see the system overturned by introducing market reforms or creating a free speech studies program or something. It's also why landed gentry clung to their prerogatives like ticks on a dog and in the end could only be supplanted by revolutionary violence. They arguably kept the world stagnant for close to 5000 years.
I think elites are just humans. They want autonomy for themselves so they can amass status and ease and security. But once they have those things, they will fight to uphold the systems that give them those things. If they are smart they will probably, yes, support some level of meritocracy as meritocracy helps smart people succeed. But I think their attitude will shift the instance some guy smarter than them shows up to take their role or invents a thing that will replace them. Go ask the average white American software engineer how they feel about H1B1 visas or the average successful artist how they feel about AI art generation.
It makes me think of Napoleon. He was disdainful of traditional authority like the church and nobility because he (correctly) understood he was smarter than the old elites. And, yet, he was still a king and thoroughly illiberal when it came to threats to his own power. He had very parochial ideas about economics for one thing and a deep saltiness about Britain's just better navy and economy.
Are some parts of social conservatism smarter than other parts?
I noticed no mention of guns here and few mentions of abortion. For that matter, large corporations have been quick to adopt loud expressions of social liberalism but slow to shout "We're pro-abortion!"
https://youtu.be/FMvRVoaV568?si=rASeZ1X3VqdLd1Ze
Details, schmetails, facts, schmacts. More general factors make conservatives less likely to belong to a cognitive elite. If we zoom out, a conservative feels shipwrecked by a perceived rift in history and must transgress against a current order to recover a lost identity. Policy specifics are variable and context-dependent. For example, Putin, while nominally an unimaginative communist bureaucrat, is reactionary because the collapse of Communism is foundational to who he is. Wherever the spirit of Janus is present -- the god of portals, gates, doors, beginnings, endings, transitions -- conservatism is always nearby, trying to look backward and forward at the same time.
This has two corollaries. One, a conservative is someone who is fundamentally not redpilled. There is always a red pill someplace that they do not want to take because it means consigning something beloved to the abyss of the past -- religion, commerce, state, family, culture, gender, whatever. Liberalism, in contrast, has the spirit Stendhal attributed to Danton: La vérité, l'austère vérité. Take all of the redpiils. Secondly, a conservative is someone who feels like they are fighting against history, either by being doomed, implementing a holding action, or attempting a restoration. They are, by definition, bitter clingers, necrophilic in Fromm's sense; the inability to respond creatively to life, whether by nature and/or circumstance, drives them to conservative politics. Both of these factors, ceteris paribus, select against intelligence, though this is an empirical generalization and not something necessary and law-like.
"Liberalism, in contrast, has the spirit Stendhal attributed to Danton: La vérité, l'austère vérité. Take all of the redpiils."
Thought it might be a bit strange that verity always points towards more and more equality. Is the world really as simple that every reality and truth always points towards "just treat everybody equally" ?
Second question: if it is so, why do we need super smart people to figure this out? This looks like an extremely simple idea.
The third part is that it is egalitarianism about many things but not all things. Sex, gender, sexual orientation, race and partially money. But not so much egalitarianism about money. And no egalitarianism over who has a say - the educated do, the uneducated do not. So actually it gets not very consistent.
1) On its surface, liberalism isn't necessarily connected with equality. As is well-known, Locke himself was a large shareholder in the Royal African Company. So, we would need a stronger argument to prove such a connection, as if egalitarianism is latent within liberalism, as if ideas from the ancient Sophists to the Logical Positivists are democratic because knowledge is somehow accessible to all.
Even if we grant this for the sake of argument, I'm not sure it proves much. Liberalism is about other things. Conservatism believes in an organic society, whether it be nation, culture, religion, or race, while liberalism, going back to Locke, has an instrumentalist interpretation of the state. Liberalism will always have a bit of slackness, making room for plurality or agonistic politics. Inconsistency is built into the doctrine -- it is a feature, not a bug. This interlocks with the meliorism and adaptationism of liberalism, the acknowledgment that applied knowledge can fix certain problems, which contrasts with the static conservative idea that the world is a vale of tears.
2) Yes, liberalism is a prosaic doctrine. Capital-M Meaning, the sublime, and worries about the world turning gray and filling up with NPCs is a conservative thing. See Burke -- his aesthetics, not his politics.
3) I agree with this, but I don't equate liberalism with egalitarianism. I have what Geert Hofstede might describe as low "power distance" and generally prefer horizontal over vertical relationships with other people, but it isn't an end in itself. See point 1.
Maybe this idea is somewhere in the comments already, but high IQ may simply enable a higher varience of views. Nothing listed here as socially liberal is actually ingrained on a century-scale anywhere, maybe check back after a few generations of a mostly atheist England, with prominent gay individuals in media continuously to ~2080, or in Russia with it’s level of abortions out to a post-Soviet century.
