Conservatism Thrives on Low Intelligence and Poor Information

[Johnfromokc]

Anyone surprised? Relevant sections highlighted to assist "low information voters".

http://www.alternet.org/story/15408..._low_intelligence_and_poor_information?page=2

There is plenty of research showing that low general intelligence in childhood predicts greater prejudice towards people of different ethnicity or sexuality in adulthood.

February 12, 2012 |

Self-deprecating, too liberal for their own good, today's progressives stand back and watch, hands over their mouths, as the social vivisectionists of the right slice up a living society to see if its component parts can survive in isolation. Tied up in knots of reticence and self-doubt, they will not shout stop. Doing so requires an act of interruption, of presumption, for which they no longer possess a vocabulary.

Perhaps it is in the same spirit of liberal constipation that, with the exception of Charlie Brooker, we have been too polite to mention the Canadian study published last month in the journal Psychological Science, which revealed that people with conservative beliefs are likely to be of low intelligence. Paradoxically it was the Daily Mail that brought it to the attention of British readers last week. It feels crude, illiberal to point out that the other side is, on average, more stupid than our own. But this, the study suggests, is not unfounded generalisation but empirical fact.

It is by no means the first such paper. There is plenty of research showing that low general intelligence in childhood predicts greater prejudice towards people of different ethnicity or sexuality in adulthood. Open-mindedness, flexibility, trust in other people: all these require certain cognitive abilities. Understanding and accepting others – particularly "different" others – requires an enhanced capacity for abstract thinking.

But, drawing on a sample size of several thousand, correcting for both education and socioeconomic status, the new study looks embarrassingly robust. Importantly, it shows that prejudice tends not to arise directly from low intelligence but from the conservative ideologies to which people of low intelligence are drawn. Conservative ideology is the "critical pathway" from low intelligence to racism. Those with low cognitive abilities are attracted to "rightwing ideologies that promote coherence and order" and "emphasise the maintenance of the status quo". Even for someone not yet renowned for liberal reticence, this feels hard to write.

This is not to suggest that all conservatives are stupid. There are some very clever people in government, advising politicians, running thinktanks and writing for newspapers, who have acquired power and influence by promoting rightwing ideologies.

But what we now see among their parties – however intelligent their guiding spirits may be – is the abandonment of any pretence of high-minded conservatism. On both sides of the Atlantic, conservative strategists have discovered that there is no pool so shallow that several million people won't drown in it. Whether they are promoting the idea that Barack Obama was not born in the US, that man-made climate change is an eco-fascist-communist-anarchist conspiracy, or that the deficit results from the greed of the poor, they now appeal to the basest, stupidest impulses, and find that it does them no harm in the polls.
Don't take my word for it. Listen to what two former Republican ideologues, David Frum and Mike Lofgren, have been saying. Frum warns that "conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics". The result is a "shift to ever more extreme, ever more fantasy-based ideology" which has "ominous real-world consequences for American society".

Lofgren complains that "the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital centre today". The Republican party, with its "prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science" is appealing to what he calls the "low-information voter", or the "misinformation voter". While most office holders probably don't believe the "reactionary and paranoid claptrap" they peddle, "they cynically feed the worst instincts of their fearful and angry low-information political base".

The madness hasn't gone as far in the UK, but the effects of the Conservative appeal to stupidity are making themselves felt. This week the Guardian reported that recipients of disability benefits, scapegoated by the government as scroungers, blamed for the deficit, now find themselves subject to a new level of hostility and threats from other people.
These are the perfect conditions for a billionaires' feeding frenzy. Any party elected by misinformed, suggestible voters becomes a vehicle for undisclosed interests. A tax break for the 1% is dressed up as freedom for the 99%. The regulation that prevents big banks and corporations exploiting us becomes an assault on the working man and woman. Those of us who discuss man-made climate change are cast as elitists by people who happily embrace the claims of Lord Monckton, Lord Lawson or thinktanks funded by ExxonMobil or the Koch brothers: now the authentic voices of the working class.

