I am currently reading the book Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism, by Arthur C. Brooks. Brooks notes that when it comes to charity, America is two nations—one charitable, and the other uncharitable. Most Americans are generous, compassionate people. However, he states, there is also an identifiable slice of the population that does not donate to people in need; does not volunteer; does not give in informal ways; does not even feel compassion toward others. Brooks was surprised and disturbed by many of the facts and trends that emerged in the course of his research. His analysis is based entirely on data from years of analysis on the best national and international datasets available on charity, computational horsepower, and the past work of dozens of scholars.
The data indicates that political conservatives are, on average, more personally charitable than liberals (for example, in 2000, conservatives gave 30% more money to charity than liberals, spanning every income class, yet liberals earned an average of 6% more in income). He notes this a startling conclusion, but that's not the end of the story. Conservatives aren't more charitable than liberals simply because their politics somehow make them inherently virtuous, it is the worldview and lifestyle of charitable people that is usually more in sync with the right than they are with the left. This is based on four forces in modern American life that he has discovered are primarily responsible for making people charitable. These forces are religion, skepticism about the government in economic life, strong families, and personal entrepeneurism. Lest anyone think Brooks is biased, his expectation when he began his research was that political liberals would turn out to be the most privately charitable people. His political and cultural roots were decidedly liberal, but his research changed his views in his personal search for the truth. Like Brooks, my search is also for the truth, based to the best of my ability on evidence, rational thought, and natural law, all of which led me to my Christian faith.
Here is an excerpt from the book, which is highly instructive about who gives and who just talks a mean game:
Politicians are uniquely situated, one might think, when it comes to handing out favors at no expense to themselves. But we see the same behavior in vast swaths of "regular" people as well. A significant number of Americans (and Europeans as well) consider themselves charitable simply because they support policies of income redistribution through taxation. And this affects their private giving.
The relationship between charitable giving and ideas about income redistribution is by no means obvious. In fact, before I started the research for this book, I assumed that those people most concerned and vocal about economic inequality would be the most likely to give to charity. But I was wrong. Instead, I found a large amount of data all pointing in the same direction: For many people, the desire to donate other people's money displaces the act of giving one's own. People who favor government income redistribution are significantly less likely to behave charitably than those who do not. Even if the policies they support do not come into effect, they are still far less likely to donate to charity. For many Americans, political opinions are a substitute for personal checks; but people that value economic freedom, and thus bridle against forced income redistribution, are far more charitable.
In this chapter, we will see that charity and conservative views on forced income redistribution go hand in hand. As such, through its economic policies and preferences, the political left is effectively conceding a tremendous amount of moral authority to the right wing when it comes to charity.
So there you have it. There are those who put their money where their mouth is, and those who don't but are happy to offer up your money as a means for assuming the moral mantle. Based on their reported charitable charitable giving, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden fit the latter description, while George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have been exemplary in fitting the former, in contrast to what many believe. I would highly recommend the book, which is a short, quick read, and will post more excerpts as I work through the book. I'm looking forward to your comments on this post.
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