Why Are Conservatives Angry and Liberals Depressed?

Ross Douthat asks a good question in his New York Times column. Two good questions, actually. Taking an essay in American Affairs as his starting point he asks:

Thus our peculiar situation: a once-radical left presiding somewhat miserably over the new order that it long desired to usher in, while a once-conservative right, convinced that it still has the secret of happiness, looks to disruption and chaos as its only ladder back from exile.

Here’s that starting point:

As Musa al-Gharbi writes in an essay for American Affairs, the happiness gap between liberals and conservatives is a persistent social-science finding, visible across several eras and many countries. Meanwhile, the view that “my life is pretty good, but the country is going to hell,” which seems to motivate a certain kind of middle-class Donald Trump supporter, would have been unsurprising to hear in a bar or at a barbecue in 1975 or 1990, no less than today.

He cites a Gallup poll which found a substantial “happiness gap” between conservatives and liberals. How big?

In Gallup polling from 2019, just before the pandemic, the happiness gap between Republicans and Democrats was larger than in any previous survey. And the trend of worsening mental health among young people, the subject of much discussion lately, is especially striking among younger liberals. (For instance: Among 18- to 29-year-olds, more than half of liberal women and roughly a third of liberal men reported that a health care provider had told them they had a mental health condition, compared with about a fifth of conservative women and around a seventh of conservative men, according to an analysis of 2020 Pew Research Center data by the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt.)

What has happened? “Conservatives” are angry because they’ve realized their views don’t represent the American consensus, at least not any longer:

the entire organizing premise of post-1960s American conservatism was that the country as whole shared its values — hence the rhetoric of the “silent majority” and the “moral majority” — and that the problem was just an elite class of liberals, irreligious and unpatriotic but also out of touch with the breadth and depth of American society. Remove the weight of ineffective bureaucracy, end the rule of liberal judges, and watch the country flourish: That was the effective message of Republican politicians and quite a few conservative intellectuals for a very long time.

Fewer and fewer conservatives seriously believe that it’s this simple anymore. But where does conservative politics go without a traditional cultural foundation to conserve?

As he paints it the situation for “liberals” is equal and opposite:

An organizing premise of progressivism for generations has been that the toxic side of conservative values is responsible for much of what ails American society — a cruel nationalism throttling a healthy patriotism, a fundamentalist bigotry overshadowing the enlightened forms of religion, patriarchy and misogyny poisoning the nuclear family. Thus in many ways the transformations of the last few decades are ones that liberals sought: The America of today is more socially-liberal on almost every issue than the America of George W. Bush, more secular, less heteronormative, more diverse in terms of both race and personal identity, more influenced by radical ideas that once belonged to the fringe of academia.

Unfortunately in finding its heart’s desire the left also seems to have found a certain kind of despair. It turns out that there isn’t some obvious ground for purpose and solidarity and ultimate meaning once you’ve deconstructed all the sources you consider tainted. And it’s at the vanguard of that deconstruction, among the very-liberal young, that you find the greatest unhappiness — the very success of the progressive project devouring contentment.

I think his premises are almost completely wrong. First off, what are called “conservatives” today have only the slightest relationship to those of 30 or 40 years ago. Many are what would be better termed Southern social conservatives and they’ve been angry for 200 years.

Similarly, today’s liberals bear very little relationship with those of 30 or 40 years ago. “Progressives” would be a better description and progressives by definition are dissatisfied. They have always been dissatisfied. They will always be dissatisfied. It’s inherent. If they weren’t dissatisfied, they wouldn’t be progressives. They keep demanding that arc of history bend toward justice more quickly. But, as Mr. Douthat observes, they have no standard by which to measure justice any longer.