Via Nate Silver..his thoughts and discussion at the link.
The above data says that liberals are on the average less happy than conservatives across all of these demographic and behavioral categories.
What do you think is going on with this?
Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Via Nate Silver..his thoughts and discussion at the link.
The above data says that liberals are on the average less happy than conservatives across all of these demographic and behavioral categories.
What do you think is going on with this?
The foundational essence of the Left has always been hate and hubris.
They don’t like America or Americans. They lie and slander relentlessly insisting that most of the country is made up of stupid, hate-filled assholes. They don’t demonstrate much in the way of gratitude.
Not generally optimal for happiness.
I wonder what these results would have looked like a few decades ago…pretty different, would be my guess. There were once people identifying as Liberals who believed in free speech, economic development, the generally positive influence of the United States, etc…most of these people have either changed their political identification to Conservative/Republican or have fallen into the increasingly extreme ideology now associated with the words ‘Liberalism’ and ‘Progressivism’..
The same questions come up every time: Does conservatism (in some sense) make us happy, or do happy people become conservative? Is it just a measure of who has the good things in life – better jobs, better partners, better education? No disabilities, no traumas, better genetics? Or more subtly, is it a measure of who likes the status quo because it favors them? Do liberals see more clearly what is wrong in a society and are bothered by it? Or are they just natural complainers anyway, seeing things as worse than they are? These questions counter each other well.
Here’s my synthesis. Conservatives are better at institutional memory, status quo, how to get things done, how to keep a lot of balls in the air. But power and being comfortable with power breeds arrogance and insensitivity. They are like the deacons of a church where their fathers and grandfathers were deacons before them, who now cut corners on their theology and what they call piety in service of hollowed-out traditions.
Liberals do not run things well, but they are very good at pointing out where the system is not working. Their solutions for that may be unrealistic, but they usually get it right that there is injustice in the pipeline. They bear the burden of being unhappy, and at some level we should thank them for it, so that we don’t have to do it. Conservatives are happier because they are more balanced in their thinking. But that too easily turns into complacency.
In my lifetime the liberals have run things and the conservatives have been the ones complaining about how the system isn’t working. This is the reverse of what should work best.
Don’t bother to tell me that this is simplistic. I already know that.
So, highly educated conservative religious older black men making over $100k/yr are the happiest.
I’m currently wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Clarence Thomas on it. I sent the same shirt, and one with Thomas Sowell, to my (black) best friend. All of them say, “Hi!” and “Yes, thank you for asking!”
Funny, I was just wondering about this a few minutes ago. I posted a wildly successful link to a movie on sdocial media I saw and someone had to say that it was Trump’s favorite movie. Then another chimed in to say, “well, that’s because he’s a fascist”.
They have to be miserable people.
A lot of this has to do with people with a strong sense of Agency versus people with a strong sense of Envy. It’s not a perfect predictor of Liberal versus Conservative identification, but it works on the average.
In his memoir of Germany between the wars, Sebastian Haffner made a relevant observation. He said that when the political and economic situation began to stabilize (during the Stresemann chancellorship), most people were happy:
“The last ten years were forgotten like a bad dream. The Day of Judgment was remote again, and there was no demand for saviors or revolutionaries…There was an ample measure of freedom, peace, and order, everywhere the most well-meaning liberal-mindedness, good wages, good food and a little political boredom. everyone was cordially invited to concentrate on their personal lives, to arrange their affairs according to their own taste and to find their own paths to happiness.”
But not *everyone* was happy:
“A generation of young Germans had become accustomed to having the entire content of their lives delivered gratis, so to speak, by the public sphere, all the raw material for their deeper emotions…Now that these deliveries suddently ceased, people were left helpless, impoverished, robbed, and disappointed. They had never learned how to live from within themselves, how to make an ordinary private life great, beautiful and worth while, how to enjoy it and make it interesting. So they regarded the end of political tension and the return of private liberty not as a gift, but as a deprivation. They were bored, their minds strayed to silly thoughts, and they began to sulk…To be precise (the occasion demands precision, because in my opinion it provides the key to the contemporary period of history): it was not the entire generation of young Germans. Not every single individual reacted in this fashion. There were some who learned during this period, belatedly and a little clumsily, as it were, how to live. they began to enjoy their own lives, weaned themselves from the cheap intoxication of the sports of war and revolution, and started to develop their own personalities. It was at this time that, invisibly and unnoticed, the Germans divided into those who later became Nazis and those who would remain non-Nazis.”
