I think you are largely right but I would be willing to bet my life that between the beginning and end of the Reagan administration, all 6 of these went up: 1)federal health regulation, 2)non-federal health regulation, 3)federal safety regulation, 4)non-federal safety regulation, 5)federal environmental regulation, 6)non-federal environmental regulation.

Same for George W. Bush. Twelve deltas, all positive.

Of course modern conservatives didn’t help their own cause much: they stood up with leaders who were on the wrong side of civil rights, womens’ rights and gay rights…

It is interesting to compare the attitude of most academics toward conservatives and toward libertarians. Libertarians never stood up with those leaders but they often get lumped in as not being worth taking seriously.

Caledonian, Even if “smarter and better-educated” != “rational”, I think that smarter and better-educated should tend towards rationalism.

Then I doubt that you appreciate what the function of higher education is. It might be helpful for you to review the origins of the university system.

I also suspect that you’re using ‘smarter’ in an informal and vernacular sense. The more specific meanings of intelligence do not result in any clear trend towards rationalism.

Q says, “it’s only as self-serving as the declaration that the liberal consensus among academics ‘looks like herd behavior.’”

Maybe I should clarify: as to issues where something like an objective answer exists, the fact that lots of intelligent people believe the same thing isn’t necessarily herd behavior (although it well could be). But many political issues boil down to subjective weightings of incommensurable values, where no objective solution is in the cards (e.g., the right of the fetus to live vs. the right of the woman to control her body, or the intangible value of protecting certain endangered species vs. the value of economic development). When you find a group of people who all take one side of such an issue, I don’t think it’s “self-serving” to suspect herd behavior of some kind.

You’ve obviously never read the comments at the Huffington Post or the Daily Kos.

You are right that intelligent folks can create intricate justifications, but it isn’t clear to me that this ability means they cannot distinguish rationalizations from rationalism.

Caledonian, I disagree. I think intelligent people (of the only type of intelligence that matters IMO, the ability to maximize persistence odds) are those that sense from nonsense. This is different than (1) creating elaborate and intricate external propaganda to get others to act in the intelligent person’s interest, or (2) creating and internalizing personal belief ideas and narratives that on their surface are irrational, but optimize management of system 1 “subconscious” intelligence to meet the rationally optimized goals devised by the system 2 intelligence.

Naturally it may be theoretically possible to predict such reversals, but this seems to be not a trivial task.

The fact is made more complex by the reality that people often find it convenient to conceal their intentions and motivations, and so describe their positions using names and terms that are grossly inaccurate.

Conservatism, as a political movement, has little to do with conservatism as a concept. A similar point holds for liberalism – what is formally called ‘classical liberalism’ is incompatible with Liberalism as a political identity today, and is generally considered a form of conservatism.