SmedlyButler
Gold Member
Every day on this board we seem to have threads about 'how stupid are libs?', 'dimbocrats', 'typical liberal stupidity'....you know the drill.
The strange thing is, I don't see a lot of posts claiming the opposite. Some comments, sure, but I think most people will agree that there are far, far more posts labelling liberalism as being in some way stupid, a mental illness etc than there are posts about conservatism claiming the same superiority.
I don't get this at all - I see no link between political views and intelligence. I've met some brilliant socialists, a couple of brilliant fascists, and everything in between. I have met enough painfully stupid liberals and painfully stupid conservatives that I don't think either side are in too great a position to start claiming a monopoly on smarts.
Isn't claiming 'liberalism is a mental illness' the kind of Catch 22 comment that only an intellectual dwarf could assume?
Or is there a reason that some conservatives believe they are intellectually superior?
I have seen a few studies that address this issue and the ones I've read reach the conclusion that people with liberal ideologies are smarter than those at the other end of the political scale. This article here describes one of these studies;
"The short answer: Kanazawa's paper shows that more-intelligent people are more likely to say they are liberal. They are also less likely to say they go to religious services. ... What's new in Kanazawa's paper is a provocative theory about why intelligence might correlate with liberalism. He argues that smarter people are more willing to espouse "evolutionarily novel" values--that is, values that did not exist in our ancestral environment, including weird ideas about, say, helping genetically unrelated strangers..."
"So are liberals smarter? Kanazawa quotes from two surveys that support the hypothesis that liberals are more intelligent. One is the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which is often called Add Health. The other is the General Social Survey (GSS). The Add Health study shows that the mean IQ of adolescents who identify themselves as "very liberal" is 106, compared with a mean IQ of 95 for those calling themselves "very conservative." The Add Health study is huge — more than 20,000 kids — and this difference is highly statistically significant."
These studies don't necessarily agree on why this measurable difference exists but it is clear from the ones that I've read that it does.