Happiness has everything to do with government. People like freedom and liberty. And the founders of the US were willing to die for it.
Hitler's Germans come to mind.
Hitlers Germans were extremely happy with their government, until the middle of 1941.
They had become prosperous and motivated, they had won the war, and they had every reason to expect the last little details of their foreign policy to be quickly tidied up. France was completely defeated, Italy and Spain were friendly, they had a non-agression pact with Soviet Russia, Switzerland, Sweden, and the United States were all firmly committed to neutrality, Japan was supporting them in the Far East and the Pacific, and the British Empire was militarily weak, and would likely be unable to prosecute any serious attacks on German interests, even if it was foolish enough not to sue for peace.
By May of 1941, the Germans had gone from being a crushed and defeated Great War loser, and an economically devastated victim of the worst of the Great Depression, into a modern high-tech collosus, whose military rivals had all been soundly defeated, or effectively neutralised as a threat.
Simply by doing nothing but consolidate her gains, enjoy the spoils of victory, and make diplomatic overtures (and in the case of Mussolini, demands and threats) to keep Japan and Italy from rocking the boat, and to keep the USSR and US neutral, Germany could have been poised to rule mainland Europe from the Atlantic to the border with the Soviets in the former Poland for the thousand years they boasted about.
They had secured Russian cooperation to avoid a two front war, had gambled with an ever escalating series of provocations against France and England on a massive build up of strength, and had achieved a stunning and crushing victory over both those countries that left them practically unassailable.
It was an almost total victory. And just a few years of consolidation, assimilation of the occupied territory, and rebuilding and remodernising their army in light of the experience gained when fighting in France, could have made them an invincible world power.
Germany won the second Great European War, 1939-40. And then threw it all away on an insane decision to
immediately attack their Soviet ally, rather than spend a couple of years getting ready (which had been the key to their victory over France).
The upshot, as we all know, was defeat and misery for Germany and Germans, just four years later, as they decisively lost the third European Great War, 1941-45.
Those two wars were so close together in time, (and the third war was so closely coupled with wars in the Pacific, South East Asia, and Scandinavia), that they tend to be lumped into a single entity we call World War II. But really, Germany won their war; And then threw their victory onto the fire, for no sane reason. Such is the peril of giving a madman dictatorial power.
Happiness was endemic in Germany in late 1940 and early 1941. Freedom and liberty? Not so much.
And, of course, by 1945 few Germans remembered how joyful and cheerful they had been, and even fewer were game to admit to it out loud.
