{"id":14272,"date":"2026-07-13T16:32:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T23:32:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/?p=14272"},"modified":"2026-07-13T16:32:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-13T23:32:11","slug":"conservatives-liberals-and-happiness-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2026\/07\/13\/conservatives-liberals-and-happiness-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Conservatives, Liberals, and Happiness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/open.substack.com\/pub\/williamfvallicella\/p\/conservatives-liberals-and-happiness?r=f3tzc&amp;utm_campaign=post&amp;utm_medium=web&amp;showWelcomeOnShare=true\">Top<\/a> o&#8217; the Stack.<\/p>\n<p>Conservatives are happier. Why?<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-size: 12pt;\"><em>Conservative explanation<\/em>. Marriage and religious faith are conducive to happiness. More conservatives are married than liberals, and more practice a religion. Ergo, conservatives as a group are happier than liberals as a group.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-size: 12pt;\"><em>Liberal explanation<\/em>. Conservatives are happier because they turn a blind eye to the injustices of the world. They are oblivious to inequality. And when they do see it, they rationalize it. Ignorance is bliss. Conservatives naively believe that people can better themselves by the practice of the old virtues of frugality, perseverance, hard work, self-control, deferral of gratification, and the like, when the truth is that people are products of their environment and need government help to do well.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-size: 12pt;\">As a conservative, I of course consider the liberal explanation to be bogus.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Top o&#8217; the Stack. Conservatives are happier. Why? Conservative explanation. Marriage and religious faith are conducive to happiness. More conservatives are married than liberals, and more practice a religion. Ergo, conservatives as a group are happier than liberals as a group. Liberal explanation. Conservatives are happier because they turn a blind eye to the injustices &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2026\/07\/13\/conservatives-liberals-and-happiness-4\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Conservatives, Liberals, and Happiness&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,30,56,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-happiness","category-political-psychology","category-politics","category-substack"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14272"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14273,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14272\/revisions\/14273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}