It would then take some thought to question such positions, but say once England is so settled as atheist then it’ll just be the mean view of dudes at the bar. Democracy is a good example - not even the morons who think Tucker is right about Jan 6th would actually answer a survey supporting Patrick Deneen’s post-liberalism sympathies for fuedalism, a very stupid but very galaxy brain position. They’de say they should be allowed to vote, because that’s the impression you get if you just sorta hang out in the US.
At a correlation of <0.2, the signal can be real but only requires very boring explinations.
Do you have any evidence that, if liberals skew higher in IQ, that those higher-IQ individuals seek out public positions and became part of the political landscape (other than as a voter or individual contributor of funds?) I ask this because politics is a strange landscape and having worked with many bureaucracies and legislators, I find that high-IQ people may start in government positions but quickly move on because they are not always as lucrative and the structure of the organization themselves attempts to weed out meritocracy for what we call a "schedule" of pay, or power, or whatever means must be shared by the many, meaning a higher-IQ person would be foolish to stay in politics and/or government (unless they are corrupt). Also, contemporarily, sticking your head out too far in the political game means you're likely to get it chopped off when people go digging into your past. Many people have suggested to me that I run for office, and I lean left, but I've decided not to do it. I believe Republican voters wouldn't care about my past, but liberals voters will, my intelligence and experience be damned. I don't want to sacrifice everything just to make things better for other people. While I know that attitude might offend those reading my post, I don't find the sentiment itself to be unusual. It's what keeps most people on the sidelines.
Is there any chance that, even though liberals have higher-IQs, the nature of human society has disqualified them from participating? As backwards as this may sound, my admittedly subjective observations of govt at work suggest only the bulls and the dogs win at politics and in society, not the sly and cunning, IMO. Bulldozing gets stuff done, not wittiness. I'm not sure having an IQ-advantage really matters in democratic arenas where the structure of institutions attempts to blot out individual achievement and create rivalries within the democratic structure itself, meaning you'd just have higher-IQ people spinning their wheels in non-ending, yet purposefully designed tug-o-wars. Wouldn't the higher-IQ people drop out? Wouldn't they prefer to be paid off by higher paying private gigs that let them maintain their privacy? Sure, their influence is curtailed, but that's also a matter of marketing, really. People who work at Tesla really think they're saving the world, and some of them are the smartest people to ever walk the Earth. Higher-IQ sometimes means a bigger imagination, and a bigger imagination, IMO, often leads to bigger delusions that suck up and consume that IQ in low-chance ventures that lead to perpetual failure and an inability to translate intelligence to reality.
7 Points:
1)Richard Hanania is a power-worshiper. This is why he went from being Pro-Russia to Pro-Ukraine. When it looked like Russia was on top and would quickly take Ukraine, he supported Russia, but when it turned out that wouldn't be the case, he changed his mind. It wasn't because he had a moral epiphany about the Ukraine war. This Power-worship instinct is why he has contempt for GOP voters. He recognizes that GOP voters are less deferential to elites than Democratic voters are and that greatly angers him, so this is why he takes great pleasure in writing about how dumb Conservatives are.
2) The main reason that liberals have woke positions on social issues is that liberals are more hypocritical than conservatives. For example, many,many white Liberals will constantly talk about the greatness of diversity but send their own kids to very white private schools and have as little interactions with black people as possible in their personal lives. Conservatives, on the other hand, reject such hypocrisy and advocate policies that more resemble their own personal lives.
3) Pro-Life conservatives tend to not be the dumb hillbilly with missing teeth and instead tend to either be solidly middle-class or upper-class with a degree in a real practical subject or a very industrious blue collar worker.
4) Elite liberals love to cosplay as international cosmopolitans but they can be just as nationalist(if not more)than conservatives under certain circumstances. Just look at Russiagate. Russiagate was pure nationalist hysteria by anti-Trump Liberals.
5) Pinochet Chile and Franco Spain were relatively stable compared to countries with left-wing dictatorships. The fact that both countries were able to transition into democracy without much bloodshed, unlike the many conflicts that emerged in Europe after the end of the Soviet Union, is an argument in favor of Right-wing politics over left-wing politics.
6) I think it's very telling that the more rigorous an academic field is, the less liberal it is. For example, it is likely that if you come across a Sociology professor and a Physics professor, both will be Democrats, but if one of them is a Republican, the Physics Professor will most likely be the Republican. also the case that Republican college graduates are more likely than Democratic college graduates to have Stem Degrees. You'll have a hard time finding a Republican in a comparative literature class, but you'll find a good amount in an engineering class.