"They want to live in or near a nice walkable urban center, with lots of shopping, dining, arts and cultural opportunities, intellectual stimulation, and opportunities for new experiences. That’s a progressive cultural environment."
That these things are associated with progressivism is a mark against conservatives. If the scene on X is any indication, there seems to be a contingent of young conservatives that appreciate these things and could be involved in leading them in the future.
I am trying to compile some of Aaron's work on choosing where to live. I know that there was a podcast that had a checklist/self-assessment rating the degree of "organic community" that one has in a specific area (family, coworkers, neighbors, people who you would interact with "organically" rather than through planning).
Does anyone remember when this episode was posted?
Our country is based on an Enlightenment model of progress: "Always push forward - never be satisfied with what you have - solve problems - unintended bad consequences are merely new problems to be solved". God has hard-wired into human DNA the idea of progress and we have now baked that idea into our cultural DNA. My sense is that high IQ means being able to incorporate and process large quantities of data quickly, thus the high IQ types are high cultural status because they have a genetic quality that can meet the cultural demand for pushing the envelope of what is possible.
We seem to be reaching a point where those who don't process information as quickly are becoming frustrated by the constant change. Change ("open-ness") needs to be balanced by stability ("closed-ness") which is being interpreted negatively as reactionary ("far-right-fascist").
Our political parties are like sailing boats being pushed along by the tailwind of progressivism. Those who fully embrace it are booming along, all sails aloft. Conservatives who are taking their sails down are still being pushed by that tailwind. To actually resist this would mean pulling out the oars and put their backs into rowing against it, but realistically, our culture demands change and movement. A political campaign that says "slow down" is interpreted as opposed to Progress (!) is dead in the water.
My concern is that our culture is starting to behave like a locomotive with the throttle broken off approaching some curves that, at high speeds, will bring disaster. I interpret the conservatives as struggling to slow the "change everything, always more change, faster, faster" attitude to incorporate new models and new ideas in ways that benefit everyone and not just a few.
God designed humans to be progressive, but if we lose sight of God as our greatest good and replace Him with Progressivism as our new god, our culture and our lives begin to fragment and deteriorate.
It depends on what you mean by "progressive." God designed humans to create order and beauty--even technology. Adam was instructed to "work" the Garden, not just laze around in it all day. God showed craftsmen how to build the Tabernacle.
The problem is that progressivism always falls into the totalitarian trap. Every single time.
What starts as "we're here to help" always ends with "we're here to force our help on you, whether you like it or not." Building a walkable town square is fine. Creating new technology is fine. Using "the nudge" and dark patterns to make people do what you think is right ... is not fine.
We don't separate technological progress from _human_ progress--we treat them as one in the same. While technological progress can, in fact, provide a better life for people, no technological progress in the world is going to "make humans better."
But there is no easy way to separate progress from progressivism. This is, imho, intentional on the part of progressives. Either you accept technological improvement _and_ human improvement via social engineering, or you are "closed minded" and "stupid" and "hate technology." Not accepting that humans can be "improved" via social engineering is the one specific belief that makes you stupid, etc.
There are folks who say they are "paternalistic libertarians." I understand they're trying to thread the needle, but history just doesn't have an instance of people who believe they should be in control of the lives of others that do not "progress" to believing it's okay to use force. The problem is a misunderstanding of human nature. Good intentions do not make you perfect, and the control you create over other people's lives _will_ eventually be used in some unethical way.
It's just the way people are. We somehow think "power breeds corruption" is not a universal rule--but it is.
You are quite right, of course. The Enlightenment idea of progress is very different from the modern Progressive, even though, as you point out, they like the word "progress" and pretend that they are the same. The Enlightenment still had God, though it was beginning to move away from Him. Is it possible to have humble progress, obedient to God? Yes, but the serpent in the Garden of Eden is still hard at work and corruption is pretty much universal.
