I agree with you but I also want to add something else.
How many children of Republicans go to university?
How many Republicans believe that studying social sciences or literature is worth it?
As a speech by the Republican Party, it is sold that you have to study something profitable, because money is the only thing that matters. Now I see conservatives, looking for philosophy books, conservative history books... and it turns out that everything is "communist." And I wonder, do they really not understand why?
It's my opinion, I love your substack... I'm starting to follow you. Greetings
Agreed. I think Reaganism was a Pyrrhic victory for Conservatives.
Conservatives gained some ground in the short-term due to adopting Reagan’s philosophy. But those gains came at the expense of much more valuable ground needed to sustain the long-term war against the enemies of Conservative values.
Exactly, we can also extend it to the low birth rates, all the children of the boomers think that a baby is a "cost" that only millionaires can finance. Or they don't believe in helping families because "I'm not going to support someone else's child." They see everything as a business, they do not see a country and citizens.
Definitely not. And the cultural obsession with Capitalism among Conservatives led to some serious missteps. Think about it. Conservatives voluntarily sorted themselves into the private sector for a slim chance of becoming extraordinarily wealthy, but with the vast majority ending up in the middle of the income distribution. Whereas Leftists poured into the public sector positions left open by Conservatives, which don't come with big salaries but do offer outsized influence over culture and an ever growing pool of tax dollars.
That's probably the worst political deal since Native Americans sold Delaware for some beads.
You should totally spin that into a full length article mon ami, as it offers plenty of insight into what's gone wrong on the right and why the left ultimately triumphed.
The other thing to bear in mind that conservatives are normal people who want to get on with their lives, make money and look after their families. They are not generally ideologues who want to refashion society to an imaginary ideal. So they are trampled over by progressives with an agenda. They could win, but would need to be a great deal smarter. When the tide turns, conformists who are also as interested in power and status as anything else will change their tunes.
I see. You think it is your moral responsibility to get on with other people's lives yourself, by telling them what they should care about, think about, do, and be. Yikes. I think you understand conservatives no better than the writers you discuss in your article.
This is the main issue. The left has never seen the right fully engaged in politics and cultural influence because the right values family more. The left has lately cut off every avenue for that family that occupied most of the right’s time.
So now they reap what they sow.
The political affiliation has a statistical correlation to profession. Professions where if you mess up you get fired, prosecuted, or go bankrupt tend to be conservative (Engineers, Plumbers, Electricians, Farmers) and professions where if you mess up nothing happens to you tend to be progressive (Teachers, University Professors, Government workers).
This makes perfect sense, the left wants to implement their Utopian ideas, because nothing really bad ever happens to them when they make mistakes.
Whereas the right are more likely to research and reflect on human nature and be cautious in dismantling Chesterton’s gate, because bad things do happen to them if they are an idiot.
Good article. Very important to know. I have become suspicious of these types and I am planning to write an article on why their stance on abortion is incorrect.
I think the centrist/libertarian’s aversion to the right stems from their hatred of Christianity (and love of sex). They can engage with economic issues competently, but their brain stops working entirely when they engage in moral and social issues… I think it’s because they never reasoned their way into those opinions to begin with.
When conservativism is filled with low-status views, it makes the careerist instutitional climber types want to avoid being seen as too chummy with conservativism.
People who want to climb the ladder and get promoted don't want to be seen palling around with "Jews did 9/11" conspiracy theorists, or incel Tatebros, or RETVRN biblethumpers.
As John Arcto put it:
"There is a difference between being opposed to modern feminism, which I am, and being part of the Manosphere, that is just a pit of sexual resentment that makes the entire Rightosphere look pathetic, crass, and low-status. Conspiracy theorists also make the movement toxic to the high IQ, and are in large part responsible for the crippling lack of Elite Human Capital that plagues the right and why so many people in influential administrative and taste-making positions, who might otherwise be able to be convinced, side with the Woke left.
In order to be ‘high status’, it is very important for a movement to have two things: attractive women and the well-educated, and these two factions seem intent to repel both."
The problem with conservatives is capitalism and its media echo chamber. Valid critiques of feminism turn into men should be able to sleep with multiple wives, and the 19th amendment should be repealed, because of the desire for click baiting and making money. Anti feminism and redpill incels nonsense is just wokeism for men who can’t get laid
Capitalism helps; guys like Musk can simply buy out the Cathedral of Twitter. At the same time, the right wing can't just be a movement by chuds, for chuds. In Canada, Stephen Harper was notorious for keeping a short leash on the pro-life faction of his caucus, because he knew abortion was a losing issue and he wanted to win.
Conservative politics need some version of popularism in order to make it palatable for people with high-status aspirations.
The attractive women have already switched to conservative, left just has the fat feminists now. AI is going to wipe out bureaucratic roles soon, too soon to know how that plays out politically.
From what I remember 75% of girls in 8 grade support left. Most women voting right are married. Also leftists priotising trans over women help. But it won't stay that way. Trans will be put aside and once again left will be about feminism
Include me as a Substack centrist who believes in a right to an abortion during the first trimester, the efficacy of vaccines in preventing death by disease and that climate change is a threat to humanity. On the other hand:
After the election the Democratic Party (my party) must rethink many of its policies as it ponders its future.
To be entrusted with power again Democrats must start listening to the concerns of the working class for a change. As a lifelong moderate Democrat I share their disdain for many of the insane positions advocated by my party.
Democrat politicians defy biology by believing that men can actually become women and belong in women’s sports, rest rooms, locker rooms and prisons and that children should be mutilated in pursuit of the impossible.
They believe borders should be open to millions of illegals which undermines workers’ wages and the affordability of housing when we can’t house our own citizens.
They discriminate against whites, Asians and men in a vain effort to counter past discrimination against others and undermine our economy by abandoning merit selection of students and employees.
Democratic mayors allow homelessness to destroy our beautiful cities because they won't say no to destructive behavior. No you can’t camp in this city. No you can’t shit in our streets. No you can’t shoot up and leave your used needles everywhere. Many of our prosecutors will not take action against shoplifting unless a $1000 of goods are stolen leading to gangs destroying retail stores. They release criminals without bond to rob and murder again.
