Every few years, a new study is triumphantly circulated through liberal media claiming that "higher IQ people are more liberal." The implication is never subtle. Liberalism — now increasingly indistinguishable from woke moralism — is presented not merely as morally superior, but as intellectually inevitable. If you disagree, the subtext runs, you are not just wrong; you are stupid.

Let us, for the sake of argument, grant the premise.

Suppose it really is true that people with higher measured IQ scores tend, statistically, to hold more liberal or progressive views. What follows from this? Much less than liberals imagine — and possibly the opposite of what they intend.

Intelligence is Not Wisdom

IQ measures a narrow band of cognitive performance: abstract reasoning, pattern recognition, verbal and mathematical manipulation. It does not measure judgment, moral realism, historical understanding, social responsibility, or the capacity to live well among others.

High intelligence has always been compatible with catastrophic error. The twentieth century was not ruined by peasants with low IQs; it was engineered by highly educated elites — economists, planners, ideologues, and intellectuals who believed they could redesign society from first principles. Socialism was not a folk religion of the dull. It was a theory-driven project of the clever.

If woke liberalism is similarly flawed — if it systematically misdescribes human nature, incentives, biology, culture, and moral limits — then discovering that high-IQ people disproportionately embrace it would not vindicate the ideology. It would indict the social role of high intelligence itself.

The Pathology of Abstract Minds

High-IQ individuals are especially vulnerable to certain errors:

Abstract thinkers often mistake elegant theories for reality. They privilege internal coherence over empirical messiness, and moral aspiration over practical consequence.
The smarter one becomes in symbolic systems, the easier it is to lose touch with how actual people behave, suffer, cooperate, and fail. This detachment breeds contempt for tradition, religion, and common sense—institutions that evolved precisely because humans are not rational abstractions.

Liberalism today functions as a credentialing system. In universities, media, and bureaucracies, certain beliefs signal intelligence and moral refinement regardless of their truth. High-IQ people are not immune to social pressure; they are often more sensitive to elite approval.

In this light, liberalism's attraction to the intelligent may reflect not superior reasoning, but a shared cognitive style: preference for abstraction over reality, theory over tradition, intention over outcome.

Social Dysfunction is Not a Coincidence

If high-IQ liberalism were such an evolutionary triumph, we might expect the societies and institutions dominated by it to flourish. Instead, we see:

Declining birth rates among the educated classes

Family instability and childlessness framed as liberation

Bureaucratic paralysis masked as compassion

The erosion of free speech in the name of "safety"

A fixation on symbolic injustice while material conditions deteriorate

These are not signs of collective wisdom. They are symptoms of a class that is cognitively sophisticated yet socially maladapted — brilliant at critique, inept at stewardship.

So Much the Worse for High IQ

If liberalism in its modern woke form is indeed misguided if it undermines the moral, biological, and cultural foundations of a functioning society then discovering that it correlates with higher IQ is not a defence. It is a warning.

It suggests that raw intelligence, uncoupled from humility, tradition, and moral realism, may be a liability rather than an asset. It suggests that societies need not only smart people, but grounded people, those capable of restraint, loyalty, and long-term responsibility.

In that case, the conservative reply is simple:

If high IQ leads you to beliefs that hollow out families, delegitimise nations, and moralise dysfunction, then so much the worse for high IQ.

Intelligence is a tool. When it cuts in the wrong direction, the problem is not the resistance of the material — it is the hand that wields the blade.

https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/why-are-intelligent-people-more-liberal