Another reason for conservatives to live in the big blue city: returns to scale. More people live in my urban neighborhood (80,000) than in the small town of my in-laws (60,000). The small red town is more friendly to conservatives and homeschooling, but the social resources are meager. The big blue metro area (population 3 million) is more hostile to conservatives and homeschooling, but the social resources are abundant. The percentage of homeschoolers is smaller in the city but the total number is larger because the population is so much larger. There are 400+ families in our home-school co-op (and it's not the only one in the city) who pool resources for classes, sports, and clubs. We've lived in both places, and it's much easier to find support in the big city.
Great article, Aaron. Really has had me thinking all day. These issues go deep and seem almost 'structural'. As you mentioned, openness is correlated to IQ, as are many other things. There are real differences between conservatives and progressives, not just something like IQ, but even in 'in group' and 'out group' preference and things like neroticism (I recall seeing that progressives are notably unhappier than conservatives). Progressives all around the country are making their cities worse (I live in one of these cities), and yet conservatism codes 'low class'. Liberalism really has failed, and it seems very unclear what will take it's place.
"IQ is positively correlated with openness." ... and then ... "If conservatism at a basic level is about wanting things to stay the same, that suggests lower openness." ... and then the comment about how conservative elites don't want to live around conservative voters ... presumably, based on these other comments, because they are "not open," and hence "low IQ."
In other words, conservatives--by your definition of conservative--are low IQ. Or to put it more plainly, conservatives are dumb.
This is what happens when you start with a strawman definition of a movement rather than a real one. This is also the reason the labels "conservative" and "progressive" are useless. In fact, they create a false dichotomy--you're either for ALL PROGRESS, and hence a progressive, or you're against ALL CHANGE, and hence a conservative.
This is balderdash. It's nonsense on stilts. It makes it sound like the ideal conservative situation is to eat the same thing for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and to eschew education of any kind. It makes conservatives sound stupid and backward and harsh and uncaring, while making progressives sound ... open, and kind, and loving, and ...
These kinds of false dichotomies work great for those who want to dislodge people from their brains, but they don't have anything to do with reality.
Conservatives don't hate change, they believe there are human limits to our ability to "improve people" or even "improve culture." You can be a conservative and still accept--even work for--technological advancement. I have co-authored some 40 software patents, many tech books, and have worked in tech my entire life. I'm a conservative, and I don't "hate change."
I'm a conservative because I believe in humility and limits. I'm a conservative because I believe God designed us in a certain way, and stepping outside our design parameters will work out just about as well as using a hammer to drive screws (corrected). I'm a conservative because I believe I cannot use social engineering to change people, to "make them better," to stop people from being people, to stop people from sinning, etc.
This entire article is grounded in a strawman. Correct the strawman and you'll come to different conclusions.
I think you're mistaking Aaron's point, as well as the conclusions of the article he links to, though I can't read the latter due to a paywall. Aaron's not saying that all (or nearly all) high-IQ people are politically left; still less is he saying that all (or nearly all) politically left people are high-IQ. He's just saying that people at the high-IQ (right) end of the bell curve are more likely to be on the left politically. I don't know how much more likely.
My guess would be that leftists are overrepresented at the extremes of the IQ bell curve, while people on the right are overrepresented in the middle. But there would be a mix of people at all points on the curve.
I don't think so ... Aaron posted a link to a "research paper" (just below) "proving" conservatives are lower IQ because they are more "closed minded." This is something I've encountered in my entire career ...
USAF, mid-1980s -- a new manager walks in the door of my shop and asks each person what state they are from. Almost all of them are from NY/NJ, which he thinks is fine. He gets to me, I say "Georgia," he said (paraphrasing): "I will run you out of the service ... people from the south are always stupid, and shouldn't be in the military. There's no way you can have any intelligence and be from the country, they don't have real schools there."
I'm MENSA ... every now and again I have a conversation with someone who is blown away by my Christian faith and conservative-libertarian beliefs ... it's almost inevitable that in every one of these conversations the other person will say: "You can't be conservative, you're in MENSA, and conservative people are all stupid."
