(via Instapundit) Well, maybe not the whole state - just Berkeley.  The Angry Clam reports on the research garbage your taxpayer dollars are funding:

BERKELEY – Politically conservative agendas may range from supporting the Vietnam War to upholding traditional moral and religious values to opposing welfare. But are there consistent underlying motivations?

Four researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of conservatism report that at the core of political conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include:

- Fear and aggression
- Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
- Uncertainty avoidance
- Need for cognitive closure
- Terror management

"From our perspective, these psychological factors are capable of contributing to the adoption of conservative ideological contents, either independently or in combination," the researchers wrote in an article, "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition," recently published in the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin.

God, why don't they just come out and say "we'ven proven to ourselves something we've known all along -- conservatives are raptured by a lower form of human cognition".    It's a regurgitation of that old thread that conservatives are simply liberals who haven't seen the light yet or been lifted into a higher plane.

I'm ostensibly a "libertarian" although I often have stronger sympathies with "conservatives" than "liberals".   But this pisses the hell out of me either way.   Could you imagine the academic censure that would follow if American Economic Association, for example, published a study which sweepingly concluded "We've proven that Berkeley politics are the result of a consistent lack of understanding of economics"?

How can someone who utterly embraces creative destruction be accused of possessing "uncertainty avoidance"?    How can someone who casts their lot with the ebb and flow of markets be "intolerant of ambiguity"?   Seattle-inspired WTO demonstrators surely have something to say about Liberal "fear and aggression".   Which group as a whole prefers the command-and-control of direct govt-to-govt foriegn aid vs. the ephemeral advantages of trade with another country?

Sheesh.  Crap like this is why I'm of the sneaking suspicion that the term "Conservative" has been lost to the caricature's that are Pat Buchanan and Robertson.   This article reflects the all-to-common conventional wisdom in academia that Conservative is just a synonym for Stupid.