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The American Affairs Journal noted that neo-liberals were consistently twice as likely to report mental illness compared to conservatives, regardless of whether they attended church. Ryan Burge, the political scientist behind the analysis, found that this wasn’t a fluke. It was systemic. Something in the liberal outlook itself appears to degrade mental resilience. Another survey, from the Survey Center on American Life, highlighted just how specifically this crisis afflicts young liberal women. Among all political subgroups, they reported the lowest levels of satisfaction with how society treats them and the highest levels of distress. This should be unsurprising, as the neo-liberal narrative trains people to feel perpetually aggrieved. Especially women, despite the left’s notorious trouble defining what a woman truly is.

A 2023 Northeastern University analysis acknowledged the stark liberal-conservative mental health divide but attributed part of it to “self-reporting bias.” Liberals, they said, may just be more open to discussing their struggles. That might be true to a degree. But even when controlling for self-awareness, the overall disparity persists. A Tufts Public Opinion Lab study that adjusted for age, religion, and income still found conservatives were eight percentage points more likely to rate their mental health positively.

By now, the pattern is hard to dismiss. The ideological divide in happiness isn’t anecdotal. It’s measurable. Yet overwhelmingly left-wingers see things another way. A 2024 Johns Hopkins study tried to narrow the divide, suggesting that higher neo-liberal depression rates might reflect emotional honesty rather than emotional dysfunction. But honesty doesn’t erase the harm. Being depressed more often, even if you’re willing to admit it, still means you’re suffering more. That should matter. A 2025 PLOS One study, raised a different critique: maybe conservatives downplay mental health struggles due to stigma. Possibly. But the same study acknowledged that across objective well-being metrics—mood, stress, life satisfaction—liberals still reported worse outcomes. So even if language differs, the deeper trend remains.

A joint study by Tufts and UMass: conservatives are significantly more likely to rate their mental health as “excellent” or “very good,” while liberals are more prone to report stress, anxiety, and dissatisfaction. Awareness of social issues, the researchers said, might explain the disparity. But others see it differently: constant fixation on societal ills may feel virtuous, but it actually corrodes the human psyche, causing emotional self-harm.

The neo-liberal cohort suffering most isn’t the poor or disenfranchised. It’s the elite. The Manhattan Institute found that college-educated white left-wingers now dominate the democratic Party’s internal culture. Affluent, urban-to-suburban, and fiercely ideological, they’ve pushed the party away from bread-and-butter economics toward academic-style social theory. In theory, they’ve won the culture war. In practice, they’re miserable. The Atlantic documented how well-off liberal suburbs like Scarsdale, New York—where median incomes top $250,000—maintain rigid zoning laws that block working-class families from moving in. Lefties talk inclusion, particularly to each other and especially when they all have money. However, they practice exclusion. They champion diversity, equity, and inclusion, while building echo chambers far away from blue-collar America, let alone the poor.

Conservatives don’t claim perfection. That’s good, because they have no secret formula for it. Not even close. Here’s what they do offer: a worldview grounded in, more or less, personal responsibility, self-confidence, family ties, public safety, opposition to reinventing working wheels, biological sex’s immutable reality, disdain for government actions that hamper ordinary people, hard truth over academic theory, rejecting societal upheaval masquerading as “social justice,” ending children’s indoctrination into woke ideology, tackling runaway costs of living, and national pride, among other things. All this produces lives of a higher quality. The neo-liberal model, for all its prestige, doesn’t.

If you take people at their word, and these surveys do, then it becomes impossible to avoid an unsettling question: what has the left’s political project really delivered? For all the marches, for all the legislative victories, for all the online moralizing, has it made the people who practice it any happier? The general answer, in data point after data point, is no. This is not about dunking on the other side. It’s about outcomes. Regardless of whether one calls it “woke,” “neo-liberal,” “progressive,” "left-wing" "democrat" “intersectional,” or something else, lefty ideology does something rather obvious. It leaves its adherents more anxious, more alienated, and more depressed over time, even as their material conditions improve. On this basis, it’s long past time to question leftism’s real-world value.

Mental health matters. Happiness matters. These aren’t luxuries. They are the building blocks of any flourishing society. And right now, the evidence says conservatives, not liberals, are doing a better job at leading lives of meaning, stability, and peace. That’s not a partisan slogan. It’s reality.

thx Dr. Joseph Ford Cotto