OPINION:
For a number of years, academics have developed and examined data that clearly indicates that those Americans who identify politically as liberals are less happy than those who identify as conservative. The quantity and durability of that data are not really in question.
Increasingly, neither are the reasons for the divergence.
It appears — and stop me if any of this sounds familiar — that happiness is at least partially about how connected a person is to other humans, particularly through the mechanisms of family, faith and community. Self-proclaimed liberals are less likely than conservatives, on average, to be tied to those three institutions.
Research conducted by the Institute for Family Studies and the Wheatley Institution confirms that, as does a Pew Research study, which concludes that the Republican advantage with respect to happiness over Democrats is directly related to greater family satisfaction and higher levels of religious attendance.
Psychologists Barry R. Schlenker, John Chambers and Bonnie Le have explored liberal disengagement from family and faith for a number of years. Reporting on the results of a recent study, they concluded: “Liberals have become less happy over the last several decades. … This decline is associated with increasingly secular attitudes and actions (e.g., less religiosity, less likelihood of being married, and perhaps lessened belief in personal agency).”
Why should we care? If people choose to be unhappy, isn’t that their own business?
Maybe. Maybe not. The simple reality is that personal attitudes and beliefs tend to bleed into the body politic and ultimately find their way into government policies that affect us all.
If you think about the current strain of liberalism, much of it is unleavened by generous sentiments about one’s fellow man and none of it is informed by a belief in a creator.
The animating power and leitmotif of the current left in the United States is the drive to deconstruct everything that has been painstakingly constructed over the last four centuries on the North American continent. The critique of the left — whether focused on government, academia, the arts, popular culture, the media, sexuality, religion, the legal system, business, personal rights, childhood, or anything, really, that predates this very minute — is that the entire system is irredeemable and corrupt and must be destroyed by any means.
This all-encompassing revolutionary fervor is familiar. France in 1789. Russia in 1917. China in the 1960s. So is its terminal point. If you don’t believe in God, if you are disaffected from your fellow man, if your family is more conceptual than real, it is a pretty short jump from hostile discourse to actual homicide.
Along that particular line of thought, it passed mostly without notice two months ago when one of America’s most famous living actresses, Jane Fonda, advocated on national television (“The View”) the murder of anyone who disagreed with her with respect to one particular policy (in this case, it was right to life, but one suspects it could have been anything).
The hostesses of “The View” not only did not express shock and concern, they chuckled as if such a recommendation were within the bounds of normal discourse.
In the terrible August of 1914, at the commencement of the Great War, British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey stood in his office one evening and watched the streetlamps in London being lit. He remarked to a friend: “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”
Here in the States, such darkness, which begins with individuals and is eventually collectivized and normalized, grows.
• Michael McKenna, a columnist for The Washington Times, is president of MWR Strategies. He was most recently a deputy assistant to the president and deputy director of the Office of Legislative Affairs at the White House. He can be reached at mike@mwrstrat.com.
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