Maybe Ross is right, though I suspect Ms. McArdle is making more sense in this case, but can someone please smack the AFP writer who penned this drivel:

Aristotle may have been more on the mark than he realised when he said that man is by nature a political animal.

(Crankish intellectual mode on.)  For the love of all that’s holy, if AFP writers must refer to Aristotle, could they at least consult their Cliff’s Notes (or appropriate French substitute) first?  This is not a clever play on words or an amusing joke, but a kind of bowdlerised Aristotle for morons.  This is obviously not what zoon politikon means, and never could have done, since ta politika for Aristotle meant something that encompassed a wide range of social, ethical and religious life.  When he said that man is a political animal, he meant that man was naturally inclined to live in political community with others. (Crankish intellectual mode off.)

It has never been clear to me that liberals are all that much more interested in “ambiguity and complexity” than the average conservative (those on our side did not come up with the phrase “knee-jerk liberal” out of nowhere), and it is not at all clear that many of the people who call themselves conservatives today are actually politically conservative, which complicates things a bit.  The kind of bizarre dogmatism and blindness to reality exhibited by many soi-disant conservatives these days seem to be traits of an ideological cast of mind, but it doesn’t seem to me that this is conservative or that it is associated with a recognisably conservative politics.  The modern king of stubbornness and inflexibility, Mr. Bush, is probably temperamentally less conservative than Woodrow Wilson, and his politics are lamentably similar.   

Ross offers his explanation:

It isn’t just that the left, far more than the right, tends to tell brainiacs what they want to hear – that they were born to rule, that the world is just waiting to be reshaped for the better by their combination of smarts and expertise. (Though of course right-wingers sometimes give in to this temptation as well.) It’s that we live in a society that makes an aggressive attempt to select for intelligence in the formation of its elite, and then educates that elite in a university system that is liberal to the core – not left-wing, necessarily, or not anymore, but certainly not conservative either, unless you think (as some fools do) that Thomas Friedman qualifies as a man of the right. The modern meritocracy has evolved to bring up most of its pupils to be Friedmanites, a minority to be Chomskyites, and a vastly smaller minority to be actual conservatives. Small wonder, then, that if you’re brainy in America, you probably call yourself a liberal – you were raised that way, after all. Whereas conservatives are the stupid party – the party of the Boston phone directory, not the Harvard Faculty Club, with some crankish intellectuals thrown in for ballast.

This sounds plausible at first.  God help me, I was raised that way in many respects, but fortunately I managed to survive with my mind intact and free of sympathies with the “great” Friedman and the like.  Certainly, preparatory schools try their best to indoctrinate “future leaders” with the very latest hogwash, but it is this kind of constant reinforcement that creates the elite Ross is talking about. 

After thinking about Ross’ claims about “brainiacs” and being “born to rule” for a moment, I realised that we might observe that the left has so often argued for nothing of the sort.  It has traditionally told everyone that no one was born to rule, not even the intellectuals, and the more far left the revolution the more leveling, anti-intellectualism and cutting down of the tall flowers you would have.  There is a reason why the left-liberal Karl Popper identified the root of evil in Plato and Hegel, not exactly champions of rote repetition or plebeian yahooism, and it is because there is actually a presumption against the importance of intelligence and rejection of superiority of any kind in most leftist thinking. 

Social engineering does require smart technocrats, I suppose, and so those inclined to this sort of thing will be drawn towards liberal politics, but I would guarantee you that if the incentives of power, influence and status favoured a different politics many of the smart fellows, being smart fellows, would suddenly discover the virtues of right-wing ideas (or whatever was in fashion).  Rather by definition, left-wing ideas tend to be seemingly newish ideas, which makes them fashionable and thus attractive to the up-and-coming, so there may be a tendency for people who spend a great deal of time pondering ideas to fall for the latest nonsense simply because it has arrived recently on the scene.  Even so, academia was once the redoubt of relatively politically conservative people until not all that long ago, and its members were not therefore necessarily rigid or unimaginative.  

It certainly can’t be the inherent plausibility of liberalism that draws smart people to it, since it has little or none.  Today it has value as a marker of social status and in-group membership, and most who hold to its presuppositions do so out of rote and habit and unthinking allegiance, because it is expected and much more risky to reject outright.  Unless the reasonably smart person is either unusually cranky or oblivious to the social and professional costs of espousing a strong traditional conservatism, he will find a way to accommodate himself to the prevailing views of his peers.  This is how the social and political elite maintains its status–it co-opts those who might threaten it if it can and marginalises the rest.  At present, this means liberals are in, but this has to do with the changes in the kinds of people who acquired and held power in the past much more than the “cognitive style” of members of the different groups.