However, I've always linked it to brain-hemisphere dominance.
Right-brained (creative) people like artists and actors tend to be pinkos, while left-brained (analytical) people like economists tend to be conservative.
Posted on 09/10/2004 10:29:38 PM PDT by neverdem
There are two sorts of people in the information-age elite, spreadsheet people and paragraph people. Spreadsheet people work with numbers, wear loafers and support Republicans. Paragraph people work with prose, don't shine their shoes as often as they should and back Democrats.
C.E.O.'s are classic spreadsheet people. According to a sample gathered by PoliticalMoneyLine in July, the number of C.E.O.'s donating funds to Bush's campaign is five times the number donating to Kerry's.
Professors, on the other hand, are classic paragraph people and lean Democratic. Eleven academics gave to the Kerry campaign for every 1 who gave to Bush's. Actors like paragraphs, too, albeit short ones. Almost 18 actors gave to Kerry for every 1 who gave to Bush. For self-described authors, the ratio was about 36 to 1. Among journalists, there were 93 Kerry donors for every Bush donor. For librarians, who must like Faulknerian, sprawling paragraphs, the ratio of Kerry to Bush donations was a whopping 223 to 1.
Laura Bush has a lot of work to do in shoring up her base.
Data from the Center for Responsive Politics allows us to probe the emerging class alignments, but the pattern is the same. Number people and word people are moving apart.
Accountants, whose relationship with numbers verges on the erotic, are now heavily Republican. Back in the early 1990's, accountants gave mostly to Democrats, but now they give twice as much to the party of Lincoln. Similarly, in the early 1990's, bankers gave equally to the two parties. Now they give mostly to Republicans, though one notices that employees at big banks, like Citigroup and Bank of America, are more likely to give to Democrats.
But lawyers - people who didn't realize that they wanted to be novelists until their student loan burdens were already too heavy - are shifting the other way. This year, lawyers gave about $81 million to Democrats and about $31 million to Republicans.
Media types are Democratic, of course, but one is dismayed to learn that two-thirds of employee donations at Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation went to Democrats. Whatever happened to company loyalty?
If you look at the big Kerry donors, you realize that the days of the starving intellectual are over. University of California employees make up the single biggest block of Kerry donors and Harvard employees are second, topping folks from Goldman Sachs and others in the supposedly sell-out/big-money professions.
Academics have had such an impact on the Democratic donor base because there is less intellectual diversity in academia than in any other profession. All but 1 percent of the campaign donations made by employees of William & Mary College went to Democrats. In the Harvard crowd, Democrats got 96 percent of the dollars. At M.I.T., it was 94 percent. Yale is a beacon of freethinking by comparison; 8 percent of its employee donations went to Republicans.
It should be noted there are some professions that span the spreadsheet-people/paragraph-people divide. For example, lobbyists give equally to both parties. (Could it possibly be that lobbyists don't have principles?) And casino people split their giving, with employees at Harrah's giving mostly to Democrats and employees at MGM Mirage giving mostly to Republicans.
Why have the class alignments shaken out as they have? There are a couple of theories. First there is the intellectual affiliation theory. Numerate people take comfort in the false clarity that numbers imply, and so also admire Bush's speaking style. Paragraph people, meanwhile, relate to the postmodern, post-Cartesian, deconstructionist, co-directional ambiguity of Kerry's Iraq policy.
I subscribe, however, to the mondo-neo-Marxist theory of information-age class conflict. According to this view, people who majored in liberal arts subjects like English and history naturally loathe people who majored in econ, business and the other "hard" fields. This loathing turns political in adult life and explains just about everything you need to know about political conflict today.
It should be added that not everybody fits predictably into the political camp indicated by a profession. I myself am thinking of founding the Class Traitors Association, made up of conservative writers, liberal accountants and other people so filled with self-loathing that they ally politically with social and cultural rivals.
Class traitors of the word, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your friends - and a world to gain!
?
Academia is dominated by leftwingers. Even economics and business faculty at most universities are predominantly Democrats (in my experience, and, I think, the objective evidence). I think it is the groupthink that pervades journalism. Those of us that are on the other side must keep silent lest we reap the consequences of being outed as conservatives. In my overseas travels around the world, 99 percent of the anti-Americans I encounter are either academics or recent students corrupted by academics, but almost never are working class people.
However, I've always linked it to brain-hemisphere dominance.
Right-brained (creative) people like artists and actors tend to be pinkos, while left-brained (analytical) people like economists tend to be conservative.
[There are two sorts of people in the information-age elite, spreadsheet people and paragraph people]
Attention all citizens.
According to The New York Times Newspeak Dictionary, 14th edition, unless you are a spreadsheet person or a paragraph person - you now un-exist.
Please take note.
It's not a bad analysis, but not new either. People who tend to believe in free markets, the opportunities available in America, and the private sector gravitate towards it. Those who do not, head for the public sector, or law if afflicted with an appropriate degree of greed. Very few of the Hollywood left hold degrees, but they are good at passionately reading lines others write and hand to them.
At the risk of overgeneralizing, I think the more quantitative the subject field, the more likely it is that the student is taught reason, logic, cause and effect, and rational thought. The more qualitative the subject field, the more likely it is that the student is taught to emote, to feel, and to empathize.
The former tend to become conservative because a conservative ideology is more reasoned, logical, consistent with real world cause and effect observations, and rational. If they were not already conservative, they tend to become conservative when they enter the private sector and encounter the heavy hand of government. Qualitative, emotional thinkers - uh, feelers - tend to be more liberal because liberalism is a touchy feely ideology.
I've never seen any statistics, but I suspect engineering majors skew conservative and liberal arts majors skew liberal.
As far as hard social sciences like economics, I found there were two schools. You had the Keynesians, who tended to focus on macroeconomics (i.e., big planned stuff), loved government intervention, and were a tad touchy-feely (Keynes was essentially an emotional, not a rational economist, IMO). These guys dominate the majority of bodies teaching economics in the academy. At the other end, there is a growing number of more classical economists who reject Keynes' twisted logic, seem more microeconomic focused, and follow logical analysis (e.g., the Laffer Curve). The most quantitative are the econometricians, who are pretty much statisticians and SAS/SPSS programmers. Keynesians are liberals. Their counterparts are more middle of the road to the right.
It's been some time since I went to school some time ago, but it seems to me that the best professors (left or right), tended to keep their political views out of the classroom and instead tried to teach students how to think for themselves. When politics did enter the classroom, I seem to recall that overwhelmingly, it was liberal professors who injected it with a sense of self-righteous smugness.
Of course, my experience is probably not the norm. My undergraduate degree is from the college of engineering at Texas A&M, which is the most conservative college in one of the most conservative universities in the country. What can you say about a place where Phil Graham and Wendy Graham both taught, where tradition is revered, where the most military officers are created of any university outside of the service academies, and so on?
Heck, even my business degree came from a place where Dick Armey taught (I've still got a book he wrote on pricing).
I think Brooks is fundamentally wrong...and reveals why so many conservatives disdain him. The conflict is philosophical. Conservatives derive morality (and thus group morality aka politics) from Judeo-Christian religious roots. Liberals derive their morality from Kantian and socialist philosophy. (I am personally neither, but it helps clarify the differences)
The key is that the supposed conservative is dealing with the question accepting the assumptions and methods of socialist philosophy...the class warfare hooey. The differences lie in the concepts of right and wrong and where they come from, and in some leftist circles, whether they exist.
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