Democrats are literally the party of crazy people

Crazy is, admittedly, a bit of a pejorative term. But as a new study published by Political Behavior shows, not only have the negative connotations attached to mental health conditions fallen as the prevalence of mental illness risen, but an increasingly large percentage of Americans use mental health as a source of political identity, particularly younger Americans.

Previous studies have already shown that people who report suffering from mental illness at least at some point in their lives are more likely to support higher government spending on not just healthcare, but also other Democratic Party priorities such as education and welfare. Other research has shown that Democrats are far more likely to report having suffered from mental illness than Republicans.

And using the 2022 Cooperative Election Study, Utah State University Assistant Professor of Political Science Lauren Van De Hey confirms that just 16% of those that consider themselves “very conservative” or “conservative” report having suffered a mental illness at least once in their life, compared to 31% of those who consider themselves “liberal” and 39% of those who consider themselves “very liberal.”

Van De Hey further used Cooperative Election Study data to create Mental Health Identity and Alienation scores from responses to seven follow-up questions asked only to those who first said they had suffered from a mental illness in their lifetime. The questions measured whether respondents considered mental illness important to their own identity, how strongly they identified with other people with mental illness, whether they believed people with mental illness should work together to change unfair laws, and whether they thought people with mental illness in America had a lot in common with one another. By combining these answers, Van De Hey created a score meant to capture not just private experience with mental illness, but whether respondents understood that experience as a shared group identity with political meaning.

Van De Hey found that not only did those with high Mental Illness Identity and Alienation scores support higher levels of government spending on healthcare, welfare, and education, they also opposed higher spending for law enforcement, all positions common to Democratic Party voters.

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“Mental health identity has begun to function as a political identity for some individuals, particularly in shaping support for increased state spending on healthcare, education, and welfare,” Van De Hey writes. “In our current political climate, it seems as though mental health will continue to be an important political consideration, especially as Gen Z ages as a cohort.”

Democrats have spent decades turning personal fragility into virtue and private suffering into political entitlement. The Van De Hey study shows where that leads: mental illness becomes an identity, identity becomes a constituency, and the constituency demands more spending, less policing, and a politics organized around grievance instead of sanity.