I feel happy!
I feel happy!
Posted on 02/11/2008 6:28:47 PM PST by rhema
After virtually ignoring happiness for more than 100 years, social scientists are making up for lost time. They're churning out hundreds of research papers on the subject each year. There are happiness conferences, a Journal of Happiness Studies, a World Database of Happiness. Happy, you might say, is the new sad.
All of this cogitating about contentment has revealed much about who's supposedly happy and who isn't. Most studies show wealthy people are marginally happier than poor ones. People with pets or children are no happier than those without. People with active sex lives are - surprise! - happier than those without. No single morsel of happiness data, though, is more intriguing than this: Republicans are happier than Democrats.
A 2006 Pew Research poll found that 45 percent of Republicans describe themselves as "very happy," compared with only 30 percent of Democrats (and 29 percent of independents). This is a sizable gap and a remarkably consistent one, too. Republicans have been happier than Democrats every year since the General Social Survey, conducted biannually by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, began asking about happiness in 1972.
What to make of this finding? Is there something about being a card-carrying member of the GOP that induces a warm, fuzzy feeling, a sort of political Prozac? Or does the river of causality flow in the other direction: Are happy people more likely to become Republicans than Democrats? Or maybe neither explanation holds water and it only appears as if Republicans are happier than Democrats. The most obvious place to look for an explanation is, of course, with money. Wealthy people are marginally happier than poor ones, and Republicans, according to some surveys, tend to be wealthier than Democrats, so that must be why they're happier, right? Nice try, but no dice. Even after adjusting for differences in income, the Pew researchers still found a marked happiness gap: Poor Republicans are, on average, happier than poor Democrats, and wealthy Republicans are happier than wealthy Democrats.
Maybe the answer is power. Republicans have controlled the White House for most of the past 35 years, and nothing spells happiness like p-o-w-e-r. Wrong again. Republican bliss persists even if a Democrat - be it Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton - resides in the White House.
You can practically hear the researchers at Pew scratching their liberal heads. They put the findings through a rigorous process called multiple-regression analysis to isolate the relevant variables. But try as they might, they could not wash that Republican happiness out of their hair.
Basically, Republicans have in spades all the things that combine to make us happy. Church attendance is particularly crucial. People who attend religious services regularly are more likely to report being "very happy" than those who don't - 43 percent vs. 26 percent (a happiness boost, by the way, that cuts across all the major religious denominations). In addition, Republicans are more likely to be married than Democrats, and married people are happier than singles.
When I tell my liberal friends about Republican happiness, they usually reply angrily - angry not being a happy trait. "They're just not paying attention," one friend snapped. "Ignorance is bliss," said another. Or perhaps it's what Ralph Waldo Emerson said, putting it more eloquently and less angrily: "God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please - you can never have both."
If this isn't depressing enough for liberals, it turns out that some of their own pet policies are to blame for their unhappiness. Once in power, Democrats tend to focus on issues that, according to the science of happiness, have little effect on our contentment - income equality, for instance, and racial diversity. Neither is linked to greater happiness. Countries with large disparities between rich and poor are no less happy than more egalitarian ones, studies have found. And the happiest countries in the world tend to be homogenous ones, such as Denmark and Iceland, not the ethnic melting pots that liberals celebrate.
In any event, Republicans are happy, and that, of course, is a very American thing to be, or at least to strive to be. We Americans have a complex relationship with happiness. Yes, it's in our founding document, but it is perennially elusive, just out of our grasp - a sad fact that Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the 1830s, when he noted the United States was populated by "so many lucky men restless in the midst of abundance."
We suffer from what the historian Darrin McMahon calls "the unhappiness of not being happy." It is a uniquely American malady. For us, happiness is not a blessing but an expectation.
And we expect it from our politicians. The more optimistic candidate won nine of the 10 elections from 1948 to 1984, according to Martin Seligman, the pooh-bah of the positive-psychology movement. More recent elections have been spottier, but the pattern holds: All things being equal, voters choose the more optimistic candidate.
This may explain why Republicans have dominated presidential elections in the past 40 or so years. They, of course, have as their happy standard-bearer Ronald Reagan, who smilingly urged us to ask ourselves if we were better off (read: happier) than we'd been four years earlier. On the Democrats' side, John F. Kennedy knew how to play the happiness card, but most of his would-be followers haven't. Only Bill Clinton, with his "bridge to the 21st century" and his "Third Way" (part Democratic technocrat, part Republican mirth), managed to break through the happiness barrier.
