From NCofnas.com:
Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem
To win over the elites, the right needs to challenge the Big Lie that motivates wokism: the equality thesis
Nathan Cofnas
Jan 02, 2024
Attributions of low intelligence are considered insults—something we lob at our enemies, not our friends. So why should I, who am committed to the defeat of leftism, say that my own side is the dumb one? I cannot shame my political allies into having higher IQs. Talking about the right’s intellectual limitations seems demoralizing and mean. What’s wrong with letting conservatives view themselves as intellectually superior to the “libtards” who invent vaccines and run academia, big tech, and our major corporations?
If the intelligence deficit among conservatives—and right wingers in general—is real, there are at least two reasons why we need to talk about it. First, although IQ may not be under our control, being smart is to some extent a choice. Behaviors like doing “physiognomy checks” on X or getting all of your information from Internet memes are not genetically determined. It is sometimes possible to shame people into living up to their intellectual potential. Second and more important, the fact that an ideology fails to attract smart people is an indication that there is something wrong with the ideology, which needs to be corrected. If smart people overwhelmingly choose wokism over right-wing alternatives, we need to understand why.
… Instead of striking out on our own, the right needs to figure out how to turn smart people away from the left.
I’ll review several lines of direct and indirect evidence that the left has a crushing intelligence advantage over the right, especially among the elites. Then I’ll consider why this is the case, and explain the strategic implications.
To explain the appeal of leftism—which increasingly takes the form of wokism—you have to explain what wokism is. I argue that wokism is simply what follows from taking the equality thesis of race and sex differences seriously, given a background of Christian morality. Both the mainstream left and right believe that innate cognitive ability and temperament are distributed equally among races, and probably the sexes, too. (Mainstream conservatives acknowledge the existence of physical sex differences, but they rarely chalk up disparities in, for example, mathematical achievement to differences in innate ability—at least not publicly.) As I will explain, wokesters correctly follow the equality thesis to its logical conclusion, whereas conservatives fail to recognize the implications of their own beliefs. Smart people are disproportionately attracted to wokism in large part because it offers a more intellectually coherent explanation for the major issue of our time, which is the persistence of racial disparities.
And yet … the inevitable problem with a religion whose most fundamental tenet is that blacks are just as smart as Jews is that you now wind up being told to read Kendi and Arday in 2020s rather than Gould and Lewontin in the 1970s. It was more fun for bright people to read Gould and Lewontin, while today’s Woke intellectuals are a drag.
I will show why my explanation of wokism is superior to Rufo’s wokism-as-philosophy theory and Hanania’s wokism-as-law theory. Wokism needs to be attacked from philosophical and legal angles, and Rufo and Hanania provide important guidance on how to do that. Ultimately, however, the woke system can only be brought down by exposing the Big Lie upon which it is based (the equality thesis), thereby giving elites a reason to change their minds and defect to the right. Wokism will end when the right becomes smart enough to attract the people who matter.
Liberals Are Smarter: The Evidence
One of the most robust findings in social psychology is “stereotype accuracy.” The stereotype that Jews are rich or Jamaicans are good sprinters reflects statistical realities about the distribution of money and fast-twitch muscle fiber, and is not based entirely on irrational prejudice. There are many individual exceptions—many poor Jews and fat, slow Jamaicans—but on average there are differences between populations in the direction of stereotypes. (After writing this I Googled “richest person in Jamaica.” Surprise—up popped a picture of a Jew. The fastest man in Israel is Ghanaian.)
Stereotype accuracy is bad news for conservatives and right wingers, who are stereotyped as low-IQ rubes—and not only by liberals. It was a conservative Republican Senator from Wyoming, Alan Simpson, who nicknamed the Republican Party “the stupid party.”
Liberal John Stuart Mill said much the same about the Tories in 1861:
“I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party. I know that I am liable to a retort, and an obvious one enough; and as I do not wish to allow any honorable gentleman the credit of making it, I make it myself. It may be said that if stupidity has a tendency to Conservatism, sciolism [a pretentious display of superficial knowledge or the practice of talking and giving opinions on subjects one knows very little about], or half-knowledge, has a tendency to Liberalism. Something might be said for that, but it is not at all so clear as the other. There is an uncertainty about sciolists; we cannot count upon them; and therefore they are a less dangerous class. But there is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power”
Back to Cofnas:
… There is no definitive study on the IQs of self-identified liberals vs. conservatives or Democrats vs. Republicans. The best data we have come from the General Social Survey (GSS), which every other year surveys a representative sample of Americans. Participants in the GSS answer questions about their political identity, take a ten-item vocabulary test called WORDSUM, a test of probability knowledge, and a test of verbal reasoning.
