I actually do think it's true that at least part of the reason for educational polarization is that seeking truth makes you more likely to be a liberal, just not in the way Weineck seems to think. It's not that liberals are right about everything, and the data bears this out (not sure how the data even could bear out moral claims like the abortion issue). It's that conservatives are currently anti-intellectual, as well as being wrong about a few really cut-and-dry things (e.g., whether climate change is real), and this turns people with a truth-seeking attitude against them. Once those people are turned against conservatives, they're probably going to end up agreeing with the liberals on more and more things - that's just how the social and political dynamics works out - even in cases where they don't really have as much reason to be so confident they're right.
Is it true all conservatives believe climate change isn't real? There certainly is greater skepticism regarding the magnitude of the effect but I don't think all conservatives minded people I've met are climate deniers.
Obviously, no conservative belief is true of all conservatives, but at least in the U.S., complete denial of global warming is a very common position by regular conservatives, conservative pundits, and Republican politicians, including the current president. I say global warming here rather than climate change because they will often agree that climate change is happening on the technical note that the climate is always changing, but deny that it has anything to do with CO2 emissions warming the Earth. A common talking point is the claim that people replaced the phrase "global warming" with "climate change" because the former wasn't real, while the latter is something that's always happening.
It's true that some conservatives hold weaker positions, like, "It's happening, but not as much as people say," or, "It's happening, but it's not a bad thing." I'm not sure if those people are in the majority now, though I definitely think the complete deniers were in the majority not too long ago, because that used to be all you heard from conservatives about climate change.
A more honest statement of 'reality is liberal biased' would be that reality is biased towards the positions held by experts and mainstream institutions, and liberals are more deferential to institutions than conservatives.
This may just be a historical contingency. We've had liberal institutions, so of course, liberals are deferential to them. If we had illiberal or anachronistic institutions, liberals would be the vanguard of the anti-establishment.
Observing that they are liberal institutions begs the question of how they came to be that way. In many cases, these started out as knowledge-seeking institutions - like universities and impartial media fact finders. That such institutions have become liberal is compatible with truth having a liberal bias.
There is only one thing that has made me get audibly angry in the past decade or so when talking about politics. I'm a liberal, but it's easy for me to understand why someone would oppose abortion. But when I've spoken with other liberals about the subject, they've made it clear that they don't understand.
So I try to explain, and it doesn't work. I say something along the lines of "If you assume that the fetus is alive, and you think killing living things is wrong, abortion is wrong". The second or third time I explained this to a friend, I got the same outcome as last time: they insisted that abortion is wrong and did not seem to understand the conditional statement.
This was enough to really piss me off in an embarassing way, for some reason. It's also just another example of the weird confidence a lot of liberals have about this issue, like "it is wrong to force women to stay pregnant against their will".
Agreed, I can understand both positions on abortion and an intelligent and sincere person could hold either one. Overall I think we have far too much of it but there are some circumstances where the necessity makes it a morally acceptable choice. I hate the "no abortions under any circumstances" policies as well as the other extreme.
Gun ownership would be another one where intelligent and sincere people might take a variety of positions.
”The most left-wing fields are the humanities. STEM is more right-wing, as is economics, especially on fiscal policy.”
Based on the provided link even STEM fields tilt quite heavily liberal. I think this should be clarified as readers may misinterpret the relative difference compared to humanities as STEM people being right leaning on average.
I think there’s still a great deal of plausibility to the thesis that the Vietnam War caused the liberal takeover of the academy, not any intellectual discourse.
I agree that many liberals are smug and that there is no clearly correct position on things like abortion, tax policy, etc. But I think that you are too charitable to the conservative side. Many of the biggest positive strides in social policy were championed by liberals and opposed by conservatives (gay marriage, for example). Republicans in congress consistently vote against generally good and popular policies like allowing medicare to negotiate drug prices. There is a real debate to be had about where the ideal tax rate falls on the laffer curve; however, it does not appear that the conservatives in power actually care about the deficit, etc.
More education does correlate to liberalism. Though liberals arent rigorous truth seekers, they are probably more rigorous than the average, lesser educated conservative. I am unconvinced by this post.
I think you made things a little too easy with the argument you picked. I might phrase it as "staying in the good graces of the mainstream right in 2025 America requires affirming obviously false factual claims and a rejection of a commitment to accuracy, which is highly offputting to people who do have such a commitment." I would agree that the same applies to a portion of the left, but I don't think it applies to liberals as such. Not sure if that is well-put, but there is a stronger argument underneath the sentiment you're pushing back against.