I'm involved in several international standards bodies, and end up in the same sort of conversation from time to time ... "you're either stupid and just hide it well, or you're actually not a serious Christian conservative, because those two things don't go together."
When the "four horsemen of Atheism" decided to "name" their movement, they called themselves "brights," because conservatives and Christians are all stupid.
The list goes on and on and on ...
And yet, here I sit with a BA, an MA, an MS, and a Ph.D., 40'ish patents, 20'ish books, builder of Internet standards, etc. I don't exist, I cannot exist, because the studies and everyone knows ... if you're smart, you're some kind of progressive.
Maybe the opposite is true--I'm smart enough to be a conservative because I've actually read history, and I know where progressivism always ends. Maybe I'm smart enough to understand what human dignity means, and how progressivism consistently destroys it. Maybe I'm smart enough to dive into epistemology enough to know that the only convincing argument for discovering truth comes from deeply Christian philosophers (specifically Alvin Plantinga).
Conservatives need to stop telling ourselves that we're stupid. We need to stop believing that an education--a real education, not what's offered in 99% of the colleges today--is dangerous because it will cause you to "lose your faith." We need to look at the past and realize that some of the most educated people through history have not been "progressive" in the modern sense, and understand that it's okay to be smart _and_ be conservative.
Conservative beliefs are practically to the point of self-harm on this topic, and it needs to stop.
I hate to break it to you but I trust social research of this kind just about as far as I can throw the entire metro area of NYC. The survey used here began by assuming "closed minded == conservative," and then validated their assumptions. Most studies of this kind are exercises in self-validation.
And the premise can be fully and neatly refuted by reading history.
Read _Preaching Eugenics_ ... and think about how all the "intelligent people" came to the conclusion that eugenics was great. What educations did they have? Where did they live? Were they progressive or conservative?
Read any book on how the leading elites of German society embraced the Holocaust. Again, where did they live? Were they educated? What kind of intelligence did they have?
Repeat throughout history ... the "elites" think they are so much smarter, and yet they constantly fall for every hair-brained bit of nonsense that comes along. "It's progress," they say, "so it must be good."
This "progressives are smart, conservatives are stupid" trope is just wrong--and it's actually pernicious and hurtful in many ways ...
People are people. Some people who live in cities, and some people among the "elite," are intelligent. Others are just overeducated. Some people among the small country towns are intelligent, others are not. Some are just undereducated.
I don't see any reason to assume that because someone holds to particular political beliefs they are either intelligent or not.
I believe that everyone is made in the image of God, and that eugenic programs are theologically and spiritually wrong.
The disturbing truth about eugenics, though, is that it is effective in accomplishing its aims. If a government wanted to remove cystic fibrosis, sickle-cell anemia, or other disorders that make people suffer from the gene pool, it can do so by sterilizing anyone that carries the alleles for said disorders, and the disorders will no longer exist by the next generation. This can be done with any heritable trait. So it makes sense that people with high intelligence would see that eugenics did in fact work in practice. Intelligent people are not necessarily moral people.
Every Gen Xer knows El Segundo because of the fine rappers in A Tribe Called Quest. Disappointed they were not duly acknowledged for their role in all this
As someone who knows two or three of the "Gundo" crowd, I can tell you that they considered locating somewhere else, but the access to the kind of affordable (and gigantic) tooling and talent pool that they need is still incredibly localized in LA, because of the old aerospace infrastructure. So in that case, it was less about mental preference or lifestyle, and more of a cost/access constraint. That relates to your article, but it's a bit of a different angle on the problem.
Wondering if any Renn readers in the Portland, OR area? When I lived in Boston I developed a network of conservative intellectuals as friends. Haven’t tried that in Portland. I’m only 25 minutes from PDX.
1. My late grandfather advised, a few years after I'd moved to Northern Virginia, that "you have to be where it's at". That's really stuck with me.
2. Conservatives tend to overestimate the extent to which politics are a bigger factor than natural advantages, at least in the American context. Blue-city and blue-state governance certainly has its problems, but it doesn't turn the places under its rule into East Germany / North Korea / Venezuela style basket cases.