But when I survey this wreckage I wonder who the real idiots are. Confronted with mass discontent, the once-progressive major parties, as Thomas Frank laments in his latest book Pity the Billionaire, triangulate and accommodate, hesitate and prevaricate, muzzled by what he calls "terminal niceness". They fail to produce a coherent analysis of what has gone wrong and why, or to make an uncluttered case for social justice, redistribution and regulation. The conceptual stupidities of conservatism are matched by the strategic stupidities of liberalism.

Yes, conservatism thrives on low intelligence and poor information. But the liberals in politics on both sides of the Atlantic continue to back off, yielding to the supremacy of the stupid. It's turkeys all the way down.

 

[All Else Failed]

Linear/binary analysis, especially when deliberately robbed of context and history, is a clear hallmark of the political agenda toolkit.

 

[Johnfromokc]

Linear/binary analysis, especially when deliberately robbed of context and history, is a clear hallmark of the political agenda toolkit.

Conservatism Thrives on Low Intelligence and Poor Information:

Case-in-point.​

 

[Johnfromokc]

OK - So where are the rest of the right wingers? Don't be shy.

 

[Peter Parka]

OK - So where are the rest of the right wingers? Don't be shy.

The're not right wingers, the're libeterians! :24:

 

[All Else Failed]

Conservatism Thrives on Low Intelligence and Poor Information:

Case-in-point.​

Not sure why you posted a picture of a rune.

It is by no means the first such paper. There is plenty of research showing that low general intelligence in childhood predicts greater prejudice towards people of different ethnicity or sexuality in adulthood.

yeah see racial prejudice doesn't define what conservatism is

Importantly, it shows that prejudice tends not to arise directly from low intelligence

an article that dismantles itself

 

[Johnfromokc]

Not sure why you posted a picture of a rune.


yeah see racial prejudice doesn't define what conservatism is


an article that dismantles itself

Keep on proving the study right AEF. http://www.offtopicz.net/imgres?img...=PI05T_jZLuS62wWvt5yaAg&sqi=2&ved=0CDIQ9QEwBA

 

[All Else Failed]

hey thanks for addressing what i said and not going on some sort of super vague tangent

 

[Johnfromokc]

hey thanks for addressing what i said and not going on some sort of super vague tangent

Sometimes you just make it too easy AEF................:24:

 

[All Else Failed]

why did you post that picture?

 

[Tim]

yeah see racial prejudice doesn't define what conservatism is

http://hypervocal.com/news/2012/fox...y-racist-reactions-to-whitney-houstons-death/

:24: You're right, it doesn't define it, but they sure do go nicely together.


I would love for you to find a liberal or progressive blog or news site that even come close to the racism spewed on the rights sites... Please, just one

 

[All Else Failed]

I'm not going to hunt down some skinny white liberal saying he hates blacks or something, that is not important (PS, I'm sure all of those white liberals that move out of cities and away from minority populations don't really mean to, they just like to support 'diversity' at a distance)



and pointing out that some idiots use racial slurs on a news article is a pretty bad attempt at labeling conservatives as racists



but then again the left is super-sensitive to anything that has to do with race.

 

[Johnfromokc]

 

[All Else Failed]

oh cute


one of those again

 

[Mercury]

Social conservatives seem to either be jealous or fearful of that which they condemn.

 

[CityGirl]

I don't think it is the case that conservatism thrives on low intelligence and poor information as the OP implies. I just read an interesting article titled Assessing the Vote and the Roots of American Political Divide. It is an interesting perspective and has some merit. Here are a few excerpts:

The Republican Party, from an economic perspective, has traditionally supported economic policy that favors investors, big business and the wealthy. The Democratic Party has always supported economic policy that favors farmers and the working-class, at least from the popular perspective.