One thing I give liberal people (of which I am not one), they were mostly the force behind liberation of women, gay people and minorities and these were all tremendous advances for humanity.
I feel that neither "side" has a monopoly on truth, you need people of a variety of temperaments in the body politic. Sincerity, humility and the ability to reevaluate and update one's positions are most important, because none of us knows it all and we are all fallible.
Nobody has a monopoly on truth, I agree! But, these massive advancements indicate that one side is possibly better at truth seeking than the other (not in all cases, of course. Just in general)
The data about liberals self-selecting for universities is interesting. Reflecting a little on the power of the average professor to impact the views of the typical student made me suspect as much, but it’s always nice to see suspicions about the empirical confirmed by actual data.
This is true, but ONLY if by "left-winger" you mean "communist". In which case clearly the vast majority in academia AREN'T "left-wingers" (You really shouldn't go for THAT interpretation because then your very first sentence would be false!). The clear majority of people at universities aren't communists.
If, however, by "left-winger" you also include liberals, then it's just OBVIOUSLY wrong that "left-wingers" generally don't like free trade. Most social democrats like free trade and are vehemently opposed to tariffs. Neoliberals do so too, obviously.
So on either interpretation your argument is quite weak.
"Nearly all college professors support increasing the minimum wage. In order to figure out whether raising the minimum wage is a good idea, you’d have to figure out the effects it has on unemployment. This requires actually reading the rather tangled and complicated empirical literature. Do you think most left-wing professors have done this? Have they done any thorough investigation of the empirical literature surrounding the minimum wage—perhaps beyond reading a Vox article five years ago."
They might not have read all the literature, but what they certainly HAVE done is look at the world. And if you look at the world, then you recognise that countries where social democracy has historically been strong and where social democratic policies have been implemented tend to do astonishingly well (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, The Netherlands and so on). Look up the Human Development Index and you'll see that almost all of the leading countries have left-leaning economic policies and a left-wing-inspired welfare state (even Switzerland, which is #1 in the HDI and which is significantly more right-wing than countries like Norway, is much to the left of the US economically and has a high minimum wage in many of their federate states). You might not be aware of this because you are American and not European, but it's a very obvious fact that most educated people are aware of. This perfectly explains why educated people tend to like left-wing economic policies - it demonstrably works.
I know you're from the US where these are habitually conflated, but I think you confuse liberal with left-wing a lot here. I don't think there are many anarcho-syndicalists in the upper echolons of large corporations; there may be a few journalists who are committed socialists, but not the majority; probably not many communists in public institutions like the judiciary and policing.
It’s so standard in the US to use liberal to mean left-wing that it makes sense to conflate it to go along with standard US usage. Also, the “reality has a liberal bias” is a somewhat common phrase here and it uses “liberal” in a left wing sense.
Some one who writes a philosophy blog should be able to distinguish between liberal and left wing. Even in the US it would be nonsense to say that Marxists are more economically ”liberal” than Democrats even though they are more left wing.
He knows how to distinguish those terms in certain contexts - some use the term “left-liberal,” but it’s unnecessary here. You’d also be surprised how many might say that Marxists are extreme liberals.
Further, you’re nitpicking and splitting hairs. It’s a pointless critique.
You can play that game with any two political philosophies. What do ba'athists and maga have in common? A deference to the strongman. What do posadists and neo-realists have in common? Nuclear proliferation. etc. etc.
There's a Hegelian synthesis here which is close to what I actually believe on this topic. The world is far too complicated for most people, even smart people, to have object-level correct views on things. So to have correct views on a variety of topics, we have to fill in the gaps using what I call "social epidemics", or identifying well-informed people on the topic and trusting what they have to say is true.
I claim that smart people are better at social epistemics, i.e. they are better at identifying the best informed people in various topics and then adopting those people's views.
There could be a variety of mechanisms for this. One might be to just evaluate the quality of the arguments made by various people on a topic, perhaps by doing a deep dive in a narrow issue within the topic, and when a person's the quality of argumentation is superior, one can adopt their views broadly on that topic. That takes a significant level of intelligence to do well. Another is to use heuristics such as credentials. Do not overestimate stupid people's ability to even do something as basic as evaluate the strength of signal in a credential.
I find these sorts of pieces, for me at least, often begin with a non-starter.
