Impressionistically it does seem that young white liberals sometimes forget that not everyone is at the same point on social issues.
To test that out, I decided to look at the HOMOSEX variable for 2018-2022. Do people think homosexual sex is wrong? And if so, who?
First, let’s look at white non-Hispanics.
Though conservative whites are split, liberal whites are almost totally in agreement that homosexual sex is not wrong at all (the residual are generally very old if you use the COHORT variable).
How bout black Americans? The same size is smaller, so I decided to just look at ideology.
Self-described liberal blacks are only somewhat more liberal on homosexual sex than non-Hispanic white conservatives.
Let’s compare black Democrats to white Democrats.
Black Democrats basically have the same views as conservative non-Hispanic whites. The contrast with college-educated white Democrats is pretty striking.
In the conversation between Coleman Hughes and Charles Murray, there was a point where they mooted the idea that white Democrats are smarter than white Republicans. Since the realignment of the Trump era, this seems to be a major issue, as college-educated white Democrats have become more Democrat and liberal, while non-college whites less so.
I’ve looked at this before, but I’ll look at it again, using GSS’s WORDSUM variable. Correlating with IQ at 0.70 the vocab test is decent if imperfect. I looked at the distribution in non-Hispanic whites from 2016 onward (race(1) hispanic(1) year(2016-*)) for WORDSUM, and broke it into the bottom 30%, middle 50%, and top 10%. Then I looked at distributions within each political/ideological class (column) and the proportions of each political/ideological class within the vocabulary bracket.
Am I befuddled by history? Or by historiography? Or do I need a different word altogether?
Until five minutes ago, before I read this book review, it never would have occurred to me that white women were anything less than full partners with men in the white supremacy of the antebellum South. I have never read anything that even remotely suggests such a thing. And yet, apparently this has been a widely held belief—and not just by the masses, but by practicing historians as well.
Additionally, today I listened to the Extremeley Offline podcast where Zaid Jilani moderated a conversation between Liz Bruenig and Jon Chait, and Jilani talks about some of his confusion and discomfort with the racial dichotomies that have recently emerged in the United States (though our politics are very different it seems we have had the same experiences and reactions in relation to this). For example, all nonwhites are now “people of color,” set against whites. The three present a thesis that a dominant form of conceptualization of the world on the modern Left is between the marginalized and those who are not, and so you have dichotomies. People of color vs. whites. Women vs. men. The queer vs. straight. And, of course, the poor vs. the rich.
In the 20th century version of the TV series Murphy Brown, there was an episode where three young American scholars were introduced. The big laugh was that they had very Chinese or Indian names. Though it’s probably politically incorrect today to depict it that way, the joke is that the best “American” scholars were not really American….
If you’re an Asian American who remembers the period before the 1990s, you know where I’m coming from. This was an America in black and white, and you were literally the Other if you were outside of those two boxes. People would be surprised that you spoke English without an accent, and inquire where you really came from. This still happens now and then, but back in the 1980s, it was pervasive. It was tradition. The children of the first post-1965 immigrants were not yet grown, so the majority of Asian American adults you saw and encountered were immigrants outside of a few areas, such as Hawaii and portions of the West Coast. In 1980 1.7% of the people residing in the United States were Asian American. Today nearly 7% are Asian American.
This is having an impact. The winners of spelling bees and science fair winners don’t “look like America” anymore.
And this is the major reason why the cultural elite is very upset about the scrutiny which admissions processes at top universities have been receiving. Consider this op-ed in The New York Times, A Damaging Bid to Censor Applications at Harvard. It concludes:
As a leader in higher education, Harvard is trying to change this through its modest consideration of race in admissions. Its goal is to create a diverse community of students who can engage with and learn from people who are different, and carry those experiences with them beyond the university.
Expressions of racial identity are part of the fullness of our humanity. It’s not possible to be blind to race. Pretending as though it is ensures we will forever be divided.
The op-ed is pretty measured and not particularly shoddy as far as it goes. This is the sort of message that the editors and reporters at The New York Times want to amplify. Call it the anti-Bari Weiss effect.
