John Lott Thinks Things Will Get Worse Because Of The Stakes

Dr Lottt weighs in:

Some hope that the shooting of House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and others last Wednesday will lead to more civility in politics. It’s clear that the attack was politically motivated — the Democratic shooter even carried a hit list of Republicans. The political viciousness has been everywhere.

While some will blame the violence on the grotesque picture of Kathy Griffin holding the President’s severed head or a play where the president is being stabbed to death, this Sunday Jill Abramson, the former chief editor of the New York Times, told CNN that it was “President Trump and the congressional leadership on the Republican side [who] are extremely divisive.”

But all these discussions miss something more fundamental that is driving all this, and, unfortunately, the viciousness isn’t likely to abate.

One reason that previous generations didn’t treat their presidents with similar levels of hated is because so much is at stake today. As government has grown, so too have the stakes…

Two baseball teams playing in the seventh game of the World Series are probably going to play a lot harder than two teams competing in August with no chance of making the playoffs. In the same way, as the size and scope of the federal government increases, interest groups will spend more on elections in an effort to influence the levers of government.

If federal spending still amounted to two percent to three percent of GDP — as it did a century ago — people likely wouldn’t care as passionately about election outcomes.

This theory misses a couple of things. First, spending was more under Reagan than it was under LBJ, yet LBJ had Hippies, r-ified by the fifties boom, bombing Police stations. Meanwhile Reagan, in a nation K-ified by Carter, had very little leftist violence.

Second, this fails to account for the strange SJW phenomenon, the obsession with importing foreigners as a proxy political force, or the cyclical nature of these things. It doesn’t even explain why the right and left cannot get along in the first place.

Yes there is more at stake, but there have been periods with less at stake and more acrimony, and there have been periods with more at stake and less acrimony.

What is really happening is our populations have been assaulted with free resources, and the weaker contingent of our people, predisposed by biology to the r-selected reproductive strategy, have gone massively r-selected, causing a consequent massive divergence between them and the remaining K-selected individuals who were not as corrupted. That shift in psychology is what has created this vicious rift between these r and K-selected mindsets, which now have split so much that they just cannot get along.

No other explanation makes nearly as much sense as simply understanding r/K Theory, which is why one day everyone will see politics in terms of r/K Selection Theory.

Spread r/K Theory, because it is the explanation