I'd like to talk about this a bit.
I'm an engineer, and work with lots of engineers. Some are good at their jobs, others not. Some I know the political opinions of, others not. While I thus cannot say that I see any strong correlation between a 'red' outlook on things vs 'blue' and being a good engineer (my data set is far too threadbare), I can certainly point to some very 'blue' folks who are better engineers than I am (of course I can also point out counter examples).
I think as a society we mistake education for intelligence, and intelligence for (for want of a better word) wisdom.
I would agree with thegunguy that a decent IQ is needed to be a successful engineer, and of course most companies won't even look at your resume without a degree so education is needed too. But I don't think either one, or even the combination, show wisdom.
Now some engineering jobs you need wisdom too - but not all of them. I expect that's true of even most "calculus required" fields.
I think the red/blue divide isn't at all about intelligence or education - except coincidentally. I think it is about wisdom.
Wisdom (again, perhaps not the best word choice) is where you realize that almost everything is a tradeoff - if I drive faster I'll get there sooner, but I might get a speeding ticket. Tradeoff.
I see a lot of 'red' area folks talk about tradeoffs. I seldom hear that from 'blues.' I hear 'blues' talk about ideals.
Take COVID-19. I hear 'blues' talk about how "if everyone wearing masks saves even one life it is worth it." That sounds like a tradeoff... but it is really an absolutist position because wearing masks has negative health effects on a large part of the population. The "tradeoff" question is "does everyone wearing masks result in a healthier society?" I have my own opinion on that, but *every single person I've had a productive discussion with on those terms was someone I knew was a 'red'*.
Again, gun control. Does it work? Does it reduce crime? To the 'blues' this doesn't matter - we have heard the "if it saves only one life" mantra for decades. Of course gun control also *costs* lives - the lives of those who couldn't defend themselves. Again, I have my own opinion. Again, every person I've actually been able to *talk* about that idea with was 'red' or at least 'purple'. The 'blues' simply look at the positive results and ignore the unintended (or at least unspoken) consequences. Guns do bad things and are evil, so anything that reduces the number of them out there *must* be good.
This, obviously, is a simplification, but I really feel like it is the clearest divide I've seen.
Thoughts?
I appreciate this post because you are clearly thinking about this, rather than emoting, which is a lot of what I see here.
The red/blue divide obviously cannot be broken down into one thing, but it is important to understand what conservatism and liberalism mean. Conservatism,
by definition, means a desire to slow change, or to eliminate change and revert to a previous position. It tends to be reactive, in that someone proposes a change (let's say gay marriage). A conservative position is to oppose that, because it contradicts previous traditions (or religions) and rules. Taxes might be another position - a liberal (in 1913) might propose income taxes, and a conservative would oppose that change because it poses a threat to some aspect of their economic life.
Because liberals want change (in certain directions), they naturally want the authority to effect that change, and therefore seek the authority to do so. They are therefore considered the group in favor of governmental power. This is why conservatives oppose governmental power - to oppose any such changes. In US history, the biggest manifestation of this was the Civil War, in which conservatives wanted to preserve the current order (slavery) and liberals wanted change. The southern states therefore framed this as a states' rights issue because a strong federal government would be in a position to eliminate slavery.
It is worth thinking about the fact that, as time has passed, the vast majority of beachheads defended by the conservatives have disappeared because society has moved on in the direction of liberal change: slavery, resistance to women's right to vote (and equal rights), outlawing birth control, segregation, proscription of gay marriage, resistance to science (e.g. the Scopes Trial), book censorship, trickle-down economics, isolationism (and the America-First Committee associated with Lindberg). Today, you won't find too many conservatives defending segregation, but when I was a small child, it was not uncommon. My grandmother remembered fighting for the right to vote.
There are a few exceptions - conservative libertarian issues have tended to be supported, such as gun rights. Some elements of conservative economics are still generally considered sound, although much of that is open for debate by economists today.
However, it is worth considering that the US was founded during the Enlightenment, as a liberal nation. It was very much founded by the secular liberals of their day (who, against conservative thought, rejected the divine right of kings), and many of the the most important changes to the nation (end of slavery, Progressive Era, Civil Rights Era, WW2) are 'liberal' in that sense. There have been social reactions to these things, of course - the end of reconstruction and the 2nd KKK, the Reagan Revolution, etc. You might read Alexander Stephens' 'Keystone Speech' for a fairly brutal articulation of this. Despite these reactions, the trend is clearly in the direction of the changes I listed.
(Trump was, in this sense, a reaction to Obama and the change he represented [a black president who got universal health care instituted]. But then we got Biden, who is even more liberal than Obama.)
This desire to change and improve is why liberals tend to look to the future. They see that things can be better in the future if specific changes are made. In this sense they may be seen as 'idealistic', whereas conservatives tend to be pessimistic. A liberal may want to change something about society, but a conservative is pessimistic that the change will actually achieve the desired result, or be positive at all. Sometimes conservatives are correct - some liberal experiments at social engineering, such as public housing, have largely been a disaster, (gun control is another example). But sometimes liberals are right - gay marriage does not seem to have been the end of the nuclear family. Nor has the right to vote for women lead to a dissolution of society. Programs like Social Security and the ACA (Obamacare) seem to work. The American public university system is the envy of the entire world and is significantly responsible for the economic might of the US. Environmentalism (starting largely with Teddy Roosevelt) is why we all have public lands where we can camp, hunt, fish, and share as Americans. Public funding for research (NSF and NIH) has been responsible for innumerable medical and technical advances.
But I would beware of conflating pessimism with wisdom. Over the last 250 years the world has steadily changed, and conservatism, as a general philosophy, has tended to be wrong. We no longer defer to monarchs or religious authorities. The traditional social hierarchies inherited from the previous 10,000 years, of master over slave, landholder over peasant, priest over parishioner, male over female, colonial invader over native, etc., have been rejected. In all of these cases, it has been the forces of enlightenment and liberalism that have driven the world forward. The adoption of democratic principles, science, universal education, the rights of man, legal egalitarianism - these are all liberal changes, and all resisted by conservatives (at the time).
There are people on this board (over on the vaccination thread) who have said that they will never get the vaccination, no matter what. That is a conservative reaction, driven by a conservative impulse to resist change. It is also wrong. It is true that liberals sometimes overreach, or move too fast. Conservatives like to latch onto those instances. But, historically, on balance, it is the liberal trajectory that is the right one. Where would the world be today without vaccinations? Have you ever seen someone with polio or smallpox?
Some people have difficulty understanding the big picture, but step back 20, 50, 100, and 200 years. What are the important changes in world and US history? In which cases was conservatism in the right?