Inductivist

 Progs love to tout what lovers of humankind they are. The General Social Survey asked people if they sometimes try to get even rather than forgive and forget. 20.8% of conservatives answered true, but liberals are 1.7 times more likely to seek revenge (34.5%).

Political parties have gotten more polarized in the past few years. Is this true for abortion attitudes, too? Using General Social Survey (GSS) data, I created the following graphs:

Liberal Women

In 2006, 60% of self-described liberal women favored abortion for any reason. That number grew and jumped from 2018 to 2021. It's now 88%. 

Liberal Men

We see the same trend for liberal men. By 2021, the percent in favor was 79%. Currently, few liberals have a problem with unrestricted abortion. 

Moderate Women

It's trended up for moderate women as well. They are now at 54%

Moderate Men

Moderate men are now at 57% approval. 

Conservative Women

By contrast, attitudes among conservative women have stayed fairly steady, the current level of approval is at  27%.

Conservative Men

The story is similar for conservative men. They are currently at 34% approval. Overall, conservatives have not changed much, whereas liberals have veered left on the issue, especially in the last few years. There is more consensus among liberals than conservatives. 

Carl Zimmer and Razib Khan have made a big deal on Twitter about the inaccuracy of the claim that Elizabeth Warren is no more Indian than the average White American. Razib, a geneticist, says that when the data are interpreted accurately, Warren would probably have 10 times the Indian ancestry of the average White American.

Truth is, 10 times the tiniest fraction is still tiny. Zimmer said the vast majority of white Americans have ZERO Indian ancestry. So you can have a absolutely trivial amount of indigenous blood and still have much more than most of us.

Assuming the Stanford geneticist is correct, Warren had an Indian ancestor 6 to 10 generations back. My parents have carefully documented our ancestry going back many generations. Most of my ancestors are English with a little Welsh, Irish, Scottish, and Danish mixed in.

But I do have one grandmother exactly six generations back who was born in Germany but ended up in Pennsylvania in the 19th century. Have any of my relatives ever dreamed they were German, or even part German? A huge tree of ancestors, and one damn German? It's absurd. I would be a liar if I told people I was German. My boss is 100% German, but you don't see me kissing up by telling stories about my German grandmother.

UPDATE: Hmmm. I wonder if it would work...

Liberals like to explain Trump like this: He has succeeded by blaming white people's problems on non-whites.

In other words, the President is a big-time scapegoater. Like Hitler blaming Jews for Germany's troubles, Trump supposedly appeals to our basest instincts.

Let's side aside the fact that Trump has consistently criticized NON-AMERICANS, not non-whites. Cheating, lying sons of bitches that liberals are, they always turn everything into an opportunity to call us (subhuman) racists.

But the truth is that Leftists are the supreme scapegoaters of ALL TIME. They set the example going back more than 200 years.

Like the Nazi who sees a Jew behind every social problem, liberals claim that EVERY injustice is the fault of rich people. All paths lead to the FAT CATS. They are evil incarnate.

And if the Left gets the opportunity, they will holocaust anyone who even seems well-off. My wife's Ukrainian great grandfather was sent to Siberia because he owned two horses and had six kids. Naturally he was a filthy rich, evil kulak.

Nazi hatred for Jews has got nothing on Leftist hatred of successful people.

We can go to Nietzsche to get an explanation of their psychology. He calls it ressentiment. Capitalism has kicked socialist ass for two centuries, so the losers transform their sense of inferiority into hatred of their betters. And so they wound their enemy with lies. If they get power, they imprison and murder them.

And because so many of us are tempted by this hatred of the rich, we have let them get away with their malignant scapegoating.

Of course, the Left's latest move has been to replace the wealthy with whites as the demonic source of all suffering. But that's another post.

Using General Social Survey data, I calculated the correlation between conservatism and feeling cool toward blacks. It's practically non-existent--a trivial .07. Next, I correlated a correlation between liberalism and coolness toward conservatives. It's large--.45.