The average voter knows this is happening and outright reject our party. Enough.
I’m curious if those are your actual reasons for being a Democrat since there are plenty of Republicans who believe in first trimester abortion, the efficacy of vaccines and the need to fight climate change. https://mainstreetcaucus.house.gov/
Simon: No you are right those are my phony reasons. Are you serious? Republicans as a group don’t believe in any of those issues. Their VP doesn’t support abortion even in cases of rape and incest. Many Republican led states have six week bans including populous Florida. Trump is appointing the nation’s leading anti vaccine advocate as head of HHS and a climate change denier to lead EPA. You have to rethink your comment.
Amin: Look up any listing of single cell animals to see if humans are listed. They are not. I am sorry but I have little sympathy for those who cannot distinguish between a single cell ( . ) and a 👼. Further when I hear people saying no exceptions for rape or incest I wonder if they truly believe that a young girl raped by her father should be forced to give birth to her sibling. Our VP does believe this. He says that two wrongs don’t make a right. Cruelty personified.
I personally go along with the majority and would permit abortion during the first trimester for any reason and after that to protect the health of the woman and because of the lack of viability of the baby.
Cofnas also made the claim that the Right lacks sophisticated publications, but then makes no mention of The New Criterion, Claremont Review of Books, and a host of other savvy webzines and print journals.
Good essay. I subscribed purely on the basis of this one essay, which is unusual. I think the better question is in asking does American conservatism have what it takes in order to undo the damage done by the alliance with the economic side of the libertarian argument in order to gain a far broader tent appeal? The best government is the least government can mean one of two things. It can either mean less government spending as a portion of GDP, or it can mean government doesn't have the right to tell citizens what to do. It needs to be constrained so that doesn't have the power to rule over people- to me this is the far more salient and important argument for most American voters.
Don't get me wrong, conservatives should still continue to hammer away at government waste and bureaucracy, but why not tell Americans that the money should be spent on them, rather than bureaucratic gatekeepers and NGOs? If government is as important as the Democrats maintain, why wasn't it there for ordinary citizens in East Palestine or Hawaii? Why is the water in Flint still not safe? Any decent conservative would have been threatening to send in the Army Corps of Engineers for over a decade, regardless of who happened to sign off on the deal with the corporations. One of the rare instances where government might actually be a welcome thing is in the event of national emergency- yet recently during such crises American government has been absent, too busy indemnifying corporate interests behind the scene.
And this hits upon another aspect of the American divide. Most Americans are far more sympathetic to entrepreneurial small business types than they are the corporations. The corporations are also naturally aligned with the Democrats and government through crony capitalism, especially given that the PMC class in both have attended the same indoctrination mills in higher education. Other than extraction and farming most of corporate America is now aligned with the Dems anyway- and conservatives should also make a meal of the fact that one of the industries with which the Left is naturally aligned now includes the most despised sector of all- Finance.
Small business entrepreneurs. The Trades. The Blue Collar Class, regardless of race. These should be the natural constituencies of conservatives. I recently had an Angus Deaton clip pop up into my YouTube feed, in which he lectures Paul Krugman on the real reason behind American prosperity and greatness in the post-WWII period. He maintained it had little to do with FDR and Big Government bureaucracies and everything to do with immigration levels. He also notes that the upward economic trajectory of African Americans began long before LBJ and had its origin in tight labour markets.
What conservativism really needs is a legion of autodidacts, schooled in the works of great thinkers like Henry David Thoreau and JS Mills.
Well nobody I watch or read is against sane levels of immigration. Mass migration is an entirely different animal. The Australian system worked great until the early 2000s because it was high and specific. Most people don't know this, but Australia had a profoundly outsized effect in developing universities in the developing world. Because people needed to get qualified in order to fit the criteria for Australia's Priority Migration Occupation List it helped create entire markets for higher education in places like Addis Ababa and Kuala Lumpur.
Basically, for most groups around 50% of the population cannot achieve anything worthwhile through academic education, no matter how much time and resources are spent on them. In order for the social contract to function fairly there need to be a number of trade professional jobs (other than plumbing, elevator repair or electricians, which tend to draw from the top of the cognitive pile anyway) which promise decent wages for hard work and the acquisition of technical skills. Skilled construction, carpet-layers, tilers and roofers all fit into the category.
Pay should be around the $30 an hour mark, with pre-inflation purchasing power. Many think this would be naturally inflationary, but one has to remember that most house building costs relate to either regulatory costs or artificial scarcity created by government, with a view to extorting more from ordinary citizens through property taxes. America could probably do better than Australia in that rather than creating a specific list, with everything else excluded, it could create a list of occupations from which new non-citizens are specifically excluded from participating in. Another option is to increase employer taxes for non-citizens to around 20% higher than employer taxes for citizens, perhaps shifting the latter down marginally to prevent the tax burden from rising.
One of the reasons why I argue this is because its key to criminal reform and reducing violence in Western countries. Most reforms to criminals don't work. Sure, they age out of the violence, starting at around 34, but the incarceration up until that point, or possibly longer, depending on the crime, is a huge drain on America in particular. Generally, reforms to criminals don't work. Recidivism rates tend to hover around 70% provided one doesn't fiddle the metrics by shortening the timespan for when one measures recidivism. Basically one needs to look at the ten year range. If one looks at this timespan, then the Norwegians which Michael Moore featured on his documentary actually perform somewhere at a level of between 40% and 53% and in other sources I managed to locate the Norwegians readily admit they have more problems with the reform of gang members, but don't go as far as furnishing any data. Regardless, this approach would require the types of social spending support mechanisms most Americans wouldn't tolerate in their tax bill, even though many of the costs would be deferred by reduced spending on incarceration.
What does work is youth reform. If you can catch the kids early enough, just as they are becoming gang-involved, and frog march them into blue collar trades in which the mentoring is likely to be male, then it can have miraculous results. Like many American cities, Scottish Public Health Policing managed to halve violent crime within a decade using data-driven proactive policing. Unlike most American cities, they managed to do it without substantially increasing incarceration levels. Specifically, incarceration of the young didn't rise at all, even though they were experiencing a knife crime epidemic at the beginning of the period.