3. Conservative would-be elites are almost always capable of mitigating the downsides (e.g. rainbows all over the public school classroom) of blue governance.
4. There's a lot of myopia that results when the partisan nature of a place is only considered a) with vote percentages and b) at the municipal/county/state level. Using ratios and more fine-grained analysis can paint a much clearer picture.
One small point ... "Conservative elites are almost always capable of mitigating..." They do so with lots of money and social capital. People who are not in the "elite" cannot use their position or wealth to counter these things.
This sounds like what happened to a young online rightist who decided to move to the Midwest for 'white nationalist' reasons, then discovered he hated living in a white Midwestern community:
"I quickly discovered that Midwesterners had no sense of imperial destiny and “right to rule” like you see in New Yorkers, Texans, or Californians. They had nothing like the feisty Faustian individualism of Floridians or “f you” pride of Appalachians. They didn’t even have the air of faded glory and gothic tragedy you see in the Deep South. It was nothing but aggressively bland conformity everywhere you looked. To be sure, the Midwest met my expectations of being safer, more affordable, and less degenerate than the coastal Sun Belt. But it turns out this was a bad thing for my temperament!
"It turns out safety is mostly achieved by cultivating a boring and risk-averse culture optimized to meet the needs of smallminded and gossipy people who get don’t get excited about much other than college sports and weddings. If you’re a contrarian novelty-seeker you will quickly get ostracized in an environment like this because people like you are a genuine threat to the social order. You can make friends with 95th percentile openness people who see you as a curiosity, but when push comes to shove they will never choose you over the Shire."
Good article about Vermont that you wrote. True to my experience. The wife and I got up there all the time when we spent more time at the Connecticut house--I particularly like Woodstock. Only an hour an a half to the Vermont border from our house in CT. (An hour and a half to Boston Common or Manhattan, too--when traffic permits.)
Woodstock is very nice - also extremely liberal. Lots of propaganda signs in every store window, including - I counted - eight BLM signs in a town with only 12 black residents.
The BLM sign thing is a good example of the flip-side phenomenon of left-wing elites also not being representative of the people they claim to speak for. Another big one was the huge push to use “Latinx” when the vast majority of Latinos hate that word.
Right--conservatives live in the "northeast kingdom"--lots of AM talk radio in the diners up there, and over near the upstate NY border. Woodstock is right across the river from Dartmouth--that also has an influence. If you're into the great illustrators--Maxfield Parrish's home is nearby.
This piece matches my personal experience to a T. I live in NYC and I attend events where I will meet people that moved here to work for the Manhattan Institute, the New Criterion, First Things, Encounter Books, the New York Post, etc., often hanging out with each other at the same parties. It makes me wonder how close they are with the people that say they represent. I have noticed how much conservative and right-wing media focus on things that urbanites might care more about, like tax cuts, DEI programs, crime, and Israel, compared to the things non-urban conservatives might care about more, like abortion, guns, fossil fuels, etc. Like, I can’t remember the last time I read a pro-gun article in a conservative magazine, despite gun owners being a massive source of GOP votes.
Also, some of these right-wing elites in cities don’t identify as conservative at all, but rather as right-wing progressives (N.S. Lyons had a great essay on this).
I'm definitely not elite though a conservative. I live in Seattle because I grew up in the region and don't care to move. Seattle is alright for a city I guess, but cities aren't for me. Noise, crowds, etc. If I could afford it I'd move to Bainbridge Island a half hour ferry ride away. Stupendous natural beauty, not too much density, quiet, and safe. Prosperous of course.
Quiet, natural beauty, absence of people are what I most prefer.
"They want to live in or near a nice walkable urban center, with lots of shopping, dining, arts and cultural opportunities, intellectual stimulation, and opportunities for new experiences. That’s a progressive cultural environment."
That these things are associated with progressivism is a mark against conservatives. If the scene on X is any indication, there seems to be a contingent of young conservatives that appreciate these things and could be involved in leading them in the future.