To put this in plain English, conservatism does NOT predict hatred for blacks, but liberalism STRONGLY predicts hatred for conservatives.

An interesting claim was made by Tantum Malorum on Twitter (where I spend all my time these days).  He said that Asians tend to vote Democrat because they are disproportionately young.  I looked into this with GSS data. The mean age of all voters in 2012 was 52.2. Here are the means for Asian groups listed in GSS:

Mean age
Chinese  51.1
Filipino  42.6
Japanese  45.5 
Indian  48.6
Other Asian  45.0

Mean age for all groups was lower than for the total sample, although it's not much lower for Chinese Americans. Since young people tend to vote Democrat, it could be that Asians are not more inclined to be liberal, they're just younger.

Next, let's look at voting in 2012 for: 1) young Asians, and 2) older Asians. I'm going to add all Asian groups together since sample sizes are so low.

Percent voting for Romney

Ages 18-44  
All voters  32%
Asian voters  25%

Ages 45 and up
All voters  40%
Asian voters  38%

First of all, it looks like the numbers are lower than they should be. GSS oversamples women, so this might be a problem.

Anyway, 25% of young Asians voted for Romney, compared to 32% of all young people. For older Asians, there is only a two point gap with all older voters.

So, it looks like the Asian vote is tilted Democrat because they are a younger population, but they are a little more liberal as well.

The numbers are too small to make much of it, but of the Asian groups, Indians were noticeably more likely to vote for Obama.

Why do these predominantly white Red States vote for Bernie in the primaries/caucuses? Is there a polarization that goes on? For example, in my mostly white state, about 60% vote Republican and 40% Democrat. The Republicans tend to be ordinary, religious folks. The Democrats are not religious and tend to be hipsters. I wonder if the progressives prefer the more extreme Democrat candidate because their politics are, in part, a reaction to state domination by conservatives. "I want to be the opposite of those bigoted squares," and Hillary is not a sufficiently extreme contrast. Why else would they vote so differently from their demographically similar neighbors? 

Seeing so many democratic socialists in the Iowa Caucus disturbed me.  I wanted to see if this is part of a larger trend of liberals moving left. The green areas show that the percent of liberals who say they are extremely liberal has stayed at around 14% for more than a decade. Where we see change is the move away from slightly liberal to liberal. In 2002, 41% said they were liberal. In 2014, this had increased five points to 46%.

This is consistent with other data I've seen that the country (just like the national leadership) is more polarized--fewer people in the middle.

We'll have to watch whether Bernie can convince liberals in the South (i.e, blacks and Hispanics) and beyond to vote for him. If he does, this country is more open to European-style socialism than I thought.

Man, it's weird dusting this thing off.  I still don't have time for a blog, but the Presidential election cycle always gets me jazzed up and wanting to see what the data have to tell us about interesting questions, often political questions.

With the Trump phenomenon, the old "Republicans are stupid people" is back with a vengeance, but the politically correct twist I've heard more of lately is that they are "uneducated."  So is that true?

The General Social Survey asked people who they voted for in 2012.  Here's is the mean vocabulary score--a decent proxy for IQ--for the two groups:

Mean Vocabulary Score

Voted for Romney (n = 421): 6.45

Voted for Obama (n = 615): 6.23


Romney voters were slightly smarter than Obama voters. Now, let's look at mean education:


Mean Years of Education

Voted for Romney (n = 421) 14.45

Voted for Obama (n = 615) 14.23

Again, Romney voters are slightly more educated. It's pretty clear that Trump fans are more working-class than others planning to vote Republican, but liberals constantly make the mistake of thinking that "no more Muslims" is a sign that someone is dumb, when in fact it is a sign that a person happens to not be part of the crowd that is convinced that liberal ideas are a signal of intelligence and enlightenment, and therefore must be adopted. Liberals think these people are sheep, but as Noam Chomsky once said, no group is more sheepish than liberals.