Basically, the state needs to push troubled kids into high prole blue collar trades and employers are always going to take fully trained off-the-shelf foreign labour if they can. But make no mistake, it's the key to turning kids who might otherwise be a burden and a danger to their fellow citizens into productive citizens willing to shoulder their share of the tax burden, and in so doing, lowering taxes for everyone else. Of course, they days with so many otherwise patriot kids saying no to military service because they don't want to live under the DEI agenda, I wouldn't be surprised if the old military service or jail offers which judges used to make might start getting reinstated.
This BBC article from 2019 was obviously written by an old school journalist. It's a bit light on detail, but it does include a section on opportunity right at the bottom- strange given that this was by far the most powerful of Scotland's Public Health Policing initiatives. Economists who apply their work to study crime and suggest or implement solutions have long known that if one raises the opportunity costs of crime it will lower overall crime rates for at risk groups. It certainly doesn't help that incentives towards organised drug-related activity are so insanely high.
This is Roland Fryer giving a seminar to students at UATX. It's long, but if you're really interested in ways America could help solve its crime problems, or writing about it, it's fascinating about informative. One of Glen Greenwald's tips for writers looking to build a brand is to thoroughly research four to five main areas of expertise, which can really bring value to your readers. Another great source on a more modern approach to American policing is Peter Moskos with the Violence Reduction Project.
It’s the same here in Oregon, where independent voters represent 1/3rd of the electorate but where they frame all discussion around the Leftist agenda/perspective and where they would never vote for a Republican candidate or policy ideal. There is no center in the political middle.
Conservative here. At the risk of playing “credentialism” with Mr. Cofnas, I’d point out that there are a LOT of well-educated American conservatives. Most of my close friends who are politically conservative are MDs and engineers who can more than win a debate with the average liberal/progressive. Your point about the capture of institutions by the Left is relevant, and has been self-perpetuating. Equally so your point about how smart one has to be to be a manager, whether in academia, Pharma, or corporate America. The fact that any number of institutions have foolishly jumped on the DEI bandwagon to their current regret should say something about just how smart a lot of university presidents and CEOs are, or not. Witness Boeing’s current travails. I’d bet good money that the average Boeing engineer or assembly line worker has more common sense and perception about what an aerospace company’s core mission is than a lot of C-suite folks. Same for the medical field.
One important aspect of the problem IMHO is that conservatives in general would prefer to focus on family, work, faith, etc. and not spend as much time on politics or social activism. That’s a recipe for not getting our message out to the masses.
Hanania is just dishonest and wants to push his own brand of liberalism. I found this article right after being banned from his comments for pointing out how dishonest he is in pretending to not get that conservatives use the same definition of "conspiracy theory" as leftists do
For all your criticism of Cofnas, you really don't understand where he's coming from. For one, the GSS data unambiguously shows that white extreme liberals have an 8.5-point IQ advantage over white extreme conservatives, and a 4-point gap between moderates again favoring liberals. Given that you implicitly dismiss the value of general intelligence in the piece, that might not be enough to persuade you, but it doesn't keep you from being less wrong. IQ is still the best predictor we have of general intelligence, which is still the best predictor we have of most of the positive life outcomes, in particular general problem-solving ability. These people recoil from conservatism, and have for some time.
Second, Cofnas's point wasn't merely that the Left appeals more to smart people, but that if you follow the tenets of contemporary popular morality through to their logical conclusions,* you implicitly accept left-wing politics as correct. For all the protestations of Will Stancil to the contrary, most on the Right clearly still believe this to be correct. There are no meaningful politicians in the US who say otherwise, and few popular media figures who do. Of the few who do, none of them are really all that big. Hanania is probably the biggest nowadays, but he's still dwarfed in profile by obvious cranks and morons like Candace Owens and Jackson Hinkle, neither of whom even mention HBD in public, and assuming they do in the future, it'll probably be to blast the concept as a tool of the Jews to start all the wars in the world, or something else along those lines.
For the Right to stop becoming the party of retards, they need to make the case that much of human behavior is innate, and that there are important cognitive differences between races, sexes, and individuals within and between. The strategy as of now has been to ignore this, assuming any awareness of such was even possessed, and it's been an abject failure in every respect. Sixty years of failure should be more than enough to teach the Right that these ways aren't working, but most still have yet to get the memo, so who the fuck knows how much longer we'll have to stomach the deathspiral.
* Namely, as he puts it, that all human populations are the same in innate ability.
You completely misinterpret it yet again. The reason the focus is on whites is because whites are the most culturally-important demographic in the US, and the Saddamesque margins of black support for Dems drag a boat anchor down the averages. Smart whites, on average, are what matter, and they either don't care enough about politics to want to bother with you, or lean leftwards. There is no secret group of white élites you can draw from. You have to convince the whites who actually care about politics that their fundamental assumptions are wrong, and they don't buy what you're selling because unless you're willing to embrace the importance of hereditarianism, you fundamentally accept their worldview! They're just following it through to its logical conclusion.
Cofnas matters because he's actually advocating for hereditarianism, which is the only thing that has a prayer of working to turn the ship around. Working with the clown crew available now is a dead end. You're hardly the first guy to try it, and you'll fail just as badly as the last several-hundred people who tried it.
People already know that there's difference between innate abilities between people, IQ is quite known concept. Differences between races are also on some level known by most people, they're just taboo that can throw you out of polite society. Idea that its knowledge problem is crazy. Also conservatives don't fight only affirmative action, there's more differences between right and left
If this were the case, why does damn near every time you bring up I.Q. online, you get flooded by people who throw out nonsense takes like "I.Q. Just measures how well you can do in an I.Q. test" or "E.Q. is more important" or it's about grit and growth mindset" or "genius is fundamentally a right-wing concept" or any number of other such wrong takes? Surely they can't all be doing it out of insincerity when they'd have a much easier time simply saying nothing.
(And this is just bringing it up online. It's even worse when you bring it up in real life!)
