The Pursuit of Happiness at the Price of Ukraine

The pursuit of happiness is one of the most famous promises in political history. When Thomas Jefferson wrote those words into the American Declaration of Independence, he was borrowing from the currents of Enlightenment thought. John Locke had spoken of “life, liberty, and property,” imagining that human beings sought security, freedom, and material stability. Jefferson’s substitution of “happiness” for “property” has often been taken as a humanistic leap, a sign that America would found itself not on possession but on fulfilment. Yet happiness was never clearly defined. It was left elastic, ready to be stretched by culture and by commerce into whatever suited the mood of the age.

This idealism is impossible to understand apart from its shadow. The republic that declared liberty also codified slavery. Jefferson could pen luminous phrases of freedom while holding human beings as property. The pursuit of happiness was never universal. It was a promise narrowed by race and ownership. From the beginning, freedom and bondage were entwined, and slavery became the negative image of liberty, its shadow and its condition. To imagine happiness as a right was only possible because others were denied even the status of persons. America’s ideal was born compromised, and the tension between freedom and unfreedom has haunted it ever since.

In the early republic happiness was still tethered to virtue and community. The idea was not simply that one should feel good but that one’s life should align with civic responsibility and moral order. A flourishing individual was imagined as inseparable from a flourishing polity. Yet even this civic vision rested on exclusions. Women, the enslaved, and the poor were largely outside its circle. Over time this conception frayed. Industrial capitalism, and later consumer capitalism, remade happiness as a solitary goal, measurable by acquisition, leisure, and self-expression. The marketplace found a use for every ache of discontent. The citizen was reimagined as a customer, and happiness as a product on perpetual backorder.

Alexis de Tocqueville, writing in the nineteenth century, already detected this restlessness in the American character. He noted that Americans, even when prosperous, were haunted by the suspicion that they might be missing out on a greater satisfaction elsewhere. They rushed from one novelty to another, unable to be still. Tocqueville read this not as a quirk but as a structural feature of a democracy organised around the promise of happiness. Restlessness was the shadow of the ideal. One could add that slavery itself was another shadow: freedom for some rested on subjugation for others, so the very promise of happiness carried within it the seeds of fracture.

The cultural critic Lauren Berlant later gave this restlessness its sharpest contemporary form. In her account of “cruel optimism,” she argued that the very objects we believe will make us happy actually weigh us down. The job, the diet, the relationship, the curated life are the very objects that burden us, trapping us in a cycle of frustrated attachment. Optimism becomes a form of imprisonment. In this sense, America’s obsession with happiness is not a pursuit at all but a captivity.

The irony is that alongside this culture of commodified ease has grown a countercurrent of posturing toughness. Marcus Aurelius urged his citizens to accept hardship, to master their desires, and to find dignity in sacrifice. His Meditations spoke with extraordinary serenity about the futility of chasing pleasure. Yet Rome under his reign was already under pressure, its outer strength belied by inner fragility. America today has its own pseudo-stoics. They gather in gyms and podcasts, celebrating grit and discipline while marketing protein powders and courses on how to become “alpha.” This is a parody of stoicism. It is as devoted to consumption as any wellness brand. Beneath the rhetoric of resilience lies the same fear of discomfort, the same avoidance of sacrifice.

This bro-stoicism converges with political nostalgia. “Make America Great Again” is less a programme than a yearning for lost virtue. Paramilitary groups who march with rifles and fatigues act out a fantasy of republican courage. But it is theatre. The longing for discipline is real, yet it cannot be satisfied by cosplay. America wants to believe in its stoic strength while continuing to consume its pleasures undisturbed.

The result is paralysis in the face of real crisis. Russian aggression has become the test. To confront Moscow with genuine resolve would require sacrifice: higher energy prices, military commitments, a willingness to endure uncertainty. To look away is easier. Capitulation offers the comfort of normality. This is why the pursuit of happiness matters geopolitically. A nation trained to value comfort above principle will retreat when principle demands pain.

Republicans and Democrats are equally implicated. Both offend virtue with their promises that politics can be painless. Neither side dares to defend democracy when it costs, whether that be Biden running like a coward from Afghanistan or Trump acting like a coward in relation to Ukraine. Both are evasions.

