Yes, the Right has enough smart people to form its own elite

A surprising number of self-described right wing writers think that conservatives are not intelligent enough to govern themselves.  The argument goes like this:

The Left controls everything.  They own the media, they own Hollywood, they own academia, they own the Fortune 500 companies, they own the government bureaucracy.  If all of these high-powered jobs are done by liberals, it must be because conservatives are not smart enough to do them.  Therefore, conservatives cannot build their own elite.

If that argument sounds convincing to you, consider this analogous argument:

It’s 1920 and we’re in French Indochina.  The native Vietnamese must not be intelligent enough to build their own elite.  Vietnamese people must not be capable of holding high-powered jobs, because look at all the high-powered positions in French Indochina today - they’re all held by Frenchmen!

But of course the Vietnamese could and did build their own elite, their own regime, and their own media apparatus.

The reason why elite positions in 1920s Indochina were all held by Frenchmen is because people were hired to those positions on a tribal basis.  Conservatives in the West are in a similar situation today.  If you’re a conservative and you want to work in the mainstream media, or Hollywood, or academia, you have to hide your views.  When conservatives are in power, they hire the best man for the job.  When left-liberals are in power, they make sure to hire someone who shares their ideology.  Over the course of decades, this has flushed all conservatives out of the halls of power.

The Conservative-Liberal IQ gap

Before I proceed I want to address a point raised by Nathan Cofnas about the IQ gap between conservatives and liberals.  As I wrote in a separate piece, the deeper problem with Cofnas’ view is that he misunderstands what conservatives actually believe, but here let’s focus on the IQ gap.

First, the IQ gap between conservatives and liberals actually shows that the conservative average IQ is about 2 points higher.  Cofnas is talking about the data on whites only.  White conservatives have average IQs 8.5 points lower than white liberals.  But this is unsurprising.  Smart white conservatives are allied with white rabble, and smart white liberals are allied with black rabble, so of course when you compare whites with whites, the liberal IQ is higher because the white rabble on the conservative side bring down the white conservative average.  

Tying smart conservatives to Qanon is as unfair as tying smart liberals to Hotep theory.  The popular perception that conservatives are dumb arises from the fact that the mainstream (liberal) media loves to write stories on Qanon and almost totally ignores Hotep.

Given that the all-races conservative IQ is higher than the all-races liberal IQ, It is not clear why Cofnas thinks that the white liberal-conservative IQ gap is such a problem for conservatives.  Cofnas correctly points out that you need lots of smart people to staff the media outlets and think tanks that a successful movement needs.  But if liberals are trying to staff their institutions with black liberals and other nonwhite liberals who on average have IQs 2 points lower than the white conservatives who staff conservative institutions, wouldn’t that be an advantage for conservatives?

There’s also the distinction between social conservatism and economic conservatism.  GSS data shows that people with libertarian economic beliefs (economically conservative) tend to have higher IQs.

[T[he observed relationship between intelligence and conservatism largely depends on how conservatism is operationalized. Social conservatism correlates with lower cognitive ability test scores, but economic conservatism correlates with higher scores (Iyer, Koleva, Graham, Ditto, & Haidt, 2012; Kemmelmeier 2008).

Politics is Ethnic

Ethnic Group, noun

A group of people who more or less share cultural practices, and are more or less related by blood, and whose shared cultural practices are part of a tradition in which all members of the ethnicity were fully immersed

Examples:

1. A French officer who is invited to Prussia by Frederick the Great will marry a Prussian woman and his grandchildren will be fully Prussian.  In genetic terms we would say: Prussian ancestry is mostly from medieval Germanic peoples, with some French contribution.

2. Afrikaners are an ethnic group of mostly Dutch ancestry, but some other European and small amounts of African and South Asian ancestry.

3. A Ukrainian baby who is adopted by Polish parents will grow up in Polish culture and will be Polish, albeit not quintessentially Polish.  If he has children with a Polish woman, his children will certainly be Polish.

4. It is less clear whether a Portuguese baby could become fully Polish.  An African or Korean baby could not become fully Polish, and even if they had children with a Polish person, their grandchildren would not be fully Polish.

Politics in America is more ethnic than most people realize.  The conventional wisdom is that Blacks and Hispanics vote as racial blocks, but whites split their vote more evenly.

Here are the election results by race for 2020:

Here’s 2012:

However, the seemingly more even split among whites conceals large differences between different white groups.

