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09/15/2003: "The Liberty Bell Curve"

The typical way to diagram the political orientation of Americans is via the political spectrum. This is that flat line showing conservatives on the right-hand side and liberals on the left. Sometimes the diagram shows uncommitteds (understood as apathetics) in the middle, with labels like “independents,” “moderates,” or “swing voters.” The word spectrum comes of course from physics. It’s the sequence of colors revealed when white light shines through a prism, as discovered by the great physicist Roy G. Biv. (Actually it was discovered by Sir Isaac Newton; Roy G. Biv is the mnemonic for remembering the colors of the spectrum from red through green to violet). It’s not hard to understand why this has become a “comfortable” way of representing the diversity of political opinion in America. It makes one’s particular position on the spectrum look like a matter of personal choice, with “red” being equally as valid a choice as “violet.” It also implies that there are as many people with “red” political inclinations as there are people with “violet” political inclinations. The problem with the spectrum is that political inclination is a characteristic of a human population, and when a characteristic of a human population takes a range of values, the distribution of these values is seldom an even spread. Take intelligence, for example. If you graph the IQ of individuals across the population, you get a relatively small number of geniuses on one side of the graph, a relatively small number of mentally challenged people on the other, with the great majority of the population in the center of the diagram. (As an advocate for moderation I’m passing up the opportunity for an IQ joke at the expense of the right wing!) Similar results are found for virtually every characteristic that takes a range of values across the population: small numbers at the edges, building up to a fat center area. This is of course the bell curve, beloved of our high school math classes (and encountered in virtually all of our science classes). So why should political inclination be any different? The answer is that it isn’t. Were there to be a perfect way to quantify an individual’s political inclinations as they range from extreme liberal to extreme conservative, the results across the hundreds of millions of voting-age Americans would be a bell curve. Let’s spend this week working through the implications of this insight.