So while you might think that the 2008 presidential election hinges on Iraq or the economy or change vs. experience, it doesn't. The real issue - the meta issue - is, as usual, happiness. Which candidate can best convince voters that if elected, he or she will increase their happiness? Which candidate actually seems the happiest, or at least the most optimistic?
Seligman and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania have tried to answer that question scientifically, analyzing speeches and other statements by the candidates and assigning each an optimism score. He found that, among Democratic candidates, Hillary Rodham Clinton, not Barack Obama, is the most optimistic. On the Republican side, John McCain and Mitt Romney are equally optimistic, though of course that didn't help the former Massachusetts governor.
Being optimistic helps candidates in two ways. Optimists are able to persevere in times of adversity, so perhaps optimistic candidates are elected because they're able to weather setbacks during the grueling primary season. But there is also, of course, something about an optimistic candidate that voters find irresistible. Psychologists have found that we tend to like more positive people - no surprise there - so that might explain why we vote for the more optimistic candidate.
There is, though, an exception to the Happy Republicans trend. More Democrats than Republicans say they're excited about the current election, according to an Associated Press-Yahoo News survey conducted in November, and Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say that the election season leaves them frustrated and bored. Might Democrats be on the verge of transforming themselves into the party of happiness? If so, that would be the ultimate flip-flop.
Not this week they aren’t. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr...
Democrats are filled with hate and anger. Thats part of drinking liberal Hatorade.
This article makes me happy.
I feel happy!
I feel happy!
Democrats were very happy on 9-11.
of course we are... we don't suffer from BDS!!!
I’m happy just because I’m not a RAT!
You wouldn’t know that by reading the posts on FR lately.
To see a perfect example of this just visit DemocraticUnderground.com
Those people over there are so miserable....so dysfunctional; full of fear and hate....and the language they use just makes for futher evidence.
poll again in 12 months.
All one has to do is contrast FR to DU. On the former you’ll see some biting wit/humor on almost every thread. On the latter, none — deadly serious (and profanity laced) all the time. Quite revealing.
LOL...me too!!
Hillary vs McCain - two cranky old folks, toss up and likely to be a very close election.
Obama vs McCain - clearly Obama would be the winner
Hillary vs Huckabee - One old hag vs a preacher turned politician. I’d have to favor Huckabee
Obama vs Huckabee - hmmm, that just might be another 50/50 split.
[/sarc]
And BEFORE this current election cycle.
The reasons given are insufficient. The jokes that follow don’t answer the question either.
Republicans, and especially conservatives and religious believers are happier because they have a purpose in life. They feel part of the past and contributing to the future whether this be in their personal, political or spiritual lives.
Many people, we call them saints now, in the past gave up life itself willingly and happily for the purpose they believed in.
Modern liberalism is a credal faith with a litmus test series of ad hoc beliefs that feel good and seem good. They really have no real purpose in their actions even though they claim moral superiority in caring for the poor, the ignorant and the elderly. In actual fact, when surveys are made of charitable giving conservatives trounce liberal every time.
Such is life. Soren Kierkegaard, a devout but self-isolated Christian, saw humans as making choices. Sometimes not all at once. And sometimes without being aware or reflecting on the choices; but, nonetheless we make choices and among these is searching, defining and actualizing our purpose in life.
I have a relative who is a Democrat. She had a very hard time with her first child. “I didn’t realize it would be so hard!” she complained, particularly when her child misbehaved.
I have another relative who is a Republican. “Children are born with original sin. You just have to expect they will act up from time to time, particularly when they are young.” she said. She loved being a mother with her first child.
I have a Democratic ex-relative in his sixties. He is depressed at how little time he has left.
I have a Republican relative who just turned 70. He is delighted to still have his health, and gets involved in as many activities as he can.
I have a Democrat relative who has many grown children. She is often sad that some of them haven’t turned out as she hoped.
I have a Republican relative who has a few grown children. They also haven’t turned out as he hoped, but he quips “when you plant onion seeds, you get onions. With kids, you never know.”
I had a very dear Democratic friend who had terminal cancer. She asked “why did this happen to me?”
I had a very dear Republican relative who had terminal cancer. She said “this is my lot and I will deal with it the best that I can.” (I’ll admit she was truly exceptional and I sure don’t blame my Democratic friend for not being as cheery.)
Anyway, the pattern I see is that Republicans are much more likely to understand the world isn’t ever going to be perfect. That’s one of the keys to happiness.
Conservatives are optimists.
Just look at my tag line! :)
Me too! Life is good!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.