Northeasterners and Southerners are clearly distinct ethnic groups.  They speak different dialects, have different religious beliefs, and have fought wars against each other.  The book Albion’s Seed by David Fischer explains that the original White Americans comprised four distinct groups, descended from different waves of settlers from different parts of Europe, and that these four distinct nations still exist to this day.  The groups are: Northeasterners (descended from the Puritans), Mid-Atlantic (descended from the Quakers), Southerners (descended from the Cavaliers), and “Greater Appalachians” (descended from the Scotch-Irish).

Credit: JayMan - https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/maps-of-the-american-nations/

Looking at the 2020 election results for the Northeastern states we see that the Democrats won Massachusetts, the heart of Northeastern Puritanism, by 66-32 - on par with the 2020 Hispanic margin.  Democrats won Connecticut, Vermont, New York and Rhode Island by similar margins.

In the Greater Appalachian state of Kentucky, Republicans won by 62-36 (a 26 point margin, much higher than Romney’s national 20 point white margin or Trump’s national 17 point margin with whites).  In West Virginia it was 69-30.

In the Southern state of Alabama, Republicans won 62-37.  The breakdown by race is even more striking.  77% of Alabama whites voted Republican.  Note that the 90-10 split among Alabama blacks is the same as the national black split.

The 58-42 split for whites nationwide conceals a lot of ethnic bloc voting.  If anything, the R/D splits probably understate the ethnic differences.  Anecdotally, a New England “conservative” is to the left of a Kentucky moderate.

So the analogy to Vietnam/Indochina is apt.  Not only do left-liberals act as a tribe to take over institutions, left-liberals in fact are a tribe.  To a first approximation, being a liberal in America is a matter of ethnic partisanship.  Northeasterners are raised with liberal values, and they are taught to disdain their ethnic group’s ancient rivals - especially the Southerners.  

The Northeasterners are the dominant ethnic group in America.  They rule over the other ethnic groups of America and try to impose their religion on them.  The Northeasterners crushed their rivals in the Civil War, conferred great prestige on their historic universities - the Ivy League, built or wrested control over the mainstream media and Hollywood, and have gradually imposed their will more and more on the Greater Appalachian and Southerner ethnic groups who have long chafed under their rule.

Once we recognize that the American government is run by a dominant ethnic group which rules over other ethnic groups, it becomes plausible that the subjugated ethnic groups might be capable of independence.  The genetic differences between them are small, so there’s no reason to expect the IQ differences between these ethnic groups to be large…

What About Converts?

Or is there a reason to expect large IQ differences between the four white American ethnic groups?  Do smart children who are born into Greater Appalachian and Southern families tend to move to Blue States for college and employment?  Do they abandon the culture in which they are raised?  Do they assimilate to Northeasterner culture?  Do they adopt Northeasterner norms in hopes of gaining higher status?  I’m not aware of any good data on this so I’ll give my best guess.  I think the answer is Yes - but only to an extent.

There will always be some converts.  There will always be some people who dislike their own ethnic group and reflexively side with its political enemies (think ex-Evangelical “New Atheists”).  There will be some people who sincerely are persuaded by the values of a different tribe.  There will be some people who gravitate toward power and adopt the customs and taboos of the powerful as they seek employment and status for themselves.  And, much more commonly, there will be some people who simply move to where they find jobs, mates, and friends, and absorb some of the values of the people around them

But anecdotally I have seen that conversion usually only goes part way.  Think of the small-town girl who rejects her Dad’s “judgmental” views on homosexuality and abortion, but never adopts the sexually libertine lifestyle of her blue-city peers.  The good Southern boy might drift away from traditional conservatism, but he is far more likely to become a moderate or libertarian than a left-liberal.

The data on IQ by state seems to support my anecdotal experience.  West Virginia, a white American backwater if ever there was one, scores only 5 points behind Massachusetts, the home of the Ivy League.  Of course the states with more blacks tend to be more Republican and tend to have lower average IQs, but if we look at the states with nearly all-white populations, North Dakota, Wyoming, and Utah rank ahead of Maine and Oregon.

I am not denying that many smart children of Red America grow up to assimilate somewhat to the values of our Northeasterner rulers.  What I am saying is that

1. There are still plenty of smart people on our side

2. Most of the members of our own ethnic groups who grow up to assimilate to Blue-State culture do so only part-way (and could probably be won back)

We don’t need to win over Northeasterner elites.  We need to rally our own kind and reach out to those of our own kind who have drifted away because they were just trying to fit in with the dominant culture.  We need to articulate why our ethnic group’s customs and ideas are just as intellectually defensible as Northeasterner customs and ideas - and that the dominant culture’s values i.e. left-liberal values, i.e. Northeasterner values, were never universal, were never the inevitable result of Science and Progress, they were ethnic/cultural particulars all along.

We want independence for our people.  We have all the human capital we need.