WORDSUM is of course biased toward wordcels over shape-rotators.
The interviewer also assesses the respondent’s ability to understand the survey questions. The GSS’s intelligence tests and the interviewer’s assessment of the subject are not proper IQ tests, but scores can be used to estimate IQ. Noah Carl found that, when all of these measures of intelligence are converted to IQ, Republicans have a 1–4 IQ-point advantage over Democrats.
However, the results are skewed by the large number of lower-average-IQ minorities who vote Democrat. When Emil Kirkegaard restricted the analysis to whites (still the most culturally influential demographic) and considered ideological rather than party identification, he found a substantial difference favoring liberals in WORDSUM IQ. “Extreme liberals” score the highest at 107, followed by “liberals” at 105. They were trailed by “conservatives” at 101, and “extreme conservatives” at 98.5. Only people who reported that they “don’t know” their political orientation scored worse than extreme conservatives. …
An 8.5 IQ-point gap between extreme liberals and extreme conservatives might not be conspicuous on an individual level. To put it in context, the average sibling pair differs by 12 IQ points, and it’s often hard to tell which sibling is smarter. But, on a population level, an average 8.5-point difference has far-reaching implications. …
The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) ranks the world’s universities based on objective criteria such as the number of publications they produce in Nature and Science and how many of their alumni have won Nobel Prizes or Fields Medals. It gives more weight to achievement in the hard sciences, which conservatives consider “real subjects,” than in the humanities. According to the ranking, 5 of the top 20 universities in the world are in California—the bluest and gayest state in America. In the top 50, there are 28 American universities, of which 23 are in blue states. The five in red states are UNC Chapel Hill (ranked 21st in the US), Duke (22nd in the US), Washington University in St. Louis (17th in the US), the University of Texas at Austin (25th in the US), and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas (27th in the US). All five of these red-state universities are located in solidly blue cities, and none of them are conservative institutions—in fact, they are about as woke as their blue-state counterparts. The only relatively conservative university in the US that’s even listed on the ARWU is Brigham Young University, whose global ranking is in the 501–600 range. I say BYU is “relatively conservative” rather than “conservative” because it still leans liberal, with 61% of its political donors giving to liberal rather than conservative causes. If conservatives are just as smart and intellectual as liberals, why have they failed to create even a single major conservative-friendly university that is remotely competitive with the top liberal universities?
The right has a handful of think tanks that in some cases employ scholars who are as good as, or better than, those at elite universities. But these are relatively small operations. The annual expenditures at the conservative American Enterprise Institute are less than $50 million. At the Manhattan Institute, they’re less than $20 million. If conservatives seriously cared about building elite institutions of learning and scholarship, they could do better than this. The fact that they don’t is further evidence that they are not as intellectually oriented as liberals.
Tucker Carlson recently said: “Let’s keep dumb people and crazed partisan demagogues away from our financial system and our power grid. They can keep the sociology department—have fun. But why don’t you stay away from the fundamentals that keep the country running.” A liberal commentator would never say something like this, because most liberals understand that culture is influenced by ideas, and surrendering idea-generating institutions to the enemy is a bad strategy. Carlson himself is far more intelligent than most professors of sociology. But he knows that, to his conservative audience, the notion of studying social phenomena in a scholarly way (what sociology is supposed to be) is literally a punchline. The fact that conservative leaders often express this kind of attitude is evidence that the average conservative doesn’t get why ideas are important.
