Martin Simpson

To begin looking at the connection between leftist politics and unhappiness, I’ll mention the two theories I raised earlier in this series: most lefties think that they understand the world’s unfairness better than conservatives do, and they think of themselves as much more empathetic than conservatives are.  Thus they think that their greater unhappiness is the result of their being more intelligent and more caring.  As I mentioned, both of those are self-flattering diagnoses. 

To be fair, again, most people’s rationale for their own beliefs are self-flattering.  Even for a guy as humble as I am!  Just ask me.  Since I instinctively believe that I’m right about nearly everything, any explanation I give of my political views is bound to be self-flattering. 

That’s just the cross I bear.    

Sane lefty Nate Silver (whom I mentioned last time) noted a 15% happiness gap between conservatives and liberals, and offered three theories to explain leftist unhappiness, which overlap with mine above.  He also provides one extra thought, having to do with one way in which the “social solidarity” offered by seeing injustice in the world can go wrong:

“This [solidarity with like-minded others] can snowball — misery loves company — while attracting some number of people who face serious mental health challenges.”

That rings true to anyone who has perused live video and subsequent photo lineups of antifa and BLM protestors/rioters.   There’s a lot of obvious misery there, and more than a little mental illness.  And as easy as it is to turn those folks into straw men in a political argument, and to mock them mercilessly (Lord knows I’ve done my share of that!), I’m trying to redirect myself.  Because honestly, so many of them are damaged or broken, and I feel sorry for them, and want better for them.

Which is not to say that we should treat the violent among them with kid gloves.  As a society, we need to meet their violence with force, and swift trials and punishment, both to protect the rest of us from them, and to provide them with the just consequences that give them the best disincentive to continuing down the disastrous path they’re on.  

I agree with Breitbart’s John Nolte’s alternative explanation for the happiness gap, which counter-intuitively begins with the way most conservatives have lower expectations of human nature.  He says that we “have made peace with…the messy, complicated, impossible to control” aspects of humanity, and he sees that truce as the cause of a quintessentially conservative goal:  “All we want from the world (and our government) is to be left alone.”

That is a little overstated – we are willing to pay taxes for essential government services; we embrace a system of law and order that constrains our behavior – but it accurately contrasts conservatism with the leftist “[genetic predisposition] to a totalitarian streak.”

Nolte says it well: “This desire to control what cannot be controlled (human nature) breeds their unhappiness. How can anyone be happy if they get angry over someone misgendering someone else, someone voting a certain way, [etc.]” 

Does that not ring true?  Conservatives think leftist ideology is as wrong-headed as leftists think conservative ideology is…but only one side tends to end friendships, cancel co-workers and disinvite family members from Thanksgiving over political differences.  The left was furious at DeSantis and other conservative governors because they allowed their citizens to wear masks, take the vaccine and close their businesses – or not – during covid. 

The Right said, “It’s a free country.”  The Left issued mandates, and made arrests.     

In addition to “giving up your desire to control what you cannot control,” Nolte listed three other secrets to happiness: “having a work ethic, not taking yourself seriously, and being grateful for what you have.”

None of those three are necessarily political.  And yet I think they are all at least politics-adjacent, i.e. a higher proportion of conservatives are on the positive side of each of them.

Conservatism and hard work have been associated with each other for a very long time, partly because of how much more religious conservatives are, on average.  Biblical injunctions about working hard and avoiding sloth are common.  (Proverbs like “hard work brings gain, but mere talk leads only to poverty;” warnings about idleness in both testaments; Paul’s admonition, which should be plastered all over every welfare office in the country: “If a man will not work, let him not eat.”)  

I’m obviously not saying that there are no hard-working lefties, or lazy righties.  But there’s a reason it’s called “the Protestant work ethic” and not “the socialist work ethic.”  (The socialist work ethic produced…Bernie Sanders.  I rest my case.)

Leftists often sneer at the idea that there is a connection between working hard and getting ahead, as part of their overall denigration of the “American Dream,” which they see as a myth used by the rich to trick and exploit the poor.  A central belief on the Left since Marx is that you are entitled to the fruits of other workers’ labor “according to your need,” rather than what you’ve worked for and earned.      

