Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania was meeting last week with representatives from a teachers union in his home state when things quickly devolved.
Before long, Fetterman began repeating himself, shouting and questioning why “everybody is mad at me,” “why does everyone hate me, what did I ever do” and slamming his hands on a desk, according to one person who was briefed on what occurred.
As the meeting deteriorated, a staff member moved to end it and ushered the visitors into the hallway, where she broke down crying. The staffer was comforted by the teachers who were themselves rattled by Fetterman’s behavior, according to a second person who was briefed separately on the meeting.
What if it’s deeper than that. Like not systematic. What if liberals who are educated are just more outspoken. Or that people who tend to need post secondary school are more left leaning. What if it has nothing to do with education at all. I see no reason to believe the left are any more intelligent than the right. The argument that they are is similar to arguments like people in Alberta saying they’re better than other provinces because they’re rich but really it’s just a product of living in a province where there’s an abundance of natural resources.
I think a major part of it is education and exposure. Conservativism is, generally, a desire to halt or even roll back “progress”. The embrace of traditions and nostalgia for the imaginary “good old days”. You know what your parents and your community taught you. You’ve established what normal is from your small sample size. Why change things? Everyone you know gets along just fine and you like the way it is. Different is scary.
Unfortunately, the world is really fucking complicated. Simple explanations can make perfect sense when your understanding is simple. However, the more you learn about the world, the more diversity you are exposed to, the more context you discover, the more stereotypes get broken… the more accommodating and progressive you usually become.
It is deeper and systemic. Depending on your field of study it could be analyzed any number of ways. I said nothing about intelligence, that’s hard to quantify and we’re all born with the same set of tools more or less. What is quantifiable is the census and voting records of various states around this nation. Being born into a family of poor idiots doesn’t make you dumb, but it does put you at a statistical likelihood of not seeing that potential because college is expensive and the local culture believing higher education=liberal brainwashing.
No one is automatically better than anyone else based on their zip code, but being in the nicer ones does help, who’d have thought
But intelligence and education are not exactly the same things.
A stockbroker knows about farms; but not the finer details that make one successful. Much like how politicians say they understand the struggles of the working class but never worked a day in their lives
It’s far darker than this. You’re all one step away from this kind of flip. I mean neurotypical people here (though I doubt neurodivergent are proof against it, normal people are just super vulnerable). It’s all based on identity and once something is part of your identity there is no logic that can shift you.