I understand many of you refuse the label.
No, you assert it. That's one of the more inexcusable habits some among the hard right of conservative ranks routinely engage in. To be fair, it's not an exclusively right wing problem. A leftist here once called me an apologist for the Christian right, so I suppose it's mostly an extremist/zealot problem.
If you're sure of the rightness of your position that you can't see a principled difference, it tends to lead you toward the demonization of opponents and the belief that they're either dense or willfully opposed to the good you perceive. That, in turn, must mean they should be or are either a) ashamed and hiding their allegiance or b) attempting to work some undetermined harm by appearing to be something else so that they can do damage to your position from a position of so-called nonpartisanship.
The problem with that is that it's nuts. People who believe in a thing support it and gain nothing by pretending not to, given that anyone not self-evidently in your wheelhouse would have their opinion met with the very suspicions people like you level. So your assertion doesn't really make a great deal of sense, when you consider it.
Do you consider yourself as more innately intelligent than most conservatives you meet?
Doesn't matter if they do. The average liberal is better educated and most studies (but not all) have concluded with a correlation of liberal belief and higher intelligence, as with the 2009 study conducted by libertarian Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics or the 2010 National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.
Do you consider yourself more moral? More compassionate?
The moral question would be interesting. I know that conservatives give more time and resources to charity while liberals support programs that help the disadvantaged, programs that many of those otherwise charitable conservatives seek to destroy or agree with abolishing, like school lunches of impoverished kids.
Moral and compassionate superiority might be harder to get at than most would think on either side.
Do you think America would be better off without conservatives?
As a moderate who agrees with conservative thinking on any number of issues, I'd vote no. I hope a liberal would agree, but I suspect if you found a counterpart to yourself they'd have a similar response to your likely vote on liberals within that same inquiry.
Having them around for entertainment value or to keep your mind sharp doesn't count.
Well, if you killed every conservative comic you wouldn't lose much of the world's humor. I always thought Miller's HBO show was very sharp, but he was the exception. I think that's because conservatism tends to represent the entrenched power structure and comics make their business the tweaking of that structure. Just a guess though.
