Liberals Progressives Democrats The Left pride themselves on being tolerant, “multicultural,” pro-“diversity,” open-minded, well-educated, warm and fuzzy, and oh-so-enlightened bleeding hearts, in contrast to those intolerant, “nativist,” judgmental, hateful, uneducated knuckle-dragging primitive Conservatives.
Alas, as we amply have experienced in our personal lives and on this blog where we regularly are insulted, cursed, and threatened with violence and death (see here and here), the Left’s description of themselves is just their self-serving narcissistic fantasy.
How do we know that?
We know that not from our personal prejudice or experiences, but from social science survey data on the differences between Democrats and Republicans. (Although Republican and conservative are not synonymous and not all Republicans are conservative, nevertheless Republicans are more conservative and right-wing than Democrats.)
It turns out that not only are Republicans more knowledgeable on politics and current events than Democrats, they are also better educated than Democrats.
See:
- Republicans more knowledgeable, better educated than Democrats
- Democrats have a lower News IQ
- Pew Research Center finds Republicans are more knowledgeable than Democrats
Republicans are also more open-minded, more tolerant of opinions and beliefs that differ from theirs, and have more empathy for other people.
Neil Munro reports for The Daily Caller that two 2012 Pew surveys (“Partisan Differences in Knowledge” and “Social networking sites and politics”) found that:
1. Republicans know more about politics and political history than Democrats: On 8 of 13 questions about politics, Republicans outscored Democrats by an average of 18 percentage points. The widest partisan gap in the survey came in at 30 points when only 46% of Democrats (vs. 76% of Republicans) correctly described the GOP as “the party generally more supportive of reducing the size of federal government.”
2. Republicans are better educated than Democrats: Pew thinks that Republicans being more knowledgeable about politics than Democrats is because the Democrats’ low average rating likely is a consequence of its bipolar political coalition, which combines well-credentialed post-graduate progressives who score well in quizzes with a much larger number of poorly educated supporters, who score badly. For example, the survey reported that 90% of college grads recognized the GOP as the party most supportive of cutting the federal government. But that number fell to 54% of people with a high-school education or less. In contrast, the Republican party coalition is more consistent, and has few poorly educated people and fewer post-graduates.
3. Republicans are not just better informed, they are more intellectually consistent, more open-minded, more empathetic and more receptive to criticism than Democrats. Democrats are far more likely than conservatives to disconnect from people who disagree with them:
- 28% of liberals have blocked, unfriended, or hidden someone on social networking sites like Facebook because of divergent opinions and beliefs, compared with 16% of conservatives and 14% of moderates.
- 11% of liberals, but only 4% of conservatives, deleted friends from their social networks after disagreeing with their politics.
4. A Washington Post poll in March 2012 also showed that Republicans are more consistent and honest about their beliefs. In contrast, Democrats are more willing to change their views about a subject to make their team look good.
- In 2006, 73% of Democrats said the GOP-controlled White House could lower gas prices, but that number fell by more than half to 33% in 2012 once a Democrat was in the White House.
- In 2006, 47% of Republicans believed the GOP-controlled White House could influence gas prices. By 2012, when a Democrat was in the White House, that number had risen to 65%, up 17 points compared to the Democrats’ 40 point shift.
See also:
- 2014 exit polls show Republicans and Democrats are very different peoples
- Conservatives and liberals smell different
- How the Left harm America’s moral character
- Disunited States of America
- Go to our “Leftwing Pathology” page for the links (colored red) to posts on the Left’s death threats and intolerance.
~Eowyn
