It’s My Fault, It’s My Success

Why are liberals so unhappy?

In a March 9th oped in the New York Times, David Brooks tries to understand why studies show that liberals are much less happy than conservatives. He has three theories.

First, liberals tend to over-react, to see every bad thing as not just bad, but as the end of the world.

Second, liberal culture demands maximum denunciation of the other side. You are not allowed to see, much less say, anything good about Ron DeSantis, for example. Something like, “he’s not as bad as Donald Trump,” which, while a low bar, is true.

Third, liberals are over-sensitive. “This was the sense many people had that they were constantly being assaulted by offensive and unsafe speech, the concerns that led to safe spaces, trigger warnings, cancellations, etc.,” Brooks writes.

And finally, liberals lack a sense of agency. Brooks goes on: “But, as Jill Filipovic argued recently on her own Substack: “I am increasingly convinced that there are tremendously negative long-term consequences, especially to young people, coming from this reliance on the language of harm and accusations that things one finds offensive are ‘deeply problematic’ or even violent. Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life” are “vastly better off than people whose default position is victimization.””

It’s this last point that resonates most for me. I started drifting away from the left twenty years ago — almost exactly. I can pretty much pin it down to the day, which was April 15, 2003, the day I took office as Mayor of Madison. The left was unreasonable, whiney, dissatisfied with everything. They just were insufferable people, impossible to work with and, most unforgivably, humorless — and I was one of them! I found that I did not want to be one of them.

My drift picked up speed in 2016. With the election of Donald Trump much of the left went hard-left. They totally freaked out. In contrast I became intensely practical. With American democracy itself now on the line, I became focussed on just winning elections. Any compromise was fine by me if it meant electing more Democrats. And, as a general rule, I believed and continue to believe, that means that Democrats must become more moderate.

Then the left moved even further away from me after the murder of George Floyd. Of course, I think that was horrendous, but I tend to believe that most cops are good people and that Floyd’s killer was an outlier. But the hard-left doubled down on the notion that everything is “systemic.”

I’m not much into the systemic stuff. I think people are mostly responsible for their own lot in life. Sure, we’re all dealt different hands. Nobody starts out even. But it still comes down to how we play the cards we’re dealt. Barack Obama grew up without a father, one of the biggest deficits any young man can have. And yet, he did okay.

But the hard-left mindset is to see all failure as the result of “oppression” and all success as the inevitable outcome of “privilege.” You can’t even enjoy your own accomplishments and you must feel guilty, as if you were personally responsible, for the failures of others. What an awful way to live.

Having a sense that you can do something to improve your existence is invigorating in itself, even if your efforts are less than successful. And, as for failure, I’ve had my share of that too, but I find it to be more healthy to focus on my own role in that, to think through what I did wrong, and to resolve not to repeat the mistakes.

From the outside, it appears to be a miserable existence being a hard-left liberal. Apparently, it really is miserable and it’s pretty clear why that is. Liberals have only themselves to blame.