Now, within the past 20 years, because the Republican Party has adopted the social agenda of the old Democratic Party, farmers and laborers shifted alliances to the Republican Party, especially in the South. Interestingly, this puts the Republican Party at odds with the traditional economic positions of its new base. Rural America has been the recipient of redistributed wealth in America throughout history, especially since the Civil War. The American Midwest and the South have traditionally been the largest opponents to free market practices throughout American history. A significant element of the Democratic platform throughout history has been getting federal aid to farmers and using federal funding to subsidize development in rural America.

This means that the working-class is now divided in America, with a major segment of the working-class actually voting against their own economic interests and supporting the investor class, i.e. wealthy capitalists. Interestingly, while Republican voters are now toeing the "free market" party line, and have now adopted a mentality that is opposed to so-called "redistribution of wealth" through taxation, Middle America remains the largest recipient of redistributed wealth, as has traditionally been the case in America. This continues to lead to even more political and economic confusion as "conservative" Republican voters are led to believe that their wealth is being taxed away to pay for "liberal programs", when in fact it is the other way around.

The American South is actually one of the few places in the entire world that never embraced the working-class ideology of the 19th and 20th centuries. At a critical time in world history, the Southern region was isolated from international events and was consumed with its own regional social conflict. In the American South the "enemy" of the white male working-class was not wealthy capitalists or corrupt royalty, but it was instead poor blacks and liberal women.

When one contrasts the events in the social development of regions around the world during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, one sees that all across Europe, Russia, Asia and South America the dominant social struggle of the time was of the working-class against oppression and wage labor.

The American South did not take part in this struggle. It was instead fighting a backward struggle apart from the rest of the world. In the American South the working-class was bitterly divided by race with working-class whites fighting, not for the improvement of workers' rights, but instead fighting for the continued oppression of the class that was below them, the newly freed propertyless slaves.

By the end of the 19th century the American South stood alone in the world as the most backward and divided working-class in the world. Whereas workers in the rest of the developing world were directing their attention "up" against exploitation by the wealthy, be they capitalists, the remnants of royalty, or foreign imperialists, the workers and farmers in the American South were directing their efforts "down", seeking to retain their class position above the ex-slaves. Instead of fighting for their own rights as workers, white males in the South were fighting to continue to deprive the lower class of their rights.

Farmers and rural workers around the world tended to join industrial workers in support of advancing workers' rights as a whole. In this way, even regions where wage labor had not yet come to dominate society, agricultural workers and craftsmen joined forces with their fellow urban laborers to work in their common interest. This is because throughout the Old World, both peasants and laborers were typically non-propertied, and thus had a common cause.

However, because of the rifts between the industrial North and agricultural South in the United States, this cooperation never took place, and in fact these two interests opposed each other and have continued to oppose each other ever since.

During the Cold War "anti-Communism" became a major sociopolitical force across the Midwest and the South. It was easy to demonize the Left and to glorify capitalism in these regions because the people living in these regions had no real contact with capitalism.

It was easy to use anti-Communism to demonize all elements of the Left in the South and Midwest because these people had very little first hand contact with either Marxist ideas or with capitalism itself, and thus those who framed the discussion were able to shape perceptions about things that people had no first hand knowledge of.
It was easy to demonize unions in the South and Midwest because so few people in these places had contact with either unions or with the working conditions that spawned union activity. All of these reasons made the South and Midwest attractive areas for the Republican Party to look for support.

In the South and Midwest people were farmers, people owned their own land, they owned their own businesses, they had an established community of friends and neighbors. They did not face the harsh reality of urban and mechanized life. They did not face living in places where home ownership was next to impossible, where the majority of people worked on assembly lines for wages that were dictated by millionaires, deprived of their self respect and sense of individual purpose.

This is industrial capitalism. This is what the people in the "blue states" have faced for 100 years in America, and this is the environment that "blue state" society has developed in.

To a man on his farm, getting up at 4:30 a.m. to say his prayers and go out into his barn to prepare his tractor and seed for the day, coming back inside at 6:00 to eat the fresh cooked breakfast that his loving wife has made for him, and then going out to work the fields with his son until 6:00 p.m., its very hard to understand the sentiment of a thousand angry workers, striking out in front of a Ford auto plant, demanding more pay and shorter hours.

