I’ve been curious about the new massive camp of Jordan Peterson acolytes. In one of my many prodigal late-night lurking sessions through the depths of Reddit, I noticed they collected some data on themselves. So here we go.

If you’ve been following my recent writing, podcasts, and videos, you’ll know I’m especially interested in the relationships between education, political correctness, taboo topics, and ideology.

I’ve been hypothesizing that there is a substantial number of culturally conservative (against the cultural leftism of the West) but libertarian (let people do what they want, free speech, etc.) folks, who have been increasingly shut out from mainstream Western political culture for decades now. Not just from the left, but from a mainstream right that bows before cultural leftism (what the right internet lovingly refers to as “cucks”).

In many educated circles, support for Donald Trump is seen as somewhere between insane and evil, quite seriously. Yet, about 50% of the Americans who voted did so for him, so we know at least a non-trivial number of educated people voted for him. But who are they? I haven’t really had strong intuitions about this, and my sense is you just don’t really see or hear from educated and highly thoughtful Trump supporters. I’m aware this could definitely be “my bubble,” but I don’t think it’s just that. I think there exist thoughtful educated Trump supporters, but I think they are systematically unlikely to appear in mainstream culture.

But I have been watching closely the explosion of popularity enjoyed by academic psychologist Jordan Peterson, and it has seemed to me that his constituency might just be some of the educated Trumpians. It is also consistent with my “long-term mass suppression” thesis, because this helps to explain how a random academic psychologist achieved genuinely extraordinary, anomolous levels of fame all of a sudden. It’s the same pattern with Trump (though I’m not, at all, equating the two individuals): a massive unexpected and rise-to-power indicating a massive reservoir of public interest in something that has hitherto been systematically under-supplied by the status quo.

So with these ideas in mind, let’s take a look at support for Trump, education levels, and identifications in the “four quadrant” model of ideology.











Correlation plot Let’s look into the structure of the more specific beliefs in the survey.