I’ve noticed that most technical forums, from user groups to mailing lists, slashdot to stackoverflow, all tend liberal.
I want to know why there seems to be a paucity of conservatives in these settings. I want to know why the libertarians that show tend towards the radical fringe of the party.
With the size of the overall tech/geek population, there should be a more representative cut of political viewpoints.
Yet what I see is that most of the geeks I run across are distinctly left-leaning. They seem to all be in favor of Obama, with only a couple coming out in favor of anyone else in this presidential campaign.
Personally, I don’t like either major candidate: Obama is far too liberal for me, and so is McCain – there isn’t any form of conservative mainstream alternative, so I’m voting 7th party this year.
I want to know why, though, it seems that all the nerds I run across are liberal, and almost none are conservative.
I’ve read that there is a correlation between higher levels of education and propensity to hold so-called liberal perspectives. Also, most I’ve spoken to in technology get more news from non-traditional sources and less news from the mainstream media. The mainstream media is much more closely associated with the conservatives views of their corporate parent organizations than the average non-traditional sources, I think. So, there’s my bias- ‘liberals’ are better educated and better informed. For a fee, I’d be glad to do the legwork to pull together citations to support this perspective.
I’d have an initial tendency to agree with you, except that mainstream media (ie big newspapers, the major news stations, etc) are distinctly non-conservative in their reporting viewpoints (see the New York Times, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, Washington Post, etc). Certainly there are some big publications that tend conservative (Fox News and the Wall Street Journal), but almost every “alternative” news source I’ve come across (such as the triangle’s Independent) are distinctly liberal, too.
Also, I’d personally take umbrage with equating “educated” with “informed”. With a prevalent tendency towards liberalism in higher education, then certainly those who are informed there would also be liberal?
Continuing in the same vein as the previous comment that mentioned education levels I’ll just mention that although it’s glib, there’s more truth than people realize in the saying:
“Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”
Also, let me clarify that I don’t mind any given party affiliation, I’m just wondering why it’s lopsided.
@antipaucity
I think you’re conflating several contradictory biases when you call CNN and WaPo (for example) liberal. Being “liberal” means very different things depending on whether we’re discussing the quarterly report from Ford Motor, abortion laws, or immigration. I don’t think you can fairly call either CNN or WaPo “liberal” on all three of those.
Backing up to your original point, I think your sense of the percentage of liberals in tech circles vs. the general population is skewed by who posts. People with high verbal scores & lots of alphabet soup after their names tend to be liberal by most measures and, crucially, like to see stuff they’ve written posted to the web. That doesn’t mean there aren’t lots of right-leaning folks in the same group.
Lastly, I don’t think Obama is nearly as liberal as you make him out to be. He taught at Chicago, which has one of the most conservative law faculties of any respected law program (they’re #5 in the nation right now). That program gave the world people like Frank Easterbrook. Anyway, my point is that you should look at Obama’s major accomplishments in his time in Chicago and in his time in the Senate. They’re not out-of-left-field liberalism. Some highlights from the US Senate:
Ethics reform that became law:
* backing Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and going against his own party’s leadership on earmark reform. (January, 2007)
* Co-sponsored S.2590, the ethics reform bill amended by DeMint above, with Tom Coburn (R-OK) (April, 2006)
Securing loose nukes:
* Lugar-Obama Nonproliferation Legislation passed in January 2007 with Dick Lugar (R-IN)
There’s more, including a bill to pay for screening of veterans for brain injuries, another bill with Coburn to prevent no-bid contracts for rebuilding after Katrina…. there’s a lot there if you care to look, and I think his approach to legislation is pretty steady and, well… conservative.
No doubt on some social issues (eg. abortion) there are people who won’t like his votes, but if you boil down everything to people’s attitudes on narrowly-defined social issues then you’re not really asking for leadership or governance, are you?
Google ‘conservatives for obama’ (without the quotes) and you’ll get a lot of interesting reading (and some domain squatter).
Agreeing with previous comments, most of the media outlets you mention are pretty conservative, for the most part. The myth of the liberal media is about as true as the mythos of American individualism and about as widely believed in spite of the evidence. Some are not as far right as Fox, but they’re still not at all what Canadians or Brits would call ‘liberal’. Nor would I. Have a look at who owns these companies at http://www.mediaowners.com/ and then try to argue that GE and Walt Disney are liberal organizations.
You’ve argued here that higher education institutions are liberal and turn out liberal students. Maybe. And maybe, as I believe, liberal viewpoints are often the result of more education. The media and conservatives like to pretend that liberal, hippy professors are twisting the minds of students. I don’t buy it. Education leads to a better understanding of the world. A better understanding of the world often leads to the recognition, as has been pointed out here, that reality does have a liberal bias.
Education, at least where I went to school, was mainly concerned with learning to question and examine. There were a couple of people who were clearly pushing an agenda- some liberal, some conservative. You’re right, though, not everyone who gets an education gets the point. Some just want to get a job and aren’t interesting in examining anything, I suppose. You’re free to take umbrage with my opinion, but I think it’s pretty well established that the more education a person has, the more likely they are to be liberal. Less education has also been correlated with likelihood and conviction of religious belief.