The methodological flaw here is amusingly it’s own fascinating study: using some verbal sophistication proxy as a cognitive ability proxy to correlate political attitudes is arguably the key feature of modern hyper-polarized, Internet-speed news cycle politics.

It’s difficult to watch a screen without hearing some version of “most people are stupid”. This is deeply wrong: most people are very smart, but this is difficult for the well-educated, because most people are inarticulate.

Surviving, let alone reproducing in meaningful numbers, has almost always been a ruthless selection process on intelligence, but hyper-literacy is a path to high status that has only recently become available to people in large numbers, and even then only in some places (in the US where I live, smarty-pants hyper-literacy is dramatically higher status on the urban coasts for example).

This is why so many of my fellow coastal lefties are always befuddled if not enraged that huge blocks of the rest of the country (and world) vote with their ballots or feet or both for very poorly-articulated policies and agendas: the (to borrow a dangerous phrase) “sullen, silent majority” understands why “progress” is bad for them, but doesn’t articulate it well. This leads to a combination of feeling obviously right, but getting trounced at the polls rather often.