Independent (or just confused) Personality

He also found that personality traits assigned by the psychiatrists in the initial interviews largely predicted who would become Democrats (descriptions included “sensitive,” “cultural,” and “introspective”) and Republicans (“pragmatic” and “organized”).

That's a small quote from the middle of a long article in last month's Atlantic(1) about a long study that purportedly sheds light on what makes for a happy life.(2) It interests me in a personal way because I have taken seriously my deliberate decision to belong to neither the Democratic nor the Republican party. I've always felt that my political beliefs(3) have never consistently fallen in with either party and that I've been free to agree or disagree with either at any time. This little quote nicely confirms this thought. Read those personality traits again. If I or anyone else extremely close to me had to choose five words to describe me, those might be the first five picked.(4) I have all the dominant traits of Republicans and Democrats.
So I think what this means is that I ought to be on the Supreme Court.

1. I've loved this magazine for a long time, and you really can't go wrong reading anything in it. But I've got a little complaint about how they changed their name from the Atlantic Monthly to just the Atlantic. A little too pretentious, if you ask me.
2. I'm not sure if I'm terribly impressed with this article. It was the cover feature last month so normally you'd be free to just end the debate and start anthologizing it. But it wandered around, never really answered its own hypotheses, and turned into a biography on the study's director, which would be a fine and simple article to write, but not terribly interesting in a broad sense or enlightening in any sense. I still feel the same way about the Atlantic now that I did about PBS a few years ago (enthralled, awed, and completely devoted), I'd just call this article the "Antiques Roadshow" of the Atlantic.(a)
3. My beliefs on social issues are decidedly liberal. I am mature and humble enough not to always assume I'm right about diverse and complex political and economic issues, but not social ones such as gay rights or abortion(b) or the like. There I am no better than a petulant child. The only difference is that instead of being absolutely certain of my own rightness, I'm more sure of my adversary's wrongness.
4. Let's put them in this order: pragmatic, introspective, organized, sensitive, cultural.

a. Hopefully anyone reading this knows enough about me that I don't have to explain how I feel about "Antiques Roadshow." Let's just say that Mondays, and any day they were doing a pledge drive and giving away Broadway-related merchandise, were disappointing evenings for me.
b. Abortion being a very interesting issue. It's got both a strong social component as well as a strong political one. I don't disagree that there are a lot of sensible arguments on both sides of the political abortion issue, but only one on the social side. A woman has a right to choose what she does with her body, no matter what any religious text has to say about it.