and shit on the environment. this comment thread is full of the exact condescension that conservatives and libertarians are sick of. People who uphold the Constitution and the vision of the Founders are comically uninformed? Stanford's Hoover Institute is comically uninformed? What a joke.

Given every libertarian/conservative economic theory that's been advanced since Reagan entered office has been tried and without exception resulted in increased income inequality and bricking the economy, comically uninformed seems pretty accurate. Given conservatives collective track record of having legislation thrown out in court on constitutional grounds claims of upholding it are likewise clearly unfounded.

Totally and utterly false and uninfotmed nonsense. Quite accurate if leftist policies - the failures of which can be measured and hundreds of millions of dead bodies and collapsed economies.

Is Peter Thiel comically uninformed?

Fascinating. So we should ignore Kansas' state economy going belly up due to grotesque mismanagement by "conservatives" attempting to implement libertarian-inspired economic policies? What about the sharp (and enduring) spikes in income inequality and the market crashes provoked by the Reagan and Bush Jr. regimes? We pretending basic economic indicators are hard to track or something?

Incidentally, you probably don't want to drag body counts into a conversation that's teetering on the brink of a larger critique of capitalism. Unless, that is, you'd like to review deaths world-wide from preventable illness due to lack of access to healthcare? In the US alone it's estimated to be 45,000 deaths annually. Meanwhile Texas (in all it's staunch conservative glory) has 3rd world infant mortality rates.

Regarding collapsed leftist economies, what percentage of these are attributable to inherent failures of socialist policy vs simple economic sabotage and regime tampering by the US and it's allies? Would you like to review what the CIA has been up to since the 1950's?

Or would you rather simply review the number of times conservative legislators have run afoul of the constitution just in the last 5 years? We can start with the electoral maps of North Carolina getting chucked over illegal racist gerrymandering, and a thick stack of executive orders that have died in a judge's trash can this year.

51% of Republicans STILL believe Barack Obama was born in Kenya. http://www.newsweek.com/trump-birther-obama-poll-republicans...

There are definitely principled conservatives that are highly informed.

But the strategy the Republican party and media uses to win elections, includes a lot of disinformation and caters to the uninformed.

50% of Democrats believed George W Bush was complicit in 9/11 [1].

People like to believe their own tribe is the exalted one, but exploiting the uninformed isn't a partisan strategy.

[1] https://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2011/04/more-than-h...

and that's a false equivalence. It is provably true that Obama wasn't born in Kenya. However, it is plausible that some in government (not just W) wanted that war. The survey you refer to does not compare to the simple yes/no of the Birther idiocy

As if upholding "the Constitution and the vision of the Founders" magically makes people informed about everything else?