I am trying to compile some of Aaron's work on choosing where to live. I know that there was a podcast that had a checklist/self-assessment rating the degree of "organic community" that one has in a specific area (family, coworkers, neighbors, people who you would interact with "organically" rather than through planning).
Does anyone remember when this episode was posted?
I think this might be what you are referring to:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1330924/8195055-organic-community
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1330924/9153065-what-to-think-about-when-you-think-about-moving
Thank you Aaron! Those are great episodes. It took a while to find it in the backlog, but was specifically looking for this post
https://open.substack.com/pub/aaronrenn/p/newsletter-56-understanding-your?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=hbzy3
Our country is based on an Enlightenment model of progress: "Always push forward - never be satisfied with what you have - solve problems - unintended bad consequences are merely new problems to be solved". God has hard-wired into human DNA the idea of progress and we have now baked that idea into our cultural DNA. My sense is that high IQ means being able to incorporate and process large quantities of data quickly, thus the high IQ types are high cultural status because they have a genetic quality that can meet the cultural demand for pushing the envelope of what is possible.
We seem to be reaching a point where those who don't process information as quickly are becoming frustrated by the constant change. Change ("open-ness") needs to be balanced by stability ("closed-ness") which is being interpreted negatively as reactionary ("far-right-fascist").
Our political parties are like sailing boats being pushed along by the tailwind of progressivism. Those who fully embrace it are booming along, all sails aloft. Conservatives who are taking their sails down are still being pushed by that tailwind. To actually resist this would mean pulling out the oars and put their backs into rowing against it, but realistically, our culture demands change and movement. A political campaign that says "slow down" is interpreted as opposed to Progress (!) is dead in the water.
My concern is that our culture is starting to behave like a locomotive with the throttle broken off approaching some curves that, at high speeds, will bring disaster. I interpret the conservatives as struggling to slow the "change everything, always more change, faster, faster" attitude to incorporate new models and new ideas in ways that benefit everyone and not just a few.
God designed humans to be progressive, but if we lose sight of God as our greatest good and replace Him with Progressivism as our new god, our culture and our lives begin to fragment and deteriorate.
It depends on what you mean by "progressive." God designed humans to create order and beauty--even technology. Adam was instructed to "work" the Garden, not just laze around in it all day. God showed craftsmen how to build the Tabernacle.
The problem is that progressivism always falls into the totalitarian trap. Every single time.
What starts as "we're here to help" always ends with "we're here to force our help on you, whether you like it or not." Building a walkable town square is fine. Creating new technology is fine. Using "the nudge" and dark patterns to make people do what you think is right ... is not fine.
We don't separate technological progress from _human_ progress--we treat them as one in the same. While technological progress can, in fact, provide a better life for people, no technological progress in the world is going to "make humans better."
But there is no easy way to separate progress from progressivism. This is, imho, intentional on the part of progressives. Either you accept technological improvement _and_ human improvement via social engineering, or you are "closed minded" and "stupid" and "hate technology." Not accepting that humans can be "improved" via social engineering is the one specific belief that makes you stupid, etc.
There are folks who say they are "paternalistic libertarians." I understand they're trying to thread the needle, but history just doesn't have an instance of people who believe they should be in control of the lives of others that do not "progress" to believing it's okay to use force. The problem is a misunderstanding of human nature. Good intentions do not make you perfect, and the control you create over other people's lives _will_ eventually be used in some unethical way.
It's just the way people are. We somehow think "power breeds corruption" is not a universal rule--but it is.
You are quite right, of course. The Enlightenment idea of progress is very different from the modern Progressive, even though, as you point out, they like the word "progress" and pretend that they are the same. The Enlightenment still had God, though it was beginning to move away from Him. Is it possible to have humble progress, obedient to God? Yes, but the serpent in the Garden of Eden is still hard at work and corruption is pretty much universal.
