Intelligence and Politics: Why This Conversation Is a Trap
There's a recurring discourse that pops up across the political spectrum about whether certain political beliefs correlate with intelligence. Liberals love to cite studies showing conservatives score lower on certain cognitive tests. Conservatives counter with their own data about 'common sense' or emotional intelligence. Leftists sometimes join in, arguing that class consciousness requires intellectual development that liberals and conservatives lack.
As an anarchist, I'm here to tell you: this entire framing is garbage, and engaging with it uncritically reinforces the very hierarchies we should be dismantling.
The Problem With "Intelligence" as a Metric
First, let's address the elephant in the room: 'intelligence' is not a neutral, objective measurement. IQ tests and similar metrics were literally designed to justify racial hierarchies and eugenics. The history of intelligence testing is inseparable from white supremacy, ableism, and class oppression.
What we call 'intelligence' is largely a measure of how well someone performs within specific cultural and educational contexts—contexts that are shaped by access to resources, which is shaped by class, race, disability status, and other systemic factors. When we talk about intelligence as though it's a fixed, measurable quality that determines the value of someone's political beliefs, we're buying into a framework designed to justify inequality.
Someone can be brilliant at abstract reasoning but completely lack practical skills. Someone can have extensive formal education but no understanding of how power operates in their own community. Someone can have all the 'intelligence' markers our society values and still be a fucking fascist. Intelligence, however you define it, does not correlate with moral clarity or political wisdom.
Liberals love this discourse because it lets them feel superior without actually challenging power. 'Republicans are stupid' becomes a substitute for analyzing why right-wing politics appeal to certain populations, what material conditions create that appeal, and how the Democratic Party has failed working-class people for decades.
It's easier to dismiss Trump voters as unintelligent than to reckon with the fact that both major parties serve capital, that neither offers meaningful solutions to the crises facing ordinary people, and that right-wing populism fills the void left by the absence of a genuine left alternative. Blaming individual stupidity absolves the system—and liberals who benefit from that system—of responsibility.
This framing also conveniently ignores that many architects of right-wing policy are extremely 'intelligent' by conventional measures. The people crafting voter suppression strategies, dismantling social programs, and building the infrastructure of surveillance capitalism aren't idiots—they're highly educated operatives serving class interests. Focusing on the intelligence of voters distracts from the intelligence of oppressors.
The Leftist Version Isn't Much Better
Some leftists fall into a similar trap, arguing that 'true' class consciousness or understanding of theory requires a certain level of intellectual sophistication. This version of the discourse suggests that workers who don't embrace socialism simply haven't read enough Marx, haven't understood dialectical materialism, haven't reached the necessary level of political education.
This is elitist bullshit that treats theoretical knowledge as superior to lived experience and practical wisdom. Some of the most politically astute people I know never finished high school. Some of the most effective organizers I've worked with couldn't tell you what 'dialectical materialism' means. They don't need to—they understand power because they've lived under it, fought against it, and built alternatives to it.
The fetishization of theory and intellectual sophistication within leftist spaces often serves to exclude working-class people, disabled people, and those who haven't had access to formal education. It treats political consciousness as something that happens primarily in the brain through reading rather than in the body through struggle and in communities through collective action.
Political affiliation isn't primarily about intelligence—it's about material conditions, socialization, access to information, community ties, personal experiences with oppression and power, and a hundred other factors that have nothing to do with how well you can solve logic puzzles.
People adopt right-wing politics for complex reasons: because they've been failed by the system and offered scapegoats instead of solutions, because they benefit from certain hierarchies and want to preserve them, because right-wing narratives provide community and meaning in an atomized society, because reactionary politics offer simple answers to complicated problems, because they're afraid of change that threatens their position.
None of this requires stupidity. It requires conditions that make those politics appealing or advantageous.
Similarly, people come to anarchist or socialist politics through many paths—not all of them intellectual. Some people radicalize through labor organizing, through mutual aid work, through direct experiences with police violence or housing insecurity. Some people arrive at anti-authoritarian politics because they've experienced the violence of institutions firsthand, not because they read Kropotkin.
From an anarchist perspective, the intelligence/politics discourse is suspect because it:
Reinforces hierarchy. The premise that some people are too stupid to hold correct political views justifies authoritarianism and vanguardism. If the masses are too dumb to understand their own interests, then obviously they need enlightened leaders to guide them—exactly the logic we reject.
Obscures material analysis. Focusing on individual intelligence distracts from examining how capitalism, the state, and other systems of oppression shape political consciousness. It's idealism disguised as science.
Enables ableism. Treating intelligence as the primary determinant of political value marginalizes people with intellectual disabilities, people with different cognitive styles, and anyone who doesn't fit narrow definitions of 'smart.'
Divides the working class. Creating hierarchies of intelligence among oppressed people benefits those in power by preventing solidarity. 'I'm smarter than those Republicans' or 'I'm more class-conscious than those liberals' becomes a substitute for building coalitions.
Mistakes education for liberation. The assumption that correct politics follow from sufficient intelligence treats consciousness as primarily an educational problem rather than a material and collective one. It suggests that if we just explain things correctly, people will naturally arrive at anarchism—ignoring that political transformation requires changing material conditions and building alternative structures, not just changing minds.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Instead of debating whether conservatives or liberals are stupider, we should be asking:
What material conditions make different political narratives appealing?
How do we build working-class solidarity across political divides?
What are the barriers preventing people from engaging with anti-authoritarian politics?
How do we make anarchist and socialist organizing accessible to everyone, regardless of educational background or cognitive style?
How do we practice political education that values lived experience as much as theoretical knowledge?
We should be building movements that don't require academic credentials or theoretical fluency to participate meaningfully. We should be creating spaces where mutual aid, direct action, and collective organizing are accessible to people with varying cognitive abilities, educational backgrounds, and learning styles.
Intelligence doesn't make you right. Understanding theory doesn't make you a good organizer. Having a degree doesn't mean you understand power. What matters is: Are you fighting oppression or reinforcing it? Are you building collective power or hoarding individual status? Are you in solidarity with the oppressed or aligned with their oppressors?
Those questions have nothing to do with how smart you are and everything to do with what side you're on.
The intelligence/politics discourse is a distraction from the real work of building power and dismantling hierarchy. It's a trap that lets people feel superior while doing nothing to challenge the systems that oppress us all.
Every moment spent debating whether Republicans or Democrats are dumber is a moment not spent organizing, not building mutual aid networks, not engaging in direct action, not creating the alternative structures that prefigure the world we want to build.
Stop asking if people are smart enough for the right politics. Start asking how we create the conditions where liberatory politics become materially viable and emotionally compelling for everyone—regardless of IQ, educational background, or how well they score on cognitive tests designed by eugenicists.
Intelligence is not the problem. Hierarchy is. Capitalism is. The state is. Focus on those, and leave the intelligence discourse in the trash where it belongs.