In his wonderful political novel The Possessed, Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote that socialists obsess about their own money more than anyone. Anecdotally, the flaming lesbian socialist professor whose office is next to mine is constantly on the phone with someone talking about her investments. (I can see why she worries. She has a lot more money than the rest of us. Her salary is 20 percent higher than any faculty I know.)

The General Social Survey asked respondents who is in charge of family finances (sample size = 208). This might not be the perfect measure of concern for money, but it's the best one I could find.

Twelve percent of liberals compared to 24 percent of conservatives said their spouse takes care of the money. (Gender is not a factor. Also--most couples share the responsibility.) So, by this measure, twice as many conservatives don't focus on money.

The verbal tricks of liberals show real audacity. You always hear how conservatives are divisive because we oppose things like abortion and gay marriage. Up until 40 years ago, practically everyone--even the irreligious--believed that traditional views of marriage and family were authoritative. Everyone took them for granted.

Then liberals came along, claimed that the institution was oppressive and antiquated, and they proceeded to tear it down. The truth is only obvious: THEY are the aggressors here. And when we start fighting back after getting smacked around, we're called divisive. Only verbal tricksters as deceptive as liberals could get away with walking up to you, punching you, and then crying about what a bully you are.

Liberal smugness nauseates me when it doesn't make me laugh. Mocking Michelle Bachman's husband's clinic for treating men for homosexuality is just the latest example. (I'm not defending here the malleability view of some conservative Christians.)  We all know the liberal reasoning: Science has demonstrated that a homosexual orientation is genetic so, therefore, it is normal. The thinking that has gone into this talking point belies typical liberal shallowness.

First, twin studies have estimated the heritability for homosexual orientation to be well under 50 percent. Alcohol abuse, by contrast, is over .5. (If you're offended by my example, simply substitute shyness, negative emotionality or any of a very long list of traits.) To be consistent, liberals should be arguing that alcoholism is even more genetic than homosexuality and therefore should be enthusiastically embraced by society, and the notion of treatment is absurd.

Although they leave their beliefs unexamined, they consider alcoholism to be problematic because of the costs that it imposes on people. (Of course, many progressives still deny that genes are important for just about anything other than homosexual orientation.) Their morality is that sexual behaviors are good if people have a desire to do them, and nobody gets hurt. But that doesn't explain their discomfort with, for example, polygamy, prostitution, or bestiality, so throw in heavy doses of public image work (i.e., propaganda) done by cultural elites, and we have an moral-psychological explanation for why liberals equate biology with goodness in the case of homosexuality.

Liberals are blind to how their view of the goodness of homosexuality is at its base moral, not scientific. (One can very easily make that case that, assuming an evolution-based morality, homosexuality is pathological because it works against reproduction.) Conservative Christians are very open about their values. Liberals, on the other hand, delude themselves into thinking that their beliefs are science. Christians believe in an eternal objective morality. (Flawed humans don't apprehend it fully, but it is there nevertheless.) Progressives look to Hollywood for today's right and wrong. When I was a little boy, gay men were portrayed as villains in movies. Today they are saints and martyrs. Right and wrong change so quickly, I can't keep up. Elites change their minds so often, one begins to think they have no idea what they're talking about.     

Talking about the debt ceiling fight, Chris Matthews just called Republicans terrorists. Let's react to that statement like a liberal would. Americans respond to terrorists by killing them. Matthews has just called for the murder of Republicans.

What do those clever liberals call it--exterminationist language?

And this from a guy who was blaming Palin for the Arizona shooting days after it was clear that she had nothing to do with it.

It's the 4th: let's do a post that will bring everyone together.

Liberals like to pat themselves on the back for being the smart voters. They seem to think this proves that they are right. While various data analyses by HBD-ers like myself have shown that the claim of having higher IQs is a myth, GSS data indicate that, based on their way of reasoning, conservatives are right.

Of the 19 people surveyed in 2010 with IQs of 70 or lower, 14 or 74 percent voted for Obama. Sixty-one percent of the retarded sample voted for Kerry (n = 67). The most mentally limited Americans vote for liberals.