The farmer sees his trusty Ford truck, a truck that he depends on for his livelihood, and he gets angry at those union men for refusing to work and demanding more pay. He gets up before dawn and works hard all day long, loves his wife, prays to God to thank him for everything that he has, and loves his country, and now these men are "going to make the cost of a new Ford truck go up" because "they" want more pay?

It was easy for the Right to turn that anger and misunderstanding against fellow Americans and against their economic opponents: wage laborers.
The difference, though, is that rural citizens had control over their own lives. They owned a lot of property, and that property was important to them. They owned land, they owned tools, they owned supplies, they owned and operated their own stores and businesses.

(cont'd)

 

[CityGirl]

The difference, though, is that rural citizens had control over their own lives. They owned a lot of property, and that property was important to them. They owned land, they owned tools, they owned supplies, they owned and operated their own stores and businesses.

And so, this is what has happened, politicians have turned Americans from vastly different cultural experiences against each other. Those that represent the interests of the wealthy capitalist class have used rural and suburban America to undermine the interests of working-class wage laborers.

Large corporations have used small businessmen, farmers and the self-employed to protect their own interests. They appeal to these groups and tell them that that are "among the capitalist class", when in fact they are not. But they have connected with Middle America and convinced them that the interests of industrialized corporate America are the same as the interests of small town America. Since Middle America does not experience life in the urban industrial centers they don't see the difference between industrial capitalism and independent rural America.

Corporate America and the Right feed Middle America's fear of the urban working-class, using this fear as a political bulwark against the interests of wage labor.

Middle America has traditionally reaped the fruits of capitalist production without having to endure the reality of capitalist society. Industrialized areas have produced goods that are made available in rural and suburban America, which has allowed these regions to benefit from mass production and wage labor capitalism without living in the environment created by mechanized wage labor society. Middle Americas have had a very distorted perception of capitalism because they have only been on the receiving end of the capitalist system, and have not themselves lived in capitalist society.
The irony here is that what Middle America is now experiencing is the encroachment of capitalist culture into their traditionally rural and independent region.

Over the past 20 years wage labor society has spread into Middle America and the South. What is the vehicle of this encroachment? It is the increase and aggressiveness of marketing, the increase of liberal entertainment, and, most importantly, the growth of wage labor in rural America.
The first of these items is self-explanatory, however understanding the increase of liberal entertainment is slightly more complex. Liberal post-modern society is a product of urban capitalist socioeconomic relations.

Urban and rural society have always been different, even prior to the development of capitalism. However, they are more different today than ever. Additionally, in the past these two cultures did not mix and impose themselves upon each other the way that cultures mix today via the mass media. Because most media in America is a product of urban post-modern culture, it does not represent the values and interests of Middle America. "Red state" values have traditionally been based on community, a relatively humble existence, and a culture of opposition to worldly desires. Capitalist culture, however, promotes a culture of selfishness, neediness, and putting individual desire above community interests. Capitalism intentionally promotes desire. The basis of post-modern capitalism is the creation, manipulation, and deepening of human desire. Capitalism, not just through marketing, but all aspects of capitalist society, encourages self-indulgence and lasciviousness. Desire creates demand, and demand "moves product".

The intrusion of liberal capitalist society into rural America's community based social structure it not the only problem that Middle America is facing however.

With the explosion of large chain retail stores, chain restaurants, and factory farming, wage labor is now becoming increasingly prominent in "red" America. White rural America has historically been a relatively classless society where individuals have independently owned and controlled their own economic means. With the advance of wage labor into Middle American society, rural Americans are now experiencing the beginnings of the capitalization of their culture.

The problem is, though, that Middle America is now completely out of step with the historical development of the labor movement.
Middle America has been used to bludgeon the American labor movement to death, and now that rural Americans are in the process of being taken over by the capitalism that they have been supporting from afar for so long, they don't have the class-consciousness or critical questioning of the system that is needed to combat its harmful effects.

