Further to yesterday`s post on Matt Taibbi`s article about the Tea Party in Rolling Stone

“I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative.”

This is a well-known and often cited quote from John Stuart Mill in a letter to the Conservative MP, John Pakington, March 1866.  The issue Mill was addressing?  The unwillingness of the Conservatives to extend women the vote.

Adam Gopnik on the meaning of the quote:

After [his wife] Harriet’s death, Mill entered Parliament, in 1865, as a liberal backbencher, and did about as well as intellectuals usually do there. He was often hooted, and became notorious for having once described the Conservatives as “necessarily the stupidest party.” What he meant wasn’t that Conservatives were stupid; Disraeli, who was running the Tory Party then, was probably the cleverest man ever to run a political party, and Mill’s own influences from the right were immense and varied. He meant that, since true conservatism is a complicated position, demanding a good deal of restraint when action is what seems to be wanted, and a long view of history when an immediate call to arms is about, it tends to break down into tribal nationalism, which is stupidity incarnate. For Mill, intelligence is defined by sufficient detachment from one’s own case to consider it as one of many; a child becomes humanly intelligent the moment it realizes that there are other minds just like its own, working in the same way on the material available to them. The tribal nationalist is stupid because he fails to recognize that, given a slight change of location and accident of birth, he would have embraced the position of his adversary. Put him in another’s shoes and he would turn them into Army boots as well.