Could it be that the nation is divided not by east or west, urban or rural, colored or white, rich or poor, but by the attractive and the unattractive?
I am speaking in relative terms, of course, and ignoring the inevitable unattractiveness of aging, but there is in life what sociologists call a “beauty premium.” Handsome people are given advantages that homely people are not. Yes, it is unfair but it is ingrained in the human psyche, in the DNA even. The phenomenon is seriously studied under the term “lookism,” and it cannot be changed by mere proclamation.
Research finds evidence of it in labor markets, where more attractive people earn more, are hired more readily and are sorted into roles where looks yield higher returns. The premium is largest in jobs requiring substantial interpersonal interaction such as litigators, broadcasters, direct sales, family physicians, etc. It is smaller or absent in roles centered on information, data and behind-the-scenes expertise e.g., political staffers, anesthesiologists, academics, print and social media but also the producers of television news.
We get this from the ancient Greeks, who related physical beauty with nobility, goodness and happiness. But could there be a countervailing “homely premium,” a sort of magnified revenge of the nerds, the ultimate notch in the social-justice gunstock?
Compare, if you can bear the shock of the contrast, staff photos of the Biden and Trump administrations. Indeed, you may have to go no further than the images of their “best foot forward” — their press secretaries, Caroline Leavitt and Karine Jean-Pierre. Yes, I understand that beauty is in the eye of the beholder but the two put forward starkly different personas.
A superficial judgment? Well, there is reason to believe that you could divide by political orientation every state legislature without reading a single policy statement, using nothing more than headshots. This from my assistant Grok:
- In a 2010 “PLOS One” study, participants categorized U.S. Senate candidates and college students as Democrat or Republican from yearbook-style or campaign photos with above-chance accuracy.
- A large 2021 “Scientific Reports” study applied facial recognition to naturalistic images of over 1 million people. An algorithm correctly classified liberal-conservative face pairs at about 72 percent accuracy.
- A 2024 “American Psychologist” study used carefully standardized lab photos (neutral expression, same clothing/lighting, hair pulled back, no makeup/jewelry) of 591 people. Both humans and an algorithm predicted continuous political-orientation scores better than chance even after statistically removing age, gender and ethnicity effects.
Competency being equal, though, there must be at least some handsome liberals and some homely conservatives. Maybe, but that’s not the way it shakes out. Notable individual exceptions acknowledged, it is almost as if beauty and homeliness were at war, that the distinction might be more important than even politics. You can use history, at least, to make that case.
Adopt Hitler is hated by liberals today, this theory goes, not for the full range of his policies, many of which liberals endorse (gun confiscation, smoking bans, eugenics, vegetarianism, riotous thugs, classification by group identity, socialized medicine and a statist economy). Rather, if liberals are being honest, he is hated in part because he defined an Aryan ideal, one uncomfortably similar to that modeled by their old nemeses on American campuses — those Greeks again, the fraternities and sororities.
Another example: Consider that the ghastly Maximilien Robespierre, who would have fit in nicely on the staff of the student newspaper, sent France’s most beautiful people, the court of Louis XVI, straight to the guillotine. And Pol Pot, a wonky student of political science, murdered thousands for their appearance alone (the wearing of eye glasses).
When they are forming the firing squads, looks matter.
The theory is that the unattractive when they gain power seek revenge for being belittled by the cool kids. They join other angry misfits in radical political movements such as Antifa that assuage feelings of resentment and envy while boosting a sense of moral superiority. This radiates out by degrees to take in the whole of the Democrat Party, including its nerd-filled Silicon Valley and Wall Street donor bases and especially its platoons of the ethnically, sexually or racially dissed.
Only the famously ugly Socrates breaks the pattern. He contested the Greek assumption that physical beauty was necessary for happiness. He taught instead that reason would bring virtue and virtue would bring happiness.
But two centuries later Nietzsche dismissed him thus: “With dialectics the rabble comes out on top.” (indeed, Socrates died on a popular vote by a crowd, many of whom could not even hear his defense.) Jonny Thakkaris, a Princeton philosopher, is left to ask our concluding question: “What better way to get revenge against a culture that takes beauty to reflect nobility than to simply redefine beauty as an inner quality possessed only by intellectuals?”
All of which is why this column is not accompanied by the author’s headshot, which would only confuse the issue. — tcl
