Conservative candidates are better looking

You’ve long suspected it, but now we know it’s true:  objectively speaking, conservative political candidates are indeed better looking:

Rightwing candidates are better looking than their leftwing counterparts, something they benefit from during elections, according to a study conducted by Swedish and Finnish economists.

The economists who conducted the study figured this out by asking people to look at candidate pictures that did not indicate the party with which the candidate was affiliated.  Conservative candidates won this beauty contest.

I don’t quarrel with the study’s bottom-line conclusion.  We in the conservative blogosphere have often commented on the fact that conservative women are better looking than Leftist women.  When you look at Laura Bush versus Hillary Clinton, or Dana Loesch versus Helen Thomas, there’s really no contest.  And just picture Scott Brown standing next to Harry Reid.  Again, no contest.

I do have a quarrel, however, with the theories the economists advance to justify their study’s results.  Basically, they say that good looking people are snotty, so they’d obviously be drawn to a snotty, non-egalitarian political world view:

“One possible explanation is that people who are seen or consider themselves beautiful tend to be more anti-egalitarian and rightwing,” Niclas Berggren, one of the three co-authors of the study, told AFP Wednesday.

[snip]

Explaining the findings, he said that globally, “the left perhaps traditionally has used a more rational approach.

The right meanwhile, “has been more conscious of the importance of looks,” he said, pointing to the examples of Ronald Reagan and Sarah Palin in the United States.

I’d like to offer a different theory, one that is equally unsupported by fact, but that makes a great deal more sense.  My theory is that unattractive people are often angry, unhappy people.  They feel as if the world has treated them unfairly.  They resent other people for having better looks and, with those better looks, having better luck in life.  (As the same article points out, attractive people tend to be more successful.)

These unattractive, unhappy, angry people are drawn to a party that says that individuals have no responsibility for themselves.  Instead, to the extent they are unsuccessful or unhappy, the fault always lies with the unfairness of others, a fundamental problem that can only be solved by a large, impersonal bureaucracy that overrides the inequality of individualism.  Unattractive people, therefore naturally hew to socialism, which negates individual worth and merit, and substitutes rules and regulations that are meant to equalize things.

Keep in mind in this regard that you can’t make stupid, ugly people smart and beautiful, but that you can place so many handicaps on the smart and beautiful that they no longer get the benefits of their gifts.  (Before he went Left wing loony, Kurt Vonnegut understood this, as you can see if you read his short story Harrison Bergeron.)  As I explain to my kids, in a footrace, the only way to ensure that everyone finishes the race at the same time is to force the good runners to go slowly, because it is impossible to get the bad runners to go quickly.

If that’s too sophisticated an analysis, I’ve got another one:  conservatives are better groomed.  Good grooming covers myriad sins.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News

(Welcome, Instapundit readers!)