Also, why would it be forbidden to bring up in polite society if most people sincerely didn't believe it? Surely the fact that it is means it's primarily believed sincerely.
They say it because they don't want IQ to matter, not because they believe it. Children in US got IQ tests not so long so understanding what it means is ingrained even in school system(or was idk how it is now)
Children are seldom told what I.Q. actually means. In my experience, and I'm far from alone, every teacher I had who brought up the subject said some variation of "multiple intelligences" or "I.Q. tests just measure how well you do on I.Q. tests" or other such totally wrong bullshit lines. In the popular consciousness, many treat I.Q.s with little more seriousness than horoscopes.
This would not happen if most people genuinely believed the opposite. There wouldn't be a popular pressure to stay quiet about the truth.
They do. They care much more about politics, ordinally and cardinally. Moreover, smart left-wingers are more likely to care about politics specifically than right-wingers, to the point where they're more willing to sacrifice their own money for the sake of greater political influence, both for the sake of donating to political causes and for the sake of taking lower-paying high-cognitive-demand positions which provide greater political influence, like by being a teacher.
They also certainly use underhanded means to press this advantage, such as by imposing ideology tests with D.E.I., but they're only better at using these means because they already have an ordinal and cardinal advantage. Rightoids aren't inherently more moral, or they never would've nominated the least-moral candidate of this century three times in a row for the highest office in the land despite every other option providing a better chance at winning the White House.
Cofnas arguments for conservatives being lower IQ are slop. I’ll elaborate if you want but the quick down and dirty is the GSS study is an overly simplistic measure of verbal IQ, at most.
The arguments are secondary to the stereotype of conservatives as low-I.Q., podcast-brained chuds who listen to Morgan Wallen, don't read books, and who are lucky to be able to imagine how they'd feel if they didn't have breakfast in the morning. It'd be leftoids who are stereotyped as being idiots if they were on average the dumber side.
Those studies are unreliable would you like to know why?
>It's not really about the studies it's about the stereotypes, like this meme conservatives constantly use on the left about breakfast, it aksually applies to the conservatives
No it's not. Black people are not the only people on Earth with I.Q.s in the "too low to understand counterfactuals" range. That's anyone who has I.Q.s around the low 80s and below, which certainly includes many more Subsaharan Africans than Europeans, but Euros with I.Q.s in the low 80s and lower aren't magically smarter than their interracial equivalents with comparable g. In fact, at around the 70s and lower, they're more likely to be less functional, since for a Euro, an I.Q. in the 70s is much more likely to be a result of some sort of syndrome, rather than their just rolling low numbers on their genetic dicethrows:
The second moral begs the question. I saw the takeover of academia in slo mo and I can guarantee you it’s not only multifactorial you could easily write a convincing essay why certain traits and aspirations make it less likely on average for credentialed or comparably fit conservatives to work in academia as well as not finding it as welcoming an environment even when it was nothing like it is now a truly hostile and silencing and cancelling and even threatening environment. You don’t need to do any mental stretching to realize that vocal radical minorities can exert themselves with exceptional (good or bad) consequences and this phenomenon in a free and liberal country will start slowly but once it reaches a certain energy level it’s a ball down a slope and can be replicated quickly in captive cultural environs. I also think it an exercise in futility to have a dialogue with those who visualize in stereotypes and wrap their facts uncritically around them. I lament the lack of strong voices on the right but I would point out that because of contemporary populism the free market is again under fire as the bogeyman of all evils and it has few defenders as an imperfect system that is better than the others. It’s an instructive starting point because it offers lessons and debates in human behavior human limitations human motivations human ingenuity free exchanges freedom of movement and association and tradeoffs (so critical) and by the way we are so far from unfettered capitalism and I do view crony capitalism as a very substantial problem in America. The right as a counterpoint to leftist illiberalism and also elaborate but shallow forms of racism and favoritism is not much of a right. It’s a halting force a correction mechanism but it’s not much of a right. Let’s be honest. Neither is Trump. The right needs to figure out what it is same as the left needs to decide even if just in self preservation if it wants to continue to purge the center.
RE: Nathan's hypothesis-I suspect that growing up in privilege and being able to relate to the world through theory and play-acting (which every progressive I know loves) make you more likely to be progressive. Aside from the class variable I doubt if there's any correlation between IQ and Leftism. I'm pretty sure there's a negative correlation with extreme progressive views and low verbal intelligence, actually. Of course our elites (who happen to be smarter) buy into a worldview based on patronizing moral fictions and class prerogatives and incorrect ideas about criminal justice and business and economics! They're the ONLY people who believe this stuff (in my experience). Why wouldn't they? If they had more access to the working class and the realities of mainstream American society they wouldn't be progressives... but their life experience secludes them in their bubble.
I agree with you but I also want to add something else.
How many children of Republicans go to university?
How many Republicans believe that studying social sciences or literature is worth it?
As a speech by the Republican Party, it is sold that you have to study something profitable, because money is the only thing that matters. Now I see conservatives, looking for philosophy books, conservative history books... and it turns out that everything is "communist." And I wonder, do they really not understand why?
It's my opinion, I love your substack... I'm starting to follow you. Greetings
Agreed. I think Reaganism was a Pyrrhic victory for Conservatives.
Conservatives gained some ground in the short-term due to adopting Reagan’s philosophy. But those gains came at the expense of much more valuable ground needed to sustain the long-term war against the enemies of Conservative values.
Exactly, we can also extend it to the low birth rates, all the children of the boomers think that a baby is a "cost" that only millionaires can finance. Or they don't believe in helping families because "I'm not going to support someone else's child." They see everything as a business, they do not see a country and citizens.
Definitely not. And the cultural obsession with Capitalism among Conservatives led to some serious missteps. Think about it. Conservatives voluntarily sorted themselves into the private sector for a slim chance of becoming extraordinarily wealthy, but with the vast majority ending up in the middle of the income distribution. Whereas Leftists poured into the public sector positions left open by Conservatives, which don't come with big salaries but do offer outsized influence over culture and an ever growing pool of tax dollars.
That's probably the worst political deal since Native Americans sold Delaware for some beads.
