Thoughts on Studies Showing that Liberals are More Depressed Than Conservatives (posted 3/13/23)

I saw a couple of stories last week that only require a short response, followed by an article that requires more attention.

Stories first:

Biden had what is being called a “cancerous lesion” surgically removed last week.  Yet oddly enough, “Dr.” Jill Biden, Que Mala Harris and Mayor Pete have all been seen with Joey Gaffes in the week since the surgery.

So speculation on who exactly was the cancerous lesion on the presidency continues…

Here is a PJ Media headline from last Tuesday: “They’re on to Him: a Shockingly Low Percentage of Americans Think Old Joe Biden Is Really Running Things.” 

I like PJ Media, and I would generally be loath to correct them, but in this case I feel like I must.  The article points to a survey finding that only 30% of likely US voters are “very confident” that Biden is physically and mentally up to the job of POTUS. 

“Only” 30%?  ONLY?  That number is far from “shockingly low.”

In fact, after watching Joey Gaffes’ performance for the last two years, any number higher than zero is shockingly high!

Then again, I guess if John Fetterman can sponsor 6 bills despite being incommunicado in a hospital being treated for what sounds like multiple strokes and depression, I guess our Cadaver in Chief can lead the free world from the comfort of his metal tray in the White House Morgue.

(Also, while I’m not a physician – although my PhD makes me more of a doctor than “Dr.” Jill is — I think that if you could excise the cancerous lesion that is his wife, Fetterman’s condition would markedly improve.) 

But the most interesting thing I’ve read this past week is a piece by Matthew Yglesias on why young liberals are more depressed than young conservatives.

Yglesias is a lefty, but a mostly reasonable one.  He co-founded Vox, but he left several years ago to go to Substack – along with some other smart lefties, including Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss and Glenn Greenwald – to write and think independently, outside of a uniformly leftist bubble.

The article that Yglesias reacted to was called, “The Politics of depression,” and it found higher rates of depression in young females than young males, which made sense to leftist commentators, since they generally think that males are evil little want-to-be patriarchs, who naturally make females miserable.

But the far larger depression gap didn’t involve gender, but politics: while liberal females were considerably more depressed than liberal males, and conservative females were slightly more depressed than conservative males, it turns out that conservatives of both genders (spoiler alert to lefty readers: there are only two genders) are way less depressed than liberals of both genders.

In fact, liberal males are considerably more depressed than conservative females.  Which has to be especially galling to a certain type of feminist, since female leftists like themselves are the saddest, and the conservative males they hate are the least depressed. 

Cue the sad violin.  (Because to this type of feminist, the sad trombone is probably too disturbingly phallic, what with that slide protruding farther and farther as the note becomes sadder.)  

If you are an irreverent roving correspondent with a fondness for cheap jokes, you could easily make a few snarky comments at this point.

So I will.

I’m no scientist, but I can give you two quick reasons why leftist young people might be depressed:

1. The females are mopey because their males are all betas who weren’t raised to be chivalrous men, and couldn’t open a door for you if they wanted to because of their lack of upper body strength due to the hormone blockers they are on while they’re trying to decide if their authentic self is more of an effeminate male or a masculine female.

2. The males are depressed because of the above, and because the only females they have any chance with are their political co-religionists, and news flash: scowls, genitalia-simulating hats and psychotic daddy issues and hatred of testosterone are not the turn-ons that they are cracked up to be.

Seriously.  Look at the women on Fox News, and then at the women on CNN, or MSNBC, or the View.  They are the visual equivalent of the antidote to Viagra.  And unfortunately for them, they’re as pretty on the inside as they are on the outside.

So… yikes!

But childish mockery aside, I think there is more at play than just physical attractiveness.  Those of us on the right aren’t all paragons of physical beauty (CO Nation excepted, of course), and I’m sure that there are some attractive lefties out there somewhere.

But leftism carries its own unhappiness with it, for several reasons.

