Political Happiness

It's interesting to me that just a day or two after I revisited a discussion from 2006 about whether conservatives or liberals are happier and what that might mean in the post "The Difference Between the Pursuit of Meaning and the Pursuit of Happiness in Life," this showed up in my Facebook feed:

Are Conservatives Happier Than Liberals?

In the New York Times, Arthur Brooks argues that conservatives are happier than liberals.

Brooks starts with a reference to Barack Obama’s remark four years ago  about “bitter” blue-collar Whites who “cling to guns or religion.” Misleading, says Brooks.  So is a large body of research showing conservatives as “authoritarian, dogmatic, intolerant of ambiguity, fearful of threat and loss, low in self-esteem and uncomfortable with complex modes of thinking.”

Despite that research, it’s conservatives, not liberals, who identify themselves as happy.  And, Brooks adds, the farther right you go on the political spectrum, the more happy campers you find. . . . 

The rest, at Sociological Images