One reason people join ideological movements is to explain all the ghosts and goblins that haunt their lives. It supplies a framework for dealing with the fears and terrors that constantly beset many of them. It’s grounded in dogma succinctly expressed in the 20th-century feminist slogan "The personal is political," arguing that the problems in life — ranging from job satisfaction to childbearing to the hostility of other people — stem from broader societal power structures and gender inequality, not individual failings.
Whether one is struggling with obesity, career failure — indeed, any vicissitude — any "alienated" person who lives in genuine anxiety would find some explanation for their misery in social ideology. The problem lies outside; it is caused by someone else. This is in contrast to the historical Western approach of locating the causes of personal and collective failure within the individual or the group itself.
One of the most influential ideas in Western history is the doctrine of original sin. Evil existed outside of us to be sure, as personified in the Devil, but he could be resisted by an effort of will, and failure to do so lay at the center of human suffering. However, “progressive” ideologies not only reject a Devil, but also the ability of an individual to overcome social problems. In place of mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, there is the accusatory "You did this to me." The only remedy for unhappiness therefore is to change society. Personal guilt is replaced by collective guilt, like the Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Germany. The role of Satan is transferred to ideas like “toxic masculinity,” “white fragility,” “internalized oppression,” etc, which must be purged from community life for contentment to return.
Strangely enough, there are more demons now than ever. The most malignant beings in progressive demonology are Nazis, aka the white supremacists. They are eternally cruel people, quite unlike the Communists, who, although they historically massacred more people than the Nazis, are only now remembered as “anti-fascists” who saved humanity from Hitler, yet not these imps who, according to popular culture, are still everywhere. There are Nazis on the dark side of the moon. Nazi Zombies lying frozen in Norway, awaiting only some poor wayward hiker to rouse them back into activity. They are even in primary schools. This world of ghosts is so fearsome that, implausible as it may be, a grown progressive adult may cower in fear at the prospect of a child who (pronoun here) fears may be infected with the conservative virus (privilege) that will transform the tyke into a fiery-eyed, unnaturally muscled monster that will spring up to rend the class.
A non-binary school teacher in Tumwater, WA, named Mx. TJ Thornton, allegedly pushed back against teaching a 10-year-old boy for the fifth grade school year because his father, school board member Casey Taylor, had voted months earlier to keep girls’ sports biologically female, according to Alesha Perkins’ Substack.
According to the investigator’s Sept. 24, 2025, report, “Mx. Thornton told me they had talked to (the principal) about their concern regarding their safety with the placement of students with parents who do not support people who are nonbinary.” That implausible danger may actually seem real to them. The left is full of people who live in a nightmare world, convinced that dark forces out there are working to harm them. For proof that Nazis exist, they can cite their own unhappiness. Progressives and Democrats tend to report higher levels of misery than conservatives and Republicans, who often “cling” to God, work hard, and value their families to supply meaning to their lives, and who, faced with failure, turn inward to amend their lives. This difference isn't universal — depression rates are similar across parties in some data — but self-reported happiness and mental health favor the right.
Tellingly, progressive agitators have a vested interest in spreading misery. For one thing, it is easier to recruit among the discontented; for another, it allows them the consolation of regarding themselves as sophisticated. Charles de Gaulle famously replied, when asked if he was happy, “Do you take me for an idiot?” Peace of mind is MAGA idiocy; misery, by contrast, is fashionable.
Angst-consumed progressives are easily convinced that Trump is creating a selfish, miserable world. For proof, they can cite themselves. The left chiefly historically recruits among the unhappy, the wretched of the earth. But in a rich country like America, where even the poor are obese and drive cars, where do you find the wretched? For the first time in history, the best pickings are not among the objectively poor but the subjectively alienated. Some studies have shown that among the unhappiest groups of people in America are:
- Young adults under 30
- Unmarried young adults under 35
- Nonreligious singles
- Young liberal women; and bringing up the rear
- Low-income workers.
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The predominant source of unhappiness is often "uncertainty" and "social isolation." The New York Times recently reported that "for American adults under 25, there has been an 80 percent increase in dining alone".
Americans are increasingly miserable, the report says, and it explored a possible indicator: The number of Americans eating alone has risen exponentially this century. In 2023, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey, about a quarter of Americans reported eating all of their meals alone the previous day, an increase of 53 percent since 2003.
It’s a crazy, upside down world where young people rich enough to eat out, some free of the chains of marriage fundamentalism, liberated from the strictures of the White heteropatriarchal family; free for the first time to adopt Black, Indigenous, immigrant, mother-headed, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning (LGBTQ+) family structures should be so alone and so afraid.
