Liberals smarter than conservatives?

So here’s the latest bulletin from the psych department: According to the journal Nature Neuroscience, liberals are smarter and more adaptable than conservatives. It’s a scientific fact, or what passes for one in the world of lab rats and mazes. Needless to say, this discovery was greeted with a yawn on the rustic campus of Unsolicited Opinions Inc. — the one-man, five-dog think tank where this column originates.

Yo, professor, tell us something we don’t know.

Actually, several professors at two universities, New York University and University of California, Los Angeles, concocted this foolishness. First, the experimenters asked student subjects to self-identify as liberals or conservatives. Then they sat them at computer monitors. Half were asked to push a button every time the letter “M” appeared on the screen, but to ignore “W.”

The others were asked to respond to “W,” but ignore “M” — to rule out unreasoning contempt for the letter “W,” I suppose. Anyway, the liberals made fact-based responses far more often than conservatives, who tended to react every time they saw any letter, like a chimpanzee trying to tune in the Rush Limbaugh program on a car radio.

According to the Los Angeles Times, assistant professor David Amodio of NYU, “explained the difference in terms of a commuter who drives the same way home from work every day. If he’s a liberal, he is more likely to be alert to a detour. If he’s a conservative, he’s more likely to, well, stay the course.”

Now as political commentary, this strikes me as plausible. Last time I checked, the Bush administration had floated eight or nine contradictory rationales for invading and occupying Iraq, starting with make-believe nuclear weapons, bestowing the gift of democracy on our grateful Middle Eastern brethren, standing up until they sit down (or whatever it was), all trending toward the inevitable destination of “exterminate all the brutes.” Few loyalists appear to have noticed.

In politics, context is all. In, say, 1970, the same study would have had very different results. At this moment in history, Bushism has knocked the liberal-versus-conservative debate totally out of whack. On overwhelmingly liberal campuses like NYU and UCLA, persons calling themselves “conservatives” are more likely Bush dead-enders.

Conservatism as a political philosophy has nothing to do with the presidency of George W. Bush. Don’t take my word for it. Read conservative pundits such as George Will or Patrick Buchanan on the futility of the Iraq war. Former Nixon White House official John Dean has made a veritable career out of warning against the decay of Republican principles into an authoritarian cult of personality.

“For more than 40 years,” Dean writes, “I have considered myself a ‘Goldwater conservative,’ and am thoroughly familiar with the movement’s canon. But I can find nothing conservative about the Bush/Cheney White House, which has created a Nixon ‘imperial presidency’ on steroids, while acting as if being tutored by the best and brightest of the Cosa Nostra.”

Authoritarian leaders, Dean contends, “are typically men whose desire in life is to dominate others and to be in charge. … They are highly manipulative. They are also people who have absolutely no appreciation of equality of others. They see themselves as superior, and they are amoral in their thinking.”

Sound like anybody we know?

Like George Orwell’s sheep, cultists can’t change their minds no matter how badly their theories fare in the visible world. To alter course is to show weakness.

So, yeah, the Nature Neuroscience team measured something real. It just wasn’t conservatism.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].