Musa al-Gharbi has written a review essay on “How to Understand the Well-Being Gap between Liberals and Conservatives.” He summarizes studies that show that conservatives are more likely than liberals/progressives to describe themselves as happy, and this relationship holds when one controls for demographics. In other words, conservatives do not report being happier because they are more advantaged; instead, a conservative who has the same social circumstances as a progressive is likelier to be happy. Al-Garbi says that this finding is consistent across countries and extends back in time.

1. Replicating the basic pattern: conservatism is associated with happiness.

I can’t independently vouch for his overview of the research, but I can confirm the main finding with data from Tufts’ 2022 Equity in America survey. We drew a representative sample of 1,831 Americans, with large subsamples of African Americans and Latinos to allow more precise estimates of racial/ethnic differences. We also collected an extraordinary number of measures about each respondent.

We asked, “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days? Would you say you are… Very happy, Pretty happy, or Not too happy.”

In a model with age, education, race and gender, more education and older age predict greater happiness. (We know from extensive research that the age curve is not linear; happiness dips in middle age. That pattern is invisible in a linear regression.) If I add marital status and a self-report of physical health, only those variables are significantly related to reported happiness. In other words, it looks as if older and better educated people are more likely to be married and in good health. Those factors then relate to happiness.

If I add ideology, it is also significant (p <.001), with more conservative people more likely to report being happy. If I also add religious attendance, it too is significant, and ideology stays signifiant. That implies that the ideology “effect” is not explained away by religiosity, but both matter. Here is that model. The last four variables are significant.

2. Could the explanation be progessives’ social awareness?

I think some progressives might say that they–and others on their side–are unhappy because they are rightly conscious of social injustices and dangers. Thus their unhappiness reflects social concern.

We can test this hypothesis to a limited extent with our survey. It includes a few relevant attitudinal questions along with many variables about life circumstances. I added the following four items to the above model:

1. How bothered have you been witnessing someone in a public place being treated unfairly because of their race?
2. How has the pandemic impacted your mental health?
3. Thinking about climate change makes me feel anxious. [Agree/disagree]
4. Someone [I] know has been unfairly stopped, searched, questioned, physically threatened or abused by the police. [Agree/disagree]

Except the climate question, each of these is related to unhappiness to a statistically significant degree. However, being liberal is still also related to being unhappy. That means that these specific concerns seem to accompany unhappiness but do not explain away the ideological “effect.” Or, to put it another way, someone who was not worried about these four specific things, but who identified as a liberal, would still be more likely than a conservative to be unhappy.

3. Could liberals display a negative bias?

A conservative might be inclined to see progressives as negatively biased rather than socially conscious. And there may be some evidence of that in our data. We also asked: “Imagine a ladder with 10 rungs (or steps). At the top of the ladder (rung #10) are the people who are the best off, those who have the most money, most education, and best jobs. At the bottom are the people who are the worst off, those who have the least money, least education, worst jobs, or no job (rung #1). What rung from 10 through 1 best represents where you think you stand on the ladder.”

I used that item as the dependent variable in place of self-reported happiness. Liberals/progressives rated themselves lower on the ladder compared to other people when I controlled for demographics. In other words, if a liberal and a conservative have the same education, race, gender, and age, the conservative will feel more fortunate. A critic might say that liberals are people who–regardless of their actual social positions–rate their own circumstances relatively poorly, and that attitude drives their ideology and makes them unhappy or else reflects their unhappiness.

4. People with depression cluster on the left.

However, there may be a different explanation. In our sample, 281 people say they have been diagnosed with depression. If I remove them from the sample and run the first of the two regressions shown above (the one with happiness as the dependent variable), ideology is no longer statistically significant. Now, only marriage, physical health, and race are related to happiness (with whites being more likely to report being happy).

We also asked how often in the past week people had felt depressed. I subtracted the 683 people who answered more than “rarely.” Running the model without those people generated a result in which only physical health was related to happiness. Ideology again ceased to be significant.

Finally, we asked people to rate their own mental health from poor to excellent. 272 said fair or poor. When I excluded that smallish group from the sample, ideology was still significant.

In a model based on the whole population, each of the mental health measures predicts unhappiness, and liberalism does as well. Those coefficients are compatible with two theories: either most conservatives are a bit happier than most liberals, regardless of depression, or else the average happiness of liberals is lower because they include some depressed people. By excluding those who report depression or a diagnosis of depression from the analysis, I find evidence that the latter is the case. In short: people with depression are reducing the mean happiness of liberals.

Indeed, people with depression cluster on the left. In the sample as a whole, 5% of respondents identify as extremely liberal, but 14% of the people who have been diagnosed with depression are extremely liberal. Conservatives represent 18.5% of the sample but just 11% of those with diagnosed depression. This pattern is consistent with previous studies.

Saying that you are depressed or reporting a diagnosis of depression depends on many factors–not only one’s mental health and access to medical care but also one’s beliefs and attitudes about psychology, which may relate to ideology. From our survey, it is not clear whether depressed people are concentrated on the left or whether people who employ the label of depression tilt that way.

However, my own informal observations and what I hear from others suggests that a substantial subset of people who gravitate to the left have significant mental health challenges, often related to trauma. I suspect that they explain most of the association between conservative ideology and happiness.

