Why conservatives are happier than liberals

Ross Pomeroy, editor of RealClearScience, calls it “one of the most surefire findings in all of social psychology, repeatedly replicated over almost five decades of study: American conservatives say they are much happier than American liberals. They also report greater meaning and purpose in their lives, and higher overall life satisfaction.”

Given their recent embrace of lockdowns and masking as a societal ideal, drag queens as role models, abortion as a good career move, and sanctions against “misgendering,” it might not surprise you that American liberals are much more prone to neurosis, depression, and anxiety, and, as one recent study cited by Pomeroy pointed out, “have become less happy over the last several decades.” Their unhappiness “is associated with increasingly secular attitudes and actions.”

Think about that for a moment. “Attitudes” and “actions” imply that liberals might be people who choose to be unhappy.

That may sound flippant, but it’s a reasonable conclusion, especially given that social scientists often assert that conservative happiness rests on three “attitudes” and “actions” that pretty much anyone can adopt.

The first attitude is religious belief. Now, “religion” is a broad word — sort of like saying “politics” — but in our context, what we’re really talking about is Christian belief, and the action is going to church.

After 2,000 years of Christian witness and theology, and pro- and anti-Christian polemics, it’s reasonable to conclude that on the question of whether Christianity is true, there are respectable arguments on both sides. The odds are at least fifty-fifty that there is a God — a prime mover, a creator, a designer — that the gospels and the Acts of the Apostles are reliable historical documents, and that our lives have an eternal purpose. This is against the belief that the universe is the product of chance and random evolution, that the New Testament is a conspiracy theory, and that our lives have only such meaning as we give them.

If it’s a fifty-fifty proposition — and, frankly, it would be easy to calculate the odds much more in favor of Christianity — why would one choose a path shown by the science, albeit the social science, to be the path of neurosis, depression, anxiety, and unhappiness?

Marriage is the often proposed second pillar on which conservative happiness rests. Marriage might be less easily willed because it requires a willing partner, but conservatives are nevertheless much more likely than liberals to want to get married and have children. Liberals apparently see marriage as an inhibition to their freedom. The science tells us that this is the freedom to be unhappy.

The generally cited third source of conservative happiness is “personal agency” or what you and I might call the can-do spirit. Conservatives are much more likely than liberals to believe they can improve their circumstances through hard work. While conservatives revere the past and tradition — where they find examples of American grit and pluck — they are, in fact, future-oriented, focusing on achievement, supporting a family (the next generation), and one’s eternal reward. You could call it: the purpose-driven life.

Yet just as liberal cosmology denies free will, so too does it deny the idea of meritocracy (at least in its popular formulation). We live, in the liberal view, in a world shaped by an oppressive white, male, Christian patriarchy that needs to be overthrown. To that end, we should sort ourselves (if we are not conservative Christian white males) into a wide variety of alleged oppressed minority groups — a rainbow coalition, if you will. Or, if one is a liberal straight white male, one must be an “ally” of alleged oppressed minority groups.

In practice, this sorting leads to a relentless pursuit (intentional or not) of immiseration, pessimism, grievance, and anger — not to mention the creation of ever more obscure (and perverse) group identities. This, again, is a choice.

In the 1970s, a time oft-compared to our own — with its foreign policy disasters, energy crisis, skyrocketing crime, and social upheaval — a tribe of liberals packed up their tents, moved to the right, and proclaimed themselves “neoconservatives” or “liberals who had been mugged by reality.”

But today’s liberals are not much interested in reality — no matter how often it mugs them. They have prior ideological commitments.

If you think we live in a crazy world, it’s because we live in their world, a world where liberals who have lost reason and faith dominate every institution and use their bully pulpits to impose their neuroses on the rest of us.

Luckily, however, there is a cure. The ballot box is one part of it. Making the right choices ourselves is another.