A hereditarian revolution won't solve the right’s "stupidity problem"
Responding to Nathan Cofnas.
Written by Noah Carl.
Nathan Cofnas has written a brilliant essay: ‘Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem’. If you haven’t read it yet, you should. Briefly, he argues that in order to defeat wokeness and win over elites, the right needs to expose the “Big Lie” that all races have the same innate potential.
I agree with 80% of what Cofnas has to say. For example, I agree with him that Christopher Rufo’s and Richard Hanania’s explanations for wokeness are unsatisfactory in that they beg the question: in Rufo’s case, of why woke activists managed to gain so much power within the academy; and in Hanania’s case, of why judges ignored the letter of the Civil Rights law and started discriminating against whites and Asians. I also agree with his main point that the taboo surrounding hereditarianism is good for the woke and bad for the right.
However, there are three points on which I disagree with Cofnas. The first is that cognitive elites are woke. The second is that the taboo surrounding hereditarianism (the “Big Lie”, as he calls it) is the most important cause of wokeness. The third is that cognitive elites’ belief in racial environmentalism is the most important reason why they don’t lean right. In the remainder of this essay, I’ll explain why I disagree on these points.
Cognitive elites are liberal
“Smart people are disproportionately attracted to wokism,” Cofnas writes. They “overwhelmingly choose wokism over right-wing alternatives.” Do they? I think Cofnas is being imprecise with his language here. He’s right that smart people are attracted to racial environmentalism.1 But he’s wrong that they’re attracted to wokeness.
Racial environmentalism is clearly a major element of wokeness (no woke person ever endorsed hereditarianism), but this doesn’t mean that every racial environmentalist is woke. After all, the vast majority of people are racial environmentalists – or at least claim to be when asked. In a 2014 survey, 82% of Britons disagreed that “some races are born less intelligent than others”. Yet the proportion who endorse wokeness is far smaller. For example, only 23% of Britons think the term “white privilege” is helpful.
As I’ve noted before, wokeness is a particular strand of leftism that is distinct from other strands, such as old-school Marxism or traditional left-liberalism. Some of the defining features of wokeness are: an excessive focus on identity groups like sex and race; an explicit questioning2 of liberal values like equality before the law; and an extreme opposition to speech that is deemed offensive or harmful. All of these features stand in contrast to traditional left-liberalism – and all are unattractive to cognitive elites.
That’s because cognitive elites lean liberal. Who are the most prominent woke intellectuals? Robin Di Angelo and Ibram X. Kendi – not exactly the intellectual giants of our age. By contrast, who are the most prominent liberal intellectuals? Many of them can be found among the signatories of the 2020 Harper’s Letter – people like Matthew Yglesias, John McWhorter and Steven Pinker. One could also mention names such as Scott Alexander, Peter Singer and Robert Wright. Whether you like or dislike each of these individuals, you can hardly dispute they have high intelligence.
Of course, we can do better than simply guesstimating the intelligence of public figures. A study from 2020 found that cognitive ability is positively associated with support for free speech for racists and other disliked groups. And a study from 2022 found that cognitive ability is positively associated not only with support for free speech, but also with less concern about political correctness. Both studies were based on US data.
One possibility is that these associations are attributable to black and Hispanic respondents having lower cognitive ability and being more opposed to free speech. However, I checked in the General Social Survey, and even when you restrict the analysis to whites in the period 2010–2022, there’s a significant positive association between cognitive ability and support for free speech for racists. In fact, among whites scoring 10 out of 10 in the Wordsum vocabulary test, fully 84% support free speech for racists.
The General Social Survey includes two other items relevant to wokeness. One asks whether the respondent agrees with the statement: “Irish, Italians, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without special favors.” Here the woke response (i.e., disagreeing) is indeed more common among whites with higher cognitive ability. However, it is also rare. Consequently, whites scoring 10 out of 10 are about as likely to agree as disagree (42% versus 41%).
