Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous Than Others
James Gilligan
Polity Press, 180pp.

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. For example, on page 28 he states that the difference in violent death rates between Republican and Democratic presidencies ‘amounts to a difference… representing roughly 114,600 fewer violent deaths per year under Democrats than under Republicans’.

A man who can look at that figure and not see immediately that it must be wrong is no more to be trusted with statistics than an alcoholic in a wine-merchant’s. There are approximately 16,000 murders a year in the United States, and 30,000 suicides. Even Gilligan does not maintain that all of those are caused by Republican presidencies, or the memory or possibility thereof; but even if he did maintain it, it would still not amount to 114,600 per year. He writes what cannot be true.

His economic history is likewise suspect. He states, for example, that Franklin Roosevelt’s policies put an end to the Great Depression, without any acknowledgement that those policies were started by Hoover, and that many economists now believe that those policies actually turned a recession into a depression. I am not saying that I know for certain that these economists are right; but not even to acknowledge that a different view of the matter from his own exists demonstrates a faith of almost religious intensity in his own views.

The author’s dictatorial aspirations are further illustrated by his comparison of the effects of the Republican party (for which, incidentally, I hold no brief, and many of whose atavars seem to me profoundly foolish) with those of smoking. If the analogy is as close as he suggests, it follows that the activities of the Republicans should be severely restricted, and driven almost underground.

The author’s crude views, his attitude that ordinary people are just so many sheep for the shearing, is illustrated by his view that the tobacco companies managed by their obfuscations to disguise from the public the harmful effect of their products. But it does not follow from the fact that they tried to do so that they actually succeeded in doing so. I have been a doctor for nearly 40 years, and I have never met anyone who did not truly believe that smoking was bad for him.

James Gilligan would have been one of those psychiatrists who pronounced Barry Goldwater as psychiatrically unfit to be president. This is an abuse of psychiatry, though not as bad as that which used to occur in the Soviet Union. As far as the professor is concerned, you can have any policy you like, so long as it is his. 

First published in The Spectator.