Another reason for conservatives to live in the big blue city: returns to scale. More people live in my urban neighborhood (80,000) than in the small town of my in-laws (60,000). The small red town is more friendly to conservatives and homeschooling, but the social resources are meager. The big blue metro area (population 3 million) is more hostile to conservatives and homeschooling, but the social resources are abundant. The percentage of homeschoolers is smaller in the city but the total number is larger because the population is so much larger. There are 400+ families in our home-school co-op (and it's not the only one in the city) who pool resources for classes, sports, and clubs. We've lived in both places, and it's much easier to find support in the big city.
Great article, Aaron. Really has had me thinking all day. These issues go deep and seem almost 'structural'. As you mentioned, openness is correlated to IQ, as are many other things. There are real differences between conservatives and progressives, not just something like IQ, but even in 'in group' and 'out group' preference and things like neroticism (I recall seeing that progressives are notably unhappier than conservatives). Progressives all around the country are making their cities worse (I live in one of these cities), and yet conservatism codes 'low class'. Liberalism really has failed, and it seems very unclear what will take it's place.
Let's put three things together here --
"IQ is positively correlated with openness." ... and then ... "If conservatism at a basic level is about wanting things to stay the same, that suggests lower openness." ... and then the comment about how conservative elites don't want to live around conservative voters ... presumably, based on these other comments, because they are "not open," and hence "low IQ."
In other words, conservatives--by your definition of conservative--are low IQ. Or to put it more plainly, conservatives are dumb.
This is what happens when you start with a strawman definition of a movement rather than a real one. This is also the reason the labels "conservative" and "progressive" are useless. In fact, they create a false dichotomy--you're either for ALL PROGRESS, and hence a progressive, or you're against ALL CHANGE, and hence a conservative.
This is balderdash. It's nonsense on stilts. It makes it sound like the ideal conservative situation is to eat the same thing for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and to eschew education of any kind. It makes conservatives sound stupid and backward and harsh and uncaring, while making progressives sound ... open, and kind, and loving, and ...
These kinds of false dichotomies work great for those who want to dislodge people from their brains, but they don't have anything to do with reality.
Conservatives don't hate change, they believe there are human limits to our ability to "improve people" or even "improve culture." You can be a conservative and still accept--even work for--technological advancement. I have co-authored some 40 software patents, many tech books, and have worked in tech my entire life. I'm a conservative, and I don't "hate change."
I'm a conservative because I believe in humility and limits. I'm a conservative because I believe God designed us in a certain way, and stepping outside our design parameters will work out just about as well as using a hammer to drive screws (corrected). I'm a conservative because I believe I cannot use social engineering to change people, to "make them better," to stop people from being people, to stop people from sinning, etc.
This entire article is grounded in a strawman. Correct the strawman and you'll come to different conclusions.
I think you're mistaking Aaron's point, as well as the conclusions of the article he links to, though I can't read the latter due to a paywall. Aaron's not saying that all (or nearly all) high-IQ people are politically left; still less is he saying that all (or nearly all) politically left people are high-IQ. He's just saying that people at the high-IQ (right) end of the bell curve are more likely to be on the left politically. I don't know how much more likely.
My guess would be that leftists are overrepresented at the extremes of the IQ bell curve, while people on the right are overrepresented in the middle. But there would be a mix of people at all points on the curve.
I don't think so ... Aaron posted a link to a "research paper" (just below) "proving" conservatives are lower IQ because they are more "closed minded." This is something I've encountered in my entire career ...
USAF, mid-1980s -- a new manager walks in the door of my shop and asks each person what state they are from. Almost all of them are from NY/NJ, which he thinks is fine. He gets to me, I say "Georgia," he said (paraphrasing): "I will run you out of the service ... people from the south are always stupid, and shouldn't be in the military. There's no way you can have any intelligence and be from the country, they don't have real schools there."
I'm MENSA ... every now and again I have a conversation with someone who is blown away by my Christian faith and conservative-libertarian beliefs ... it's almost inevitable that in every one of these conversations the other person will say: "You can't be conservative, you're in MENSA, and conservative people are all stupid."
