“someone needs to study the relationship between political ideology and abuse. Something leads me to believe it is not evenly distributed left vs. right.”
Somebody has: Paul Johnson’s book, “Intellectuals.” He describes the character deformities of many of left’s leading lights over the past two hundred years or so.
The side that wants citizens disarmed and not the criminals are the same ones who think violence is necessary to I still utopia
Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky
by Paul Johnson
“A fascinating portrait of the minds that have shaped the modern world. In an intriguing series of case studies, Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Brecht, Sartre, Edmund Wilson, Victor Gollancz, Lillian Hellman, Cyril Connolly, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Kenneth Tynan, and Noam Chomsky, among others, are revealed as intellectuals both brilliant and contradictory, magnetic and dangerous.”
ADD Thomas Piketty
Paul Johnson's book is excellent. So is Eric Hoffer's The True Believer. There is a vast literature on this. The tendency of aberrant personalities to gravitate to political extremism is well known. One must be careful not to turn this into a reductionist argument, but across the bloody 20th century, if one looks at the Nazis and the communists especially, the incidence of dysfunction is extraordinarily high. Wretched people are unfortunately all too common. Rationalization and projection are all too common. So is looking for salvation in the wrong places.