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“very conservative” said they were “very happy” versus only 25 percent of people who reported being “liberal” or “very liberal.” A 2007 Gallup Poll found that 58 percent of Republicans versus only 38 percent of Democrats said that their mental heath is “excellent.” One reason may be that conservatives are so much more generous than liberals, giving 30 percent more money (even when controlled for income), donating more blood, and logging more volunteer hours. And it isn’t because conservatives have more expendable income. The working poor give a substantially higher percentage of their incomes to charity than any other income group, and three times more than those on public assistance of comparable income. In other words, poverty is not a barrier to charity, but welfare is.5 One explanation for these findings is that conservatives believe charity should be private (through nonprofit organizations) whereas liberals believe charity should be public (through government). Here we see a pattern of political party preferences grounded in different moral foundations, which we will explore below.

One reason that liberals characterize conservatives in this manner may be the liberal bias of academic social scientists. To wit, a 2005 study by George Mason University economist Daniel Klein using voter registrations found that Democrats outnumbered Republicans by a staggering ratio of 10 to 1 among the faculty at the University of California–Berkeley and by 7.6 to 1 among the faculty at Stanford University. In the humanities and social sciences, the ratio was 16 to 1 at both campuses (30 to 1 among assistant and associate professors). In some departments, such as anthropology and journalism, there wasn’t a single Republican to be found. The ratio for all departments in all colleges and universities throughout the United States, said Klein, is 8 to 1 Democrats over Republicans.6

Smith College political scientist Stanley Rothman and his colleagues found a similar bias in a 2005 national study: only 15 percent of professors describe themselves as conservative, compared to 72 percent who said they were liberal (80 percent in humanities and social sciences).7 A more nuanced nationwide study conducted in 2001 by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute found that 5.3 percent of faculty members were far left, 42.3 percent were liberal, 34.3 percent were middle of the road, 17.7 percent were conservative, and 0.3 percent were far right. Comparing the extremes in this sample, there are seventeen times more far left liberals than far right conservatives. The bias appears even in law schools, where one would hope for a more balanced education in our future lawmakers. In 2005, Northwestern law professor John McGinnis surveyed the faculties of the top twenty-one law schools rated by U.S. News & World Report and found that politically active professors overwhelmingly tend to be Democrat, with 81 percent contributing “wholly or predominantly” to Democratic campaigns while just 15 percent did the same for Republicans.8

The liberal slant also appears to dominate many forms of the media. A 2005 study by UCLA political scientist Tim Groseclose and University of Missouri economist Jeffrey Milyo measured media bias by counting the times that a particular media outlet cited various think tanks and policy groups, and then compared this with the number of times that members of Congress cited the same groups. “Our results show a strong liberal bias: all of the news outlets we examine, except Fox News’ Special Report and the Washington Times, received scores to the left of the average member of Congress.” Predictably, the CBS Evening News and the New York Times “received scores far to the left of center.” The three most politically neutral media outlets were PBS’s NewsHour, CNN’s NewsNight, and ABC’s Good Morning America. Interestingly, the most politically centrist of all news sources was USA Today.9

Of course, liberals do not have a monopoly on political bias. Whenever I listen to conservative talk radio I find it distressingly easy to predict what the