Over the last 25 years, I've taught in around 11 or 12 academic institutions in the US, ranging from state universities to small liberal arts colleges, technical colleges to an art institute, and there are almost none of them that I'd say fit that first sentence boldly asserting "The academy is extremely left wing." Not in terms of the professors. Definitely not in terms of administration. Mildly left wing? Sure, that's something you can observe. Extremely? No.
Of course my own experience could be quite skewed. That's always a possibility. I'm willing to bet that it isn't all that unrepresentative of what the spectrum of "the academy" actually looks like
According to the 2016 UCLA-Higher Education Research Institute Undergraduate Faculty Survey (the most recent one I could find) "Overall in 2016–2017, 0.4% of faculty identify as far right, 11.7% as conservative, 28.1% as middle-of-the-road, 48.3% as liberal, and 11.6% as far left." That's just about as many professors identifying as "far left" as "conservative". How many of the "middle-of-the-road" professors do you think voted for Trump?
You assert that the upper echelons of large corporations are extremely left. Really, the nation's corporate executives are extreme Marxists? I find that hard to believe.
I suspect you are using the very modern convention of assigning progressive versus reactionary social/cultural beliefs to a left-right axis. But this confuses things with the Socialist laissez-faire Capitalist economic axis that traditionally was seen a left-right. The two dimensional Nolan chart reserved the left-right axis for economics and had an authoritarian-liberal second axis.
I propose a two dimensional chart with the left-right economic axis and red-blue cultural axis. This nicely resolves the upper echelons of large corporations. They have always been Right, but also Blue, going all the way back to the Federalists.
"If you know anything about free trade, you know it’s a good thing."
Free trade is far too complex to assign this kind of view. There are lots of thorny implications of free trade and conflicting examples of such policies both succeeding and failing.
The economic successes in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and China were all reliant on certain trade barriers and active industrial policy, for example. Free trade policies are also at the root of current political instability in wealthy Western nations.
One can only understand our current political moment by asking not if free trade is good or bad but rather "why are movements against free trade succeeding?"
I actually do think it's true that at least part of the reason for educational polarization is that seeking truth makes you more likely to be a liberal, just not in the way Weineck seems to think. It's not that liberals are right about everything, and the data bears this out (not sure how the data even could bear out moral claims like the abortion issue). It's that conservatives are currently anti-intellectual, as well as being wrong about a few really cut-and-dry things (e.g., whether climate change is real), and this turns people with a truth-seeking attitude against them. Once those people are turned against conservatives, they're probably going to end up agreeing with the liberals on more and more things - that's just how the social and political dynamics works out - even in cases where they don't really have as much reason to be so confident they're right.
Is it true all conservatives believe climate change isn't real? There certainly is greater skepticism regarding the magnitude of the effect but I don't think all conservatives minded people I've met are climate deniers.
Obviously, no conservative belief is true of all conservatives, but at least in the U.S., complete denial of global warming is a very common position by regular conservatives, conservative pundits, and Republican politicians, including the current president. I say global warming here rather than climate change because they will often agree that climate change is happening on the technical note that the climate is always changing, but deny that it has anything to do with CO2 emissions warming the Earth. A common talking point is the claim that people replaced the phrase "global warming" with "climate change" because the former wasn't real, while the latter is something that's always happening.
It's true that some conservatives hold weaker positions, like, "It's happening, but not as much as people say," or, "It's happening, but it's not a bad thing." I'm not sure if those people are in the majority now, though I definitely think the complete deniers were in the majority not too long ago, because that used to be all you heard from conservatives about climate change.
A more honest statement of 'reality is liberal biased' would be that reality is biased towards the positions held by experts and mainstream institutions, and liberals are more deferential to institutions than conservatives.
This may just be a historical contingency. We've had liberal institutions, so of course, liberals are deferential to them. If we had illiberal or anachronistic institutions, liberals would be the vanguard of the anti-establishment.
Observing that they are liberal institutions begs the question of how they came to be that way. In many cases, these started out as knowledge-seeking institutions - like universities and impartial media fact finders. That such institutions have become liberal is compatible with truth having a liberal bias.
There is only one thing that has made me get audibly angry in the past decade or so when talking about politics. I'm a liberal, but it's easy for me to understand why someone would oppose abortion. But when I've spoken with other liberals about the subject, they've made it clear that they don't understand.
So I try to explain, and it doesn't work. I say something along the lines of "If you assume that the fetus is alive, and you think killing living things is wrong, abortion is wrong". The second or third time I explained this to a friend, I got the same outcome as last time: they insisted that abortion is wrong and did not seem to understand the conditional statement.
