Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism

by Ed West

Conservatism is rural, and liberalism is urban, yet people in cities are less open-minded in some ways, because they can find their clique or niche. If you live in a small town you’re basically stuck with a group of people with whom you’ve got little in common and so you just learn to accept people’s differences. If you’re in a big city you might pass through areas filled with people from vastly different cultures, or subcultures, but you probably won’t have much interaction with them.

The Great Awokening almost certainly represented an authoritarian turn by the Left, ‘a spreading social, cultural, and ideological conformism . . . this relentless drive for conformism, which constantly works to extinguish the illiberal’.11 Progressivism can never rest, there must always be a new battle to be fought, or to use that dreaded phrase, ‘there is still much work to do’. Yet just as this political activism was intensifying, new academic research began to overturn the long-held belief that conservatism correlated with authoritarianism.

Likewise many of the establishment beliefs trotted out in top-selling pop psychology books and repeated at TED Talks and then parroted in high-status postcodes turn out to be rubbish. Among the theories that have crumbled from psychology’s ‘replication crisis’ of the 2010s is ‘stereotype threat’, the idea that preconceived beliefs about people become self-fulfilling prophecies and affect their outcomes. Stereotype threat explains that there are fewer women than men at the top of maths and science-based professions because they are put off by the perception that men are better, an idea so comforting that one 1995 paper has been cited over five thousand times. Yet it has completely failed to replicate. In contrast, the less hopeful idea of stereotype accuracy, once assumed by the psychology profession to be largely wrong, has in recent years been shown to be resilient and accurate.40 Humans are very good at pattern recognition: we wouldn’t have made it this far if we weren’t. The same goes for ‘implicit bias’, the idea that people’s unconscious prejudices against minorities can actually have a negative effect on their outcomes. ‘Early claims about their power and immutability have proven unjustified,’ which is hardly surprising when it’s basically hexing; today, vast amounts are spent by corporations and government agencies sniffing implicit bias out, despite there being no evidence it actually exists in a meaningful way.41 If high-status progressives believe in such fairy t...

‘Change? Aren’t things bad enough as they are?’