John’s excellent post, just below, on the differential morality of Democrats and Republicans brought back memories of a piece I wrote long ago, around the time when John (who is a few years my junior) was focusing more on picking up some new Michael Jackson dance moves to show off at the junior high sock hop than on political science.
I wrote the following in, I think, 1994, and Richard Morin, who was then doing a column for Washington Post on offbeat research findings, picked it up and ran it there. It’s good to know, based on John’s post, that my argument is as true today as it was then.
(By the way [shameless self-promotion], the following will be reprinted in a forthcoming volume titled The Wit and Humor of Political Science (please hold your sarcasm), edited by Sigelman, Newton, Grofman, and Meier, to be published jointly by APSA and ECPR.)
The Hobbesian World of Democrats
Democrats are stupid (Sigelman 1988) and ugly (Sigelman 1990). This much is certain. From these hard but uncontestable truths it is but a small step to an image of Democrats as bottom feeders in a dismal swamp, relegated by the flatulence of their intellects and the unsightliness of their visages to the bottom rungs of a societal pecking order in which looks and smarts are what count.
Until now, there has been no hard evidence — merely logic and common sense — to indicate that Democrats are miserable failures in life. In the grand tradition of social science, my purpose here is to confirm what everyone already knows, or at least should know. However, because social scientists are themselves notorious Democrats (Ladd and Lipset 1975), it is never safe to assume that they know what they should.
My argument is simple: Compared to respectable Americans, i.e., Republicans, Democrats can be expected to inhabit a Hobbesian state of nature, a world in which life is poor, short, solitary, brutish, and nasty (Hobbes 1968). My method is equally simple: I compare Democrats’ and Republicans’ answers to questions about their lives that have been asked in the ongoing NORC General Social Survey, 1972-1993 (Davis and Smith 1993).<1>
Findings
Poor. I will begin by saying what goes without saying: Democrats are substandard wage earners. The mean family income of all 1972-93 Democratic GSS respondents was 25% below that of their Republican counterparts — $21,900 versus $27,300 (p<.001).<2> This means that most Democrats can only dream about the really great stuff that the average Republican can buy every day — nougahyde recliners, gas barbecue grills, vacations at Disney World, and the like.
Short. Many dead people vote a straight Democratic ticket — the so-called “graveyard vote” that has been responsible for so many Democratic victories over the years. The preponderance of cadavers among Democrats could conceivably be taken as evidence that people put themselves at risk of dying by being Democrats, but I prefer a more conservative interpretation: people put themselves at risk of becoming Democrats by dying.
What evidence, then, is there that Democrats have short lives? Because most survey respondents are alive when they are interviewed,<3> it is somewhat awkward to use survey data to try to establish that Republicans live longer than Democrats do. However, once we realize that healthy people live longer than unhealthy people do, the facts begin to fall into place. Democrats are significantly less healthy (p<.001) than Republicans: Asked to describe their own health as “excellent,” “good,” “fair,” or “poor,” Democrats, on average, fall between “fair” and “good” (1.9 on a scale on which 0 denotes “poor” and 3 equals “excellent”), while Republicans fall between “good” and “excellent” (2.1 on the same scale). Democrats are also better bets to take their own lives. Birds of a feather flock together, and when asked how many people they know who have committed suicide, Democrats average .26, Republicans a mere .08 (p<.05). But the single most compelling datum is simply that the average Republican is a full year older than the average Democrat (47.5 years versus 46.6, p<05), which must mean that Republicans live longer than Democrats do. Solitary. Democrats — impoverished, sickly, suicidal, doomed to an early death — are hardly the sorts of people any rational individual would seek out for companionship. Accordingly, they are significantly less likely than Republicans to be married (58% versus 63%, p<001), and, if they have ever been married, are significantly more likely to have been separated or divorced (31% versus 24%, p<001). Nasty. So far, we have seen that about all Democrats have to be thankful for is their relatively short life span. Reflecting the wretchedness of their lives, they also have lousy dispositions. Only 31% of Democrats, but 39% of Republicans, describe themselves as “very happy” (p<001), and 13% of Democrats, but only 8% of Republicans, consider themselves “not too happy” (p<001). They also have a dismal view of human nature: Asked whether “most people would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance” or would “try to be fair,” 40% of Democrats but only 30% of Republicans see people as predators (p<001); asked whether “most of the time people try to be helpful” or “are mostly just looking out for themselves,” 49% of Democrats but only 40% of Republicans see people as self-serving (p<001); and asked whether “most people can be trusted” or “you can’t be too careful in dealing with people,” 61 % of Democrats but only 50% of Republicans endorse distrust (p<001). In short, by comparison to Republicans, Democrats are curmudgeonly misanthropes; in this light, it is little wonder that so few people are willing to marry them or stay married to them. Brutish. As noted above, it has already been established that Democrats are stupid and ugly, two prime characteristics of brutishness. Moreover, they are singularly lacking in self-control and are apt to be involved in all sorts of mayhem and disreputable behavior. For example, 37% of them smoke, as compared to only 30% of Republicans (p<001), and 23% of them have seen an X-rated movie within the past year, as compared to only 17% of Republicans (p<001). These differences might be pooh-poohed as lifestyle choices,<4> but during their adult lives Democrats are also significantly more likely than Republicans to have been hit (p<.001), shot at (p<.01), robbed (p<.01), and burglarized (p<.01), and no normal person chooses to be hit, shot at, robbed, or burglarized. Conclusion
Might these differences between Democrats and real Americans be spurious? For example, Democrats are disproportionately poor, and many of the uncivilized attitudes and feral behaviors considered here are known to be linked to social class. So is it possible that the differences catalogued above say less about the kind of people Democrats are than about the kind of people who are Democrats?
