This Fourth of July, progressives have officially lost their minds

“In this authoritarian and suffocating climate where being an American feels like a curse,” she began, “where just breathing here feels like complicity with genocide, psychotic imperialism, misogyny and endless racism, it is hard to move, let alone imagine what one can do to transform this horror to good.”

If we should give credit where credit is due, all of us should applaud V, formerly Eve Ensler, for boldly articulating how progressives truly feel in The Guardian.  Rather than hiding behind the requisite doublespeak of most political articles or claiming that someone, somewhere will arise to defeat their archenemy President Donald Trump, V lays it all out there from the very first paragraph, expressing the impotence, frustration, and sense of utter hopelessness in the boldest possible language.  “In this authoritarian and suffocating climate where being an American feels like a curse,” she began, “where just breathing here feels like complicity with genocide, psychotic imperialism, misogyny and endless racism, it is hard to move, let alone imagine what one can do to transform this horror to good.”  While it might be easy for supporters of President Trump to simply laugh in response, dismissing V as just another progressive crank, consider what it actually took to make such a statement on a public, supposedly reputable forum, essentially admitting that the occupant of the Oval Office has caused you to suffer from clinical depression.  According to the Mayo Clinic, the signs of this mental disorder include persistent hopelessness, loss of interest or pleasure, excessive guilt, fatigue or loss of energy, and slowed movements.  Putting this another way, V is confessing that she has been psychologically damaged by President Trump; that his existence weighs upon her on an emotional and physical level; that she cannot escape that existence and is consumed by it to the point where she has trouble breathing.  She doesn’t simply believe Americans made the wrong choice on an intellectual or political level.  She feels it, physically, and she isn’t alone.  Late last year, even before President Trump was reelected, the 2024 American Family Survey revealed that 37% of conservative women and 28% of moderate women, between the ages of 18-40, self-reported that they were “completely satisfied” with their lives while just 12% of liberal women said the same.  As The New York Post described it, “Liberal women are the least likely to report being fully satisfied with their lives and are far more likely to report feeling lonely often…Liberal women were also nearly three times more likely than conservative women to say they experienced loneliness at least a few times a week.”  Even as early as 2022, the Cooperative Election Study found that 51% of conservatives, including men and women of all ages, reported excellent mental health compared to 30% of moderates and a scant 20% of liberals.  Conversely, 45% of liberals report poor mental health while only 35% of moderates and 19% of conservatives say the same.

The famed statistician Nate Silver took a closer look at the data recently, asking “Could this reflect a spurious correlation? In other words, that voters with characteristics associated with lower happiness tend to be attracted to liberalism, but that political attitudes themselves don’t tell you much on their own?”  He concluded that wasn’t likely to be the case because the “difference between liberals and conservatives is remarkably persistent even once you control for those factors.”  These factors included gender, where he found “Men report slightly higher mental health than women, although it isn’t really a big gap until you get into the younger age cohorts. However, political attitudes are more predictive. Conservative women report considerably higher happiness (66) than liberal men (58).”  Race, which wasn’t a large factor, except “that liberal Black voters describe higher mental health than other liberals, which cuts somewhat against the thesis that historically oppressed groups are more likely to report mental health problems.”  Interestingly, mixed race individuals or those who describe themselves as “other” reported being particularly unhappy.  In Mr. Silver’s view, this “may be because mixed-race identification is higher among younger voters, and young people who are struggling with their identity are often struggling with other things, too.”  Education and income, where “having more money does make people happier,” but also rather interestingly, conservatives earning a scant $30,000 per year report about the same mental health as their liberal counterparts earning more than three times as much.  Religion, where there was no meaningful difference among followers of organized religion, but the conservative and liberal gap persists, albeit at about half the overall amount.  Marriage and children, where those in meaningful relations generally report better mental health, but not by much, the overall gap persists, and it especially does for those without children.  At the same time, conservatives without children are happier than the average American while liberals, not so much, 63 to 48 percent.  Sexual orientation, where happiness levels are generally lower overall for those in the LGBTQ community, but “conservative gays and lesbians report higher happiness than heterosexual liberals. Liberals who describe themselves as bisexual or having some ‘other’ sexual orientation report notably low happiness, however. Undoubtedly, this is partly because they often face a society that isn’t very accepting of them. But this is also correlated with age. According to Gallup, 21 percent (!) of Gen Z women and 7 percent of Gen Z men describe themselves as ‘bisexual’, a much larger number than the more heated question of how many say they’re trans (just 1 to 2 percent).   Political and social media activity, where somewhat shockingly, people who report “higher political interest generally report higher happiness,” and yet the gap remains.  Of all these factors, age was the only one that overwhelmed political leanings.  “Old liberals report better mental health (64) than young conservatives (58), for instance. Still, the political gap persists once you control for age. It is especially large among Gen Z voters, as I described in the post about young men.”

