Why Democrats Are So Sad
A Story of Cognitive Dissonance
Why Democrats Are So Sad: A Story of Cognitive Dissonance
By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com
They’re not just sad. They’re exhausted. They’re furious. They’re bewildered. And it all comes down to one thing: they built a house of narratives, and reality refuses to live in it.
Psychologists have a phrase for this condition: cognitive dissonance — the mental strain you feel when your deepest beliefs collide head-on with facts. It’s not a new discovery. But what we’re seeing on the Left today is cognitive dissonance on an industrial scale. They’ve hoaxed themselves into a corner where every escape hatch requires admitting they were wrong. And that is the one thing they cannot do.
The Mental Health Gap
Let’s start with the receipts. Surveys for decades — from the General Social Survey to Tufts University’s Cooperative Election Study — show conservatives reporting higher happiness than liberals. The gap isn’t small. In the CES 2020 data, over half of very liberal young women said they had been diagnosed with a mental health condition. That’s not a fringe number; that’s a cultural warning light blinking red.
Meanwhile, conservatives, especially those who are religious and family-anchored, report far stronger mental health. The reasons aren’t mysterious:
Faith and family: real support networks.
Worldview: expect life to be hard, and setbacks don’t shatter you.
Personality: conservatives tend to score lower on neuroticism.
Liberals, by contrast, are more secular, more crisis-oriented, and more prone to define themselves by grievance. That makes them exquisitely vulnerable to disappointment.
Bob’s aside: “If your therapist’s therapist is out on leave, you might be too liberal.”
The Predictions That Blew Up
Cognitive dissonance sharpens every time a forecast fails. And the Left has endured a decade of blown calls:
Tariffs: They warned Trump’s tariffs would collapse the economy. Instead, the stock market is at record highs.
Courts: They cheered convictions against Trump, only to watch reversals pile up.
Deep State: They trusted the FBI and DOJ to be their muscle. Instead, Russiagate was exposed as a fabrication, and the investigators are being investigated.
Bureaucrats for Life: They thought Washington’s administrative army was untouchable. Then DOGE and Trump cleared house.
That’s not a string of minor embarrassments. That’s a worldview getting steamrolled by reality.
The Emotional Pressure Points
The dissonance isn’t abstract; it hits where it hurts most:
Trump the Villain, Trump the Victor. For years he was cast as Hitler, Mussolini, and Attila the Hun rolled into one. Yet he stops wars, reins in Iran, drives the economy forward, and draws record crowds. To the Left, this is intolerable: the villain wins the day.
Faith & Family. While secular experiments sputter, nuclear families, Protestants, and Catholics show resilience. The very models progressives mocked are thriving.
The Trans Movement. Once untouchable, it’s now tied to violence too brutal to spin. The favored cause has turned radioactive.
Climate Alarmism. The DOE report landed like a hammer: apocalyptic forecasts don’t match data. Trillions spent, no receipts.
Law & Order. “Defund the police” collided with crime spikes. Voters fled.
Education. Indoctrination exposed, test scores sinking, homeschooling and charter schools rising.
Palestine. Brutal atrocities on video made “resistance chic” impossible to defend.
Immigration. The once-sacred open-border policy is now political poison.
Every bullet point is another migraine of dissonance.
Public Reaction as Symptom
When Charlie Kirk was assassinated, the nation should have paused in shock. But many on the Left sneered, excused, even celebrated. That’s not joy. That’s despair breaking into the open. When a movement responds to tragedy with mockery, it reveals how brittle the mind has become under pressure.
The Death of DEI: The Great Betrayal
Nothing illustrates this collapse more than the death of DEI.
For years, the Left sold DEI as the moral crown jewel. Identity was elevated above merit. Skin color, gender, and checkbox status became more important than skill, work, or achievement. Entire institutions re-engineered themselves to enforce it. Dissenters were branded racists and bigots.
But the jig is up.
Companies are abandoning DEI programs in droves.
Courts are striking it down.
The public has stopped pretending it works.
Why? Because it doesn’t. DEI poisons trust, erodes excellence, and divides rather than unites. It was never a ladder up; it was a trapdoor down.
For the Left, this is unbearable. They didn’t just invest in DEI — they staked their moral identity on it. Watching it collapse is like watching their cathedral crumble stone by stone.
Bob’s line: “If you bet the farm on skin color, don’t whine when the crops fail.”
The Corner of No Return
Put it together: climate hoaxes, collusion hoaxes, DEI hoaxes, border hoaxes, “peaceful protest” hoaxes. Each was built as a fortress. Each has fallen.
To escape, they’d have to admit they were wrong. But when your identity is built on being right — on being morally superior — that’s impossible.
So the only options left are:
1. Stay sad.
2. Stay mad.
3. Lash out.
And we’re seeing all three.
Why Sadness Rules Them
The sadness isn’t a passing mood. It’s structural. It comes from:
Predictions blown to pieces.
Causes exposed as scams.
Villains revealed as achievers.
A life built on grievance that never resolves.
Sadness, confusion, lashing out — these aren’t side effects. They’re the logical outcome of living inside a broken narrative.
Bob’s closer: “You can’t hug your hoaxes forever. Eventually, reality hugs back — and it squeezes.”
Closing Note
The Left isn’t sad because the world is cruel. They’re sad because their story doesn’t match the world. And until they face that fact, their condition will only worsen: more dissonance, more bitterness, more violent spasms against reality itself.
They didn’t just box themselves in. They hoaxed themselves in. And the walls are caving fast.
" - - They didn’t just box themselves in. They hoaxed themselves in. And the walls are caving fast."
Well - - Yes. They appear to be. (The walls, that is) But then one has to wonder - - what comes next? There is the perpetual parade of crises to consider (the crises that aren't). At least the crises that aren't have a solution. It is a simple, universal solution: 'Throw money at it'.
It goes without saying the author of a crisis also has the solution, and only needs a bit of time, funding and (ahem - -) FAITH and the crisis will pass - - which it does - - not because the genius we trusted found a solution, but (as you pointed out) there never was a crisis in the first place. Ref: “From the Office of Imaginary Threats”
All well and good - - BUT - - what became of the money? The one outcome you may depend on, regardless of the ‘Imaginary threat’ is - - the money is GONE!
So what about the $30-something trillion debt our politicians have run-up in our name? Is that real? The ‘system’ seems to keep up with a running total on the interest, which sure makes that one seem real , and you missed a couple of real doozies on your list - - Billy Gates tells us climate change might not be so bad after all, and Anthony just needed a couple more years to cure viral infection forever - - not to mention the great Liberal Liberator of the poor who spends his days deciding which of his multi-million dollar property to occupy for the season? Will we ever learn?
I am running across an open plain, trying to catch a dot that sometimes grows larger, and sometimes smaller, but no matter how fast I run, no matter how hard I try, it never comes into clear view. Am I awake or sleeping? How did I get here, and where am I going?
I see an object in the distance that appears stationary. It IS! Time shifts. I am on it. I swoop it up, in mid stride, my pursuit of the dot never slacking. Binoculars! I raise them to my eyes and see I am chasing a running man. I stop and look behind me, and see in the distance a still figure, with a bald spot on the back of his head, that looks very much like my own .
I don’t need to look forward. I know what I will see - - .