Googling Evil

While both sides of a deep philosophical or moral divide are inclined to label their opposite as "evil", it often feels like one side tends to do it a lot more than the other. Thinking about this, I'm reminded of two exchanges from Star Wars:

Obi-Wan: "Anakin, Chancellor Palpatine is evil!"
Anakin: "From my point of view, the Jedi are evil!
Obi-Wan: "Well, then you are lost!"
...
Anakin: "If you're not with me, then you're my enemy!"
Obi-Wan: "Only a Sith deals in absolutes."

This is either brilliant piece of dialogue highlighting the hypocrisy of the Jedi Order, or an egregious example of a writer spectacularly lacking in self-awareness. Either way, it encourages me to check my own biases.

My predisposition is to perceive individuals on the conservative end of the spectrum as more likely to vilify their opponents than individuals on the left end. This perception is partly based on personal observation, and partly based on the distinct association between the right and evangelical groups which talk like... well, evangelists. As much as liberals focus on climate change, conservatives seem to focus on fire and brimstone, and there's a lot of moral absolutism when you start talking about God and the Devil. 

Is my perception accurate though? As a loose test of my own implicit theory, I tried a number of google searches, and recorded the number of hits, hypothesizing that those on the left end of the spectrum would be renounced as evil more often than those on the right.

First, I searched without quotation marks. This yields all hits where the words appear on a page together. The notable disparity is marked by bold font.

• Evil Republicans = 12,500,000 hits
• Evil Democrats = 22,600,000 hits
• Evil Conservatives = 9,130,000 hits
• Evil Liberals = 8,050,000 hits
• Evil Right-Wing =  66,200,000 hits
• Evil Left-Wing = 59,500,000 hits

This search was consistent with my expectations. However, "Democrat" is nearly twice as likely to appear on a page with the word "evil" than "Republican" is. It's hard to interpret this, though. For the Right/Left and Conservative/Liberal dichotomies, there's little difference in the likelihood of appearing on a page with the word evil, so we lack a consistent trend. Furthermore, searching for just "Democrat" and "Republican" together yields 132 million hits, so there's definitely going to be an overlap between "Democrats" and "Republicans" appearing on a page with the word "evil". Finally, appearing on the page together does not necessarily mean that the word "evil" is being applied to the target. 

So, I repeated each search with quotation marks:

• "Evil Republicans" = 23,800 hits
• "Evil Democrats" = 24,300 hits
• "Evil Conservatives" = 7,680 hits
• "Evil Liberals" = 48,100 hits
• "Evil Right-Wing" = 110,000 hits
• "Evil Left-Wing" = 14,200 hits

As you can see, there's some extreme and puzzling differences here. There's little difference between Republicans and Democrats now, but there are over 6 times as many hits referring to "Evil Liberals" as there are hits referring to "Evil Conservatives", and nearly 8 times as many hits referring to the "Evil Right-Wing" as to the "Evil Left-Wing" (searching for "Evil Leftist" yields only 15,700 hits, so not significantly more than "Evil Left-Wing"). Given the seemingly inconclusive results, I tried another set of searches, altering the grammar to be more broad:

• "Evil Republican" = 75,200 hits
• "Evil Democrat" = 23,000 hits
• "Evil Conservative" = 39,300 hits
• "Evil Liberal" = 27,100 hits
• "Evil Right" = 320,000 hits
• "Evil Left" = 72,200 hits

Again, this bucks my hypothesis. The search for "Evil Right" was greatly inflated by an internet meme referencing Austin Powers' "Dr. Evil" saying the word "Right", with air quotes, but even considering only the Republican/Democrat and Conservative/Liberal pairings, Republicans/Conservatives seem to be subjected to more morally-absolutist rhetoric. This certainly didn't map to my expectations, but it then occurred to me that the two sides of these dichotomies may speak in distinctly different ways, such that the syntax of the statement matters. So I tried repeating the second search with "evil" as a predicate nominative rather than as an adjective.

• "Republicans are evil" = 75,500 hits
• "Democrats are evil" = 81,800 hits
• "Conservatives are evil" = 31,700 hits
• "Liberals are evil" = 579,000 hits
• "Right-Wing is evil" = 7,610 hits
• "Left-Wing is evil" = 5,810 hits

Altering the grammar of the search in this way closed the Republican/Democrat gap. "Evil Democrat" or "Evil Democrats" doesn't show up much on Google, but the phrase "Democrats are evil" appears a lot. The Right/Left difference is minor, but the big shocker is the conservative/liberal dichotomy, with "Liberals are evil" appearing 579,000 times, compared to "Conservatives are evil" appearing only 31,700 times

Ultimately, I leave it to the reader to decide which of these approaches, and the results they yielded, are most valid, However, I would venture one interpretation. Fundamentally, this little diversion was about moral absolutism - the extent to which one side dismisses, even dehumanizes the other side using the word "evil".  I had initially assumed the grammar was only marginally relevant, but in retrospect, there's a big difference here. If I refer to a "black cat", the implication is that not all cats are black, which is quite different from saying "cats are black". Likewise, saying "Liberals are evil" is much more absolute than referring to "evil liberals." From that perspective, the results would seem to support my hypothesis, but only for the liberal/conservative dichotomy. 

Of course, another important point, which is more than I can get into before making lunch, is that the pages generated by these searches seem very different. My general observations from the first pages of each search were that articles about 'evil republicans' or 'evil conservatives' tended to be editorials about the melodramatic demonization of the right (often compared/contrasted to similar rhetoric about 'dumb liberals' or 'stupid democrats'), whereas 'evil liberals' or 'evil democrats' were being discussed on sites like Church Militant (a site which I feel dirty for even clicking on), or in articles directly quoting the President of the United States. Both of which are kind of chilling when you think about it.