As potential explanations, Mr. Silver presented three hypotheses.  First, that “liberals are more conscientious about the suffering of other people or the conditions of the world, whereas conservatives are happy but selfish,” second “that people become liberals because they’re struggling or oppressed themselves and therefore favor change and a larger role for government,” and third “there may be a performative aspect to this. Liberals may express negative sentiment as a sign of solidarity with a movement that thinks there is profound injustice in the world. But then this can snowball — misery loves company — while attracting some number of people who face serious mental health challenges.”  While there’s probably some truth to these propositions, I think Mr. Silver is missing something both broader and subtler at the same time.  (To be clear, I am about to generalize based on my own experience, while admitting that all of these tendencies occur on a spectrum).  Broad in the sense that, however you define mental health or personal happiness, there is an underlying drive to personalize everything and anything among modern liberals that results in strong reactions, where rationality is suppressed in favor of emotion.  Nothing is merely a policy debate in their mind, where as every rational person knows, no policy will be perfect, some will benefit more than others, some might lose more than others, and there are fundamental trade offs to be made, all of which are constantly shifting and changing.  Each individual will undoubtedly view those trade offs differently, based on their own beliefs, life history, and even prejudices, but rational people recognize that they exist as an immutable law of life.  Instead, progressives seem to deny this reality and personally demand that their way is the right way in all circumstances, everything else is a moral outrage, subject to an emotional outburst and an emotional description.  Therefore, whatever the topic at hand, everything becomes a personal mission and any loss is seen as a personal affront, whether or not it actually affects them directly.  For example, much has been made of potential cuts to Medicaid under the proposed Big Beautiful Bill, but the debate isn’t over whether current Medicaid spending is sustainable, much less whether able bodied, working age people should be on the program permanently to begin with.  In their view, each and every person on Medicaid must remain on Medicaid, as though there were no alternatives, even those like Obamacare that they championed for years, each and everyone one of them was on Medicaid themselves and their family’s own future was at risk, anything less is a travesty.  This tendency to personalize everything is coupled with a more subtle lack of proportion.  Rather than recognize that there are issues of varying importance, what we colloquially refer to as hills to die on, each issue is treated as an existential threat to them personally and anyone potentially on the losing side of the issue must be oppressed in some fashion.  Whether you support the Big Beautiful Bill or not, the prospect of somewhere around 2 to 3% of the population, who are all of working age and able-bodied, potentially having to find alternative healthcare or a small number of rural hospitals closing – even assuming either comes to pass – isn’t exactly world ending, and yet they insist it is.  The reality that these proposed cuts will be used to keep current tax rates for 90% of the population, most of whom would receive a massive tax increase next year if they were not made permanent, and that millions of working Americans will receive a tax cut through no taxes on tips, Medicare, or Social Security is irrelevant.  The 2% on Medicaid are all that matters; they are the oppressed, even if they are not.  Thus, after the Senate passed the bill yesterday, Senator Chris Murphy called it the “most monstrous, immoral piece of legislation he’s ever voted on.”

The combination of the two results in a perpetual outrage machine, where emotion trumps reason and one cannot keep track of the various atrocities occurring on a delay basis, prompting a desperate need to find some savior, any savior.  If you look at the world this way, it’s hard for me at least to see how one can be happy and mentally healthy.  As if we needed any more evidence that was the case, at least some segment of progressives will not be spending the Fourth of July with their family and friends.  Instead, they will be protesting Donald Trump, even knowing they are screaming at the sky.  As V put it more generally, “It is so clear something essential is dying. The illusion and seduction of the American dream is over. Neoliberalism is dead. There are huge cracks, openings in the old structures and narratives. These are opportunities to plant the seeds for the new world as we protect those suffering now.”  How one can take advantage of the opportunity in their currently unhappy, mentally afflicted state remains a mystery.  After the election, before I knew what the results were, I urged everyone to remember Billy Joel’s classic “Angry Young Man:”

I believe I’ve passed the age
Of consciousness and righteous rage
I found that just surviving was a noble fight.
I once believed in causes too,
I had my pointless point of view,
And life went on no matter who was wrong or right.

Progressives, it seems, are incapable of doing so and are confined to misery for the foreseeable future because you cannot reason with emotion.