Exactly, I hadn't thought of that. Thanks for answering me.
Of course, my pleasure! Thanks for sharing your insights as well.
You should totally spin that into a full length article mon ami, as it offers plenty of insight into what's gone wrong on the right and why the left ultimately triumphed.
Well said
The other thing to bear in mind that conservatives are normal people who want to get on with their lives, make money and look after their families. They are not generally ideologues who want to refashion society to an imaginary ideal. So they are trampled over by progressives with an agenda. They could win, but would need to be a great deal smarter. When the tide turns, conformists who are also as interested in power and status as anything else will change their tunes.
You're right that a lot of people just want to get on with their lives, but that's not something to be proud of. That's just irresponsibility.
I see. You think it is your moral responsibility to get on with other people's lives yourself, by telling them what they should care about, think about, do, and be. Yikes. I think you understand conservatives no better than the writers you discuss in your article.
Yes, when the enemies of civilization are at the gates, in your people's greatest hour of need, "I only care about myself" is not acceptable.
Hmm. Ok, I would agree with that. Next time you should add that, if that is what you mean.
This is the main issue. The left has never seen the right fully engaged in politics and cultural influence because the right values family more. The left has lately cut off every avenue for that family that occupied most of the right’s time.
So now they reap what they sow.
The political affiliation has a statistical correlation to profession. Professions where if you mess up you get fired, prosecuted, or go bankrupt tend to be conservative (Engineers, Plumbers, Electricians, Farmers) and professions where if you mess up nothing happens to you tend to be progressive (Teachers, University Professors, Government workers).
This makes perfect sense, the left wants to implement their Utopian ideas, because nothing really bad ever happens to them when they make mistakes.
Whereas the right are more likely to research and reflect on human nature and be cautious in dismantling Chesterton’s gate, because bad things do happen to them if they are an idiot.
There are plenty of Conservatives who want to make an ideological splash, just there are plenty of liberals who just want to get on with their lives.
Good article. Very important to know. I have become suspicious of these types and I am planning to write an article on why their stance on abortion is incorrect.
I bet it's gonna blow people's minds
I think the centrist/libertarian’s aversion to the right stems from their hatred of Christianity (and love of sex). They can engage with economic issues competently, but their brain stops working entirely when they engage in moral and social issues… I think it’s because they never reasoned their way into those opinions to begin with.
Or perhaps they feel strongly about moral and social issues too and just disagree with Conservatives.
I think it's moral incompatibility rather then lack of rationality
I think the issue is more one of status.
When conservativism is filled with low-status views, it makes the careerist instutitional climber types want to avoid being seen as too chummy with conservativism.
People who want to climb the ladder and get promoted don't want to be seen palling around with "Jews did 9/11" conspiracy theorists, or incel Tatebros, or RETVRN biblethumpers.
As John Arcto put it:
"There is a difference between being opposed to modern feminism, which I am, and being part of the Manosphere, that is just a pit of sexual resentment that makes the entire Rightosphere look pathetic, crass, and low-status. Conspiracy theorists also make the movement toxic to the high IQ, and are in large part responsible for the crippling lack of Elite Human Capital that plagues the right and why so many people in influential administrative and taste-making positions, who might otherwise be able to be convinced, side with the Woke left.
In order to be ‘high status’, it is very important for a movement to have two things: attractive women and the well-educated, and these two factions seem intent to repel both."
https://anglofuturistmag.substack.com/p/factions-of-the-rightosphere-manosphere
The problem is that our enemies determine who is high status.
We need to create our own status-making institutions.
The problem with conservatives is capitalism and its media echo chamber. Valid critiques of feminism turn into men should be able to sleep with multiple wives, and the 19th amendment should be repealed, because of the desire for click baiting and making money. Anti feminism and redpill incels nonsense is just wokeism for men who can’t get laid
Actually polygamy is natural step in social liberalism and consent based morality.
Capitalism helps; guys like Musk can simply buy out the Cathedral of Twitter. At the same time, the right wing can't just be a movement by chuds, for chuds. In Canada, Stephen Harper was notorious for keeping a short leash on the pro-life faction of his caucus, because he knew abortion was a losing issue and he wanted to win.
Conservative politics need some version of popularism in order to make it palatable for people with high-status aspirations.
American conservatives literally gave up everything they stood for in past 80 years. How have that ended?
Pretty well since it led to Making America Great Again
Imagine that you're conservative in 50s, would you be happy how US looks now?
Depends how many deportations happen. So far not enough.
You want get attractive women because left gives them better deal. Same with educated wanna be bureaucrats
The attractive women have already switched to conservative, left just has the fat feminists now. AI is going to wipe out bureaucratic roles soon, too soon to know how that plays out politically.
From what I remember 75% of girls in 8 grade support left. Most women voting right are married. Also leftists priotising trans over women help. But it won't stay that way. Trans will be put aside and once again left will be about feminism
Media is complaining about all the hot MAGA girls, so yes the hot girls lean right now.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/power/2025/06/18/young-maga-women/
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/inauguration-trump-supporters-conservative-movement-post-maga.html
That's just some article. Most women vote left and there's no established link to attractiveness from what I know
Actually that's 2 articles. Most single women vote left, most married women do not, and most hot girls don't stay single for long.
Won't*
Somehow, I've never seen this post until now, but I do strongly agree that Cofnas greatly exaggerated the lack of intelligence among conservatives.
I've also written a response to his first substack post that makes different points, but arrives to similar conclusions. https://zerocontradictions.net/civilization/wokism
Include me as a Substack centrist who believes in a right to an abortion during the first trimester, the efficacy of vaccines in preventing death by disease and that climate change is a threat to humanity. On the other hand:
After the election the Democratic Party (my party) must rethink many of its policies as it ponders its future.
To be entrusted with power again Democrats must start listening to the concerns of the working class for a change. As a lifelong moderate Democrat I share their disdain for many of the insane positions advocated by my party.
Democrat politicians defy biology by believing that men can actually become women and belong in women’s sports, rest rooms, locker rooms and prisons and that children should be mutilated in pursuit of the impossible.
