Few men are prepared to die for the right of others to say what they strongly disagree with; and most people’s faith in multiparty democracy is at best a lukewarm recognition that the alternative is much worse. Secretly most men would like their ideas (which they naturally believe to be correct) to rule absolutely and forever. Of this company is James Gilligan.
He is a professor of psychiatry at New York University and would like to see the Republican Party in the United States disappear from the face of the earth. His argument for this consummation so devoutly to be wished is as follows: the death rate from homicide and suicide in the United States goes up when there is a Republican president and down when there is a Democratic president. This, he thinks, is because the Republicans preside over increasing unemployment and economic inequality, and these in turn lead to shame, humiliation and lack of self-esteem in the part of the population vulnerable to the killing impulse, whether it be of self or of others.
He says that in view of the almost (though not quite) invariable effect of Republican presidents, that is to say poverty, despair and death, it is a wonder that any of them is ever elected. But he explains this paradox by arguing that Republican candidates and their party are able repeatedly and easily to throw dust in the electorate’s eye, so that it mistakes its own interest. It does not occur to him that, if this is really so, it raises questions about the nature of democracy. He would really rather prefer the rule of Plato’s philosophers, of whom, by happy coincidence, he is one.
Some of his statistical manipulations to arrive at his conclusions — which, despite his repeated protestations to the contrary, I suspect were foregone — seem to me to be doubtful.
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