American Violence and the Republican Party

Tiassa

Tiassa

Let us not launch the boat ...
Valued Senior Member
On Party and Violence: The Politics of Death

Flashback:

About 15 years ago, Lee and Gilligan began examining deaths by violence in America since 1900. As Lee sliced and diced their massive data set, she was shocked to find significantly higher national rates of violent death under Republican presidents than under Democratic ones. What's more, murder and suicide rates were higher in states that had voted for Republican presidential candidates than in those that had voted for Democratic candidates. Their key findings were published as a 2011 monograph, Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous Than Others.

"Since 1900, every time a Republican president has taken over, economic inequality has increased and the country has become more violent," says Gilligan, now a professor of psychiatry at NYU. And as the government safety net has crumbled in recent decades, rates of murder, imprisonment, and poverty have been five to 10 times higher in the United States than in Western Europe, Canada, and Australasia. Lee and Gilligan had to circulate their data-driven paper on the political correlates of violent death rates for nearly seven years before they finally got it published in 2014 in a specialized journal, Aggression and Violent Behavior. "My sense is that our study kept getting rejected not because it was lousy science but because editors wanted to avoid appearing too political," she says.

(Kendall↱)​

Can't imagine who sees that and wants more.
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Notes:

Kendall, Joshua. "The psychiatrist who warned us that Donald Trump would unleash violence was absolutely right". Mother Jones. September-October, 2022. MotherJones.com. 4 January 2025. https://www.motherjones.com/politic...ivil-war-bandy-lee-psychiatry-goldwater-rule/
 
Yes. Nobody can be truly safe until everybody has at least 16 guns each.
 
Contrary to popular belief, murder and suicide (by firearm) rates are higher in rural areas. Which skew towards the GOP. And contrary to GOP belief, rural metrics of well-being drop under GOP governance. Rural folk profess to loathe big gubment and crazy Leftist spending, but when that gubment assistance is cut back they ain't happy.
 
Sarkus said:
The solution is obvious, though: more guns!! ;)
Click to expand...

Well, we are the nation that believes in war for peace, mutually assured destruction, and the sociability of fear and threat.

Honestly, though, the whole idea is a little surprising; the meanings of liberal and conservative in American political discourse are of comparatively recent vintage, ca. 1968-1980. Looking back before the period between the '68 Democratic convention and Reagan's presidential vilification of liberalism, it's a lot harder for our contemporary values to identify those liberals and conservatives as a straightforward party-line difference.

Today, the idea that Republican administrations coincide with increased violent mortality doesn't surprise us. They are, after all, the bloodthirsty and belligerent party. But it's much harder to line up the issues of yesteryear according to our late- and new-century values.

James Gilligan put the data into a 180 page book, published in 2011; from the overview, via Amazon↱:

Politicians and the political process, even in ostensibly democratic countries, can be deadly. James Gilligan has discovered a devastating truth that has been "hiding in plain sight" for the past century - namely, that when America's conservative party, the Republicans, have gained the presidency, the country has repeatedly suffered from epidemics of violent death. Rates of both suicide and homicide have sky-rocketed. The reasons are all too obvious: rates of every form of social and economic distress, inequality and loss - unemployment, recessions, poverty, bankruptcy, homelessness also ballooned to epidemic proportions. When that has happened, those in the population who were most vulnerable have "snapped", with tragic consequences for everyone.

These epidemics of lethal violence have then remained at epidemic levels until the more liberal party, the Democrats, regained the White House and dramatically reduced the amount of deadly violence by diminishing the magnitude of the economic distress that had been causing it.

This pattern has been documented since 1900, when the US government first began compiling vital statistics on a yearly basis, and yet it has not been noticed by anyone until now except with regard to suicide in the UK and Australia, where a similar pattern has been described.​

Text from the introduction:

In the first chapter … I present the data―not mine but those compiled by the US government. They show: (1) the rise and fall of rates of homicide and suicide from 1900 through 2007; (2) the three periods during which these rates of lethal violence reached epidemic levels and then declined to non-epidemic ones; (3) the association of these periods of epidemic rates of lethal violence with Republican administrations and of non-epidemic levels with Democratic administrations; and (4) that the year-to-year changes in both suicide and homicide rates show net cumulative increases during the 59 years in which Republicans were in power (following the baseline year, 1900), and equally large decreases during the 48 years of Democratic administrations ....

.... Examining the data, I conclude that, however I slice and dice them―for example, confining the study to the period before the Great Depression, or Before World War II, or after World War II, in order to rule out the possibility that some great but unique historical event, rather than the party in power at the time, could have skewed the data―one finding remains constant: rates of lethal violence (suicide and homicide) rose to epidemic levels only during Republican administrations, and decreased below those levels only under Democrats . As a consequence of that, the sum of year-to-year changes showed a net increase in both suicide and homicide under Republicans, and a net decrease under Democrats, even during these shorter time periods. Given the stability of that correlation between political parties and violent death rates, and my inability to disconfirm it, the question that remains is: what does it mean? Why is it occurring and doing so repeatedly? As a physician, my interest has always been in matters of life and death, not politics, and this foray into politics because of a chance discovery that implicated political actors only happened because of my attempt to learn what was causing these deaths and how we could save lives.​
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Notes:

Gilligan, James. Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous Than Others. Cambridge: Polity, 2011.
 

More of this type of violence these days. The burning of the library seems especially barbaric. A bit of poetic justice in the arsonist also burning himself. Herr Drumpf has seemingly been able to pay lip service to both supporting the Jewish community and to encouraging white Christian nationalists. Another day, another cognitive dissonance. Easy for Drumpf, since there's a void at the center of him.
 
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