Red or Blue... Which America Do You Really Prefer?

This is bound to tick some people off. 

In fact, I’m betting I lose several thousand readers for writing what you’re about to read, and you know what? I’m fine with that. 

More than fine with that, actually. It’s the result I want. 

Because sometimes, you need to unabashedly, unapologetically cut the fat in order to accomplish anything. 

As you may have guessed, the topic is politics, but this time, I’m not going to be focusing on candidates. 

Instead, I’m going to zero in on what drives candidates and campaigns: the voters themselves. 

Because after all, no candidate with a snowball’s chance in hell of winning would ever set foot on the campaign trail without first identifying a target audience consisting of millions. 

Last week, I uncovered a very interesting infographic compiled by Verdant Labs. 

It’s featured in a soon-to-be-released book, The Best American Infographics 2016, where I’m sure it will cause a stir once Amazon releases it this coming October. 

The infographic attempts to objectively categorize some of the nation’s most popular professions by political preference. 

It’s really as simple as it gets, and, like the best infographics, allows the viewer — you — to draw his or her own conclusions.

Who Do You Want Building Your Nation?

Midwife or surgeon… gardener or farmer… park ranger or sheriff.

Below is a sampling of 24 professions, each with a graph indicating political leaning. 

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And in more general terms, here are the results of the same study, arranged by industry:

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It’s a lot of data to digest, but even at first glance, several premises tend to emerge here. 

People working directly with money and money management, namely accountants, financial managers, bankers, and business owners, tend towards the right. 

People working in artistic fields or any field where liberal arts degrees are popular lean, quite predictably, towards the left. 

Teachers and academics, similarly, tend to be Democrats by a large margin. 

The medical industry is highly segmented, with physicians leaning slightly left overall, but the highest-stress specialties, namely surgeons, are predominantly Republicans. 

Who else tends to the red side of the spectrum?

Farmers, pilots, sales reps, business executives, people in the oil business, and small business owners engaged in professions such as contracting and plumbing. 

Lawyers tend to be Democrats. So do engineers, writers, and people in retail sales. 

Environmentalists and social workers, it goes without saying, are usually Democrats. 

Entrepreneurs are usually conservative. Philanthropists and fundraisers aren’t.

Like I said, it’s a lot to digest, but what does it all mean?

Thankfully, the conclusions to be drawn are far less numerous than the trends.

What It Boils Down To

People who own their own businesses and are therefore directly involved with things like balance sheets, corporate and payroll taxation, and everything else required to keep the many cogs of a private enterprise in sync tend to be Republicans. 

People who occupy positions where the bottom line of direct market competition isn’t a focus — teachers, retail employees, non-self-employed engineers — tend to be Democrats. 

People whose jobs are generally not geared for wealth creation — artists, writers, chefs — also trend towards the left. 

People who generally pay higher income taxes (and probably don’t want to pay any more) are usually right-wing favoring. 

People whose jobs involve taking other people’s money and distributing it where they think it’s more useful, despite having no intent on creating wealth themselves, are predominantly lefties. 

People who work in fields where theory and aesthetic value supersedes practicality (mathematicians, scientists, and artists, as opposed to accountants, entrepreneurs, and surgeons) fall towards the left. 

People who have to negotiate the realities of fiscal responsibility, market competition, and self-management lean heavily to the right. 

So instead of asking who you would prefer to dictate the political and cultural ideology of your nation, maybe the real question should be: “Who has a better chance of competing and succeeding in the modern world?”

In case you’re having a stroke over the obvious implication that I think certain professions are more important than others — which is a foregone conclusion even without these statistics — I just want to say that I have no problem deferring to the reasoning, the common sense, and the market environment needs of a neurosurgeon in favor of a nurse, a pilot in favor of a flight attendant, a business owner over a charity administrator, a cop over a librarian, or a farmer over an artist any day of the week. 

No, I’m not disqualifying everyone else’s opinion, but on a spectrum — and if you’re a grown-up, you understand that there is a spectrum — some individuals are simply more geared for facing and dealing with reality on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour business. 

Given the choice, which it appears we’ve all been, one side just doesn’t really stand a chance. 

There Are Dreams… And There is Reality

Democracy, however, doesn’t care much about who’s right and who’s wrong. These statistics reflect current popular opinion among a wide cross-section of individuals.

The way things are trending now, and with today’s demographics favoring almost all of the predominantly blue professions, the future of this country is almost guaranteed to follow theory and aesthetic value instead of practicality for maybe an entire generation.

More of the professions whose participants heavily favor the left are growing faster than those on the other side… by a wide margin. 

And with things like the wealth gap, which is purported to be bigger than ever (on many levels, it was far more stark at the end of the 19th century), and gender equality in wages (actually attributable to fewer hours worked per lifetime, as opposed to mandated unequal pay policies) becoming the central argument, this next batch of leftist leaders will be one to remember.

I’m not talking about Bernie or Hillary. That’s today — the present.

The future generation of cult-of-personality politicians will have to placate millennial voters for at least two election cycles beyond this one, until the majority or at least large minority of them come to terms with the fact that financial and cultural liberty is more important than financial and cultural political correctness — the very plague that has rebranded personal wealth as inherently suspicious, if not downright evil, and free speech as nothing more than the white straight male’s natural right to offend and intimidate. 

It’s going to make today’s progressives look timid by comparison, and it will eradicate what’s left of American economic dominance right along with it as emerging economies more focused on practicality wage a market war against our newly liberal sensibilities. 

As the environment for the most important class of practical-thinking Americans, entrepreneurs, and business owners turns sour and greener pastures are sought, the American experiment will officially be over. 

Everyone will lose. 

No, it’s not the most polite set of data to draw on, but of the many models that predict increased national debt heading into a terminal destabilization of the U.S. economy, and the dollar with it (and there are plenty), it is one of the most compelling. 

Plenty of investors see this coming, alright, and some of them see this as the best moment to buy back in, just as calamity sets in and the inevitable but time-consuming process of restructuring begins. 

But the reality is, if you hope to get through this at all, much less in a financial position where you can take advantage of the lowest market trough ever, you need to be prepared now. 

Many think it’s impossible, but it’s not. 

All it takes to give yourself a fighting chance against the most predictable event in American history — a depression to end all depressions — is a bit a foresight and some steady nerves. 

Here are just a few stories about Americans who managed to pull themselves to financial security before most people even knew there was a serious problem. 

Read them here, and decide if you have what it takes to do the same.

Fortune favors the bold,

Alex Koyfman

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