Why is the American right obsessed with IQ?

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On Sunday, I was unfortunate enough to schedule a journey on the New York subway that coincided with Donald Trump’s homecoming rally. The train passed through Madison Square Garden, where Trump was flanked by Elon Musk, Dr Phil, Hulk Hogan and co with tales of how together they were going to take America “back” from an unnamed other. There, inevitably, the true believers who didn’t manage to get tickets to the Trump 2024 sideshow piled into the carriage, and, inevitably, an argument ensued. A man in a camo Maga hat took up against a tourist for putting his suitcase in the supposedly wrong place, supposedly blocking the entrance.

“In your country you can do whatever the f*** you want,” the man in the camo hat bellowed at the poor bewildered guy, who had no space to move his suitcases even if he wanted to. And then, the culmination of the whole rant, when the man said he “didn’t speak English”. “I have an incredibly high IQ”, said the man in the camo hat, while everyone else stared stubbornly down at their phones, pretending not to hear. “I am a highly intelligent person.”

What this particular Trump supporter’s intelligence had to do with the situation was unclear. Except that high intelligence, particularly intelligence measured by IQ, is an enduring fascination for the right. Just this week, Mel Gibson, an actor and director perhaps more well known of late for his racist and antisemitic rants rather than his acting or directing, went in on Kamala Harris’s perceived low intelligence. Gibson, who’s unsurprisingly voting Republican, told TMZ he thought the vice-president’s political track record was “appalling”. He went on to say she had “no policies to speak of”.

“And she’s got the IQ of a fence post.”

The right’s confluence of Harris’s “incompetence” with low IQ is nothing new. A day before Trump spoke at MSG, JD Vance was joking to crowds in Pennsylvania that he was “about 20 IQ points dumber” after watching one of her speeches. Trump has repeatedly called Harris “low IQ” during his election campaign, so much so that the VP responded by saying she would take a cognitive test to disprove his claims. Before Harris was in his crosshairs, Trump directed the same “low IQ” insults to Joe Biden. Trump’s fixation on IQ as a marker of self-worth is well documented – remember when he called himself a “very stable genius”? – so much so that a former White House aide told the website Politico that “part of it comes from his insecurities about not being perceived as intelligent”.

Obsession with intelligence is a repeated theme for right-wing demagogues who all, funnily enough, seem to have near-genius IQs. In 2013, Boris Johnson, then Mayor of London, was criticised by Nick Clegg for “unpleasant elitism” and “talking about people as if they were dogs” when Johnson, educated at Eton and Oxford, suggested some people struggle to get on in life because of their low IQs. Elon Musk claims he has an IQ of 155, while simultaneously mocking Instagram users for having IQs of “lower than 100”. Andrew Tate says his is 148. Jordan Peterson claims his is 147. For comparison, the average IQ is around 100. Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking ranked close to 160. Mensa accepts membership from anyone who tests at over 130, which equates to around 2 per cent of the global population, and, somewhat suspiciously, all of the right’s favourite men.

To understand the right’s IQ obsession, you have to go right back to the invention of Intelligence Quotients as a marker of intellect. And to do that shows that the eugenicist origins of IQ testing are well documented. As a field of study, it emerged in the early 20th century, around the time when interest in eugenics and so-called “feeble-mindedness” were reaching new heights and ever more mainstream attention. It was against this backdrop that Alfred Binet created the first practical intelligence test in France in 1905, for the purposes of organising school placements for children. Although he warned that results from the test should not be used to measure innate intelligence or label individuals permanently, that is precisely what’s happened in the century or so since.

From the very beginning then, as IQ scores – then known as Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales – became more popular, racism was embedded and explicit. American psychologist Lewis Terman wrote that Mexicans, African-Americans and Native Americans had a mental “dullness” that he claimed was inherited from their “family stock”. Those with low IQ were branded “morons”, and low scores were frequently used as justification for forced sterilisation. At one stage, IQ tests were being deployed at Ellis Island to argue for limitations on immigration, particularly from southern and eastern Europe.

The movement to replace IQ as a measure of intelligence when such cultural biases skew its findings began as early as the 1960s. Civil rights groups like the Association of Black Psychologists called for a moratorium on IQ testing amongst minority groups, saying in a statement that “psychological testing historically has been a quasi-scientific tool in the perpetuation of racism on all levels of scientific objectivity, it [testing] has provided a cesspool of intrinsically and inferentially fallacious data that inflates the egos of whites by demeaning Black people and threatens to potentiate Black genocide.” Modern psychologists pointed out flaws in the science of IQ testing, discovering that scores could change over time, particularly in the case of young children.

The science of modern intelligence testing – even if it wasn’t the obvious case that Trump, Musk, Tate and the rest were self-reporting above their reality – is muddy and complicated. As with all science, it frequently contradicts itself with warring studies. And, sadly, there is a tendency on the left to stoop to the levels of alt-right intelligence science to beat the demagogues, fascists and racists at their own game. There’s a strange air of self-satisfaction to research papers that point out that lower cognitive ability overwhelmingly lends itself to conservative ideology. One recent paper from the University of Minnesota found that being more clever “correlated with a range of left-wing and liberal beliefs”. Researchers studied 300 families, looking at IQ and genetic indicators of intelligence known as polygenic scores. The study’s author, Tobias Edwards, was careful enough to stress that “there is no law saying that intelligent people must always be supportive of particular beliefs or ideologies”.

“The way our intelligence affects our beliefs is likely dependent upon our environment and culture,” Edwards said. “Looking back across history, we can see intelligent individuals have been attracted to all sorts of different and often contradictory ideas.

“Intellectuals have flirted with and been seduced by dangerous ideologies and tyrannical regimes. Many smart people have believed ideas that are downright stupid.”

Edwards is right to be cautious. Clearly there’s a rich history of intelligence testing and academia being used to cover up sinister eugenicist or fascist ideology. A recent exposé from the anti-fascist charity Hope Not Hate found a terrifying uptick in eugenicist ideology from far-right actors and pronatalists hiding under the cloak of intellectualism. Of course, the temptation to lean into “it’s stupid to be conservative and I am clever because I am a socialist” ideology is admittedly hard to resist. On the F train, when Trump’s subway activist ranted about his intelligence, the reaction from the uneasy crowds was predictable. Hidden titters, rolled eyes. When he left, after two more painfully awkward stops, the tension broke and people laughed about it behind his back. Of course, he was an idiot. It made everyone gathered there feel better to laugh about his obvious idiocy, the same way it makes us feel better about the state of the world to laugh about Trump’s gauche inarticulacy or Elon Musk’s too-cringe-for-words jumps into the “X” logo on stage.

Laughing at these things doesn’t change anything, though, and often can do more harm than good. It feels good to dismiss ridiculous political opinions as idiocy, to laugh at people who believed in Brexit, or who think the Democrats are controlling the weather. It feels like insulation from the sobering fact that, all the same, Britain left the EU and Americans elected Trump, and laughing at each other for our ideological opponent’s perceived stupidity has only served to make society more atomised and divided than ever.

Today, scientists argue for a more inclusive way of measuring intellect and ability, methods that take into account acquired intelligence and different types of skills. As the oft-enjoyed Facebook mum quote says: “Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” The quote is usually attributed to Albert Einstein, one of society’s accepted super geniuses. Historians, for what it’s worth, aren’t actually sure where it came from. They’re not sure Einstein ever said it, in fact. But when has the truth ever got in the way of a debate about intelligence? That would be stupid.

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