Journalism is another area in which conservatives display less intelligence and competence than liberals. In a moment of lucidity at the 2009 CPAC convention, Tucker Carlson lamented the fact that conservatives have been unable to create institutions like the New York Times. Over boos from the audience, he noted that “yes they are liberal, yes they twist it. But they are still out there finding the facts and bringing them to people.” He said that “conservatives need to mimic that in their own news organizations.” They should “not just interpret things they hear in the mainstream media but gather the news themselves.” And yet, 14 years later, after Carlson was fired from Fox News and the fetters were off, he started trumpeting fake news about UFOs and Barack Obama’s gay affair. He was ultimately pulled down to the level of his conservative audience.
In Tucker’s defense, my strong impression is that he talks a lot about UFOs because he’s really interested in UFOs.
One could argue that the Wall Street Journal is the conservative New York Times, but I think this is a mistake. … Two months after George Floyd’s death, the Journal announced it would start capitalizing “Black” but not “white”! In any case, the Journal does not have the kind of influence on the right that the Times has on the left. A 2012 survey found that Journal readers are more likely to identify as Democrat than Republican (31% vs. 20%), though they leaned conservative over liberal (32% vs. 21%). A post-Great Awokening 2014 survey found that Journal readers lean slightly left, with consistent liberals (20%) and mostly liberals (21%) outnumbering consistent conservatives (13%) and mostly conservatives (22%).
The right’s lack of appreciation for intelligence is reflected in the fact that it provides no clear career path for right-leaning intellectuals, especially if their work is not directly related to hot-button policy issues like immigration, taxes, or gender ideology. Most young scholars who were kicked out of academia for challenging liberal orthodoxy, such as sociologist Noah Carl and psychologist Bo Winegard, were not picked up by establishment conservative institutions. (Carl and Winegard are both currently employed at the new magazine Aporia.) Sometimes serious scholars are hired by conservative institutions, but then fired after liberals complain. That was the fate of Jason Richwine, whose Harvard dissertation mentioned facts about race that made liberals upset. Harvard rebuffed calls to revoke his degree, but the conservative Heritage Foundation fired him. As a philosopher on the right, it’s literally easier for me to be hired by the University of Cambridge than it is to publish in National Review or the American Conservative. The fact that the left rewards its intellectuals while the right chases them away supports the view that those on the right are not as interested in ideas.
I don’t want to exaggerate the intelligence or integrity of the left, which can be almost as stupid, conspiratorial, and mendacious as the right.
Or more so, but the left’s conspiracy theorizing is more academic and respectable. For instance, we live in a society in which hatred of whites is more fashionable than pointing out that there is a lot of hatred of whites.
Hanania calls conservatives “gullible morons” because a small number of them were supposedly taken in by a liberal parody account on X that would, for example, defend affirmative action by saying, “no Black person will be able to succeed in a merit-based system.” But when liberal outlets reported that a pregnant white nurse tried to steal a bicycle from a group of young black men—a story straight out of the Twilight Zone—tens of thousands of liberals accepted this at face value.
This was an insane whoop-tee-doo of May 2023.
According to an article published in REVOLT and reprinted in outlets including Yahoo! News: “A white woman in New York City has earned the nickname ‘Citi Bike Karen’ after a video went viral of her trying to steal a Black youth’s rentable bicycle.” In a tweet that got at least 21.9 thousand likes before being deleted, Civil Rights attorney Ben Crump wrote: “This is unacceptable! A white woman was caught on camera attempting to STEAL a Citi Bike from a young Black man in NYC.” The woman’s employer, Bellevue Hospital, thought that this narrative was plausible enough to place her on leave. NBC News ran a segment edited to portray the white woman as a racist villain, even sending a camera crew to knock on her door in an attempt to confront her, and filming the front of her building so that everyone can know where she lives. The NBC report concluded with an interview with a neighbor saying: “It’s clearly like a Karen....She thinks that she’s viewed as [a] victim because she’s white....That’s obvious in this America that we all live in.” It took the New York Times two-and-a-half months to publish an op-ed cautiously defending the “Citi Bike Karen.” The Times then published several letters from readers, some of which were against the “Karen,” including one by a Hunter College sociology professor. The equally preposterous Jussie Smollett hoax was widely taken at face value by the establishment media. I’m not saying conservatives aren’t gullible morons who wouldn’t believe an absurd hoax that supports their own prejudices. But it’s not obvious that liberals are superior in this respect.
The liberal mainstream media retailed a huge number of hate hoaxes …
Paywall here.
