One of the commenters on John’s “Zombie Politics” post notes that Jonathan Chait has a new piece applauding George Packer, doubting Sides (and Bartels), then transitioning to a discussion of Packer and others discussing Charles Murray’s new book, Coming Apart. Chait’s title: “Why Are Poor Whites Conservative? And Poor?”

That’s the message I take from a recent book by James Gilligan, a psychiatrist at New York University. In Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous than Others, Gilligan documents a striking statistical connection between changing rates of violent death in the United States over the past century and the party of the president. He concludes that Republican administrations are “risk factors for lethal violence,” and that the only reason they have not produced “disastrously high epidemic levels” of suicides and homicides is that Democrats have repeatedly undone their damage. (I’ve added handsome hand-coloring to Gilligan’s key figure in order to highlight the partisan pattern.)