TGGP directs us to an excellent GSS study by James Lindgren which shows that redistributionists (liberals) are more racist, angrier, less altruistic, and less happy than anti-redistributrionists (conservatives):

In debates over the roles of law and government in promoting the equality of income or in redistributing the fruits of capitalism, widely different motives are attributed to those who favor or oppose capitalism or income redistribution. According to one view, largely accepted in the academic social psychology literature (Jost et al. 2003), opposition to income redistribution and support for capitalism reflect an orientation toward social dominance, a desire to dominate other groups. According to another view that goes back at least to the nineteenth century origins of Marxism, anti-capitalism and a support for greater legal efforts to redistribute income reflect envy for the property of others and a frustration with one’s lot in a capitalist system.


In this paper I expand and test the social dominance thesis using sixteen nationally representative General Social Surveys conducted by the National Opinion Research Center between 1980 and 2004. Because few questions of interest were asked in most years or of most respondents, the sample sizes used for analyses vary from 535 to 15,743.

I first show that respondents who express traditionally racist views (on segregation, interracial marriage, and inborn racial abilities) tend to support greater income redistribution. Traditional racists also tend to oppose free-market capitalism and its consequences, wanting the government to guarantee jobs for everyone and fix prices, wages, and profits. Next, I report a similar pattern for those who express intolerance for unpopular groups on the fifteen Stouffer tolerance questions (regarding racists, homosexuals, communists, extreme militarists, and atheists). Those who express less tolerance for unpopular groups tend to favor income redistribution and oppose capitalism.

Then I present the results of six full latent variable structural equation models. The latent variables traditional racism (Model 1: r=.27) and intolerance (Model 2: r=.31) predict the latent variable income redistribution. Similarly, the latent variables traditional racism (Model 3: r=.33) and intolerance (Model 4: r=.36) predict anti-capitalism. Controlling for education, income (log), gender, and age (Models 5 and 6), the effects of the racism and intolerance predictors on redistribution and intolerance are reduced, but remain significant. Thus the preference against income redistribution, for example, is not just the result of income or education - rather, the data are consistent with racism and intolerance continuing to play a small, but significant role in explaining the support for income redistribution and anti-capitalism. The data are broadly inconsistent with the standard belief in the social psychology literature that pro-capitalist and anti-redistributionist views are positively associated with racism.

I then explore an alternative hypothesis, showing that, compared to anti-redistributionists, strong redistributionists have about two to three times higher odds of reporting that in the prior seven days they were angry, mad at someone, outraged, sad, lonely, and had trouble shaking the blues. Similarly, anti-redistributionists had about two to four times higher odds of reporting being happy or at ease. Not only do redistributionists report more anger, but they report that their anger lasts longer. When asked about the last time they were angry, strong redistributionists were more than twice as likely as strong opponents of leveling to admit that they responded to their anger by plotting revenge. Last, both redistributionists and anti-capitalists expressed lower overall happiness, less happy marriages, and lower satisfaction with their financial situations and with their jobs or housework.

Further, in the 2002 and 2004 General Social Surveys anti-redistributionists were generally more likely to report altruistic behavior. In particular, those who opposed more government redistribution of income were much more likely to donate money to charities, religious organizations, and political candidates. The one sort of altruistic behavior that the redistributionists were more likely to engage in was giving money to a homeless person on the street.

Evidence from sixteen national representative samples from 1980 through 2004 tends to suggest that Social Dominance Orientation has been in part misconceived. In the United States, segments of the academic community seem to have reversed the relationship between pro-capitalism and income redistribution on the one hand, and racism and intolerance on the other. Those who support capitalism and oppose greater income redistribution tend to be better educated, to have higher family incomes, to be less traditionally racist, and to be less intolerant of unpopular groups. Those who oppose greater redistribution also tend to be more generous in donating to charities and more likely to engage in some other altruistic behavior. The academic assumption that anti-capitalism and opposition to income redistribution reflect an orientation toward social dominance seems unwarranted.

