Monday, October 13, 2014

Can't Challenge It. It's Science.

You know you want to go read the whole thing:
Few traits better characterize contemporary liberals than their false sense of intellectual superiority. 

We're all familiar with the clichés.  Conservatives and libertarians who deviate from liberal articles of faith, from global warming alarmism to Keynesian economics to bureaucratized social engineering, are "deniers," unmoored from rationality and "settled science."  Leftist author Thomas Frank captured that mindset with the title of his book "What's the Matter with Kansas?," asserting that Republican voters aren't even capable of aligning their votes with their supposedly self-evident best interests. 

There's only one problem. 

The actual, objective sociological evidence continues to demonstrate that the opposite is true.  Republicans routinely prove themselves more knowledgeable than Democrats. 

The left-leaning Pew Research Center provides the latest example. 

Each year, Pew conducts its "What Do Americans Know" survey, which tests respondents on a series of questions.  This year, the topics included the federal minimum wage, the territory occupied by ISIS, the Ukraine, Common Core educational proposals, fracking, where the Ebola virus is centered, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, the U.S. poverty rate, where Shiite Muslims outnumber Sunnis, who chairs the Federal Reserve, where the federal government spends most and the U.S. unemployment rate.  

Unsurprisingly, older adults demonstrated greater knowledge than their younger counterparts, as did better-educated respondents. 

But buried at the bottom of the survey report lies the subject heading "Partisan Differences in Knowledge," which itemizes each question and the percentage of Republicans, Democrats and Independents who answered each one correctly. 

So how stark were the partisan knowledge differentials? 

Out of 12 questions asked, Republicans outperformed both Democrats and Independents on 10.
I'm shocked--SHOCKED, I tell you!

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