To these questions I offer two responses. First, when all the differences reported above were reanalyzed with statistical controls instituted, as appropriate, for income, race, and age, only the differences in age and in the probabilities of being shot at, robbed, and burglarized declined to nonsignificance. All the other significant differences — 13 of the 17 — remained. Based on this evidence, I conclude that the great majority of the differences reported above reflect the kind of people Democrats are, not the kind of people who are Democrats. Second, no matter whether these differences reflect the kind of people Democrats are or the kind of people who are Democrats, the differences are real: Democrats are the dregs of society.
What, then, does the future hold for Democrats? The answer, I believe, is that the differences documented here will only widen. Because no respectable person wishes to mate with someone who is not only stupid and ugly but also diseased and desolate, Democrats are fated to continue in-breeding, producing new generations that are even stupider, uglier, and more pathology-ridden than the last several generations have been.<5>
Notes
1.I classify Democrats and Republicans according to their answers to the GSS party identification question: “Generally speaking, do you usually think of yourself as a Republican, Democrat, Independent, or what?” It has been argued that, no matter how they themselves feel about it, “weak” Republicans and Democrats should be reclassified as independents, and partisan-leaning independents should be reclassified as Republicans or Democrats (Keith, Magleby, Nelson, Orr, Westlye, and Wolfinger 1992); I strongly suspect that this is a dumb Democratic attempt to make Democrats seem less stupid.
2.In the GSS data file, family income is given in categories, e.g., “$5,000-$5,999,” rather than in raw dollars. To calculate means, I expressed each respondent’s income as the midpoint of his or her category. For the highest category, which is open-ended (“$25,000 or over”), I arbitrarily assigned a value of $50,000; if anything, this should understate the Democrat-Republican income gap, as there are certainly more rich Republicans than rich Democrats.
3.This proposition may be controversial. Study after study has established that most citizens are impervious to new political information. The assumption that most survey respondents are dead provides a powerful, yet parsimonious, explanation of this phenomenon.
4.A position with which I myself concur. If Democrats wish to behave like animals, then I consider it their right as Americans to do so.
5.The 1992 shift in the Democratic locus of power to the state of Arkansas was an obvious step in this direction.
References
Davis, James A., and Smith, Tom W. 1993. General Social Surveys, 1972-1993 [machine¬-readable data file] Principal Investigator, James A. Davis; Director and Co-¬Principal Investigator, Tom W. Smith; sponsored by National Science Foundation. –NORC ed. — Chicago: National Opinion Research Center [producer]; Storrs, CT: The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, University of Connecticut [distributor], 1993.
Hobbes, Thomas. 1968. Leviathan, ed. C.B. Macpherson. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Keith, Bruce E., David B. Magleby, Candice J. Nelson, Elizabeth Orr, Mark C. Westlye, and Raymond E. Wolfinger. 1992. The Myth of the Independent Voter. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ladd, Everett Carll, and Seymour Martin Lipset. 1975. The Divided Academy: Professors and Politics. New York: McGraw Hill.
Sigelman, Lee. 1988. “Are Democrats Stupid?” Journal of Irreproducible Results 33: 2-4.
Sigelman, Lee. 1990. “Toward a Stupidity-Ugliness Theory of Democratic Electoral Debacles.” PS: Political Science & Politics 23: 18-20.