This was enough to really piss me off in an embarassing way, for some reason. It's also just another example of the weird confidence a lot of liberals have about this issue, like "it is wrong to force women to stay pregnant against their will".
Agreed, I can understand both positions on abortion and an intelligent and sincere person could hold either one. Overall I think we have far too much of it but there are some circumstances where the necessity makes it a morally acceptable choice. I hate the "no abortions under any circumstances" policies as well as the other extreme.
Gun ownership would be another one where intelligent and sincere people might take a variety of positions.
”The most left-wing fields are the humanities. STEM is more right-wing, as is economics, especially on fiscal policy.”
Based on the provided link even STEM fields tilt quite heavily liberal. I think this should be clarified as readers may misinterpret the relative difference compared to humanities as STEM people being right leaning on average.
Good article.
I think there’s still a great deal of plausibility to the thesis that the Vietnam War caused the liberal takeover of the academy, not any intellectual discourse.
I agree that many liberals are smug and that there is no clearly correct position on things like abortion, tax policy, etc. But I think that you are too charitable to the conservative side. Many of the biggest positive strides in social policy were championed by liberals and opposed by conservatives (gay marriage, for example). Republicans in congress consistently vote against generally good and popular policies like allowing medicare to negotiate drug prices. There is a real debate to be had about where the ideal tax rate falls on the laffer curve; however, it does not appear that the conservatives in power actually care about the deficit, etc.
More education does correlate to liberalism. Though liberals arent rigorous truth seekers, they are probably more rigorous than the average, lesser educated conservative. I am unconvinced by this post.
I'm a liberal. This article isn't about who is right. It's about what explains why academia is left wing.
I think you made things a little too easy with the argument you picked. I might phrase it as "staying in the good graces of the mainstream right in 2025 America requires affirming obviously false factual claims and a rejection of a commitment to accuracy, which is highly offputting to people who do have such a commitment." I would agree that the same applies to a portion of the left, but I don't think it applies to liberals as such. Not sure if that is well-put, but there is a stronger argument underneath the sentiment you're pushing back against.
One thing I give liberal people (of which I am not one), they were mostly the force behind liberation of women, gay people and minorities and these were all tremendous advances for humanity.
I feel that neither "side" has a monopoly on truth, you need people of a variety of temperaments in the body politic. Sincerity, humility and the ability to reevaluate and update one's positions are most important, because none of us knows it all and we are all fallible.
Nobody has a monopoly on truth, I agree! But, these massive advancements indicate that one side is possibly better at truth seeking than the other (not in all cases, of course. Just in general)
The data about liberals self-selecting for universities is interesting. Reflecting a little on the power of the average professor to impact the views of the typical student made me suspect as much, but it’s always nice to see suspicions about the empirical confirmed by actual data.
"Yet left-wingers mostly don’t like free trade"
This is true, but ONLY if by "left-winger" you mean "communist". In which case clearly the vast majority in academia AREN'T "left-wingers" (You really shouldn't go for THAT interpretation because then your very first sentence would be false!). The clear majority of people at universities aren't communists.
If, however, by "left-winger" you also include liberals, then it's just OBVIOUSLY wrong that "left-wingers" generally don't like free trade. Most social democrats like free trade and are vehemently opposed to tariffs. Neoliberals do so too, obviously.
So on either interpretation your argument is quite weak.
"Nearly all college professors support increasing the minimum wage. In order to figure out whether raising the minimum wage is a good idea, you’d have to figure out the effects it has on unemployment. This requires actually reading the rather tangled and complicated empirical literature. Do you think most left-wing professors have done this? Have they done any thorough investigation of the empirical literature surrounding the minimum wage—perhaps beyond reading a Vox article five years ago."
They might not have read all the literature, but what they certainly HAVE done is look at the world. And if you look at the world, then you recognise that countries where social democracy has historically been strong and where social democratic policies have been implemented tend to do astonishingly well (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, The Netherlands and so on). Look up the Human Development Index and you'll see that almost all of the leading countries have left-leaning economic policies and a left-wing-inspired welfare state (even Switzerland, which is #1 in the HDI and which is significantly more right-wing than countries like Norway, is much to the left of the US economically and has a high minimum wage in many of their federate states). You might not be aware of this because you are American and not European, but it's a very obvious fact that most educated people are aware of. This perfectly explains why educated people tend to like left-wing economic policies - it demonstrably works.
