From the Monkey Cage: Charles Blow empirically debunks the cocktail party anecdote that Republicans are more likely to engage in illicit behavior (have affairs, get divorced, watch pornography) than Democrats. At that same time, he reminds us of the perils of ecological inference.

Using GSS data, he finds no statistical relationship between political ideology and divorce or infidelity. What’s more interesting to me is why those of us on the left like to grab on to this narrative. There seems to be a trenchant meme in popular culture about the repressed puritan who longs to “let loose.”

My wife and I recently saw Woody Allen’s Whatever Works. An otherwise funny movie except for the tired stereotype of the repressed Southern evangelicals that get enticed by the “big city’s” charms. In this image, a good Christian woman played by Patricia Clarkson is seduced by a philosophy professor and encouraged to indulge her animal spirits.

We also discover that the upstanding southern father, played by Ed Begley, is a repressed homosexual. He only discovers this in New York, of course.

Don’t get me wrong, we can go on for days about the level of hypocrisy present among the “family values crowd.” Republican politicians are having affairs so often that it’s not even news anymore. But it strikes me as interesting that we on the left so readily accept the narrative of conservatives being more sinful than liberals. It reinforces our sense of rectitude. In the same way, I imagine, that conservatives think all of us in academia are a bunch of un-reflective radicals.