I'm involved in several international standards bodies, and end up in the same sort of conversation from time to time ... "you're either stupid and just hide it well, or you're actually not a serious Christian conservative, because those two things don't go together."
When the "four horsemen of Atheism" decided to "name" their movement, they called themselves "brights," because conservatives and Christians are all stupid.
The list goes on and on and on ...
And yet, here I sit with a BA, an MA, an MS, and a Ph.D., 40'ish patents, 20'ish books, builder of Internet standards, etc. I don't exist, I cannot exist, because the studies and everyone knows ... if you're smart, you're some kind of progressive.
Maybe the opposite is true--I'm smart enough to be a conservative because I've actually read history, and I know where progressivism always ends. Maybe I'm smart enough to understand what human dignity means, and how progressivism consistently destroys it. Maybe I'm smart enough to dive into epistemology enough to know that the only convincing argument for discovering truth comes from deeply Christian philosophers (specifically Alvin Plantinga).
Conservatives need to stop telling ourselves that we're stupid. We need to stop believing that an education--a real education, not what's offered in 99% of the colleges today--is dangerous because it will cause you to "lose your faith." We need to look at the past and realize that some of the most educated people through history have not been "progressive" in the modern sense, and understand that it's okay to be smart _and_ be conservative.
Conservative beliefs are practically to the point of self-harm on this topic, and it needs to stop.
I hate to break it to you, but: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289624000254
I hate to break it to you but I trust social research of this kind just about as far as I can throw the entire metro area of NYC. The survey used here began by assuming "closed minded == conservative," and then validated their assumptions. Most studies of this kind are exercises in self-validation.
And the premise can be fully and neatly refuted by reading history.
Read _Preaching Eugenics_ ... and think about how all the "intelligent people" came to the conclusion that eugenics was great. What educations did they have? Where did they live? Were they progressive or conservative?
Read any book on how the leading elites of German society embraced the Holocaust. Again, where did they live? Were they educated? What kind of intelligence did they have?
Repeat throughout history ... the "elites" think they are so much smarter, and yet they constantly fall for every hair-brained bit of nonsense that comes along. "It's progress," they say, "so it must be good."
This "progressives are smart, conservatives are stupid" trope is just wrong--and it's actually pernicious and hurtful in many ways ...
People are people. Some people who live in cities, and some people among the "elite," are intelligent. Others are just overeducated. Some people among the small country towns are intelligent, others are not. Some are just undereducated.
I don't see any reason to assume that because someone holds to particular political beliefs they are either intelligent or not.
I believe that everyone is made in the image of God, and that eugenic programs are theologically and spiritually wrong.
The disturbing truth about eugenics, though, is that it is effective in accomplishing its aims. If a government wanted to remove cystic fibrosis, sickle-cell anemia, or other disorders that make people suffer from the gene pool, it can do so by sterilizing anyone that carries the alleles for said disorders, and the disorders will no longer exist by the next generation. This can be done with any heritable trait. So it makes sense that people with high intelligence would see that eugenics did in fact work in practice. Intelligent people are not necessarily moral people.
Using a hammer to drive nails works fairly well. Other than that, I agree with your comment.
Every Gen Xer knows El Segundo because of the fine rappers in A Tribe Called Quest. Disappointed they were not duly acknowledged for their role in all this
https://youtu.be/WILyWmT2A-Q?feature=shared
As someone who knows two or three of the "Gundo" crowd, I can tell you that they considered locating somewhere else, but the access to the kind of affordable (and gigantic) tooling and talent pool that they need is still incredibly localized in LA, because of the old aerospace infrastructure. So in that case, it was less about mental preference or lifestyle, and more of a cost/access constraint. That relates to your article, but it's a bit of a different angle on the problem.
Wondering if any Renn readers in the Portland, OR area? When I lived in Boston I developed a network of conservative intellectuals as friends. Haven’t tried that in Portland. I’m only 25 minutes from PDX.
I’m in Bremerton, but that’s a few hours away from Portland.
1. My late grandfather advised, a few years after I'd moved to Northern Virginia, that "you have to be where it's at". That's really stuck with me.