Similarly, “Not taking yourself seriously” needn’t be the property of the left or the right.  But it mostly is, isn’t it?  When you hear descriptors like, “self-serious,” “humorless” or “scold,” don’t you think of some pinched, frowning, Liz Warren type?  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)  Strict policing of language is almost entirely the domain of the left. 

Because words are violence, and silence is also violence.  And if you so much as raise your eyebrows when a hulking bruiser with a 5 o’clock shadow wearing a summer dress says, “Call me ma’am!” in a James Earl Jones voice, you want to genocide trans people.  Shame!

I can think of several possible punchlines to a joke that starts out, “How many conservatives does it take to change a lightbulb?”  But if you propose a joke with the set-up, “How many BLANKS does it take to change a lightbulb?” and the punchline is, “THAT’S NOT FUNNY!” everybody knows that there is only one word that can fill that blank.

“Feminists.” 

And God help you if you laugh at that in a staff meeting.

Finally, we come to, “Being grateful for what you have.” 

Again, this trait is not necessarily politically coded at all, and there are plenty of grateful leftists, and sour conservative ingrates.  And yet, in my next (and last) column in this series on happiness, I will argue that generally, gratitude is much more common on the right. 

I think this is partly related to conservatism being more optimistic and leftism being more pessimistic, and that it accounts for a political “patriotism gap” that is as pronounced as the happiness gap. 

I’ll try to make that case next time.  In the meantime, the weekend is here.  So be happy!

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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In my last two columns on happiness, I considered the ways in which income, health, gender, social media and social connection, and religion all affect one’s happiness.  Today, I’ve arrived at the factor that started me thinking about this topic in the first place: the ways that politics and political ideology impact a person’s happiness.

I’ll begin by noting that a substantial body of research and surveys supports the idea that in general, conservatives are consistently happier than liberals.  For just one example, when center-left political analyst Nate Silver looked at a recent survey of self-reported happiness among 60,000 Americans, he noted some of the most important take-aways:

“The average American self-reports at a 60 on this [0-100] scale: in other words, somewhere between good and very good mental health. But liberals average a score of 53 and conservatives a 68.”

The survey included the categories I’ve already written about (e.g. income, religious affiliation) as well as some I haven’t (sexual orientation, marital status, parents vs. childless), but he acknowledges that “the liberal-conservative gap is fairly consistent across all of these characteristics,” and that respondents’ political ideology correlates more closely with happiness than any of those other factors do. 

Other studies came to similar conclusions.  A 2022 Tuft’s “Equity in America” survey asked a demographically balanced pool of around 2000 respondents to rate themselves as “Very happy,” “Pretty happy,” or “Not too happy.”  The results – controlling for the usual other factors of income, race, health, religion, age, etc. – showed that conservatives were “significantly more likely to report being happy” than were liberals. 

The trend is the same among many other studies – from Pew in 2006, the General Social Survey (GSS) in 2018 and again in 2023, the Institute for Family Studies in 2025, the World Happiness Report in 2024, the Harvard Youth Poll in 2023-24, etc..  A meta-analysis established the overall gap: 37-45% of conservatives describe themselves as “very happy” compared to only 12-30% of liberals.

For what it’s worth, my own anecdotal experience with many conservative and lefty friends generally follows this pattern from the research.  Of course I’ve known some sunny liberals and some dour conservatives, but overall, the reverse is usually true.  And of the smaller number in my social circles whose politics have changed over the years, everybody who has moved to the left has gotten less happy.  Make of that what you will. 

To be fair, there are various ways in which both of these findings – happy conservatives and unhappy liberals – can be interpreted.  Unsurprisingly, both sides tend to interpret their own positions in the ways most complimentary to themselves.  Because: human nature.

Lefties who admit that they are more unhappy or pessimistic, for example, usually explain that by pointing to a few common causes:

1.Their own greater understanding of the world.  If we conservatives comprehended the deep, existential/philosophical limitations, unfairness and tragedy of life, we’d be dour leftists, too.  In this view, “intelligent” is pretty much a synonym for “leftist,” as “shallow dullard” is for “conservative.”  

During high school this position is more social fashion than an intellectual stance.  Think about teenage “goths,” with their black clothes, makeup, and performative alienation that positions themselves as insightful and perceptive outsiders, as opposed to the normies – the jocks, cheerleaders and rich kids – whose blithe and shallow happiness is the consequence of their oblivious self-satisfaction.  If you’re not scowling and scoffing, you just don’t get it. 

