“Conservatism” is incompatible with happiness.
“But wait!” you’ll say. I’ve heard that ‘conservatives’ are happier than liberals.”
Yes. We’ve all heard that. Turns out that it’s a myth. This article in Science explains why: “Conservatives” bullshit themselves a little bit more than liberals. That is to say, they hide the truth from themselves a bit more, painting themselves to themselves as more positive than they really are. That’s what accounts for the slightly higher self-reported happiness score of “conservatives.”
So we can set that myth aside and get right to showing that “conservatism” is an inherently miserable world view.
In my book Conservative Estimate, I show that core of “conservatism” is pervasive fearfulness. “Conservatives” live, and are conditioned to live, in a constant state of fearing that something will be taken from them. People who live that way must be constantly on alert, constantly trying to hedge, constantly trying to defend themselves. That way of life is not compatible with contentment.
But it turns out that there is a deeper reason why the pervasive fearfulness of “conservatives” makes them miserable.
Fear is innately non-present
As this study by Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert shows, the number one predictor of unhappiness is the inability to focus one's attention on what is happening and what one is doing in the present.
But the very definition of fear is apprehension of future harm. To live in fear as “conservatives” do, to be continually anxious that something will be taken from you, is to put your attention on an imagined harm in the future.
It is the very opposite of living in the present. And that means that “conservatives” are chronically unhappy. Living in their imaginary future filled with deprivation and loss, “conservatives” have a hard time focusing their attention on the present.
Indeed, many of them cannot do it at all. Their imaginary futures infect their present lives. They create imaginary present conspiracies, imaginary present demonic enemies, imaginary harms happening to them in the present that clear-sighted people can find no evidence to support.
Conversely, they deny actual present dangers—like COVID and the climate crisis—that conflict, in their warped reasoning, with their delusional imaginary present.
What is more, they project their imaginary future fears on the past—and then they create an imaginary past to inhabit when they are not inhabiting their imaginary future. That is the origin of all their grievances. They imagine that something has been taken from them in the past and they relish their resentment about it. White supremacy and Christian nationalism are all about that, even though nothing was taken except things that never should have existed in the first place—like the ability to prevent minorities from having the rights of other citizens. And that is what Trumpism’s mania about the 2020 election is all about, even though nothing at all was taken from them. They simply lost.
“Conservatives” live in a fearful imaginary future that infects their view of the past and the present. No wonder they are miserable.
Self-ignorance deepens “conservative” wretcheness
Then the “conservative” proclivity for self-bullshit mentioned above kicks in and makes them even more wretched.
As Socrates pointed out some 2500 years ago, ignorance of one’s ignorance makes one suffer. If you bullshit yourself about reality, it will eventually bite you. If you don’t know that you can’t live in the present, then you will live in the future and the past. And that, as Killingworth’s and Gilbert’s study mentioned above showed, is the number one way to make yourself unhappy.
Moreover, ignorance of your ignorance makes it impossible for you to escape from the trap. If you don’t know that you’re sick, you can’t take steps to cure yourself.
And if you’re good at bullshitting yourself, you convince yourself that your sickness is healthy and that everyone else is sick.
Socrates kept telling people how perverted all this is. But too many Athenians were unconsciously sick and indignant about it. In the end, slightly more than half of his fellow citizen-jurors voted to put him to death for seeing the truth.
Their self-bullshitting, full of delusional ignorance about their inner sickness, ended up infecting the rest of their fellow citizens to the point where they could not prevent the sickness from killing, irrationally, the one man who was doing the most good.
“Conservatives” are making us all miserable
Similarly, too many Americans are diseased with the virus “conservatism.” They are infecting the rest of us. Polls show that the mood of the country is dismal (here’s one from last spring, for instance), just like the invariable mood of “conservatives.” And that more and more people are taking out their displeasure on everyone indiscriminately. And that they blame, irrationally, the one man who is doing the most good—Joe Biden.
This contagion shows itself everywhere, on every level of society.
The shameless criminal behavior of Trump and his lackeys, together with their contempt for the law, has inspired a wave of criminal behavior throughout the nation.
The shameless overturning of *Roe v. Wade* in the face of majority opposition is making women forego pregnancy for fear of not getting necessary health care—a fear that women under the age of fifty never had to face before.
The shameless propagation of anti-vaccine rhetoric makes sane Americans fear another COVID epidemic.
The shameless running down of the economy—which is in fact doing very well thanks to Bidenomics—is making people fear their future prosperity.
The shameless Republican destruction of government for the sake of power is making decent people fear the end of democracy.
None of these fears is necessary. They are all delusions caused by the innate fear of “conservatives” spreading like a contagion throughout society.
We can beat this infection, just like we beat COVID
The cure to this infection is to get rid of “conservatives” in powerful positions.
We need to punish the entire Republican party for its relentless drive to infect all of America with the “conservative” virus. The sooner decent Americans decide to flood the polls and remove every last Republican from office, the sooner the nation can begin to put aside the unnecessary fears that “conservatives” are spreading.
The misery will abate quickly as soon as “conservatives” are shut out from the halls of power. Then they will be left complaining to themselves in bars and basements, but they will have no power to inflict their non-present fears on the rest of us.
And America will be able to go back to what it does best—solving the world’s problems while expanding truth and justice for all.