DEBUNKING THE "ANGRY CONSERVATIVE" MYTH

The moonbats among us like to deal in bogus stereotypes of Conservatives as "angry" and "reactionary."  In reality, those words more accurately describe the typical liberal of our time.  They are, after all, the Establishment now and as such it is they who are the angry reactionaries who bitterly cling to the dying "progressive" status quo first created by Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

A couple of weeks ago Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, published an interesting piece on happiness in the New York Times' Sunday Review.  It includes a very interesting fun fact that merely confirms what normal people already understand: happiness is being a Conservative.

For many years, researchers found that women were happier than men, although recent studies contend that the gap has narrowed or may even have been reversed. Political junkies might be interested to learn that conservative women are particularly blissful: about 40 percent say they are very happy. That makes them slightly happier than conservative men and significantly happier than liberal women. The unhappiest of all are liberal men; only about a fifth consider themselves very happy.

The findings come from the University of Chicago's General Social Survey, a survey of Americans conducted since 1972, which has produced consistent and reliable findings for decades.

In the New York Post, Ramesh Ponnuru points out something else that is significant:

"Women who say they have turned down a promotion or made some other work sacrifice for the sake of their families report high happiness levels."

In a finding that has already annoyed the proglodytes, Brooks demonstrates that the four great sources of happiness within human control are faith, family, friends and work. Married people are happier than singles. Those engaged in religious practices are happier than the unchurched.

The pushback from the Left is both condescending and deliberately obtuse:

As sociologist Jay Livingston figured out, Brooks’s claim may have come from an analysis of the cumulative (since 1972) data of the General Social Survey (described accurately by Brooks as "the scholarly gold standard for understanding social phenomena"), but Brooks did not realize that things have changed, and since 2009 (the Tea Party era), self-described conservatives have not been the happiest Americans.

Livingston then noticed another false claim, this time from Brooks's most recent column, where the AEI president wrote, "conservative women are particularly blissful: about 40 percent say they are very happy."

The upshot is that while the progs acknowledge that over the course of the past 40 years Conservative women have tended to be happier...

In the cumulative data (aggregated since 1972), the most conservative women were indeed most likely to describe themselves as very happy.

..."things have changed" in the Obama era.  Well...duh!  Naturally we Conservatives aren't happy with the damage Dear Leader has done and continues to inflict on our nation. But political satisfaction (or the lack thereof) with the current situation is only a small part of the equation.  Let's have some discussion, shall we, about the state of liberal women's happiness during the eight years of the Bush administration.

Normally, long-term trends would be counted as more illustrative of a general observation than a much more constricted time period.  But, of course, that kind of conventional wisdom is not particularly helpful to the proggies as they once again bitterly cling to their increasingly pathetic ideology.  Livingston states:

Why might political views correlate with happiness? Brooks doesn’t say, but later in his formula he cites the importance of work, of being satisfied with your job. ("I'm a living example of the happiness vocation can bring.") People who are dissatisfied in the world of work will not be happy in general. The same logic applies to politics – those who are dissatisfied in the political world will also not be happy in general. So maybe the link between conservatism and happiness is really about who is satisfied with the political status quo. Who is happy will depend on whose status is quo.

For most of those GSS years since 1972, conservatives have felt right at home politically. But the election and re-election of Obama – despite a huge recession, despite a supposedly much-hated healthcare law – changed that status quo. Hence all the conservative talk about taking their country back.

First of all, he's ignoring the fact that the bulk of the Brooks argument is not based on politics.  On many levels Conservatives are happier than their liberal counterparts regardless of who controls the White House.  It's a life thing, not a political thing.  Secondly, again, Livingston ignores the unhappiness of liberals during the Bush administration (and the Reagan era as well).  

Furthermore, he claims that the election of Barack Obama has upset the status quo.  But I'm old enough to remember that a Democrat inhabited the White House for eight years during the 1990s.  And when that era came to an end, it was the proggies who began talking incessantly about "taking back" their country, as I've discussed before. 

And then Gelman dumps this turd into the punch bowl:

And, indeed, there is a lot of unhappiness on the far right in the Obama years, as the top graph shows.