In America today, there are a significant number of people who have become accustomed to having “entire content of their lives delivered gratis, so to speak, by the public sphere, all the raw material for their deeper emotions”…and the people who need these deliveries have tended to find them on the Left.
Could this be related to a question that occurred to me recently? In 2024 it was clear that lots of people opposed Trump. But I don’t recall seeing any simple, calm account of his faults and vices or a rational explanation of the flaws in his policies. Everyone seemed simply to scream “Nazi”, “Fascist”, “Xenophobe”, “Racist” and the like. Why so? Hell’s bells, ‘they’ even came within an inch of murdering him.
Has The Left given up even a pretence of arguing logically? If so is that evidence that they are plunged in unhappiness so profound that it’s undermining their intellects? Is it impervious to cure?
When I first saw this on X, a lot of the comments mentioned family, religion, monogamy. The usual religious conservative triumphalism. “See? All these things we’ve been advocating for make people happy!”
Do they? I’m 55. I divorced my wife 15 years ago after a miserable 2 years of being married to her. I don’t have children, I don’t own a house, I live in a one bedroom apartment that is just enough room for me, and I don’t think I ever intend to marry the woman I’m sleeping with. And since I’ve been divorced, I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in my life.
I take things as they come. I try to plan for the unexpected. I keep my car in good working order. I save my money, but spend occasionally, too. My life is not full of grand vistas, only the day-to-day of working and my hobbies.
We choose to be happy. It’s not matching yourself into a matrix; more like understanding yourself and calibrating what you want with what you can get, and knowing what’s enough.
Come on, tell us the movie. Was it Triumph of the Will? I always assumed Trump’s favorite movie was Home Alone 2.
The central thesis of the left seems to be that (1) societal problems can be solved and (2) that they can only be solved through collective action or the government. This seems to create a sensitivity to problems in the world together with a sense that either through the collective or through making the government do something, you personally have a partial responsibility for all those problems.
I’d think that would encourage some baseline sense of distress. To add to it, what actions you do take (organizing) are more apt to be generic and not personal enough to give you the satisfaction of doing something tangible.
If on the other hand you look at problems from a more individual perspective, you see things you can do and things you can’t. (Friends or family who you can’t seem to help will cause greater pain, but I think that’s shared across all groups.) That should reduce the number of problems you worry about, and if you have relatively tangible ways of addressing them (food baskets, etc) you probably feel better about at least your part in solving, or at least ameliorating, the problem.
So in general, leftists should live with more of a generalized unhappiness than rightists. Simple example: global warming. If you believe we’re going to roast, you’ll be unhappy about it more often than people who don’t believe it, or who believe that it’s happening but we can’t do anything about it anyway.
Do any of these studies investigate what people are happy or unhappy _about_?
You can generalize that people on the left tend to be more neurotic and unhappy, and also more naïve/unrealistic/deluded about how the world works, than are people on the right.
Also, people on the right (QED) are endlessly curious about the motives and reasoning of the people on the left, because how could they be so stupid. Meanwhile most people on the left seem to believe that people on the right are motivated mainly by personal gain (e.g., tax cuts) or evil (Trump, Bushitler, etc.).
A lot of what goes on in public ideological discourse is difficult to make sense of if you look at it rationally. Maybe if you look at it like a Martian or like EO Wilson studying competing ant species…
The whole of us, the people, will live in the country that is the result of being governed by L or C politicians. Seems to me the result of L policies, regarding self defense as unnecessary, are likely ‘not good’. If L gets in power, as the last 4 years, they seem to create a mess, and let those seeking to damage USA do their darndest, building bombs, attacking the innocent, and so on. The C people have to live with the results of L government and hopefully counter the negatives. The L people, OTOH, get to live with the results of C government, with good protection against foreign aggression, open sea lanes, less grotesque attacks by the barbarians. IOW, the L’s get to hide behind those nasty C’s who put up protective barriers, and work to assist in rational national relations, not those based on ‘feels’.
