Xando:

The people who make you computer monitor work and develop new cancer vaccines? They actually tend to be conservatives. It's the people who laid the theoretical groundwork for it that are the liberals.

Overall I think your categorizations aren't all that far off. I've spent time working entirely on the "pure" side and entirely on the "applied" side...and now I'm doing both. I agree that the more applied the work, the more likely you are to find conservatives. I disagree with your sweeping explanation.

Xando:

And once you grasp this, the "anti-intellectualism" strain will probably make a whole lot more sense. The applied scientists are grounded in both reason and reality, whereas the theoretical scientists are fundamentally cut loose from reality.

While it's beautifully romantic to extend the intellectual framework underlying the two types of research into a well-formed political ideology, I really don't think that's the reality. Most gov't funded applied research is somehow related to defense spending. Something that is supported by Republicans. (I'm about to marry an applied scientist at a private, non-defense, company, and as far as I can tell where he works is more politically mixed.) In my past experience working as a fellow on scientific funding issues in Washington, Dems are more likely to be open to funding "pure" science. Just look at McCain's current hostility to anything that he doesn't immediately understand as being useful. I do think that this has little to do with conservative vs. liberal and more to do with the current party platforms. "Pure" scientists care an awful lot about whether their gov't is hostile to any idea that conflicts with the Bible, b/c if Genesis is right we don't exactly need to fund cosmologists. "Applied" scientists know that a Republican administration will mean a lot more DoD contracts and a lot more work (if you think I'm exaggerating, this exact conversation was happening in my Aerospace Engineering dept during the 2000 election debacle where everyone was openly discussing how much a Gore victory would hurt their funding).

Ideologically I'm pretty far left, but most scientists I know are not. Most scientists I know, though, care a lot about where next year's salary will come from. And as a result the cosmologists, at least, often favor Democrats.