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Everything is downstream from control of educational institutions. Unless they have the luck and resources (and willingness to forego prestige) to go exclusively to conservative private schools, the average educated professional will be required to spend between 16 and 20 years being indoctrinated by government-funded institutions that openly despise right wing ideas. Even if they make it out with their political ideology intact, few conservatives are hungry for more abuse.
If a conservative person wants to go into education themselves to "be change they want to see in the world," they then have to spend several more years hiding their opinions before they potentially get the protection of tenure, contend with unions that will use their dues to fund left-wing politicians, and spend their entire career surrounded by people who hate them and are constantly trying to get them fired.
It's demoralizing for even the thickest-skinned among us. It really sucks to spend your entire life around people who openly hate you and want to see you fail. I really don't see how to solve this problem other than to engage in a hostile takeover of state educational institutions like DeSantis is doing in Florida, but even then, you run into the problem you highlighted that there probably simply aren't enough educated conservatives left after decades of left-wing domination of the schools to staff the institutions even if conservatives could fire everyone. Even total victory would require relying on hostile actors for implementation for years
If the lack of smart, educated conservatives was driven entirely by institutional gatekeeping, then there would be a lot of smart uneducated conservatives, and the adverts on conservative websites would be for educational trips to Rome and the St John's College extramural programme. In fact, the adverts on conservative websites (except explicitly Christian ones) are for crypto scams and acai berry colon cleanses, suggesting that there is a real difference in IQ.
Richard Hanania isn't trolling when he complains about how dumb American conservatism is in the Current Year - he is expressing frustration. This is new, but not that new. George W Bush had to pretend to be dumber than he was in order to be a serious right-wing candidate for President, George HW Bush did not. The only powerful right-wing tendency that would appeal to an intellectually curious 130+ IQ is tradcath.
[Yes - I know Elon Musk is on the right, and a genius. But his right-wing fanbase don't like him because he builds electric cars, they lie him because of his low-effort shitposting]
Quite a few logical leaps here, e.g. even if there were a lot of smart uneducated conservatives, it doesn't follow that they'd be a large proportion of conservative consumers, nor that they'd be especially interested in education, and moreover (this is more questionable) they might be more gullible because of a lack of education.
However, isn't the original claim that there is a lack of conservatives in education (especially higher education) not that there are a lot of smart uneducated conservatives?
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Hold up, is this not what we see?
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While 130+ IQ is probably overrepresented among IRL tradcaths, a randomly-chosen IRL tradcath is more likely to be a geocentrist who believes cigarrettes are good for you than to be rat-adjacent. Median-level tradcath politics are Alex Jones-tier conspiracy theories with added reactionary social conservatism- although not twitter race warriors either.
The difference between the internet tradcath posters(most of whom do not actually go to church) and the IRL tradcaths(who do not describe themselves that way) is vast. It seems that many of these posters could care less about practicing or believing any form of Catholicism; they just want to attach themselves to a living, reactionary western tradition.
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There isn't a lack of smart, educated, conservatives. There's a lack of conservatives in the field of education, which is an entirely different thing.
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The majority of highbrow independent publishing appears to be conservative. Measuring things by ad targeting is frankly nuts because the entire ecosystem of intelligent people on the internet are adblocked ghosts to advertisers.
That's as may be, but when I go on talkingpointsmemo.com in incognito mode I get ads for premium brand menswear and SUV's, when I go on dailykos.com I get ads for e-scooters and high-end video editing software, and when I go on redstate.com or other sites in that network most of the ads are for cheap clothes imported from China. Admittedly I did see one ad for small-business accounting software on a right-wing site, which points to the one useful demographic that is still mostly conservative.
This does nothing to change the tracking performed by major ad services.
You'll have to create a totally fresh device/connection/account, and you'll have to do it in a location that's geographically separated from your current browsing history. The advertising systems know what it means when a brand new "person" hops onto the internet using the same internet connection, device, browsing patterns, display-size etc as someone who already exists.
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Have you considered that some of this is just cultural differences?
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Of course. This isn't some sort of gotcha. The fact that conservatives are openly despised and discriminated against in education today doesn't change the fact that it was the conservatives doing the discriminating not too long ago. To the extent this sort of bigotry was targeted at leftists and racial and sexual minorities in the past, that was also bad.
I'm sure there are probably some older conservatives who used to complain about "uppity blacks" and who now complain about structural oppression in a way smacks of the sort of hypocrisy you're getting at, but I'm a child of the 90s who was raised to earnestly believe all this shit was wrong no matter who/whom.
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You’re missing the other, even more obvious rejoinder: some cultures actually are better than others. It’s not “oppressive” for people with the better behavioral norms and beliefs to gatekeep out those who have shown themselves incapable of adhering to those norms and beliefs. Cultural norms are not arbitrary. The elites are actually better than the non-elites, and therefore differences in access to elite institutions are a natural result of differences in important qualities between different individuals and groups.
So far your contributions under this new alt have consisted entirely of trying to start fights based on your obvious familiarity with the sub and its users. If all you have to say is "Why are there so many white nationalists here?" we've heard it.
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It's the sort of thing that term evokes, but it's not what they mean by it, except in a motte-and-bailey where that's the motte and some sort of amorphous unmeasurable mechanism is the bailey. If all the elite entities were rejecting blacks for being black (as indeed they have done), that would be honestly called "structural oppression"; the term now hints at that while not actually meaning it.
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No, it makes me less sympathetic, because it's clear that the concept is only a weapon that doesn't get used to identify actual "power structures," but rather to provide cover for existing power structures that the critical theorist is embedded in. The concept doesn't have either explanatory or emancipatory power, because it can never be deployed except by the already powerful against the powerless.
The only way for conservatives to become "officially structurally oppressed" would be for them to take over all the universities and government so that they had the absolute power to crush anyone who didn't agree they were structurally oppressed. It would be as sick a joke as the current DEI tyranny.
If your theory about structural oppression results in you having a $400,000/yr job blacklisting job candidates who don't support the theory loudly enough, the theory itself was the oppression.
If your theory about structural oppression results in a handful of weirdos in a coffee shop talking about how powerless they are, the theory was useless as the tool against oppression it was intended to be.
Either way, the theory was bunk.
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It should, and in my case it does. Where this breaks down, though, is when "structural oppression" is maintained to exist where no evidence other than outcomes can be found to demonstrate it, but maintained not to exist when such oppression is promulgated in official policies, is routinely encountered in daily life, and is enacted into local, state and federal law.
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