I think it needs to be said that the timing of this study is relevant. 30+ years ago, it may have said that liberals die more often for the same reason. The woo woo healing crystals hippy to MAHA pipeline is very real, and it has exactly the same cause.
There weren’t disparities by political alignment 30 years ago, though.
we draw on… the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health… which has tracked a nationally representative cohort of people who were adolescents in the 1990s… over the course of their lifetimes… includes a measure of political beliefs: self-reported liberal–conservative placement.
We find that conservative Americans in this cohort, who were about as healthy as liberals in the early 2010s, experienced worsening health through the 2010s and higher mortality in the early 2020s. Roughly half of this new health gap is due to people changing their ideology over time, with new entrants to the conservative coalition being less healthy than new liberals. But another sizeable share is due to people who were already liberal or conservative diverging more in health over time…
By the 2020s, conservatives were dying at significantly higher rates than liberals, with the gap concentrated in internal causes (for example, heart disease, cancer and stroke). The divide since 2020 is substantial: while only 0.2% of ‘very liberal’ respondents died of internal causes between 2020 and 2022, the probability for people who identified as ‘very conservative’ was 1.14 percentage points higher… This gap is not limited to deaths from COVID-19 and is not reducible to demographic or geographic differences between the groups, nor is it a pure function of ageing: previous cohorts’ death patterns in older data did not show a similar correlation between health and ideology before 2010.
It’s the same as conspiracy theorists. Gives you a belief you’re smarter than everyone else by knowing something they don’t. Which is why both tend to go against whatever the more prevalent political ideology is at the time.
It was a big slap in the face when I learned (about a decade ago) the “hippes” were all bigots around here, using be a dead head as an excuse to be a drug addict.
I think it needs to be said that the timing of this study is relevant. 30+ years ago, it may have said that liberals die more often for the same reason. The woo woo healing crystals hippy to MAHA pipeline is very real, and it has exactly the same cause.
There weren’t disparities by political alignment 30 years ago, though.
It’s the same as conspiracy theorists. Gives you a belief you’re smarter than everyone else by knowing something they don’t. Which is why both tend to go against whatever the more prevalent political ideology is at the time.
It was a big slap in the face when I learned (about a decade ago) the “hippes” were all bigots around here, using be a dead head as an excuse to be a drug addict.