There is some of this in the Ezra Klein Vox piece, White threat in a browning America. There are the whites. And there are the non-whites. And never the twain shall meet.
On a side note, Klein’s reliance on social psychological research about white racial anxiety being elicited by priming or information which makes non-whites salient should be critiqued more thoroughly. I suspect most of us find the argument intuitively believable, but the past five years of the replication crisis in psychology, where social psychology was ground-zero, should really make us put our guards up about evidentiary claims which support views we already have a bias toward accepting.
In any case, Klein cites research which shows that non-Hispanic whites are now less than 50% of the births in this country. Rather than arguing about the future of racial identification, I was curious about which whites were giving birth. The problem with raw average total fertility rates is that they mask underlying variance. For example, in Britain the majority of Jews are non-observant, but the majority of Jews under the age of five are from observant families. This is a function of the extremely low fertility of the non-observant majority, and the very high fertility of observant Jews in Britain.
The reason I bring this up is that the different subcultures of the United States have different fertility rates. David Hacket Fischer posits four major Anglo-American streams which date to before the Revolutionary War: New England Yankees, Tidewater and lowland Southerners, Scots-Irish highlanders, and the diverse polyglot Mid-Atlantic region, from Quakers to Dutch. Woodward and others have a somewhat different taxonomy, but the broad sketch aligns.
The curious fact is that up between the 1640s and 1840s New England Yankees were the most fecund of the American Anglo-cultures. The fertility of New England was such that the region began to colonize parts of the United States which had heretofore been dominated by other groups. The eastern half of Long Island was taken over by New Englanders, and they became prominent in New York’s merchant class (there was also a Yankee migration into the Canadian Atlantic provinces). New England farmers swept past the Dutch dominated lower Hudson Valley and overwhelmed the rest of upstate New York, creating a cultural fission that persisted up to the Civil War between the pro-Southern city of New York and the fiercely Republican upstate areas.
In contrast, the population growth rate in the South was depressed compared to the North. Much of this probably can be accounted for by endemic disease.
When looking at the General Social Survey one of the most striking things is how much more the more educated and intelligent are in terms of accepting unpopular views. Since 2008 and the SPKMSLM variable has asked about anti-American hatred preached by Muslim clerics in the United States:
… consider a Muslim clergyman who preaches hatred of the United States.
If such a person wanted to make a speech in your community preaching hatred of the United States, should he be allowed to speak, or not?
The ideological breakdown is what you’d expect it to be, and tolerance for this sort of speech is low, at about 40% of Americans.
In case you are wondering, the impact of intelligence still matters after you correct for education. I ran a quick & dirty logistic regression, and you can see that below (in case you care, being a woman is associated with less tolerance for free speech here, and political ideology doesn’t matter much once you take into account religiosity):
Over the past year or so there have been many worries that liberals are backing off from their support for free speech. Even mainstream figures such as Howard Dean have started to chant the mantra “hate speech is not free speech”. And then you have op-eds from professors such as When ‘free speech’ becomes a political weapon.
But whenever I look at the General Social Survey I see no great change in support for free speech in terms of the patterns. Perhaps something has changed in the year 2017, but I think what we are seeing are vocal and motivated minorities who are drowning out liberal (in the classical sense) majorities.
The GSS has a variable, SPKRAC, which asks:
…consider a person who believes that Blacks are genetically inferior. a. If such a person wanted to make a speech in your community claiming that Blacks are inferior, should he be allowed to speak, or not?
The plot at the top of this posts shows that the GSS sample respondents exhibit almost no change year to year on this question.
The GSS also has a variable, SPKMSLM, which asks:
Now consider a Muslim clergyman who preaches hatred of the United States.
If such a person wanted to make a speech in your community preaching hatred of the United States, should he be allowed to speak, or not?
This question has been asked since 2008, and only a minority would allow this person to speak, 41-43 percent.
Let’s break this down by ideology and intelligence from the year 2008 onward. The GSS has a variable, WORDSUM, which is a vocabulary test. Respondents receive a score from 0 to 10 (correct). I combined 0-4 as “not smart”, 5-6 as “average”, 7-8 as “above average,” and finally 9-10 as “smart.”