Leftists replace God or any legitimate higher purpose with hack politicians who have recruited them into the service of a poisonous, immiserating ideology cobbled together from the envy and mean-spirited bile of Karl Marx, Saul Alinsky, Michael Moore and Satan.

That’s no recipe for contentment.

Peer pressure is also a big source of unhappiness, a situation exacerbated when your peers come pre-depressed. Because as the old saying goes, “Democrats love company.”

Sorry.  That’s not it.  Oh yeah: “Feminists love company.”

Shoot.  It’s on the tip of my tongue.

Ooh, I’ve got it: “Misery loves company.”

Honest mistake. 

Another contributor to depression is losing all the time.  Believe me, the rib-kicks of the elections of 2018, 2020, and 2022, have still got me wincing.  

But while they’ve been winning way more elections than they should, have you noticed that most lefties aren’t real happy about that? I think part of that arises from the fact that they’re not content with partial power.

The main point of being a little totalitarian is that you want total control.  So as long as there are red states out there – with their infuriating successes that are drawing productive citizens to flee there from your power-hungry blue states – you can’t really be happy.

To add salt to their wounds, wherever the left has gotten real power, the results have been disastrous.     

As I’ve written before, the socialist agenda has been implemented in at least 50 countries, starting with the Russkies in 1917, and it’s produced nothing but gulags, misery, environmental devastation and democide. 

Seriously, their record is 0-50-2, if you count a couple Scandinavian countries with short-lived, quasi-socialist experiments as draws.  How can you help but be depressed with a record like that? 

And who would your all-stars be?  Stalin?  (He’s got the silver medal in terms of body count.)  Mao? (Gold!)  Pol Pot, Castro, Chavez, any of the blocky, glowering Russian mass-killers between Stalin and Gorbachev? Ortega in Nicaragua, Ceausescu in Romania, 98% of the liberal arts faculties in the Ivy League? 

That’s a weaker lineup than the Mumblers’ Row that the Dems put up in their 2020 primary! (And how terrible were they?  Joe Biden whipped them all!)

So what’s to be happy about on the left?  Your women look like Bruce Jenner, your men look like Caitlyn Jenner, you’ve got the win-loss record of the 1976 Tampa Bay Bucs, and even when you win, you’ve got to immediately put up a Berlin/blue-state Wall to keep people from running away from you.

But perhaps the biggest cause of depression among lefties is that they’re the opposite of we few, we happy few, we band of cautious optimists: they look at every half-full glass and see it as half-full of hemlock.

They live in the greatest nation in history, where opportunity abounds, and the universal scourges of human life – war, disease, racism, sexism, soccer – are less oppressive than they are anywhere else.  And still they see problems everywhere. 

Their view is best summed up by creepy leftist cry-bully Taylor Lorenz, who reacted to the depressed liberals study with this quote, re-defining depressed young lefties as realists: “we’re living in a late stage capitalist hellscape during an ongoing deadly pandemic w record wealth inequality, 0 social safety net/job security, as climate change cooks the world.”

Every word of that is wrong!   Our economy’s problems are mostly caused by her ideology, and pale in comparison to those in the rest of the world; covid was way less serious than the flu for otherwise healthy young people.

Our wealth inequality arises from everyone getting wealthier, but some faster than others.  We have more safety net than ever before, to the point that it’s become an atrophy-causing hammock for millions.  And 2 degrees of warming over a century couldn’t cook a scrambled egg, let alone a planet.

All of which reminds me of one more reason for us to be happy: we don’t have to trade places with lefties! 

Before I go, I wanted to mention that I was on another audio podcast that just posted today.  This time the topic was, “When Does Humor Cross a Line?”  My cousin’s take was that most people are way too easily offended, and my take was that I enjoy jokes even when they should conceivably offend me.

As part of the discussion, I told several borderline-tasteless jokes as examples.  So if you enjoy my foolishness here, please download and/or listen to the podcast at this link, and let me know what you think: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2041434/12423113

“Dr.” Jill Biden/ Taylor “Waah!” Lorenz, 2024!