Note that many rare opinions are more common among those with high intelligence. For example, if you took a large sample of the general population and asked, “Do you identify with NRx?”, you’d probably find that the few respondents who answered “Yes” had a high average IQ. This doesn’t mean cognitive elites lean toward NRx. It just means they are more likely to endorse obscure or eccentric ideologies in general. The relevant question in the present context is: which ideology are they most likely to endorse?
The other item in the General Social Survey asks whether the respondent is “for or against preferential hiring and promotion of blacks?” Here the relationship between cognitive ability and the “woke” response (i.e., favouring preferential hiring) is somewhat unexpected. Whites who are “strongly” in favour have the lowest average IQ, while those who are “not strongly” in favour have the highest. Once again, however, favouring preferential hiring is rare. As a consequence, whites scoring 10 out of 10 are much more likely to oppose it than favour it (72% versus 28%).
To sum up, white cognitive elites overwhelmingly support free speech for racists and largely oppose affirmative action, and many believe that blacks should work their way up without special favours. The percentages quoted above may even underestimate elite opposition to wokeness, given that they are based on a test of verbal ability, which will tend to favour liberals over conservatives.
What’s more, one shouldn’t overstate the left-liberalism of cognitive elites; there’s a sizeable contingent of classical liberals too. Cofnas refers sarcastically to the “libtards” who “run academia and our major corporations”. And while he’s absolutely right about academia, he’s not quite right about “our major corporations”. For example, a 2019 study examined the political contributions of 3,800 individuals who served as CEOs of S&P 1500 companies between 2000 and 2017, and found “a substantial preference for Republican candidates”.3
Other studies have found evidence that CEOs often engage in woke activism for strategic reasons, rather than because they are secretly true believers. And such activism may recede in the coming years, now that right-wing consumers have shown they too can hurt companies’ bottom lines. “In the aftermath of the Bud Light controversy,” writes the Harvard Business Review, “many consumer brand marketing departments have become acutely aware of the potential pitfalls of taking stances on controversial social issues”.
Wokeness is recent
In the section of his essay titled ‘The True Origin of Wokism’, Cofnas states the following:
By the time major civil rights legislation was passed in the 1960s, respectable people had almost unanimously embraced the fantasy that legal equality would solve the race problem. Idealistic school teachers inculcated children with the dogma that race is skin deep, and that only a deranged hater could think otherwise. Once a taboo becomes established, it is very difficult to undo it. Full-blown wokism was inevitable.
Similarly, he writes:
Given that legal equality failed to usher in an era of racial equality of outcome, and that the elites were unwilling to accept striking racial disparities as a product of nature, there was no way to avoid wokism.
But this raises the question: if cognitive elites had almost unanimously embraced racial environmentalism by the early 1960s, why did it take until the early 2010s – no less than five decades – for the Great Awokening to unfold? It’s not as if racial gaps suddenly failed to close in the early 2010s. They had consistently failed to close since the passing of the Civil Rights Act.
Note: this is a logical problem facing all three of the main explanations for wokeness – Rufo’s, Hanania’s and Cofnas’s. How can factors that were either constant or incrementally rising since the early 1960s explain a sudden change in the early 2010s?
Rufo, Hanania or Cofnas might respond that one major element of wokeness, affirmative action, has been in place for much or all of the relevant time period. But that’s simply not what wokeness means. The thing we’re trying to explain is the dramatic shift in the culture of the English-speaking world that began in the early 2010s, comprising a sudden fixation on “racism” and other forms of bigotry, a marked rise in anti-white sentiment, a massive dialling-up of cancel culture, and the rapid diffusion of “DIE” through academia and the corporate world.
The very word “wokeness” hadn’t even been used before 2015, as the charts below indicate.4
Indeed, all the evidence suggests wokeness is a phenomenon that emerged very rapidly between 2010 and 2015. It is not something that gradually built up, like the content of Critical Race Theory or judicial interpretations of Civil Rights Law. This can be seen most clearly in David Rozado’s famous charts showing the frequency with which woke jargon is used in broadsheet newspapers:
It can also be seen in Zach Goldberg’s charts tracking attitudes to blacks and immigrants among white “liberals”.
Yet another place it can be seen is the chart tracking incidents in FIRE’s Scholars Under Fire database. A chart plotting removals of “problematic” monuments would look very similar.