Also I limited the sample to non-Hispanic whites to compare “peaches to peaches.”
What the above plot shows is that liberals support free speech for both racists and Muslim radicals. Conservatives are more skeptical of free speech for both groups, but especially the Muslims. You might be curious why moderates seem so skeptical of free speech. That’s because on average moderates are less intelligent than people at the ideological poles, and the less intelligent are generally less supportive of heterodox speech (I suspect it’s because they are too dumb ever to come up with an original and transgressive idea).
But don’t take my word for it.
It’s a very robust pattern that the less intelligent are skeptical of deviant thought. I think it’s partly because they can’t empathize since they don’t have many thoughts.
Below is a table which does a cross-tab of views on speech for racists and Muslims (again, for non-Hispanic whites after the year 2008). You can see ideological and intelligence distribution for various positions. Conservative anti-Islamic and liberal philo-Muslim tendencies are on display. The less intelligent are overrepresented among the censorious.
There’s a specter haunting the academy. The specter of “red guards” destroying lives and tearing down Western civilization and all its accomplishments in the interests of antinomian leveling impulses through denunciations and purges. (here is the latest instance; the whole thing leaves me yawning, because too few people have the courage or gall to stand up for what they know is right, so this will happen again and again and again)
I am plain in my view that this is a problem. Some of my friends in the academy agree, but in the end they make different choices about priorities. Others don’t think this is a problem at all (and honestly, they clearly think that free speech is more about speech that they think is acceptable). Ultimately I don’t think that this will end well; I’m most certainly going to be on the other side of people whom I consider friends if and when the end of our current liberal democratic order collapses of its own contradictions.
But this isn’t about that. Rather, it’s about an aspect of it: are Millennials, those born after 1980, who go to college more opposed to freedom of speech than previous generations? Is this what’s driving the flair up of campus events? The answer, as clear in the GSS is that Millennials who have gone to college are not more censorious.
The GSS has a variable, SPKRAC. It asks:
…. consider a person who believes that Blacks are genetically inferior. a. If such a person wanted to make a speech in your community claiming that Blacks are inferior, should he be allowed to speak, or not?
Should this person be allowed to speak? As you can see above there is hardly any difference between people of different generations if they have a college education on this question.* The big difference is between generations among those who have a high school education or less. I think this is simply due to the reality that if you have only a high school education as a Millennial you’re much more likely to be not very intelligent in relation to older generations. The slight decline for college educated Millennials might be due to this effect as well, and more marginal kids are now going to, and finishing, college.
If you do a logistic regression in the GSS you see what I have reported earlier: both education and intelligence have independent and notable impacts predicting support of free speech to a liberal extent. Being a woman usually correlates with lower tolerance of deviant or abhorrent speech. Socioeconomic status, income, and age, don’t really matter too much when other variables are accounted for.
What about politics? The results might surprise you.
As you can see on the whole liberals are the most supportive of free speech for racists. It does look that there has been some regression since the real “greatest generation.” And as I expected moderates are the least tolerant.
Moderates are usually less intelligent (this is easily confirmed with the GSS) and informed, and they’re conformists. Today racism is in bad odor, so their instinct to ban or restrict it is strong, as opposed to the abstract principle of free speech. This impulse probably explains the declines broadly among Millennials.
But the results at the top indicate that university education may actually inoculate a bit against this! (remember, it’s not just intelligence, as university education had an independent effect on opinions in the regression)
There’s something going on. It’s a problem. Perhaps a big problem. I do think it ultimately threatens the credibility of the academy in a way we haven’t seen in generations. But it’s not because the majority of students agree with driving speakers they don’t like off the campus or banning speech they find hurtful. A minority of students are loud, mobilized, and active. Sometimes minorities can shape history….
* I limited the sample to non-Hispanic whites. I used the variables SPKRAC, COHORT and DEGREE. I recombined some. E.g., COHORT(r:1800-1945″pre-Boomer”;1946-1964″Boomer”;1965-1980″GenX”;1981-*”Millennial”). Adding groups besides non-Hispanic whites didn’t change the qualitative result, though support for free speech declines among minorities.
