They want so badly to believe in The Dream

You've probably seen the lefty posters on social media to the effect that America just rebuked a president that had ushered in umpteen months of private-sector job growth, a steadily climbing stock market and unemployment brought down to six percent.  A little surreal, isn't it?  What is the purpose of putting them on the newsfeed?  Emotional catharsis?  The hope that readers will say, "Boy, yeah, I hadn't thought of it that way, I sure made a mistake yesterday?"

Maybe it's a balm, a hoped-for narcotic effect to blot out the actual reality:

Read between the lines of this paragraph in the federal government’s October employment report, on the eve of the election: 

“In September, 2.2 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, essentially unchanged from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months.”

That reality killed the Democrats. If there’s one economist’s term of art the average person learned in the Obama era, it is“labor force participation rate.” It’s not good. 

For decades after World War II, the U.S. economy had an annual average growth rate of 3.3%. Here are the growth rates for each year of the Obama presidency (World Bank data):

2009: -2.8%; 2010: 2.5%; 2011: 1.8%; 2012: 2.8%; 2013: 1.9%

You preside over that performance, you lose. The 2014 growth uptick arrived too late to save the Democrats. The economy was a spent political force for them.

Consider the Freedom-Hater definition of good economic news: Those is desperate straits got a little leg up, enough to keep the lights on and the car payment made, and it was made possible by government tinkering with the free market:  minimum wage hikes, stimulus spending, food stamps.  In short, those most frantically clamoring for a raft in the stormy sea got one paid for with play-like money.

Therefore, according to the FHers, everybody ought to feel good about the country's direction and keep the current regime in power.

Reality works a little differently from this scenario.  Human beings need a basis for believing that opportunity is there for them.  Human beings want to contribute meaningfully to the world and thereby prosper.  The thin gruel of the state doesn't cut it.  Americans, in particular, want to spread their wings and see what they can do with their brief sojourns on this plane of existence.  And they saw none.

It is yet another realm in which we can see the chasm between the leftist vision and reality.  The leftist vision - people are pleased with the pace and nature of economic recovery, climate change is real and dictates drastic changes to our way of life, gender identity is fluid, jihadists can be charmed into halting their war against all infidels - had just come to the point whee it was so out of sync with the lay of the land in front of everyone's nose that the cognitive dissonance was too much to bear.

The little trickle of remaining pro-Most-Equal-Comrade propaganda one sees on social media evokes a kind of pity, does it not?  The vanquished Freedom-Haters can't let go of The Dream.  Way too much invested in it.  So they continue to trumpet the MEC's glories, knowing in their delusional minds that somehow, sometime, everyone will get it and turn from the grievous mistake - basing their actions on reality - and once again ask to be herded into the pen.

They are going to wait such a long time.  Meanwhile, the rest of us have a lot of work to do, un-transforming post-America.