Again, let me emphasize that I am imputing no malign intent on the part of Arthur Brooks. Social scientists (including myself) use aggregated data all the time. It’s natural to assume, at least as a starting point, that what happened in the past will continue to be happening now. Brooks made the default choice. But it turns out he made a mistake. He should thank Livingston for catching it, and the New York Times should run a correction. No hard feelings, it’s just a simple mistake that could happen to anyone.

Really.  Brooks didn't make a mistake.  Brooks merely made points that Gelman and his fellow proggies don't like and so they barf up this oh-so-sassy bullshit.  How many times have we seen liberals talk a bunch of nonsense, abruptly declare themselves the "winner" and walk away.  And this is the Washington Post, not some Twitter troll.  Among other things, he apparently can't imagine a time in the near future when liberals will be unhappy with their political fortunes.  If ignorance is bliss then why aren't liberals happier?

And if Gelman and Livingston want to restrict the time period in such a way as to make it appear more favorable to their side then hey, let's restrict the timeline even more:  How about we examine just the past 12 months.  Does anybody want to claim that liberals are as happy in December 2013 as they were in December 2012?  Check the most recent polling, my friends.  Read 'em and weep!

The bottom line is that they really can't refute what Brooks is saying and so they are forced to distort or ignore what is being said and then attack the strawmen they've created.  The Tea Party era is hardly over and Conservatives will be politically happy (to go along with our superior life choices) this time next year when Congress is back under full GOP control.  And what will the liberal state of mind be then?

I should also point out that even the WaPo proggies didn't bother to refute the other point that's worth making: why are liberal "men" so unhappy? David French at National Review addresses that one:

A core component of modern leftism is its comprehensive attack (and accompanying redefinition) of masculinity. This attack poisons how men experience their own nature, relationships, and purpose.

First, the Left attacks the very idea of what it means to be a man. Here’s a shorthand version of the Left's view of masculinity (to borrow from a column my wife wrote): Men and women are the same, except when women are better. So when a young boys does what young boys do — play rough, show aggression, gravitate towards contact sports and more violent games and movies — they are greeted with howls of "No." No talking. No pushing. No running. No fighting. No toy guns. No drawings of tanks and guns. No. No. No. Again and again, young boys are shoved into a quiet, more relational, submissive box. As the father of an active young teen boy, what I’ve seen from other parents — the unbelievable stifling — seems cruel.

Next, the liberal male often spends his relational life walking on eggshells, dating women and living in cultures that are constantly calling out any kind of behavior subjectively perceived as "male" or oppressive. So if a man gets angry at a woman, he's just "mansplaining." A man who asks for fidelity is "slut-shaming." Assertions of will are subject to "privilege checks." To enter the world of academia, for example, is to enter a world of social rules and customs that are impossibly complex because propriety is always dictated by the subjective feelings of the most traditionally powerless person in the room. The language of equality is a mere mask for a new hierarchy that explicitly seeks to place the male (especially the white male) at the bottom.

Finally, as a result of upbringing and relationships, liberal men often lack a distinctively masculine purpose. Ask most conservative men to define their roles — whether they're firefighters or accountants — and they'll often respond with words like "protector" or "provider" — even when they're married to capable, strong women with their own careers. They're glad for their wife's success, but they view that success as independent of their ultimate responsibilities. Many liberal men would actively scorn such labels. Indeed, at the end of the day, many men are left with nothing distinctively male about them, aside from their biology. And they often feel a hole in their heart.  Indeed, a cottage industry exists to reconnect men with manly pursuits — often centered around experiencing real adventure for the first time in their lives.

These are hardly original observations, and Christina Hoff Sommers, in her 2001 book, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men, and Helen Smith, in this year's Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream — and Why it Matters (among others) have made a much more comprehensive case against the Left's treatment of young men.

In its quest to destroy the patriarchy, the Left hurts mainly its own. We conservatives, on the other hand, oblivious to the latest trends in critical gender theory and content with complementary and mutually supporting gender roles, sail blissfully on as the happiest people in the land.

And now you know why beta males like Jay Livingston and Andrew Gelman are so desperate to debunk Brooks.  It's better than self-examination, which would only confirm what Brooks and French are saying.