There are further indications that wokeness is very recent. In the 1990s, you could get away with hilariously non-PC advertisements like the ones shown below for the game Command & Conquer. In the 2000s, Jared Taylor could appear on Phil Donahue and Peter Brimelow could appear on the Young Turks. As late as 2008, major Hollywood films could feature characters in blackface. And as late as 2011, they could feature white characters who repeatedly say the n-word.5
In 2008, Joe Biden called the segregationist senator John Stennis “a hell of a guy”, having praised another segregationist senator, Strom Thurmond, in 1993. Upon accepting the Margaret Sanger award from Planned Parenthood in 2009, Hillary Clinton said, “I admire Margaret Sanger enormously … I am really in awe of her.” (Sanger’s name was subsequently removed from Planned Parenthood over her support for eugenics, including forced sterilisation of the “unfit”.) And as late as 2015, the Confederate flag still flew outside the statehouse in many Southern states.6
For Cofnas, “the driving cause of wokism was widespread acceptance of the equality thesis, and that is what must be explained”. But how can the driving cause of something that emerged very rapidly between 2010 and 2015 be something that was already present in the early 1960s? One can argue that, with each passing year, the failure of racial gaps to close made the need for corrective action more pressing. But again, it’s not as if wokeness increased a little bit each year. There was little wokeness in 2010 and then lot of wokeness in 2020.
To be clear, Cofnas is right that the Great Awokening would almost certainly never have happened if elites had not embraced racial environmentalism. However, I don’t think that’s a strong basis for describing “widespread acceptance of the equality thesis” as the “driving cause of wokism”. I think it makes more sense to say that elites’ embrace of racial environmentalism was one of several causes of the Great Awokening, with women’s entry into the workforce being another. It was a necessary but not sufficient condition.
Given the speed with which wokeness arose in the early 2010s, it seems reasonable to assume it was triggered by one or more events that happened around that time. We can rule out ground-breaking developments in Critical Race Theory or crucial new interpretations of Civil Rights Law. So what happened? The best two candidates I’ve come across are the invention of the smartphone/social media and the Occupy Wall Street protests.
I want to emphasise that I’m not disputing a causal role for elites' embrace of racial environmentalism in the rise of wokeness. I’m just saying that it’s a stretch to call it the “driving cause”.
Why cognitive elites don’t lean right
Confas gives the impression that the main or only reason for the right’s “stupidity problem” is that cognitive elites have bought into racial environmentalism. “Intelligent, thoughtful people are disproportionately likely to recognize the tension between the equality thesis and most right-wing views,” he writes. So if they could just be convinced of the truth of hereditarianism, they might start “defecting to the right on scale”.
While I certainly agree that more cognitive elites would lean right in the absence of the taboo surrounding hereditarianism, I’m not sure that many more would. In other words, I’m not convinced that the taboo is the only or even main reason for the right’s “stupidity problem”.
As we’ve seen, cognitive elites are not woke, but rather liberal. This indicates that comparatively few have followed the “equality thesis” to what Cofnas sees as its logical conclusion. Yes, there are some elite groups one can point to, notably academics, that are very woke and have a high average IQ. But they are not representative of all cognitive elites. Moreover, the wokest academics tend to have the lowest IQs. Serious subjects like Mathematics and Economics have much higher GRE scores than activist fields like Gender Studies and Communications.
Another reason to be sceptical of Cofnas’s view that exposing the “Big Lie” might solve the right’s “stupidity problem” is that hereditarianism with respect to individual differences is already widely accepted. Across two US samples, Emily Willoughby and colleagues obtained a lay estimate for the heritability of intelligence of 0.58 – almost identical to the figure reported in a recent meta-analysis of twin studies. Yet this hasn’t pushed cognitive elites to the right. Most intelligent people are still in favour of public education and a welfare state. As Cofnas himself observes, “America devotes far more money and resources to “special” than to gifted education”.
