Health and Ideology

The French seem to be turning up in their youth the same finding we have had in ours: "the most satisfied young men with their lives are those who feel the closest to the radical right," I would translate that underlined part. (H/t IP). Defining what "the right" (let alone the "radical right") is in France gives us a very different picture from how the same terms are used in America, but there is a kind of attachment to traditional culture, patriotism, religion, and traditional values in common.

Surprisingly to me, this is well attested in the literature and has been robustly studied (understanding, of course, that psychology has been having a particularly severe replication crisis for more than a decade). I cite that study because it cites many other studies on aspects of how conservatism is aligned with health, physical as well as mental. The authors' assumption is that this is causal in the one direction: those who were already healthy are likely to be conservatives because they don't experience the bad things that cause one to question conservative assumptions. Still, they have to admit quite a lot along the way:

Vigor aligns with conservatives' higher propensity toward happiness (Taylor, Funk, & Craighill, 2006), life-satisfaction (Schlenker, Chambers, & Le, 2012), and meaning and purpose in life (Newman, Schwarz, Graham, & Stone, 2019).... Having had more energy and, thus, the capacity to work hard and be productive, adolescents who were healthy as children may also exhibit higher levels of Maturity (hard-working, responsible, productive, dependable, and goal-oriented). Maturity aligns with conservatives' strong work ethic, anti-leisure, and achievement striving (Furnham, 1990; Jost et al., 2003; McHoskey, 1994; Mudrack, 1997) — and, endorsement of sentiments like, “The worst part about being sick is that work does not get done” (Furnham, 1990). Thus, through Maturity, healthy children may demonstrate conservative ideology in adulthood....  healthy children may be more inclined toward Tidiness (neat, clean, orderly, and organized). Tidiness aligns with the characterization of conservatives as clean, organized, and orderly (Carney et al., 2008; Schwartz et al., 2014), thus, through the tidiness personality trait, healthy children may demonstrate conservative ideology in adulthood. [Emphasis added]

This leads to a prediction that shows a straight-line probability of health being associated with conservativism, but the implication they would forward is that the causality goes from 'being healthy' to 'being conservative' and not the other way around, or as mutually reinforcing phenomena.

Yet we see shifts leftward among young women in spite of the fact that they have, over the same period, experienced a shift from near-parity to actual superiority in work outcomes, educational outcomes, rates of pay (younger women make more than their male cohorts, unlike in prior generations), and social power as demonstrated by movies and literature increasingly portraying female leads, and making female characters actually superior to the males around them. We also see that same cohort of young women experiencing greater mental distress -- though not any increased lack of vigor, or opportunities to work hard and develop maturity. (Here's a French graph showing that the connection holds there as well.)

Here is another article that takes the question on from a wide-scale perspective, citing the document I was citing about childhood health along with many other surveys. 

Liberal girls tended to be significantly more depressed than boys, particularly after 2011. However, ideological differences swamped gender differences. Indeed, liberal boys were significantly more likely to report depression than conservatives of either gender.... he well-being gap between conservatives and liberals is not unique to youth. The gap manifests clearly across all age groups and is present as far back as the polling goes. In the General Social Survey, for instance, there has been a consistent 10 percentage point gap between the share of conservatives versus liberals who report being “very happy” in virtually every iteration since 1972 (when the GSS was launched).

Academic research consistently finds the same pattern. 

The findings are fascinating, and you may want to go through them in detail. To skip ahead to the conclusion, however, they suggest that there might be mutual reinforcement going on after all:

The well-being gap between liberals and conservatives is one of the most robust patterns in social science research. It is not a product of things that happened over the last decade or so; it goes back as far as the available data reach. The differences manifest across age, gender, race, religion, and other dimensions. They are not merely present in the United States, but in most other studied countries as well. Consequently, satisfying explanations of the gaps in reported well-being between liberals and conservatives would have to generalize beyond the present moment, beyond isolated cultural or geographic contexts, and beyond specific demographic groups.... 

1. There are likely some genetic and biological factors that simultaneously predispose people towards both mental illness/ wellness and liberalism/ conservatism, respectively.

2. Net of these predispositions, conservatism probably helps adherents make sense of, and respond constructively to, adverse states of affairs. These effects are independent of, but enhanced by, religiosity and patriotism (which tend to be ideological fellow-travelers with conservatism).

3. Some strains of liberal ideology, on the other hand, likely exacerbate (and even incentivize) anxiety, depression, and other forms of unhealthy thinking. The increased power and prevalence of these ideological frameworks post-2011 may have contributed to the dramatic and asymmetrical rise in mental distress among liberals over the past decade.

4. People who are unwell may be especially attracted to liberal politics over conservatism for a variety of reasons, and this may exacerbate observed ideological gaps net of other factors.

So, if you are both a liberal and unhappy, would converting to conservatism and adopting traditional values make you happier? 1 and 4 suggest the effect might not be as pronounced for a convert as for someone who was already healthy and happy; but 2 and 3 suggest that it might, indeed, have a positive effect on your life.