You might remember a 2006 Pew Research Center survey in which 47 percent of conservative Republicans described themselves as “very happy,” while only 28 percent of liberal Democrats made the same claim.
Newsweek‘s Sharon Begley recalls one conservative’s response:
That led columnist George F. Will to write that “liberalism is a
complicated and exacting, not to say grim and scolding, creed. And not
one conducive to happiness.”
But Begley (whose column photo features a grimace, by the way) isn’t buying it. She cites research from a political psychologist that shows “conservatives are more likely to be older, married and religious, all of which increase happiness.”
That’s not enough for Begley.
People who agreed that “it is not really that big a problem if some
people have more of a chance in life than others,” for instance, and
“this country would be better off if we worried less about how equal
people are,” were happier than those who disagreed. The latter tend to
be liberals, who are less likely than conservatives to see inequality
as the result of a fair and legitimate system in which, say, people are
losing their homes to foreclosure because they greedily got mortgages
they couldn’t afford/didn’t deserve, not because they were misled by
lenders.
I suspect that a person who mischaracterizes the motivations of people she doesn’t like and and who sees a big-business conspiracy in every misfortune that happens to befall people in an imperfect world is not likely to be happy.
