The liberal psyche is a tangled forest of faux facts and self-aggrandizing mythologies. Liberals “just know” that they are the most caring and generous people in the whole wide world; liberals “just know” that conservatives wear silk top hats, club orphans and baby seals to death with their gold-headed walking sticks and wouldn’t toss a dime to a starving widow with twelve children and a sick puppy. Liberals “just know” that they are a superior sort of human by virtue of their highly attuned sensitivity to human suffering and need. Recent in-depth studies of American philanthropy have conclusively demonstrated that this self-congratulating liberal mindset is a cartload of crap.
In truth, liberals display a boundless enthusiasm for spending other people’s money; they will happily canonize any pocket-picking politician who lavishes other people’s hard-won earnings on liberal causes. But when it comes to individual self-sacrifice for the good of others, liberals are America’s pre-eminent skinflints.
The “generosity index” published by the Catalogue for Philanthropy has demonstrated that red states have consistently donated far more to non-profit philanthropies than have the liberal-leaning blue states. Arthur C. Brooks, the author of Who Really Cares?, a book about charitable donation, has presented the proof that households headed by conservatives give almost a third more to charities than do households dominated by liberals. A study of charitable donation sponsored by Google pegged the superior generosity of conservatives over liberals at fifty percent.
Any true intellectual will change his opinions based on revealed truths. “When I started doing research on charity,” Mr. Brooks tells us, “I expected to find that political liberals – who, I believed, genuinely cared more about others than conservatives did – would turn out to be the most privately charitable people. So when my early findings led me to the opposite conclusion, I assumed I had made some sort of technical error. I re-ran analyses. I got new data. Nothing worked. In the end, I had no option but to change my views.”
In a mad scramble to conceal their tightwad souls, liberals tried to tarnish conservative generosity by tossing out the falsehood that conservatives only appeared to be more generous because they lavished their money on sparkling local mega-churches, while the poor were ignored. The data dispute this slander.
When all religious giving is stripped away, liberals gain only a razor thin edge over conservatives. (Google data.) When donors are ranked according to the percentage of their total income given to the needy, conservatives swamp liberals even when giving to secular causes. What’s more, even as liberals pout about conservative donations to churches, a whacking percentage of liberal philanthropy ends up in the pockets of big-city art museums, symphony orchestras, and upper-crust schools and universities that cater to the tastes of the privileged, which only serves to increase social inequality. In any case, no museum ever fed a sick and starving minority child in desperate need of specialized surgery. (I just couldn’t resist saying that.)
Conservatives are also far more likely to give their personal time to charitable causes than are liberals; people in red states are more likely to volunteer for good causes. Conservatives are far more likely to donate their own blood to the needy than are liberals. After crunching the data, Arthur Brooks concluded that if liberals and “moderates” could gin up as much public spirit as conservatives, then the American emergency blood supply would suddenly increase by a whopping 45 percent.
Liberals refuse to even measure up to their muddled Marxist ideal of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” As the data reveal, the working poor donate a higher percentage of their income to charity than do the liberal middle class. By this standard, Mississippi is far more generous than New York.
Exhibit A: The liberal icon Albert Gore, Jr. In the tax year 1997, Vice President Gore claimed an adjusted gross income of $197,729 on his 34-page federal tax return. And how much did the Big Liberal and Ms. Tipper donate to charity? A measly 353 bucks. That’s less than Big Al spent on rodent control on his Tennessee plantation that year. This prompted Stacey Palmer, managing editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy to opine, “I would assume that he would want to do something to demonstrate that he was being socially responsible through his giving . . .” (L.A.Times, 4/15/98) She assumed wrong.
That same year my gross family income was less than a third of Al Gore’s, but my family’s charitable giving exceeded five times that of Al and Tipper. When it comes to charitable giving, liberals need a nudge.
The Philanthropic Giving Index, published by the University of Indiana’s Center on Philanthropy, tracks the predictions of non-profit managers. The Index reflects a sharp decline in anticipated charitable giving – from 85 to 65 in only six months, on a scale of zero to 100.
In May of 2008, the Gallup pollsters queried twelve hundred American adults about their inclination to help others. Of this sample population, the 42% who self identified as “conservative” or “very conservative” gave 56% of all reported donations, while those who called themselves “liberal” or “very liberal” comprised 29% of the sample population and contributed a mere 7% of total donations.
For persons in the same income bracket, it was the political mindset that most closely corresponded with a commitment to charitable giving: self-identified conservatives gave 3.6% of their earnings to charity; “moderates” gave 3%; “liberals” gave 1.5%. Those who identified themselves as “very conservative” gave 4.5% of their income to charity; the “very liberal” gave only 1.2%.
Secular conservatives were far more generous than non-religious liberals in 2008. When compared to his liberal twin in terms of income, sex, age, education and family structure – the average secular conservative donated $1,100 more than the average liberal.
Were the liberals just suffering from “donation fatigue” after throwing $742 million at Barack Obama – more than double what the losing John McCain raked in? Hardly.
Charitable donations in 2008 dwarfed political contributions; in 2008 non-profit organizations were given more than 270 times the amount given to both major presidential candidates combined. Liberals had plenty of reserve cash; they just kept it to themselves.
In 2009, non-profit groups found themselves pinched by a nasty recession – donations were down. This decline in charitable giving highlighted yet another difference between liberals and conservatives: when economic conditions worsen, liberals decrease their charitable giving at faster rates than do conservatives. For example: a 10% decrease in family income is historically associated with a 10% decrease in charitable giving by conservatives. The same 10% decrease in income typically prompts liberals to cut back their generosity by sixteen percent. If the recession of 2009 deepens, then the generosity gap between conservatives and liberals will grow ever wider.
The increasing generosity gap will have two consequences. The first consequence is that explicitly conservative non-profit organizations will fare better than left-wing groups. The second consequence is that non-profits of every type, to which conservatives have historically been very generous, will become far more dependent on the generosity of conservatives. The implication of this increasing dependence on conservatives is pregnant with irony. Why? Because non-profits in general have been colonized by liberals. In October of 2008, the Chronicle of Philanthropy informed us that the employees of major charities favored Democrats to Republicans with their political donations by 82 to 18 percent. In the hothouse culture of the big foundations, the margin of preference is a whacking 98 to 2 percent!
The nauseating downside is that the liberal executives of non-profits, who depend on the disproportionate generosity of conservatives to keep their non-profits in the black, are the same liberals who give the public the false impression that their non-profits are an expression of liberal generosity. They preen and strut before the cameras; they spill their liberal jabber into any open microphone; they pose with liberal candidates. What is never made explicit is that non-profits across America – from soup kitchens to symphonies – would be headed for ruin, but for the bigger big-hearted sharing of conservatives.
Thomas Clough
Copyright 2009
March 22, 2009