Middle America has experienced nothing but the blessings of capitalism for the past 50 years, while remaining able to preserve their pre-capitalist, independent society. Now, however, traditional society is finally being imposed upon by wage labor, large corporations, international business, post-modernist media, apartments and housing projects, and these people are feeling the stress and despair of capitalist social disruption. But, because of 50 years of Cold War propaganda, because of the American glorification of capitalism, because, it is claimed, capitalism has "saved God" by defeating the Soviets, the real cause of the despair and turmoil within Middle American society goes unrecognized by the Southern and Midwestern working-class.

"Red state" America is facing a real social crisis. That crisis is the struggle against the social changes that come with the loss of economic independence caused by the takeover of capitalist wage labor society.

Because, however, "red state" America has no ties to historical labor movements, and in fact has a history of opposition to the great labor movements of Western Civilization, the way that Middle America is dealing with the uncertainty and social change that is brought on by capitalism is by seeking comfort in religion and conservatism.

Summary

The American South is the single largest region in the world that stood outside the important labor movements of the 19[SUP]th[/SUP] and 20[SUP]th[/SUP] century. Not only was the American South not involved in what was the most important social development in Western civilization over the past 150 years, but the Southern working-class actually became a political force used against larger working-class interests, not just within the United States, but globally.

What we see today as "red" America are the unindustrialized regions that have not experienced true capitalist society and have much less experience with wage labor.

Because of the Cold War, objective analysis of political economy in the United States has been effectively stifled since World War II. Now, as capitalism and wage labor advance across Middle America for the first time, Middle American society is not in a position to understand and deal with the real causes of social change and fragmentation.

Furthermore, because the Republican Party has portrayed itself as the party of "conservative" values over the past 40 years, which are the values of the Middle American working-class, the Republican Party has consolidated a large portion of American working-class support.

The Republican Party, however, ultimately acts in the interests of the wealthy elite and corporations. Conservatism has enabled the Republican Party to not only get much broader support than it would otherwise be able to do based on its economic platform alone, but it has in fact enabled the Republican Party to reshape class consciousness in America and define working-class interests for the working class.

This has enabled the most exploitive institutions of American society to dictate to the working-class and to mold the economic views of extremely large portions of working-class America. This is why large portions of the American population have continued to vote against their own economic interests over the past 20 years, and why American politics is taking such a dramatic turn to the Right. Not only are these people voting against their economic interests, however, they are also voting against their own social interests because it is the economic change that is really bringing about the social changes in their community.

The United States of America now stands as the largest opponent to working-class interests in the world, with a large base of support from its own working-class population.

By polarizing the electorate, what George Bush and the Republican party have done is highlight the substantial differences between post-modern wage labor society and rural and suburban society that is currently in the process of struggling to deal with the spread of capitalist socioeconomic relations into their once pre-capitalist society. It is not the American Left that represents a threat to the property and livelihoods of "red state" America, but rather it is corporate capitalism.

Ironically, the Republican Party is the party that is facilitating the transformation of once rural and independent Middle America into a wage labor society where citizens will lose control over their lives and will experience the breakup of traditional social relations by capitalist culture.

Here is the link to the entire article which includes a look back at voter history since prior to FDR to include voter maps and graphs. http://rationalrevolution.net/articles/assessing_the_vote_and_the_roots.htm

 

[Johnfromokc]

I don't think it is the case that conservatism thrives on low intelligence and poor information as the OP implies.

Then how else does one explain the fact that although conservative policies harm the working class, middle class and small business class, that working class people would consider themselves conservatives? These people are voting against their own best economic interests and against the best interests of their own family.

That's not real smart.

The OP article has merit. And your article is interesting as well my dear.

 

[All Else Failed]

I think you know the answer to that question, John.

 

[Johnfromokc]

I think you know the answer to that question, John.

I have no clue why you vote against your own best economic interests AEF, other than you have been fooled by the multi-BILLION $$$$$$ right wing propaganda machine.

I will give credit where credit is due. I stand in awe of the effectiveness of their propaganda.