Conservatives aren’t stupid, Emil O. W. Kirkegaard notes, depending on how you slice the data:
Depending on whether we look at political ideology or political party, the gaps can reverse in the general population, but they aren’t large.
Non-White voters drag down the Democrats, so when looking at only Whites the left has a consistent lead in intelligence, but it’s pretty small. However, it is true that extreme liberal Whites are the smartest group with a mean of 107 IQ versus their counterparts extreme conservative Whites with a mean of 98.5, close to a 10 IQ gap.
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So, intelligence correlates positively with wanting more freedom as in social freedoms (abortions, free speech etc.) and economic freedom (less government involvement), but these two political dimensions are negatively correlated. This brings forth the libertarian high IQ rarity pattern. Because the ideologies are negatively correlated, people who are high in both views are rare, but their IQs are particularly elevated. Noah notes that if you combine the political ideologies into a single component, this correlates .40 with IQ. That’s pretty high!
If Libertarians are so smart, why aren’t they running things?
Who, whom?
“Freedom” is zero-sum. A man’s right to do or not do a thing necessarily imposes on his adversary the obligation to permit his doing or not doing it.
Both “social freedoms” and “economic freedoms” as framed by the political clown dialectic are establishment positions. The former invariably promote atomization (divide et impera) and the latter invariably promote the hegemony of multinational gigacorporations.
No one dares to lobby for the social freedoms of a man’s right to marry a pleasant virgin, or to utter the word of power, nor for the economic freedoms of a man’s right to run a business not having to compete with nation-state-sized conglomerates like Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, Marriott, or Nike, or to be secure in his person, houses, papers, and effects.
The eternal boomer’s right to sell a shoddy forty-year-old house for forty years’ starting wage is in direct opposition to the sensitive young man’s right to live in a free society.
The entire economic and social structure is just like this, farcically arthritic and smelling of Bengay.