Yet another reason for scepticism is that the liberalism of cognitive elites isn’t something unique to the US or countries where race is a salient issue. In a 2022 paper titled ‘Brahmin left versus Merchant right’, Thomas Piketty and colleagues show that highly educated people have shifted their support to left-wing parties in almost every Western country. This includes Finland, which is still 96% ethnic European; and Australia, where most immigrants are high-skilled Asians.
A 2018 paper found that even in China (which is 91% Han Chinese) educated people are less nationalistic, less traditional and more supportive of market-oriented reforms.
Now, it’s quite possible that the right in countries like Finland, Australia and China has less of a “stupidity problem” than the American right. For one thing, education isn’t a perfect proxy for IQ. In fact, I suspect that cognitive elites in the US are less likely to lean right than their counterparts in other countries. However, this is most likely to due certain features of the American right that make it unattractive to such elites. First, the American right is unusually religious and socially conservative. Second, the American right is led by Donald Trump.
The literature shows very clearly that IQ is negatively associated with both religiosity and social conservatism. These associations are not huge but are sufficient to produce a reliable liberal skew among cognitive elites. It follows that the more religious and socially conservative the right is, the less appealing it will be to such elites.
This is abundantly clear in the General Social Survey. Looking at five key issues that separate liberals from conservatives, cognitive elites lean strongly liberal on all five. Among respondents (of all races) scoring 10 out of 10 in the Wordsum vocabulary test: 64% support marijuana legalisation; 68% oppose prohibiting adult pornography; 70% support gay marriage; 71% support the right to abortion for any reason; and 79% oppose local governments mandating school prayer. Note that none of these issues relates to the “Big Lie” about race.
In addition to being unusually religious and socially conservative, the American right is currently led by Donald Trump – a man whose “brash” personality and “unpresidential” language make him especially unappealing to cognitive elites.
In 2016, Trump lost college educated voters by 9 points, which was the largest gap favouring the Democrats in any election year going back to the 1980s. Then in 2020, he lost them by 12 points. Mitt Romney, who was more economically right-wing than Trump (though less socially conservative), lost college educated voters by a small margin in 2012. Indeed, Yoav Ganzach and colleagues found that cognitive ability was a significant negative predictor of support for Trump, but was unrelated to support for Romney.
Charles Murray is man of obviously high intelligence who has been on the right all his adult life. In fact, he’s one of the right’s leading public intellectuals. Not only that, but he has an excellent understanding of the evidence for hereditarianism. Despite all this, he reportedly harbours “monolithic, seamless, implacable contempt for Trump”. Almost no one is more keenly aware of the “Big Lie” than Murray and yet even he deemed Trump “unfit to be POTUS”.
Another major conservative figure who was sharply critical of Trump is the late Sir Roger Scruton. His “defects of character are so manifest,” Scruton said. And he is “a product of the cultural decline that is rapidly consigning our artistic and philosophical inheritance to oblivion”.
Conclusion
I should reiterate that I agree with 80% of what Cofnas wrote in his essay – not least his fundamental point that we must demolish the taboo surrounding hereditarianism. The purpose of my response is mostly to sound a note of caution: while demolishing the taboo will likely prompt some cognitive elites to move right, it won’t cause many to do so. A hereditarian revolution may not solve the right’s “stupidity problem”.
Cognitive elites are liberal, not woke. And a majority of them already disagree with central woke policies like denying free speech to racists and preferential hiring of blacks. After the passing of the Civil Rights act – by which time most cognitive elites had embraced racial environmentalism – America went five decades without a Great Awokening. This suggests that beliefs about the causes of racial inequality have a less straightforward relationship with wokeness than Cofnas seems to imply. And even if cognitive elites could be persuaded of the truth of hereditarianism, they’d still have plenty of reasons to lean left. The American right is unusually religious and socially conservative, and is currently led by Donald Trump – all factors that make it off-putting to people of high intelligence.
Here’s how I expect policy would change following a hereditarian revolution (assuming nothing else changed). There would be less affirmative action, and immigration would shift even further toward high-skilled Asians. Aside from that, I doubt very much would be different. There would still be a welfare state and public funding of education. Cognitive elites would still be in favour of abortion, gay marriage, pornography and legalisation of some drugs, and would still be opposed to religion in the public sphere. Trump would still be held in contempt by most of the academic and media class.
