THE Huffington Post reported something stunningly new and unexpected this week. Conservatives are stupid. Surprise! It’s true: “Intelligence Study Links Low I.Q. To Prejudice, Racism, Conservatism.”  

The website posted a banner photo of the Klu Klux Klan over its piece, just in case you weren’t aware that conservatives are not only stupid, but very, very mean. Unfortunately, it did not post photos of some of the countless geniuses and super smart people who have believed in what The Huffington Post would define as conservative ideas.

The article is nothing new in itself as it represents a common and intractable belief among liberals that liberalism is true because so many smart people believe in it. But the piece does take this widespread notion to possibly unprecedented extremes. The Huffington Post states:

Dr. Gordon Hodson, a professor of psychology at the university and the study’s lead author, said the finding represented evidence of a vicious cycle: People of low intelligence gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, which stress resistance to change and, in turn, prejudice, he told LiveScience.

Why might less intelligent people be drawn to conservative ideologies? Because such ideologies feature “structure and order” that make it easier to comprehend a complicated world, Dodson said. “Unfortunately, many of these features can also contribute to prejudice,” he added.

Dr. Brian Nosek, a University of Virginia psychologist, echoed those sentiments.

“Reality is complicated and messy,” he told The Huffington Post in an email. “Ideologies get rid of the messiness and impose a simpler solution. So, it may not be surprising that people with less cognitive capacity will be attracted to simplifying ideologies.”

This is funny because liberalism is, well, simplifying. It constantly imposes the consoling, uncomplicated idea of equality upon reality’s stubborn distinctions and hierarchies. By contrast, the traditional mores of Western society require a teeny-weensy bit of mental effort, a few cognitive leaps beyond what is presented everywhere – in school, media, government and corporations. To believe human beings are inherently incapable of perfection or to accept transcendent absolutes is to embrace the very un-simple fact that many things cannot be fixed by government or collectivism.

The most obvious rebuttal to the notion that conservative ideas are stupid (that is the implication of saying that conservatives themselves are stupid) is that most intelligent segments of society once took these same attitudes for granted. It wasn’t just the Klu Klux Klan that believed that racial identity was an intractable fact of existence. Most judges, lawyers, doctors, professors, priests, and scientists did too, as recently as 70 years ago. The very foundations of Western thought were built by people who would have considered The Huffington Post too idiotic to read. Does Dr. Hodson believe Thomas Jefferson was stupid? Isaac Newton? Michelangelo? John Milton? Shakespeare? Leonardo DaVinci? I’m afraid the number of very, very smart people on the side of what the Huffington Post would define as conservatism is such an embarrassment to the opposition that it would be far wiser for today’s intellectually gifted liberals to keep the subject of who is smarter than whom a matter of private speculation.

                                                           — Comments —

Natassia writes:

I must take issue with your post today, Laura. :-) It sounds as if you are on the defensive–attempting to logically justify the results of the study. You give it too much credit. Since many of the most racist people I have ever known were non-whites, I think it is awful that the first image that pops in our minds when we hear the words “prejudiced” or “racist” is that of a white man, particularly a “conservative” white man. Anti-white propaganda has been very successful, even in the minds of racially-conscious conservatives like myself. I realized my subconscious bias toward white men when I first heard of this study and automatically pictured a young white man with tattoos and a shaved head. Maybe the majority of people who qualified as “conservative” under the study were actually low-IQ blacks who vote consistently Democrat. Look, we can’t get Democrats out of office here in West Virginia, one of the whitest, poorest, and most pro-gun, pro-union, but anti-Obama states in America with one of the worst education systems. Maybe they interviewed a bunch of West Virginians.

What exactly is the definition of “conservatism” according to the researchers responsible for this study? Doesn’t that all depend on the culture of the person being studied? Consider the differences between a conservative Catholic and a conservative Muslim, especially if one is from New England and the other from Pakistan. And why are racism and prejudice automatically associated with conservatism anyway? I mean, aren’t white liberals constantly ranting and raving about the need to address their own inherent and latent racism and white privilege?

This study is meaningless since liberals have rendered words like racism meaningless. It is meaningless because liberals refuse to acknowledge conservatism on conservatives’ own terms. Have you noticed that the media will use words like “conservative” to describe pro-sharia Muslims, when American conservatives are vehemently opposed to sharia in all its subtle forms?

Their Orwellian manipulation of our language has been so successful that we actually accept the premises of their stupid studies and then try to find ways to explain the results to improve the impressions they give. We need to stop doing that, and we need to refuse to accept the very premises of their studies.

Laura writes:

I agree with your rejection of the study, but I was not so much thinking of this study as of the attitude this article represents and the very obvious fact that many of the most intelligent and successful members of our society do believe in liberalism. That’s a pretty well established fact. So I don’t think the study, regardless of its very apparent biases, is entirely off base in identifying “conservatism” today with lower IQ. The fallacy in this belief is, as I said, that what is conservative today was mainstream yesterday, and widely accepted by the highly intelligent. So the important point is not who believes in any given idea, but whether it is true or not. By taking note of the correlation between “conservatism,” which I would define as objective morality and The Huffington Post would define as lunacy, and the less brilliant members of our society, who tend to be those who do not occupy the highest ranks of our meritocracy and have far less incentive to blindly accept the premises of an egalitarian meritocracy, liberals let themselves off the hook intellectually. Just when they are most priding themselves on their intelligence, liberals succumb to cerebral indolence. They stop thinking. They stop caring about the merit of any given idea and accept or reject it for ad hominem reasons. In other words, liberalism must be true because so many intelligent and successful people believe in it.

Laura continues:

Let me give an example of a conservative belief that is widely accepted by the less intelligent (not the unintelligent, but the less intelligent.)

A female student of Yale is very likely to consider abortion a good thing if a woman wants it. A female student at a community college, a person who could never qualify for Yale no matter how hard she worked, is much less likely to believe this. She is more likely to have an instinctive aversion to abortion. One reason why the illegitimacy rate is so high is that less intelligent women are having the same amount of casual sex as highly intelligent women, but are more likely to become pregnant and less likely to end a pregnancy. All the safe sex education in the world will not prevent them from getting pregnant and bearing their children.

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