Are Liberals Better Writers?

Not necessarily, but they do tend to have one trait that correlates with good writing

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

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This entire “Why Harris Lost” interview with Blue Rose Research founder David Shor is fascinating, but what especially captured my attention is this part, in which Shor describes how the rise of TikTok and the decline of writing has been bad for Democrats:

We used to live in this world where in order to get your message out there, you had to get people who write really well to absorb your message and put it out. And now, we’re in a world where anyone can make a video and if that video is appealing, it’ll get out there. And this is naturally bad for the left, simply because the people who write really well are a lot more left-wing than the overall population.

This is one of those things that feels true, and that, from a quick glance, seems to be true. Of course, it’s easy to think of examples of great conservative writers, from William F. Buckley to Ross Douthat. But most journalists seem to be liberal. Even many “conservative” journalists, like those who work at The Bulwark or The Free Press, tend to oppose Trump, the leader of the modern conservative movement. College is where many people either learn to write or discover a passion for writing, and college professors are mostly liberal. Most good movies are based on good writing, and Hollywood is notoriously liberal. Whenever there is a liberal cause going around social media, lots of famous authors tend to sign on because lots of famous authors are liberal.

So why does so much writing seem to be produced by liberals?

What we have here is a big case of correlation, not causation, but it’s a pretty interesting correlation. At the center of it all is a personality trait called openness to experience.

Specifically, leftists tend to be high in openness to experience, which is the trait associated with creativity, adventurousness, imaginativeness—and political liberalism, especially on social issues. To quote the aforementioned Buckley, if conservatives stand athwart history yelling “stop,” open people stand athwart the future yelling “sure, whatever.” Openness often entails supporting various types of social change, like gay marriage and trans rights. Open people tend to like progress and equality and to dislike authority and tradition, so historically, they have been drawn to progressive political candidates.

Openness has repeatedly also been shown to also be correlated with verbal intelligence, including having a strong grasp of semantics and a large vocabulary. (It’s not really correlated with mathematical intelligence, though, which is why so many journalists say they “can’t do math.”) Open people like to spend a lot of time reading, writing, and learning, so they get better at writing and find more success with writing.

In short, being liberal doesn’t make you better at writing, and writing well doesn’t make you liberal, but a single personality trait binds these two qualities together, which is why they often appear in the same person.

So is the decline of good (and presumably liberal) writing partly responsible for Kamala Harris’s loss?

The way I see it, open people who enjoyed interesting new ideas and who also enjoyed reading and writing started to explore these new ideas in well-written articles that spread far and wide through the liberal blogosphere of the Obama era (RIP.)

Then TikTok and other short-form video apps rose up and made it so it didn’t matter how well you’d developed as a writer. If you could create an engaging, 90-second video that went viral, you could win the Internet. (Shor makes a version of this point.) The social web cratered, and now many people spend far more time on TikTok than they do reading web pages.

Then all of those liberal bloggers who spent years finding the perfect way to advocate for the rights of trans kids or immigrants, or what have you, got left in the dust by the very videogenic, but not necessarily open or progressive, TikTok stars of the Trump era. Indeed, Shor found that “voters who got their news from TikTok were much more likely to swing to the GOP than other voters, even after controlling for demographics.”

It’s tough to be a person who likes writing in a world that doesn’t reward it. You live by openness to experiences, but you die by it, too.