A reasonable response to what I’ve argued goes as follows. “If elites are not woke, as you claim, then how did the Great Awokening happen in the first place?” I think there are three reasons. First, institutions in which decision-making is partly democratic (e.g., the Democratic Party) don’t generally reflect the views of their smartest members. Second, liberal whites of high intelligence are particularly sensitive to accusations of bigotry, and many have been cowed into silence by activists whose views they don’t necessarily share. Third, the backlash against wokeness on the part of conservatives and non-woke liberals was somewhat delayed. There’s now preliminary evidence that wokeness is “winding down”.
Noah Carl is Editor at Aporia.
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It is not so much that smart people are attracted to racial environmentalists as that people of low intelligence are attracted to hereditarianism (in the general population).
According to Critical Race Theory: An Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, “critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law”.
Note that “woke” is not as useful an indicator since it can also refer to “woke” as in “woke up”. Note also that “wokeness” is much more widely used than “wokism”.
Tropic Thunder and Django Unchained did cause controversy at the time. The point is that a few years later they couldn’t even be made.
One could also mention Bill Clinton’s Sister Souljah moment or Hillary Clinton’s remarks about “super-predators”.
Thanks for responding. Some comments:
I wrote that "smart people overwhelmingly choose wokism over right-wing alternatives." Non-woke liberals like Pinker and McWhorter are not counterexamples to this claim. They're not woke, but they're not on the right, either. I don't think you challenge the point that, when it comes to attracting smart people, the right is not very competitive vis-à-vis wokism *or* regular liberalism.
Point taken re the CEOs of S&P 1500 companies disproportionately donating to Republicans. However, I think this is a potentially misleading statistic. Woke corporate culture goes far beyond what is mandated by the law, and seems to be driven largely by employee demand. Note the mass resignations at Coinbase and Basecamp after they tried to dewokify the workplace. Wokism is good for business because that's what many of the most valuable employees want. The average age of S&P 1500 CEOs is 62 (literally a boomer), and most of them were probably appointed by people born before WWII. The next generation of CEOs might be different.
I could quibble over how to interpret the GSS data (footnote: I agree with almost all of the positions you labeled "liberal"), but I think the right's cognitive deficiency is clearly displayed in its collective behavior. Why are our institutions so conspicuously inferior compared to those of the left? Why have we not been able to take over a single major university? Why did we select Trump to be our leader?
"But this raises the question: if cognitive elites had almost unanimously embraced racial environmentalism by the early 1960s, why did it take until the early 2010s – no less than five decades – for the Great Awokening to unfold?"
I don't think this is a difficult question to answer. Values are sticky. It takes a couple generations to reach a tipping point where radical change occurs. The philosophical and empirical premises motivating wokism were largely accepted three generations ago. The growth of the ideology was linear until circa 2012 when you had a critical mass of people in power encouraging DEI values, plus true believing zoomers arriving on college campuses.
Agree that race isn't everything. As I say in the original post, wokism is partly the inevitable consequence of integrating women into our institutions. I link to your excellent article about this!
A post-hereditarian revolutionary world would be one in which the intellectual and moral credibility of the liberal establishment has been destroyed, and the right is free to develop a coherent philosophy. That won't fix all of our problems—and it will no doubt create new ones—but I can't imagine a scenario where "[not] very much would be different."
Sorry, but I have to say that I find this discussion greatly over-complicates things. The hard truth that Western liberalism so struggles with is that people who are free-thinking and open-minded and independent-minded are (and have always been) the exception, not the rule. In consequence there are - in big picture philosophical terms - very few 'smart people'; whatever their nominal IQ. Most people - the vast majority in fact - are group-thinkers. The need to be liked, to go with the flow etc is just too compelling.The distinctions between this that or the other brand of 'elite liberalism' that feature so large in this essay really have little significance. The big picture is that we have had 60 years of a rag-bag hegemony of 'Progressive' vanity, narcissism and sentimentality - right across the academy, arts and media. And we are currently witnessing its chickens coming home to roost.