Everyone has a right to choose and express their political views. Progressives must welcome all kinds of people onto their side. However, I think that attracting people who (regardless of their social circumstances) experience depression poses a challenge for any movement.* Also, I sometimes wonder whether progressive messages fall flat because their authors are less happy than their target audiences.

*I wanted to know whether committed activists on the left were likely to be depressed, but we only have data from 31 left-oriented people who protested in the past year, which is too small a sample to tell. See also: how predictable is the rest of your life?; the aspiration curve from youth to old age; are Americans ‘innocent of ideology’?; party identification and ideology over time.

Two stories compete in the imagination of Spain and Portugal, affecting how history is portrayed in schools, on public monuments, and in policy debates about matters like immigration. The stakes are high because the former story played an important role in the invention of the concept of race and thus helped to enable imperialism and transatlantic slavery.

First story: The original Iberians were Europeans who became citizens of the Roman Empire, speaking dialects of Latin that evolved into today’s Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan, and who converted early to Christianity. In and after 711, a foreign army conquered Spain. These invaders originated in Africa and the Middle East, their religion was Islam, and their language and culture were Arabic. Gradually, the Spanish and Portuguese drove these invaders out.

Second story: The inhabitants on both sides of the western Mediterranean were never sharply distinguished. Many on both sides became Romanized and Latin-speaking. Most converted to a religion of Middle Eastern origin, Christianity. Then, many converted to another religion from the same region, Islam. The leaders of the armies that traveled a short distance across the straits in 711 were Muslims, but their armies were of mixed faiths. A substantial proportion of people on either side of the straits assimilated to–and influenced–a broad cultural/linguistic group called the Arabs. Among those who contributed to Arab culture were Iberians of Christian or Jewish faith. Gradually, some dynasties that identified as Christian and spoke Spanish displaced those that identified as Muslim and Arab, and the former cultural influences predominated. Today’s Spaniards (as a group) have forebears who were Muslims and Arabs or Jews. Typically, people stay in place while cultures spread.

An 18th-century Carthusian monk took 30 years to make this door. It stands in an extravagantly decorated baroque chapel inside a gilt-draped Catholic monastery in Granada. The similarity to Mudejer art is unmistakable, and surely Brother Jose Manuel was practicing the art of his Arabized forebears.

The two models are reconquista (reconquest) and conviviencia (coexistence). With these two models in mind, consider the following document. In 1038, Fernando I of Castille wrote to Isma’il ibn Dhi ‘l-Nun, the king of Toledo, who had sought his support in a war against Isma’il’s kinsman. Fernando wrote:

We… demand our land, which a long time ago you conquered and which you have inhabited for as long as had been ordained [by God]. Now He has given us victory over you on account of your wickedness. Depart to your own shores and give our land up to us. For there is no good in your living with us any longer, nor will we turn away from you until God has judged between you and us.

(translated by Catlos 2018, p. 211)

This letter looks like evidence of reconquista. A leader of Christian Spain is demanding that foreign invaders go back home. Indeed, Fernando was called (although not by himself), the Emperor of Spain. His opponent was the reigning head of the Dhulnunid or Dhunnunid dynasty, which traced its origins to members of the conquering army in 711.

But, to complicate matters … both of these men spent much of their lives at war against rivals who were a mix–in both cases–of Christians and Muslims. Fernando’s better-documented son, Alfonso VI (El Bravo) was raised and educated by his father’s allies, the Banu Gómez clan. This dynasty was Christian (at least at this time), but their name is Arabic. Later, Alfonso took refuge for a while at the court of al-Mamun of Toledo, a Muslim. One of Alfonso’s wives was Zaida of Seville, who was probably the daughter-in-law of the ruler Al-Mu’tamid Muhammad, who claimed patrilineal descent from an Egyptian clan. Zaida was the mother of Alfonso’s son and heir, Sancho Alfnónsez, who was thus the descendent of both Fernando and Al-Mu’tamid. Alfonso VI lived a long and bloody life, fighting his own brother and other Christian monarchs as well as Muslim ones in various mixed alliances. When he captured Toledo from al-Mamun’s heir, he took the title al-Imbratur dhi-l-Millatayn: “Emperor of the Two Religions” and promised to maintain the city’s mosque. This is evidence of conviviencia, not reconquista.

I am not qualified to interpret Fernando’s 1038 letter, but I’d suggest reading it (and the whole history of its era) without such anachronistic ideas as racial differences or even “Europe.”

It’s at least possible that Fernando was not saying: “You and your people, go back to Africa.” Instead, he might have meant: “O leader of the Dhulnunid House, your proper feudal fiefdom is in Mauretania, where your first-known patrilineal ancestor once ruled. Go back to your own demesne, because Toledo belongs to my House, the Jimenez dynasty, also known as the Banu Sancho, and leave your vassals here for me to rule. You and I are peers and are probably kin. However, God recognizes my claim to this specific land, so be gone.”

To be sure, a Spanish identity developed that was religious, gradually racial, and defined as the opposite of an imposed “Moorish” identity. (See the first image, above.) But that happened over centuries–in part to serve political agendas–and we should be cautious about using it as an interpretive framework except when the evidence supports it.

Source: Brian A. Catlos, Kingdoms of Faith (Basic Books, 2018), but I collected the biographical details and art in the post. See also: Europa was an Asian woman, and other thoughts on the definition of Europe;  the history of the phrase “the West”; don’t name things Western but call out imperialism; to whom do the ancient Greeks belong?; Jesus was a person of color; etc.