They believe borders should be open to millions of illegals which undermines workers’ wages and the affordability of housing when we can’t house our own citizens.
They discriminate against whites, Asians and men in a vain effort to counter past discrimination against others and undermine our economy by abandoning merit selection of students and employees.
Democratic mayors allow homelessness to destroy our beautiful cities because they won't say no to destructive behavior. No you can’t camp in this city. No you can’t shit in our streets. No you can’t shoot up and leave your used needles everywhere. Many of our prosecutors will not take action against shoplifting unless a $1000 of goods are stolen leading to gangs destroying retail stores. They release criminals without bond to rob and murder again.
The average voter knows this is happening and outright reject our party. Enough.
XXX
I’m curious if those are your actual reasons for being a Democrat since there are plenty of Republicans who believe in first trimester abortion, the efficacy of vaccines and the need to fight climate change. https://mainstreetcaucus.house.gov/
Simon: No you are right those are my phony reasons. Are you serious? Republicans as a group don’t believe in any of those issues. Their VP doesn’t support abortion even in cases of rape and incest. Many Republican led states have six week bans including populous Florida. Trump is appointing the nation’s leading anti vaccine advocate as head of HHS and a climate change denier to lead EPA. You have to rethink your comment.
Why you support abortion?
Amin: Look up any listing of single cell animals to see if humans are listed. They are not. I am sorry but I have little sympathy for those who cannot distinguish between a single cell ( . ) and a 👼. Further when I hear people saying no exceptions for rape or incest I wonder if they truly believe that a young girl raped by her father should be forced to give birth to her sibling. Our VP does believe this. He says that two wrongs don’t make a right. Cruelty personified.
I personally go along with the majority and would permit abortion during the first trimester for any reason and after that to protect the health of the woman and because of the lack of viability of the baby.
1st argument is stupid because it would be classified as homo sapiens sapiens basd on DNA. Why only first trimester tho?
Cofnas also made the claim that the Right lacks sophisticated publications, but then makes no mention of The New Criterion, Claremont Review of Books, and a host of other savvy webzines and print journals.
Good essay. I subscribed purely on the basis of this one essay, which is unusual. I think the better question is in asking does American conservatism have what it takes in order to undo the damage done by the alliance with the economic side of the libertarian argument in order to gain a far broader tent appeal? The best government is the least government can mean one of two things. It can either mean less government spending as a portion of GDP, or it can mean government doesn't have the right to tell citizens what to do. It needs to be constrained so that doesn't have the power to rule over people- to me this is the far more salient and important argument for most American voters.
Don't get me wrong, conservatives should still continue to hammer away at government waste and bureaucracy, but why not tell Americans that the money should be spent on them, rather than bureaucratic gatekeepers and NGOs? If government is as important as the Democrats maintain, why wasn't it there for ordinary citizens in East Palestine or Hawaii? Why is the water in Flint still not safe? Any decent conservative would have been threatening to send in the Army Corps of Engineers for over a decade, regardless of who happened to sign off on the deal with the corporations. One of the rare instances where government might actually be a welcome thing is in the event of national emergency- yet recently during such crises American government has been absent, too busy indemnifying corporate interests behind the scene.
And this hits upon another aspect of the American divide. Most Americans are far more sympathetic to entrepreneurial small business types than they are the corporations. The corporations are also naturally aligned with the Democrats and government through crony capitalism, especially given that the PMC class in both have attended the same indoctrination mills in higher education. Other than extraction and farming most of corporate America is now aligned with the Dems anyway- and conservatives should also make a meal of the fact that one of the industries with which the Left is naturally aligned now includes the most despised sector of all- Finance.
Small business entrepreneurs. The Trades. The Blue Collar Class, regardless of race. These should be the natural constituencies of conservatives. I recently had an Angus Deaton clip pop up into my YouTube feed, in which he lectures Paul Krugman on the real reason behind American prosperity and greatness in the post-WWII period. He maintained it had little to do with FDR and Big Government bureaucracies and everything to do with immigration levels. He also notes that the upward economic trajectory of African Americans began long before LBJ and had its origin in tight labour markets.
What conservativism really needs is a legion of autodidacts, schooled in the works of great thinkers like Henry David Thoreau and JS Mills.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRBsDcHoWZU&t=9s
Great points! Other than the part about immigration I agree with all of this.
Well nobody I watch or read is against sane levels of immigration. Mass migration is an entirely different animal. The Australian system worked great until the early 2000s because it was high and specific. Most people don't know this, but Australia had a profoundly outsized effect in developing universities in the developing world. Because people needed to get qualified in order to fit the criteria for Australia's Priority Migration Occupation List it helped create entire markets for higher education in places like Addis Ababa and Kuala Lumpur.
Basically, for most groups around 50% of the population cannot achieve anything worthwhile through academic education, no matter how much time and resources are spent on them. In order for the social contract to function fairly there need to be a number of trade professional jobs (other than plumbing, elevator repair or electricians, which tend to draw from the top of the cognitive pile anyway) which promise decent wages for hard work and the acquisition of technical skills. Skilled construction, carpet-layers, tilers and roofers all fit into the category.
Pay should be around the $30 an hour mark, with pre-inflation purchasing power. Many think this would be naturally inflationary, but one has to remember that most house building costs relate to either regulatory costs or artificial scarcity created by government, with a view to extorting more from ordinary citizens through property taxes. America could probably do better than Australia in that rather than creating a specific list, with everything else excluded, it could create a list of occupations from which new non-citizens are specifically excluded from participating in. Another option is to increase employer taxes for non-citizens to around 20% higher than employer taxes for citizens, perhaps shifting the latter down marginally to prevent the tax burden from rising.
One of the reasons why I argue this is because its key to criminal reform and reducing violence in Western countries. Most reforms to criminals don't work. Sure, they age out of the violence, starting at around 34, but the incarceration up until that point, or possibly longer, depending on the crime, is a huge drain on America in particular. Generally, reforms to criminals don't work. Recidivism rates tend to hover around 70% provided one doesn't fiddle the metrics by shortening the timespan for when one measures recidivism. Basically one needs to look at the ten year range. If one looks at this timespan, then the Norwegians which Michael Moore featured on his documentary actually perform somewhere at a level of between 40% and 53% and in other sources I managed to locate the Norwegians readily admit they have more problems with the reform of gang members, but don't go as far as furnishing any data. Regardless, this approach would require the types of social spending support mechanisms most Americans wouldn't tolerate in their tax bill, even though many of the costs would be deferred by reduced spending on incarceration.
