I’ve previously looked at some of the evidence for Leftist mental problems in Kafka and Mental Illness, where a Finnish study showed correlations between depression/anxiety and great respect for the likes of Barack Obama, Greta Thunberg (check the comments for a prime example).

Now the famous pollster Nate Silver is entering the studies, looking at US data…

OK, not even sure where to begin with this one! But here’s an attempt at a deeper dive at understanding why conservatives are so much happier than liberals. Mostly looking at how persistent the gap is in survey data rather than extrapolating too much

I don’t think this can be explained by the victories of President Trump or his decade of dominating the political and news scene, despite journalist Mark Halperin in October of 2024 saying this about a Trump election win in 2024:

Halperin: 
“I say this not flippantly. I think it will be the cause of the greatest mental health crisis in the history of the country. I think tens of millions of people will question their connection to the nation, their connection to other human beings, their connection to their vision of what their future for them and their children could be like. I think that it will require an enormous amount of access to mental health professionals. I think it’ll lead to trauma in the workplace. I think there’ll be some degree of protests.”

Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) – the mental switch that links everything bad to Trump, pitched at 15 on the 1-10 evil-scale – is real and a hell of thing to witness, especially personally rather than just online.

But all these surveys point to something a lot deeper and therefore a lot more permanent with Leftists that election victories, and perhaps even policy victories, will not fix, and I do have to wonder if it’s true across the rest of the Western world?

It would explain their endless drive for a society where the rule is enforced, “To each according to his need. From each according to his ability”, the practical result of which has always been dull, grey misery with a lot of torture and murder mixed in? In those societies the Left has dragged everyone down to their miserable level!

They’re still not happy of course – well, aside from the ones at the very top of the pile, and history shows that even they suffered from existential dread which made it hard to enjoy everyday life – but at least that burden is now being shared by everybody else.