(I don’t mean to criticize those who went through a goth phase more than anyone else.  The teen years are tough, and pretty much everybody puts on performative selves.  “Jock” and “cheerleader” are poses – with behavioral codes and uniforms – just as much as “goth” is.)

In college, the romanticized alienation of high school gets layered over with intellectual pretensions.  I think of undergrad leftists as goths with a reading list.  They trade in all-black wardrobes and pancake makeup for eccentric hair colors and styles, and fashionably critical/rebellious/anti-Western thinkers, writers and bands.  The most pretentious among them might actually wear berets (very rare), and preach knowingly about Sartre, the postmodernists and Marx (not rare at all).    

But the underlying intellectual prejudice – that lefties are smart and righties dumb – continues.  Catastrophist climate change doomerism is the only defensible environmental position; the “masculinity is inherently toxic” take on feminism the only defensible gender position; socialist redistribution and suppression of free market capitalism the only defensible economic position;  the superiority of Third-world anti-Westernism the only defensible global politics position.

Anyone who disagrees is a science denier, somehow.  (Ask any Marxists, and they’ll tell you: they’re on “the right side of history.”)        

2.  Many lefties don’t just associate their politics with intellectual superiority, but with moral superiority too.   Leftists see themselves as having great empathy and sympathy with the downtrodden, the have-nots, and the racial, ethnic, gender and religious minorities.   They often apply a concept I remember from a family psychology class – “Good parents are only as happy as their least happy child.” – to the entire society.

(That might sound good at first.  What kind of monstrous parent can be happily unaffected by the misery of his children?  But if you’ve got more than two children – and sometimes if you only have one! – one or more of them will regularly be unhappy to some degree.  Therefore, no parent should ever be happy?) 

Trying to apply this idea to any society leads one to a rhetorical question that is really an indictment:

“How can you sleep at night, knowing that [insert allegedly victimized person or group here] is suffering in [insert location or situation here]?”  This could be “…knowing that gays are getting mocked or hassled by some straight people,” or “…women are being ogled/harassed by men” or “…blacks are being arrested in greater numbers” or “…poor people are living in food deserts” or “…Palestinians are being genocided.”  Etc.

The message is consistent: if you’re not dour and miserable, you’re not a smart, serious, or moral person.  That position naturally creates unhappiness, since if you catch yourself feeling happy,  you start feeling guilty.

But I don’t want to let our side off the hook.  We also choose self-flattering reasons to explain our happiness.  We think that we know the truth about life – men and women are different and cannot transition back and forth; we’ll do better managing our own lives than the government would; individuals are responsible for their own choices, and should reap the benefits of good choices and suffer the consequences of bad ones, etc.  (Okay, so we’re clearly right about those.)

Especially if we’re doing well in life, we can become cocky.  If we are religious, we naturally believe that our religion is the true one, and that can make us self-righteously judgmental.  We can also be uncharitable to our lefty fellow citizens, as I have often been.  For example, it’s easy to watch some anti-ICE protestors, and point out that they are losers in life, rude and angry and hateful, as ugly on the inside as they have made themselves on the outside. 

And though there is always some truth in that, there are also some errors and misunderstandings, arising from our limited knowledge of the lives and minds of others.  Many of them are obviously hurting.  They’ve had absent fathers or neglectful or abusive parents, and they’ve been badly educated in ways that made them vulnerable to propaganda and indoctrination.  Some of them are not very intelligent.  Many of them have had fewer opportunities than some of us have had. 

Some combination of all of the above has given many of them less margin for error than some of us, and made it harder for them to recover from bad choices.  The fact that they’re doing relatively poorly in our system naturally makes them too quick to blame the system rather than look at their own actions.  But it’s also true that our own success can make us too quick to take all of the credit for our accomplishments, and to assign all blame for others’ failures entirely to their own actions.  And that is rarely completely true.

In my next (and last) column on this topic, I’ll consider the chicken-and-egg question – are unhappy people drawn to leftism, or does being a leftist make one unhappy? – and the role played by general optimism and pessimism, and some potential ways to shrink the happiness gap…without making ourselves as unhappy as leftists!

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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