What does work is youth reform. If you can catch the kids early enough, just as they are becoming gang-involved, and frog march them into blue collar trades in which the mentoring is likely to be male, then it can have miraculous results. Like many American cities, Scottish Public Health Policing managed to halve violent crime within a decade using data-driven proactive policing. Unlike most American cities, they managed to do it without substantially increasing incarceration levels. Specifically, incarceration of the young didn't rise at all, even though they were experiencing a knife crime epidemic at the beginning of the period.
Basically, the state needs to push troubled kids into high prole blue collar trades and employers are always going to take fully trained off-the-shelf foreign labour if they can. But make no mistake, it's the key to turning kids who might otherwise be a burden and a danger to their fellow citizens into productive citizens willing to shoulder their share of the tax burden, and in so doing, lowering taxes for everyone else. Of course, they days with so many otherwise patriot kids saying no to military service because they don't want to live under the DEI agenda, I wouldn't be surprised if the old military service or jail offers which judges used to make might start getting reinstated.
This idea about dealing with crime problems is an interesting one, thanks.
This BBC article from 2019 was obviously written by an old school journalist. It's a bit light on detail, but it does include a section on opportunity right at the bottom- strange given that this was by far the most powerful of Scotland's Public Health Policing initiatives. Economists who apply their work to study crime and suggest or implement solutions have long known that if one raises the opportunity costs of crime it will lower overall crime rates for at risk groups. It certainly doesn't help that incentives towards organised drug-related activity are so insanely high.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-45572691
This is Roland Fryer giving a seminar to students at UATX. It's long, but if you're really interested in ways America could help solve its crime problems, or writing about it, it's fascinating about informative. One of Glen Greenwald's tips for writers looking to build a brand is to thoroughly research four to five main areas of expertise, which can really bring value to your readers. Another great source on a more modern approach to American policing is Peter Moskos with the Violence Reduction Project.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjdKIxc0x5A&t=38s
That Hanania guy looks like a wax figure that came to life and stalks frightened children.
It’s the same here in Oregon, where independent voters represent 1/3rd of the electorate but where they frame all discussion around the Leftist agenda/perspective and where they would never vote for a Republican candidate or policy ideal. There is no center in the political middle.
Conservative here. At the risk of playing “credentialism” with Mr. Cofnas, I’d point out that there are a LOT of well-educated American conservatives. Most of my close friends who are politically conservative are MDs and engineers who can more than win a debate with the average liberal/progressive. Your point about the capture of institutions by the Left is relevant, and has been self-perpetuating. Equally so your point about how smart one has to be to be a manager, whether in academia, Pharma, or corporate America. The fact that any number of institutions have foolishly jumped on the DEI bandwagon to their current regret should say something about just how smart a lot of university presidents and CEOs are, or not. Witness Boeing’s current travails. I’d bet good money that the average Boeing engineer or assembly line worker has more common sense and perception about what an aerospace company’s core mission is than a lot of C-suite folks. Same for the medical field.
One important aspect of the problem IMHO is that conservatives in general would prefer to focus on family, work, faith, etc. and not spend as much time on politics or social activism. That’s a recipe for not getting our message out to the masses.
Hanania is just dishonest and wants to push his own brand of liberalism. I found this article right after being banned from his comments for pointing out how dishonest he is in pretending to not get that conservatives use the same definition of "conspiracy theory" as leftists do
For all your criticism of Cofnas, you really don't understand where he's coming from. For one, the GSS data unambiguously shows that white extreme liberals have an 8.5-point IQ advantage over white extreme conservatives, and a 4-point gap between moderates again favoring liberals. Given that you implicitly dismiss the value of general intelligence in the piece, that might not be enough to persuade you, but it doesn't keep you from being less wrong. IQ is still the best predictor we have of general intelligence, which is still the best predictor we have of most of the positive life outcomes, in particular general problem-solving ability. These people recoil from conservatism, and have for some time.
Second, Cofnas's point wasn't merely that the Left appeals more to smart people, but that if you follow the tenets of contemporary popular morality through to their logical conclusions,* you implicitly accept left-wing politics as correct. For all the protestations of Will Stancil to the contrary, most on the Right clearly still believe this to be correct. There are no meaningful politicians in the US who say otherwise, and few popular media figures who do. Of the few who do, none of them are really all that big. Hanania is probably the biggest nowadays, but he's still dwarfed in profile by obvious cranks and morons like Candace Owens and Jackson Hinkle, neither of whom even mention HBD in public, and assuming they do in the future, it'll probably be to blast the concept as a tool of the Jews to start all the wars in the world, or something else along those lines.
For the Right to stop becoming the party of retards, they need to make the case that much of human behavior is innate, and that there are important cognitive differences between races, sexes, and individuals within and between. The strategy as of now has been to ignore this, assuming any awareness of such was even possessed, and it's been an abject failure in every respect. Sixty years of failure should be more than enough to teach the Right that these ways aren't working, but most still have yet to get the memo, so who the fuck knows how much longer we'll have to stomach the deathspiral.
* Namely, as he puts it, that all human populations are the same in innate ability.
I never denied IQ. I address the Conservative-Liberal IQ gap in this piece: https://simonlaird.substack.com/p/yes-the-right-has-enough-smart-people
You completely misinterpret it yet again. The reason the focus is on whites is because whites are the most culturally-important demographic in the US, and the Saddamesque margins of black support for Dems drag a boat anchor down the averages. Smart whites, on average, are what matter, and they either don't care enough about politics to want to bother with you, or lean leftwards. There is no secret group of white élites you can draw from. You have to convince the whites who actually care about politics that their fundamental assumptions are wrong, and they don't buy what you're selling because unless you're willing to embrace the importance of hereditarianism, you fundamentally accept their worldview! They're just following it through to its logical conclusion.