2. Conservatives tend to overestimate the extent to which politics are a bigger factor than natural advantages, at least in the American context. Blue-city and blue-state governance certainly has its problems, but it doesn't turn the places under its rule into East Germany / North Korea / Venezuela style basket cases.
3. Conservative would-be elites are almost always capable of mitigating the downsides (e.g. rainbows all over the public school classroom) of blue governance.
4. There's a lot of myopia that results when the partisan nature of a place is only considered a) with vote percentages and b) at the municipal/county/state level. Using ratios and more fine-grained analysis can paint a much clearer picture.
One small point ... "Conservative elites are almost always capable of mitigating..." They do so with lots of money and social capital. People who are not in the "elite" cannot use their position or wealth to counter these things.
This sounds like what happened to a young online rightist who decided to move to the Midwest for 'white nationalist' reasons, then discovered he hated living in a white Midwestern community:
https://www.tortugasociety.org/p/why-im-no-longer-a-white-nationalist
"I quickly discovered that Midwesterners had no sense of imperial destiny and “right to rule” like you see in New Yorkers, Texans, or Californians. They had nothing like the feisty Faustian individualism of Floridians or “f you” pride of Appalachians. They didn’t even have the air of faded glory and gothic tragedy you see in the Deep South. It was nothing but aggressively bland conformity everywhere you looked. To be sure, the Midwest met my expectations of being safer, more affordable, and less degenerate than the coastal Sun Belt. But it turns out this was a bad thing for my temperament!
"It turns out safety is mostly achieved by cultivating a boring and risk-averse culture optimized to meet the needs of smallminded and gossipy people who get don’t get excited about much other than college sports and weddings. If you’re a contrarian novelty-seeker you will quickly get ostracized in an environment like this because people like you are a genuine threat to the social order. You can make friends with 95th percentile openness people who see you as a curiosity, but when push comes to shove they will never choose you over the Shire."
Hilarous.
Good article about Vermont that you wrote. True to my experience. The wife and I got up there all the time when we spent more time at the Connecticut house--I particularly like Woodstock. Only an hour an a half to the Vermont border from our house in CT. (An hour and a half to Boston Common or Manhattan, too--when traffic permits.)
Woodstock is very nice - also extremely liberal. Lots of propaganda signs in every store window, including - I counted - eight BLM signs in a town with only 12 black residents.
The BLM sign thing is a good example of the flip-side phenomenon of left-wing elites also not being representative of the people they claim to speak for. Another big one was the huge push to use “Latinx” when the vast majority of Latinos hate that word.
Right--conservatives live in the "northeast kingdom"--lots of AM talk radio in the diners up there, and over near the upstate NY border. Woodstock is right across the river from Dartmouth--that also has an influence. If you're into the great illustrators--Maxfield Parrish's home is nearby.
This piece matches my personal experience to a T. I live in NYC and I attend events where I will meet people that moved here to work for the Manhattan Institute, the New Criterion, First Things, Encounter Books, the New York Post, etc., often hanging out with each other at the same parties. It makes me wonder how close they are with the people that say they represent. I have noticed how much conservative and right-wing media focus on things that urbanites might care more about, like tax cuts, DEI programs, crime, and Israel, compared to the things non-urban conservatives might care about more, like abortion, guns, fossil fuels, etc. Like, I can’t remember the last time I read a pro-gun article in a conservative magazine, despite gun owners being a massive source of GOP votes.
Also, some of these right-wing elites in cities don’t identify as conservative at all, but rather as right-wing progressives (N.S. Lyons had a great essay on this).
Thanks for sharing. Great points!
I'm definitely not elite though a conservative. I live in Seattle because I grew up in the region and don't care to move. Seattle is alright for a city I guess, but cities aren't for me. Noise, crowds, etc. If I could afford it I'd move to Bainbridge Island a half hour ferry ride away. Stupendous natural beauty, not too much density, quiet, and safe. Prosperous of course.
Quiet, natural beauty, absence of people are what I most prefer.