Why is the American right obsessed with IQ?

Roisin Lanigan, The Independent

On Sunday, I was unfortunate enough to schedule a journey on the New York subway that coincided with Donald Trump’s homecoming rally. The train passed through Madison Square Garden, where Trump was flanked by Elon Musk, Dr Phil, Hulk Hogan and co with tales of how together they were going to take America “back” from an unnamed other. There, inevitably, the true believers who didn’t manage to get tickets to the Trump 2024 sideshow piled into the carriage, and, inevitably, an argument ensued. A man in a camo Maga hat took up against a tourist for putting his suitcase in the supposedly wrong place, supposedly blocking the entrance.

“In your country you can do whatever you want,” the man in the camo hat bellowed at the poor bewildered guy, who had no space to move his suitcases even if he wanted to. And then, the culmination of the whole rant, when the man said he “didn’t speak English”. “I have an incredibly high IQ”, said the man in the camo hat, while everyone else stared stubbornly down at their phones, pretending not to hear. “I am a highly intelligent person.”

What this particular Trump supporter’s intelligence had to do with the situation was unclear. Except that high intelligence, particularly intelligence measured by IQ, is an enduring fascination for the right. Just this week, Mel Gibson, an actor and director perhaps more well known of late for his racist and antisemitic rants rather than his acting or directing, went in on Kamala Harris’s perceived low intelligence. Gibson, who’s unsurprisingly voting Republican, told TMZ he thought the vice-president’s political track record was “appalling”. He went on to say she had “no policies to speak of”.

“And she’s got the IQ of a fence post.” The right’s confluence of Harris’s “incompetence” with low IQ is nothing new. A day before Trump spoke at MSG, JD Vance was joking to crowds in Pennsylvania that he was “about 20 IQ points dumber” after watching one of her speeches. Trump has repeatedly called Harris “low IQ” during his election campaign, so much so that the VP responded by saying she would take a cognitive test to disprove his claims. Before Harris was in his crosshairs, Trump directed the same “low IQ” insults to Joe Biden. Trump’s fixation on IQ as a marker of self-worth is well documented — remember when he called himself a “very stable genius”? — so much so that a former White House aide told the website Politico that “part of it comes from his insecurities about not being perceived as intelligent”.

Obsession with intelligence is a repeated theme for right-wing demagogues who all, funnily enough, seem to have near-genius IQs. In 2013, Boris Johnson, then Mayor of London, was criticised by Nick Clegg for “unpleasant elitism” and “talking about people as if they were dogs” when Johnson, educated at Eton and Oxford, suggested some people struggle to get on in life because of their low IQs. Elon Musk claims he has an IQ of 155, while simultaneously mocking Instagram users for having IQs of “lower than 100”. Andrew Tate says his is 148. Jordan Peterson claims his is 147. For comparison, the average IQ is around 100. Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking ranked close to 160. Mensa accepts membership from anyone who tests at over 130, which equates to around 2 per cent of the global population, and, somewhat suspiciously, all of the right’s favourite men.

To understand the right’s IQ obsession, you have to go right back to the invention of Intelligence Quotients as a marker of intellect. And to do that shows that the eugenicist origins of IQ testing are well documented. As a field of study, it emerged in the early 20th century, around the time when interest in eugenics and so-called “feeble-mindedness” were reaching new heights and ever more mainstream attention. It was against this backdrop that Alfred Binet created the first practical intelligence test in France in 1905, for the purposes of organising school placements for children. Although he warned that results from the test should not be used to measure innate intelligence or label individuals permanently, that is precisely what’s happened in the century or so since.