Cofnas matters because he's actually advocating for hereditarianism, which is the only thing that has a prayer of working to turn the ship around. Working with the clown crew available now is a dead end. You're hardly the first guy to try it, and you'll fail just as badly as the last several-hundred people who tried it.
This is such an inane debate.
People already know that there's difference between innate abilities between people, IQ is quite known concept. Differences between races are also on some level known by most people, they're just taboo that can throw you out of polite society. Idea that its knowledge problem is crazy. Also conservatives don't fight only affirmative action, there's more differences between right and left
If this were the case, why does damn near every time you bring up I.Q. online, you get flooded by people who throw out nonsense takes like "I.Q. Just measures how well you can do in an I.Q. test" or "E.Q. is more important" or it's about grit and growth mindset" or "genius is fundamentally a right-wing concept" or any number of other such wrong takes? Surely they can't all be doing it out of insincerity when they'd have a much easier time simply saying nothing.
(And this is just bringing it up online. It's even worse when you bring it up in real life!)
Also, why would it be forbidden to bring up in polite society if most people sincerely didn't believe it? Surely the fact that it is means it's primarily believed sincerely.
They say it because they don't want IQ to matter, not because they believe it. Children in US got IQ tests not so long so understanding what it means is ingrained even in school system(or was idk how it is now)
Children are seldom told what I.Q. actually means. In my experience, and I'm far from alone, every teacher I had who brought up the subject said some variation of "multiple intelligences" or "I.Q. tests just measure how well you do on I.Q. tests" or other such totally wrong bullshit lines. In the popular consciousness, many treat I.Q.s with little more seriousness than horoscopes.
This would not happen if most people genuinely believed the opposite. There wouldn't be a popular pressure to stay quiet about the truth.
They do. They care much more about politics, ordinally and cardinally. Moreover, smart left-wingers are more likely to care about politics specifically than right-wingers, to the point where they're more willing to sacrifice their own money for the sake of greater political influence, both for the sake of donating to political causes and for the sake of taking lower-paying high-cognitive-demand positions which provide greater political influence, like by being a teacher.
They also certainly use underhanded means to press this advantage, such as by imposing ideology tests with D.E.I., but they're only better at using these means because they already have an ordinal and cardinal advantage. Rightoids aren't inherently more moral, or they never would've nominated the least-moral candidate of this century three times in a row for the highest office in the land despite every other option providing a better chance at winning the White House.
Cofnas arguments for conservatives being lower IQ are slop. I’ll elaborate if you want but the quick down and dirty is the GSS study is an overly simplistic measure of verbal IQ, at most.
The arguments are secondary to the stereotype of conservatives as low-I.Q., podcast-brained chuds who listen to Morgan Wallen, don't read books, and who are lucky to be able to imagine how they'd feel if they didn't have breakfast in the morning. It'd be leftoids who are stereotyped as being idiots if they were on average the dumber side.
>These studies say White libtards are smarter
Those studies are unreliable would you like to know why?
>It's not really about the studies it's about the stereotypes, like this meme conservatives constantly use on the left about breakfast, it aksually applies to the conservatives
The breakfast meme isn't about the Left. It's about the low-I.Q., and thus is perfectly appropriate to use on rightoids.
It’s about Blacks, cope more loser.
No it's not. Black people are not the only people on Earth with I.Q.s in the "too low to understand counterfactuals" range. That's anyone who has I.Q.s around the low 80s and below, which certainly includes many more Subsaharan Africans than Europeans, but Euros with I.Q.s in the low 80s and lower aren't magically smarter than their interracial equivalents with comparable g. In fact, at around the 70s and lower, they're more likely to be less functional, since for a Euro, an I.Q. in the 70s is much more likely to be a result of some sort of syndrome, rather than their just rolling low numbers on their genetic dicethrows:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23219156/
The second moral begs the question. I saw the takeover of academia in slo mo and I can guarantee you it’s not only multifactorial you could easily write a convincing essay why certain traits and aspirations make it less likely on average for credentialed or comparably fit conservatives to work in academia as well as not finding it as welcoming an environment even when it was nothing like it is now a truly hostile and silencing and cancelling and even threatening environment. You don’t need to do any mental stretching to realize that vocal radical minorities can exert themselves with exceptional (good or bad) consequences and this phenomenon in a free and liberal country will start slowly but once it reaches a certain energy level it’s a ball down a slope and can be replicated quickly in captive cultural environs. I also think it an exercise in futility to have a dialogue with those who visualize in stereotypes and wrap their facts uncritically around them. I lament the lack of strong voices on the right but I would point out that because of contemporary populism the free market is again under fire as the bogeyman of all evils and it has few defenders as an imperfect system that is better than the others. It’s an instructive starting point because it offers lessons and debates in human behavior human limitations human motivations human ingenuity free exchanges freedom of movement and association and tradeoffs (so critical) and by the way we are so far from unfettered capitalism and I do view crony capitalism as a very substantial problem in America. The right as a counterpoint to leftist illiberalism and also elaborate but shallow forms of racism and favoritism is not much of a right. It’s a halting force a correction mechanism but it’s not much of a right. Let’s be honest. Neither is Trump. The right needs to figure out what it is same as the left needs to decide even if just in self preservation if it wants to continue to purge the center.
https://simonlaird.substack.com/p/yes-the-right-has-enough-smart-people
RE: Nathan's hypothesis-I suspect that growing up in privilege and being able to relate to the world through theory and play-acting (which every progressive I know loves) make you more likely to be progressive. Aside from the class variable I doubt if there's any correlation between IQ and Leftism. I'm pretty sure there's a negative correlation with extreme progressive views and low verbal intelligence, actually. Of course our elites (who happen to be smarter) buy into a worldview based on patronizing moral fictions and class prerogatives and incorrect ideas about criminal justice and business and economics! They're the ONLY people who believe this stuff (in my experience). Why wouldn't they? If they had more access to the working class and the realities of mainstream American society they wouldn't be progressives... but their life experience secludes them in their bubble.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/our-flailing-elites