For years, studies have shown that conservatives are happier than liberals. It’s hard not to see how this would be the case. Think about it. Conservatives typically believe in traditional values, community involvement, religious affiliation, marriage, personal responsibility, self-reliance, individual rights, and personal freedoms… all things that help support social order, as well as a sense of purpose and stability.
So what do liberals generally stand for? Well, lately it’s become pretty clear that they’re all about shaking up the family dynamic and religion. They’re big on pushing for constant changes to traditional norms, claiming it’s all in the name of equality (or now equity) and social justice, while also being fans of the nanny state. And let’s not forget how they like to undermine moral values and sow division by playing the victim card all the time.
Which group do you think would be happier?
It turns out this phenomenon of an ideological link to happiness isn’t limited to adults either. According to a study conducted at Columbia University comparing conservative and liberal teenagers, conservative teens experience greater levels of happiness compared to their leftist peers — by a large margin.
Epidemiologist Catherine Gimbrone and her colleagues analyzed depressive attitudes among 12th-grade students from 2005 to 2018. The researchers discovered that conservatives consistently reported lower levels of depressive affect, self-derogation, and loneliness, as well as higher self-esteem scores compared to other groups. Conservatism was defined as “support of individual liberty, right-wing social and religious values, and unregulated free markets,” while liberalism [sic] was defined as “support of equal opportunity, free but semi-regulated markets, civil liberties, and social justice.”
Curiously, from 2011 to 2018, female liberal 12th-graders experienced a significant increase in depressive affect scores. Male liberal students initially had similar depression levels to their female counterparts between 2005 and 2011, but their rise in depressive affect started slightly later, around 2013. Throughout the entire period of the study, male and female conservative 12th-graders never reached the same levels of depression as liberal students, indicating that liberal boys were consistently more depressed than conservative girls. Until mid-2016, the depressive affect scores of conservative males were slightly higher than those of conservative females, but afterward, female conservatives began to show a slight lead.
This is actually a big deal, yet this study was published back in December. I wonder why it didn’t get more attention then?
In an effort to explain the substantial discrepancy observed between conservative and liberal teens, the researchers suggested that “conservative ideology may work as a psychological buffer by harmonizing an idealized worldview with the bleak external realities experienced by many.”
The left-wing students, however, experienced difficulty processing “a series of consequential political events,” such as Obama’s election in 2008, the Great Recession, the student debt cries, and Trump’s election in 2016, which I believe is a reach. They also suggest the sharp rise in the emotional instability of left-wing students during the Obama years may be because of “war, climate change, school shootings, structural racism, police violence against Black people, pervasive sexism and sexual assault, and rampant socioeconomic inequality [that] became unavoidable features of political discourse,” blah, blah, blah.
Apparently the researchers never once considered the meteoric rise of transgender ideology as being a factor, which I think explains a lot. Are we really supposed to believe that the rise of depression among left-wing students and the increased incidence of LGBTQ identification (particularly transgender identification) is a mere coincidence? Of course, it’s not.
They may not understand exactly why left-wing kids are miserable, but it’s telling that they at least admit that they are.