It’s been a while since I’ve done much GSS blogging. Part of it is that I’ve got only so much attention I can devote to things, and most of my focus has been on the area of science that I’m interested in, and one or two non-scientific topics. The second variable is that I started blogging about GSS data a long time ago (~2008), and there’s only so much interesting stuff you can talk about.
But over the past few years there have been some controversies related to speech in public spaces, and what is and isn’t acceptable. There has also been some chatter that young people today in particular are intolerant of freedom of speech. I’ve wanted to address this, so here I go.
The toleration of racists is in today’s America is like testing a boundary condition. If you are willing to tolerate racist speech if you are not a racist, then you are pretty likely to be a free speech absolutist. I am not interested in rehashing arguments, I support free speech in an absolutist sense personally. Rather, let’s look at some data.
The General Social Survey has a question up from 2014 for the variable RACEMEET that asks:
Should people prejudiced against any racial or ethnic group be allowed to hold public meetings?
The question was asked in 2010 and 2014, and 2,651 individuals answered this. The answer was converted to ordinal, so I decided to probe relationships between variables and the score of toleration through regression. Some independent variables, such as political viewpoint (POLVIEWS), were recoded in an ordinal fashion (so that “extremely liberal” = 1, “liberal” = 2, and so forth, to “extremely conservative” = 7). Others, such as age, do not require any recoding. RACEMEET itself was converted to an ordinal.
The above results suggest that political ideology does not predict your response to this question much once you account for other variables. In fact, I did a query on ideological views first, and the results indicated to me what was really going on.
Let’s go through the variables which were significant predictors above. First, sex.
Male
Female
1: Should definitely be allowed
21
13
2: Should probably be allowed
22
21
3: Should probably not be allowed
20
23
4: Should definitely not be allowed
36
43
These results were expected. On the whole women tend to be more skeptical of absolutist free speech positions which allow offensive material to be promoted (women are more skeptical of allowing Communists to speak too in comparison to men, so it’s not because of the ideology of the speaker or viewpoint).
Then church attendance frequency:
Never attends church
More than once a week
1: Should definitely be allowed
20
23
19
14
21
15
13
14
13
2: Should probably be allowed
21
21
27
24
13
16
26
22
20
3: Should probably not be allowed
21
17
20
18
28
24
18
24
23
4: Should definitely not be allowed
37
39
34
44
37
45
43
40
44
A modest difference.
Next, highest educational attainment:
No HS
HS
Some college
College
Graduate
1: Should definitely be allowed
7
14
11
26
32
2: Should probably be allowed
14
20
23
29
27
3: Should probably not be allowed
20
23
21
19
20
4: Should definitely not be allowed
59
43
45
26
21
The big gap here is between those with college and those without college educations.
Finally, we look at WORDSUM, which is a proxy for intelligence. It’s a ten word vocabulary test. Below in the columns are the number of answers a respondent got correct:
<5
5
6
7
8
9
10
1: Should definitely be allowed
8
10
12
16
24
30
36
2: Should probably be allowed
13
22
18
24
26
34
33
3: Should probably not be allowed
27
20
23
22
21
18
18
4: Should definitely not be allowed
52
48
47
38
29
18
12
I combined those who scored below 5 out of 10 (0-4) into one class. You can see that as score on this vocabulary test goes up, the view that racists should be allowed to meet in public goes up. It’s almost monotonic. The smartest people are more tolerant than the next smartest people who are more tolerant than the next smartest people, with the dumb being the least tolerant.
I made the below chart to illustrate this:
Often when it comes to views associated with “smart” people when you put it into some regression eduction accounts for all of the difference. In other words, the less intelligent educated have the same views as the intelligent educated, and the more intelligent but less educated have the same views as the less intelligent less educated. There are more older people who are intelligent but not educated, so it could be generational too (though in this case age does not seem to matter). A plausible hypothesis is that in many cases it is social milieu. Even if you are not bright, being in college inculcates certain values.
And college is a predictor. But these data show that even if you account for college education the brighter you are, the more likely you favor allowing tolerance for views that most people find intolerable.
It’s been a while since I’ve done much 
