The Patriot Post® · Conservatives Are Happier, More Generous Than Liberals

Where are the happiest, most generous people in America to be found? The answer might surprise you!

Lefty author and radio personality Garrison Keillor captured the popular view (at least according to Hollywood and the media) of the differences between liberals and conservatives, claiming, “Liberalism is the politics of kindness,” standing for “tolerance, magnanimity, community spirit, [and] the defense of the weak against the powerful.” Conservatives, Keillor claims on the other hand, are people who “stand for tax cuts, and further tax cuts, annual tax cuts,” and then they “use their refund to buy a gun and an attack dog” to keep people away who are not like them.

Or, as Obama put it, these are the people who are “bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”

As it turns out, that is the exact opposite of the truth.

Last year, the Social Psychological and Personality Science journal published the findings of a study by University of Southern California researcher David Newman. He analyzed the happiness of 50,000 people from 16 countries over a 40-year period.

What Newman’s team discovered is that conservatives are consistently and significantly happier than their liberal counterparts, and the more conservative a person is, the happier they are. Social conservatives are even happier than just fiscal conservatives, and both are much happier than liberals. Why? Because “there is some unique aspect of political conservatism that provides people with meaning and purpose in life.”

This was true for conservatives “at all reporting periods (global, daily, and momentary).” In other words, conservatives tend to be happy as a general rule, and not just when things are going well for them. That is extremely significant. It means their happiness is related to who they are inside, rather than being a reaction to their circumstances.

Of study participants, 52% of conservatives were “completely satisfied” with their family lives, compared to just 41% of liberals and moderates. Conservatives were also significantly more likely to believe marriage is “essential in creating and maintaining strong families,” and overwhelmingly more likely to be married (62% vs. 39%).

Considering the vast data on how marriage greatly increases overall happiness and well-being, economic stability, improved physical and mental health, and life expectancy, this is a game-changer.

In 2012, the Journal of Research in Personality analyzed four studies on happiness, and found “conservatives expressed greater personal agency (e.g., personal control, responsibility), more positive outlook (e.g., optimism, self-worth), more transcendent moral beliefs (e.g., greater religiosity, greater moral clarity, less tolerance of transgressions), and a generalized belief in fairness, and these differences accounted for the happiness gap.”

In the U.S., where leftists gravitate toward the Democrat Party and conservatives to the Republican Party, these mindsets and ideologies are clearly manifest in their messaging. As one writer put it, “Republicans … preach the message of limited government, responsibility and self-reliance, while Democrats … preach a message of victimhood and entitlement. … The former is empowering and the latter is debilitating, tending only to provoke feelings of resentment, anger, and helplessness.”

This supports the findings of a Pew Research Center study showing that Republicans maintain higher levels of happiness across all income levels, so it’s not just those evil, rich Republicans swimming in their pools of cash who are happy.

Additionally, conservative Republicans are nearly twice as likely to be “very happy” as liberal Democrats (47% to 28%), and regular church attenders were nearly twice as likely to be very happy as those who rarely or never attend.

Conservative, Christian Republicans are also far more generous than their liberal Democrat counterparts, regardless of income level. And for those who think religious conservatives only donate to charity to get the tax write-off (which makes no sense because you don’t get a dollar-for-dollar reduction in taxes), religious conservatives also donate more of their time (which could be spent making more money) to charity than liberal Democrats. In the 2012 election, 17 of the most generous states voted for Mitt Romney, while 15 of the least charitable 17 went for Barack Obama.

If you are a liberal Democrat, these findings probably offend you. You may think this is “fake news” and recall the widely broadcasted study that supposedly found Republicans have more psychopathic traits than Democrats. Numerous liberals/Democrats pointed to the study as proof that conservatism and religiosity are manifestations of mental illness.

Yet while this study’s findings were headline news when the report was issued, the retraction a short time later was barely mentioned. Go figure.

After being called out, researchers were forced to admit they screwed up the calculations, and the results were just the opposite of what they claimed: “The descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed.” In other words, the data showed that it was liberals, not conservatives, who were most likely to be associated with psychoticism.

Of course, common sense and personal observation will confirm this. It is not conservative, Christian Republicans who are rioting and assaulting those who disagree with them, or fire-bombing cars, smashing store windows, and showing up at private homes and threatening families and terrifying children. That would be “progressive” Democrats, who feel their violence is justified by their morally superior cause.

So if you find yourself unhappy, aimless, and without purpose, there is an easy fix — don a MAGA hat and head to church!