After years of failed efforts to convince Americans that the economy is great, the media has listened to the vast majority of the country… and decided that they must be crazy for thinking the economy is bad.
This Atlantic piece is only the latest in a developing media alternate reality genre whose premise is that the economy is great and then seeks to find some reason (outside the cost of food and housing, the inability to keep a small business going, etc) why Americans would think so.
And the answer must be COVID PTSD.
America is in a funk, and no one seems to know why. Unemployment rates are lower than they’ve been in half a century and the stock market is sky-high, but poll after poll shows that voters are disgruntled. President Joe Biden’s approval rating has been hovering in the high 30s. Americans’ satisfaction with their personal lives—a measure that usually dips in times of economic uncertainty—is at a near-record low, according to Gallup polling. And nearly half of Americans surveyed in January said they were worse off than three years prior.
Americans keep saying in poll after poll that the economy is terrible. Kitchen table surveys have people agonizing about how much they’re spending at the grocery store. Every time the media talks to people, they keep saying the same thing.
But the fake unemployment numbers are low and the stock market is high because panicked investors keep throwing their money at anything with the term ‘AI’ in it.
So the only possible reason Americans could hate the economy is because they’re repressing the real reason for their pain.
Four years ago, the country was brought to its knees by a world-historic disaster. COVID-19 hospitalized nearly 7 million Americans and killed more than a million; it’s still killing hundreds each week. It shut down schools and forced people into social isolation. Almost overnight, most of the country was thrown into a state of high anxiety—then, soon enough, grief and mourning. But the country has not come together to sufficiently acknowledge the tragedy it endured. As clinical psychiatrists, we see the effects of such emotional turmoil every day, and we know that when it’s not properly processed, it can result in a general sense of unhappiness and anger—exactly the negative emotional state that might lead a nation to misperceive its fortunes.
The media is really gonna do this, isn’t it?
I’m not a shrink, but it’s pretty obvious who’s repressing things here and it isn’t the housewife who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and will vote for Trump in 2024 because her paycheck no longer covers a trip to the supermarket.
The ‘party line’ in the media is to refuse to acknowledge the economic misery left people come to believe it’s true and Biden will lose. But the media lying about it doesn’t fool anyone except the media and liberal elites. The liberal elite echo chamber is then baffled as to why most of the country disagrees with it and starts psychoanalyzing Americans as nuts for not rejecting the evidence of their senses.