For decades Democrats in particular cloaked themselves in the language of justice while practising a politics as compromised as their opponents. Bill Clinton could speak the poetry of empathy while humiliating Monica Lewinsky and betraying his own staff. He could present himself as the champion of the working class while signing trade deals that hollowed out manufacturing towns and welfare reforms that punished the poor. The mask of virtue was already slipping. Barack Obama inherited the rhetoric of hope but expanded drone wars abroad and shielded Wall Street after the financial crash, protecting the very institutions that had caused misery for millions. Hope curdled into continuity. Joe Biden, who campaigned as the defender of democracy, governed as a cautious custodian of the status quo, a man more comfortable with corporate donors than with the people his party claimed to represent. By then the performance of virtue had become inseparable from its betrayal. The stage was set for a figure who would discard the mask altogether.

Yes, it was only a matter of time before someone came along who would stop pretending altogether. That someone was Donald Trump. He offered something even more seductive: vice masquerading as virtue. Trump did not invent the desire for painless politics; he merely stripped away the pretence. Where Democrats offered hypocrisy, he offered fantasy. Why confront sacrifice when delusion feels better? Why defend institutions when you can destroy them and call it liberation? Why confront Russia when you can flatter it and call capitulation strength? To believe the lies is to purchase, at no cost, a sense of triumph. And because the lies ask nothing of their believers, they become intoxicating. It is a choice between the pretence of virtue and the intoxication of vice, and vice proves more honest in its way.

It is tempting for liberals to cast Trump as the antithesis of their imagined virtue, a grotesque interruption of an otherwise noble tradition. But this too is delusion. Trump is not the negation of some lost ideal; he is the culmination of decades of decay. The hypocrisies of the left prepared the ground for him, and the hypocrisies of the right nurtured him. To condemn Trump without confronting that lineage is to build a house of straw, one gust away from collapse. He did not shatter the republic’s virtues; he exposed how thoroughly they had already rotted.

The poor feel this most acutely. They had been told for decades that the Democratic Party was their voice, their advocate, their defender. What they saw instead were leaders who preached virtue while protecting privilege, who promised equality while entrenching inequality. Against that hypocrisy, Trump’s shamelessness feels bracing. He does not hide his vice; he flaunts it. In a culture trained to distrust politicians who speak of virtue while delivering pain, the lie can appear more authentic than the truth.

The danger is that once vice has been enthroned as virtue, the republic is reduced to a carnival of grievance, and the citizens to consumers of fantasy. In this theatre democracy cannot survive, because democracy demands patience, sacrifice, and discipline, qualities that the pursuit of happiness has taught Americans to avoid. Trump’s followers enact this pretence most starkly in their obsession with abortion, which they elevate as the gravest of sins while tolerating corruption, cruelty, and the steady erosion of democratic institutions. Liberals perform a similar theatre when they rage over cultural slights while averting their eyes from drone wars, corporate plunder, or the abandonment of workers. In both cases indignation is offered as a substitute for virtue. It is not principle but spectacle, a selective morality that disguises decay. And it repeats the same structural evasion that marked the nation at its birth: liberty for some purchased by bondage for others.

This is America’s Roman moment. Marcus Aurelius taught endurance, but Rome under his watch was already brittle, outwardly strong but inwardly hollow. America repeats the paradox: it talks of resilience but flees sacrifice, clings to fantasies while recoiling from reality. Trump is not the break from this pattern; he is its fulfillment. Just as slavery once revealed the limits of the founding promise, Trump reveals the bankruptcy of its modern heirs. A culture addicted to happiness cannot face hardship, and a politics that cannot face hardship cannot resist aggression.

If America fails this test, the lesson will be brutal. The decline will not come with a cataclysm but with a sigh. The empire will wither not because it was defeated from without but because it surrendered from within, preferring pleasure to principle, comfort to courage, lies to truth. Rome fell for less.

To stand with Ukraine is to refuse the narcotic of painless politics. It is to recognise that freedom carries costs and that sacrifice is the measure of principle. The pursuit of happiness has taught Americans, and by extension the West, to recoil from discomfort. Ukraine teaches the opposite lesson: that happiness worth having is born not of consumption but of courage. In the resilience of a people under bombardment lies the reminder that democracy survives only when citizens are willing to suffer for it.

To defend Ukraine is not charity. It is the defence of our own future, the refusal to surrender to the decadence that felled Rome. What is at stake is not an abstraction but the ordinary rights that make a common life possible: to speak without fear, to assemble without permission, to choose one’s leaders and to remove them when they fail. These are fragile, and once lost they are not easily recovered. The affirmation that freedom is more precious than comfort underscores a vital truth: the daily conditions of citizenship in a free society are worth more than the illusions of ease.