I found some relevant graphs in my photos from his first term that are also neat:

I’d be curious how they stack up now.

I love how one of the issues the Imperium has with the Tau is that they keep losing worlds to the Tau because they secede after the dramatic improvement in quality of life vs. life under Imperial rule.

When did I say that they weren’t? I said that I suspect that people who grow up under specific conditions are probably more likely to hold conservative beliefs.

In fact, I’d say that that is one of the examples I’m talking about. Think the white kid who grows up poor and hears his whole childhood from his parents and neighbors that it’s all the fault of those job stealing immigrants and those communist Democrats. He’s just as likely to grow up to be conservative as the kid who grew up wealthy or in a middle class white suburb where everybody looks just like him and who never faced any hardship and therefore can’t imagine a situation outside of his own limited life experiences. The first group blames their problems on The Other, while the second two can’t imagine that things are as bad as they say because the system benefitted them and therefore it must be good.

All run the full spectrum of conservative ideology, from indifference at best to the suffering of minorities to actively reveling in it. In short, my point was that cruelty and hatred are learned in these cases, not innate states of being, because one of the most effective tools against conservative beliefs is simply exposure to diverse groups of people.

Great question, because I had the same thought.

I think there’s a “nurture” factor in here, where people who grow up in “conservative” households, grow up benefiting from the status quo/without real hardships, or are just generally insulated from diverse groups of people when they’re young are more likely to hold “conservative” beliefs. Because one of the biggest fighters against bigotry is simply meeting people with different lived experiences than yours.

Fun fact: A study was done that apparently showed that the parts of the brain responsible for empathy are smaller on average in Republicans than the rest of the population.