Overall I think this is an excellent post. I would like to comment on the thought about "ideological apparatuses that construct our reality: family, work, school, worship, and media."

Conservatives have, for the last 30-40 years, systematically infiltrated all of these institutions (leaving aside family, which they do indirectly by infiltrating the others). Academia, media (including entertainment), and finally government are, I would say, the big three. (They already had business, which has funded their covert efforts.) They have used every bit of power they've gained to bring in others, spread their web of connections and power, and then use this network to broaden the infiltration. Not only are there reams of evidence, circumstantial and documented, to this point, but I have seen it up close.

Not knowing precisely what it was, I applied for and was accepted into a summer program a few years ago that was nothing short of an indoctrination camp for libertarians. Not just civil libertarians here, we're talking the whole shabang. To give you a taste, they disseminated articles charging a gonvernment conspiracy to make tobacco look unhealthy. Not kidding.

In any case, the program was free for all who attended, with room, board, and several lectures a day given by professors from distinguished institutions - Duke, U. of Virginia, etc. The program itself was was at George Mason University, through an entity called the Insitute for Humane Studies. The purpose of this program was and is to infiltrate powerful institutions to make them ideologically friendly. My program was funded by Robert Scaife, Pete Coors, the Koch brothers, and other anti-government moneybags. It was very clear that the most important aim of the Institute and its programs was to indoctrinate young people into a radical form of economic libertarianism, with a secondary focus upon self-centered social libertarianism (for instance, "smokers' rights"  got plenty of attention, while gay rights received none).

Naturally, these folks had no clue about philosophically defensible versions of libertarianism, but they sure had been drinking the kool-aid. Disturbingly, the professors who lectured were hacks, with absolutely no shred of scholarship in their "research". They drew all kinds of inferences that were unfounded by evidence or unentailed by their previous premises. Yet they were employed by the most respected insitutions in academia. Perhaps their incompetence and their status should come as no surprise: they themselves were products of this cycling system of growing institutional power. You see, the professors themselves had been supported by these radical institutions, and now they were giving back, in an exponentially growing but covert (and most definitely hostile) takeover.

Also, let's not forget geography. Democrats are more likely to live in urban areas, where cost of living is much higher and temptations to spend are much greater. Meanwhile, Republicans are more likely to live in rural areas, where cost of living is low (unbelievably so, to a city boy like me) and temptations to spend are far fewer.

Naturally, then, Democrats might feel less financially secure than  Republicans.