I know you're from the US where these are habitually conflated, but I think you confuse liberal with left-wing a lot here. I don't think there are many anarcho-syndicalists in the upper echolons of large corporations; there may be a few journalists who are committed socialists, but not the majority; probably not many communists in public institutions like the judiciary and policing.
It’s so standard in the US to use liberal to mean left-wing that it makes sense to conflate it to go along with standard US usage. Also, the “reality has a liberal bias” is a somewhat common phrase here and it uses “liberal” in a left wing sense.
Some one who writes a philosophy blog should be able to distinguish between liberal and left wing. Even in the US it would be nonsense to say that Marxists are more economically ”liberal” than Democrats even though they are more left wing.
He knows how to distinguish those terms in certain contexts - some use the term “left-liberal,” but it’s unnecessary here. You’d also be surprised how many might say that Marxists are extreme liberals.
Further, you’re nitpicking and splitting hairs. It’s a pointless critique.
What do left liberals and communists have in common? An obsession with disparate outcomes.
You can play that game with any two political philosophies. What do ba'athists and maga have in common? A deference to the strongman. What do posadists and neo-realists have in common? Nuclear proliferation. etc. etc.
Ba'athists and MAGA are similar in the way liberals and communists are similar.
There's a Hegelian synthesis here which is close to what I actually believe on this topic. The world is far too complicated for most people, even smart people, to have object-level correct views on things. So to have correct views on a variety of topics, we have to fill in the gaps using what I call "social epidemics", or identifying well-informed people on the topic and trusting what they have to say is true.
I claim that smart people are better at social epistemics, i.e. they are better at identifying the best informed people in various topics and then adopting those people's views.
There could be a variety of mechanisms for this. One might be to just evaluate the quality of the arguments made by various people on a topic, perhaps by doing a deep dive in a narrow issue within the topic, and when a person's the quality of argumentation is superior, one can adopt their views broadly on that topic. That takes a significant level of intelligence to do well. Another is to use heuristics such as credentials. Do not overestimate stupid people's ability to even do something as basic as evaluate the strength of signal in a credential.
I find these sorts of pieces, for me at least, often begin with a non-starter.
Over the last 25 years, I've taught in around 11 or 12 academic institutions in the US, ranging from state universities to small liberal arts colleges, technical colleges to an art institute, and there are almost none of them that I'd say fit that first sentence boldly asserting "The academy is extremely left wing." Not in terms of the professors. Definitely not in terms of administration. Mildly left wing? Sure, that's something you can observe. Extremely? No.
Of course my own experience could be quite skewed. That's always a possibility. I'm willing to bet that it isn't all that unrepresentative of what the spectrum of "the academy" actually looks like
The very large majority of professors are left of centre
I figured that would be the response..
According to the 2016 UCLA-Higher Education Research Institute Undergraduate Faculty Survey (the most recent one I could find) "Overall in 2016–2017, 0.4% of faculty identify as far right, 11.7% as conservative, 28.1% as middle-of-the-road, 48.3% as liberal, and 11.6% as far left." That's just about as many professors identifying as "far left" as "conservative". How many of the "middle-of-the-road" professors do you think voted for Trump?
How can it be “obviously” immoral to eat meat when you yourself concede that there is a 30% chance that eating meat is not immoral?
Interesting. Was that in a post or a video, if you remember?
https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-best-argument-for-nihilism
Oh
You assert that the upper echelons of large corporations are extremely left. Really, the nation's corporate executives are extreme Marxists? I find that hard to believe.
I suspect you are using the very modern convention of assigning progressive versus reactionary social/cultural beliefs to a left-right axis. But this confuses things with the Socialist laissez-faire Capitalist economic axis that traditionally was seen a left-right. The two dimensional Nolan chart reserved the left-right axis for economics and had an authoritarian-liberal second axis.
I propose a two dimensional chart with the left-right economic axis and red-blue cultural axis. This nicely resolves the upper echelons of large corporations. They have always been Right, but also Blue, going all the way back to the Federalists.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/an-alternate-american-political-spectrum
“If you know anything about free trade, you know it’s a good thing”
If you know at least the basics of free trade, what assumptions did Ricardo make about the mobility of capital?
"If you know anything about free trade, you know it’s a good thing."
Free trade is far too complex to assign this kind of view. There are lots of thorny implications of free trade and conflicting examples of such policies both succeeding and failing.
The economic successes in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and China were all reliant on certain trade barriers and active industrial policy, for example. Free trade policies are also at the root of current political instability in wealthy Western nations.
One can only understand our current political moment by asking not if free trade is good or bad but rather "why are movements against free trade succeeding?"