Richard Dreyfuss, as part of his campaign against incivility in public discourse, responded to the question of whether Ed Schultz's wish that Dick Cheney would "go to the Promised Land" was incivil by saying, no, it was a beautifully phrased comment.

I would like, then, in the spirit of civility, to request that Mr. Dreyfuss go make love to himself.  

After rolling my eyes at the Native American invocation given at the memorial service rally in Tucson, I wondered what percent of American Indians even belong to an indigenous religion.

According to the GSS, here is the distribution of religious affiliations for American Indians (sample size = 1,818--I didn't count the white wannabes)

Percent

Protestant  53.3
Catholic 17.8
None 13.2
Other 7.4
Native American 4.1
Christian 3.3
Buddhist 0.8

Wow! A whopping 4 percent of American Indians belong to an indigenous faith.

According to the most recent GSS Survey (2008), 0.7% of Americans are Amerindians. So the Tucson event catered to--what--about three people?  I've got more cousins. Organizers didn't give a damn about the wishes of real, live Indians (or they would have asked a Protestant minister to pray). They really care about their fashionable liberal buddies.

Liberal arguments these days have been reduced to maligning the other side. They respond to the growth of the Tea Party, not with logic but invective. And this from people who claim it is their side that respects the scientific method. 

How do you rationally characterize a political movement? Well, you conduct a study and summarize your results. We can't rely on professional liberal analysts to do this:
 

Emily Ekins, a graduate student at UCLA, conducted the survey at the 9/12 Taxpayer March on Washington last month by scouring the crowd, row by row and hour by hour, and taking a picture of every sign she passed.

Ekins photographed about 250 signs, and more than half of those she saw reflected a "limited government ethos," she found - touching on such topics as the role of government, liberty, taxes, spending, deficit and concern about socialism. Examples ranged from the simple message "$top the $pending" scrawled in black-marker block letters to more elaborate drawings of bar charts, stop signs and one poster with the slogan "Socialism is Legal Theft" and a stick-figure socialist pointing a gun at the head of a taxpayer.

There were uglier messages, too - including "Obama Bin Lyin' - Impeach Now" and "Somewhere in Kenya a Village is Missing its Idiot." But Ekins's analysis showed that only about a quarter of all signs reflected direct anger with Obama. Only 5 percent of the total mentioned the president's race or religion, and slightly more than 1 percent questioned his American citizenship.

These numbers indicate that the Tea Party does not have more insensitive people than any other random group. They might have fewer. Once again, we see that liberals have little grip on reality--or they do but feel they have to lie because their arguments are so weak.


UPDATE: I retract my statement. The NAACP is going to release a "study" of rampant Tea Party racism one week before the election.  

In knee-jerk fashion, liberals blame everything on business practices. If minorities are less likely to have home mortgages, racist lenders are to blame. If lending is too generous, and minorities get loans they cannot repay, mortgage companies are predators.

Fortunately, Americans aren't falling for the BS. According to Rasmussen, only 20 percent--liberal kool-aid drinkers, I'm sure--believe that current home foreclosures are due to unfair lending practices. Fifty-nine percent believe the problem is that people chose to get loans they couldn't afford. Once again, we see the gulf between elites and ordinary folks. I see that Rasmussen did not offer "lenders were encouraged by government to make risky loans to low-income people" as an answer-choice.


UPDATE: I missed this shocker:

Blacks by a two-to-one margin over whites are more inclined to think unfair lending practices are the reason for bank foreclosures.

Dammit, Jon Hamm has got our number. Pretending to be a marketing expert on TV has really got him wired into the American public. He says the Tea Party has got a secret racist agenda. According to Gallup, 28 percent of Americans are Tea Party supporters. That works out to be roughly 87 million people. The lair where we plot the takeover of the world and teach each other the codewords he's talking about is one hell of a lair.