The C’s have to end up living with the consequences of L government, i.e, open borders, worthless dollars, high energy prices…. U name it. So the L’s can do what they want, make a mess, and the C’s come in and take care of the messes, and put things back on the shelf, clean the carpets, etc…
The L’s do not seem to ever harvest the results of their idiotic policies. Jimmah C from Plains, GA was never held to task for the hostages in Tehran, keeping athletes from competing in Olympic Games they may have trained for their whole life, and a whole lot more. The just never seem to get that smack in the kisser that MIGHT just wake them up and get them aware the world out there is nasty, vicious, and looking for a free meal. They’d rather buy the votes that keep them in office than perform those clean up and be responsibile functions they were elected to do.
I do not like most Ls. I have learned they are narrow minded and unwilling to face reality. I did my time in the USN, so know what being responsible is all about. Most(opinion, not known fact) military and former military tend to be C. They know.
Wish there was a way to edjumukate those L’s that the world is not all Candy, cookies and milk. Free lunch included. nope.
I will take James’s comment re: central thesis a step further
A useful heuristic to discern differences between Right and Left is their views regarding “Nature”… that is their views regarding the firm, unyielding reality of the world
People on the Right, especially conservatives, see a reality that is rooted in the accumulated knowledge and experience of the past. Its various necessary truths are also accessible by Reason, but once again those truths are unyielding. It’s there and real no matter what you might think or wish and they endure in all places at all times.
Even those who might be socially liberal can believe in that reality, just look at libertarians or other followers of classical economics.
People on the Left have a different view which is one of historicism. That is ideas and experiences are rooted in a particular time in history and while relevant to that time, may or may not be relevant to our time.
This why the more honest people of the Left write (Hi)story with that capital H because they see it as a living thing with its own Telos moving toward its own destiny.
The key is that for people on the Left it’s all about will, there is no sense of Nature or the wisdom of past experience to judge the present because that was only relevant to those past times.
Rather than opening the door to liberation and personal fulfillment, it rather opens the door to a neurotic Hell because there is no basis for a leftist to judge the wisdom of their actions except by personal experience and desire – in other words nihlism They are confronted by the terrifying limits of their own rationality without the benefit of the collected wisdom and experiences of those who came before them.
While past generations could be secure that gender was rooted to the two biological sexes, our present-day leftie is confronted by the possibility of personally-divined genders. 47? Sure, but why stop there? If you think there is more than that who is to stop you?
The associated side of historicism, pushed by Hegel, are his later followers who saw the administrative state is the rational means to achieve History Nothing in the 2,500 year old history of Western civilization would lead one to expect that mere “will” expressed through the power of the state could achieve “History” except the conceit of our present age,
In fact the abandonment of the past, reliance on the state for fulfillment, and the atomization of the individual sounds alot like…. 1984.
The entire experience of civilization, indeed all of human history points to a man’s need for something larger than himself and his own wishes, that transcends his own particular time and place.
The thing is people on the Left know this because they continuously run into contradiction. They state that there is no “Truth” because it is either in preference to a group of people or a time yet they appeal to a higher order of moral values when they use the term right or wrong. It is in part this contradiction which leads to their unhappiness
AVI
“Their solutions for that may be unrealistic, but they usually get it right that there is injustice in the pipeline.”
My complaint about simplicity would be that this is very much a matter of perspective, and borders on circularity or a No True Scotsman argument. Conservatives are quite capable of assessing that injustice exists, and liberals can be quite blind to injustices, depending on what you define as just or unjust. It also seems to me to be quite dependent on how one defines liberal or conservative positions in relation to issues.
I really like Mike’s comment above, and it resonates with me. Taking a long view of liberalism as the project of “immanentizing the eschaton” (as it has been since at least the French Revolution), the unhappiness of liberals can be addressed as the obstinance of the crooked timber of humanity to bend to their idealizations, whatever is the source of the ideals. Conservatives seem far more likely to recognize that any attempts we make to right the wrongs we recognize will be local, and temporary, and the best we can hope for is that we do some good to those nearest to us, not that we remake the world to function according to our ideals.