The Progressive Unhappiness Hypothesis

Are you with Mariano or the millionaire?

Have you read about Mariano Torres yet? He is the maintenance worker at Columbia whose physical confrontation with the millionaire marketing heir provided a sharp visual contrast in a viral image.

Here is The New York Times yesterday:

Mariano Torres, a maintenance worker at Columbia University, was cleaning on the third floor of Hamilton Hall in his signature Yankees cap one night last week, when he heard a commotion downstairs. He said he figured it had something to do with the pro-Palestinian encampment on the lawn outside and kept working.

He was shocked, he said, when he suddenly saw five or six protesters, their faces covered by scarves or masks, picking up chairs and bringing them into the stairway.

“I’m like, what the hell is going on? Put it back. What are you doing?” he recalled.

He said he tried to block them and they tried to reason with him to get out of the way, telling him “this is bigger than you.” One person, he recalled, told him he didn’t get paid enough to deal with this. Someone tried to offer him “a fistful of cash.”

He said he replied: “I don’t want your money, dude. Just get out of the building.”

The story focuses on the harrowing nature of his account, along with a security guard and another worker. It features zip ties, threats, and a fire extinguisher. You can read the whole thing here, but the biggest takeaway for our story today is the sense of duty, family, and purpose that emanates from Torres:

Mr. Torres, who had worked there for five years, confronted some of the protesters, trying to protect what he saw as “his building.”

He thought of his two young sons at home. He had no idea if other buildings were being taken over, too. Fear made him “crazy,” he said. He grabbed an older protester and ripped off his sweatshirt and mask, demanding to be let out.

You can watch an interview with him here, with Francesca Block.

The Progressive Happiness Gap

A few sections over in The New York Times yesterday, Tom Edsall has a deep dive on the social science research that can help inform this divide between Mariano and the millionaire he unmasked. The story, The Happiness Gap Between Left and Right Isn’t Closing, seeks to answer this question: “Why is it that a substantial body of social science research finds that conservatives are happier than liberals?“

This longstanding gap - research has demonstrated conservatives are happier than liberals for five decades - now has more data, including on depression. Edsall sharpens the question for a scholar thusly:

“Have liberal pessimists fostered an outlook that spawns unhappiness as its adherents believe they face seemingly insurmountable structural barriers?“

One potential reason is a lack of perceived control, according to the scholar:

If our predominant focus in how we view the world is social inequities, status hierarchies, societal unfairness conferred by privilege, then everyone would agree that these things are not easy to fix, which means, in a sense, we must accept some unhappy premises: Life isn’t fair; outcomes are outside my control, often at the hands of bad, powerful actors; social change depends on collective action that may be conflictual; an individual may have limited power to control their own destiny.

But why is the gap increasing? Another researcher pins the culprit more specifically on identity politics rather than progressivism as a whole, citing research making it “plausible that identity politics may explain the recent increase well-being gap between conservatives and progressives.“:

Identity politics, he continued, focuses “on external institutional forces that one cannot immediately alleviate.” It results in what scholars call the externalization of one’s locus of control, or viewing the inequities of society as a result of powerful if not insurmountable outside forces, including structural racism, patriarchy and capitalism, as opposed to believing that individuals can overcome such obstacles through hard work and collective effort.

As a result, Yancey wrote, “identity politics may be an important mechanism by which progressive political ideology can lead to lower levels of well-being.”

The variable that mostly corresponded to this loss of control? Agreeing that “Other people or structures are more responsible for my well-being than I myself am.”

These are complex topics, and the whole piece is worth reading. We have written about the Democrats’ Privileged College Kid Problem, but it also seems that the “privileged college kids” (and, as police reports showed, non-college kids on campus) in the progressive movement are becoming even more likely to suffer from mental health problems of their own.

The symptoms of this - especially vitriolic anger - is something we have seen firsthand. At our first big underground Welcome gathering, the icebreaker was “What is the meanest thing a socialist has ever said to you?” There is a lot of anger out there. But there are steps we can take to address it, and those steps can both help us win the middle and make our politics - and the participants - healthier.

Mariano has agency about the world around him: he takes pride in his building. When facing physical danger, he thinks first about his children. And he takes action to change his situation.

Mariano has agency in who he votes for, too. Will it be Biden?

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