Conservatives are stupid, right?

How exactly did Conservatives become associated with unintelligent red necks?  And on the other side of the coin how did Liberals get the reputation for being smart and educated?

All the wealthy and successful people I know are conservatives.  They own fine homes and businesses, play the stock market, their kids go the private schools.  These are people who go to college and expect that same of their children and such.

Conversely I've known a number of liberals who really weren't so bright.  People who are well into their 40s who have no savings for retirement, people who exercise no authority over their children.  People who run out to the car dealership every year to lease some new car they can barely make payments on.  Burnt out dead heads who still think it's cool to get high, et cetera.

I know both sides have their fair share of each kind, but from my experiences it looks like conservatives have a reputation they don't really deserve.  They tend to be unwilling to look through another culture's point of view, and unfortunately take to religion, but so far as I know most conservative people are educated and good with money.

>>1

Academia is my profession, and I've encountered almost no Conservative in Grad School and this is including teachers and students. My coursework is not humanities related and my University is not positioned in a progressive area but instead is in the "Bible Belt."

Almost everyone I've spoken with about the American political situation across the board in academia is overwhelmingly "Leftist" as you would say, but they're not the type of Leftist I don't think is heard as much as they should. These Leftists are for virtuous pursuits such as increasing literacy rates, lobbying for increased public funding toward museums and art galleries and trying to emphasize that there's more to life than  work and that creativity is the hallmark of humanity, and it is through creativity that we devise new ways to think about problems and solve them.

I've also perused some statistics and Liberals swamp the Ivory Tower Scene and there is little to no Republican or Conservative perspective present. The trend showed that as someone spends more time in University the less likely they are to consider themselves as Conservatives.

To answer your question OP, I think it's two fold. The first reason Republicans are considered as "stupid/ignorant" is because of the types of legislation the Socially Conservative minded people pass, such as obscenity laws, making abortion tougher to combat Roe v. Wade 73', and associating with Fundamentalist Christians in terms of the goals they want to achieve through legislation.

The second part of the answer is that American politics is dualist. You're either black or your white, Right or Left. There's no room for any distinctions, although the Libertarians try, they come across as Neo-Con Economists anyways because that's what they can be branded as, although they may hold socially liberal views.

Because of this dualism, I suspect that people tend to gravitate toward the extremes if they feel passionately about politics, and most of the time (generalization) they don't check into the issues or here's the key word -------------- CRITICALLY THINK (as in critical thinking) about why the particular policy is good for them, instead of good for their dogma.