The Jerkstore opened for business during the Bush-Gore Presidential race. It’s an e-mail chain started by a prison-lock magnate in the Midwest, an adherent of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, who felt that our representatives in Washington had lost sight of fundamental free-market principles. He liked to compare the United States (flatteringly) to the Roman Empire, and to call anyone who disagreed with him, including Barack Obama, “economically illiterate.” Through the years, the e-mails—his provocations and the responses to them—piled up, by the thousand. The forum wasn’t called the Jerkstore at first. During the 2012 campaign, after Obama’s poor opening-debate performance drew comparisons to the “Seinfeld” episode in which George Costanza, in a feeble attempt at a comeback, says, “The Jerkstore called—they’re running out of you,” the prison-lock magnate sent around a clip from the episode, and the name stuck.

Most of the Jerkstore correspondents are Republicans of the Ayn Rand strain. They are investment bankers, hedge-fund managers, lawyers, a candle-maker, an interior decorator. There are a few liberals, who occasionally rev up the rhetorical dudgeon or tease out hypocrisies, but for the most part the group threw in for Romney. They traded screeds about Obamacare, groupthink, and public-employee unions as well as about Benghazi and Nate Silver. After the Supreme Court’s decision on Obamacare, the prison-lock magnate, despondent, sent around a quote attributed to Tocqueville (“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money”) and then wrote, “I truly thought (and how wrong I was) that Ronald Reagan with Milton Friedman had sunk the decisive stake into the Keynesian brain trust in the 1980’s. But nope. These Keynesians are like the Zombies in ‘Night of the Living Dead.’ There are millions of them walking around spewing their government spending/stimulus nonsense.”

As the campaign progressed, though, he and the others began to grow confident that the zombies might be vanquished. The campaign seemed to be following a Carter-Reagan script. He predicted a landslide for Romney. On Election Day, he had half a dozen steak-dinner bets in hand. As night fell, and the counting began, he wrote, gleefully, “It’s morning in America!” Then he went silent. The night ended with a dispatch: “The people have spoken. I tried.” And then: “I’m crying.”

Two nights later, a couple of Jerkstore participants found themselves at the Red Lion, the old Bleecker Street bar. A band called the Jazzholes was rolling through a repertoire of Stones, Doors, and Allmans. The Jazzholes—weekend warriors, Class of ’90—get this gig because they pack the place with friends, who tip well. Many of these friends used to work at Lehman Brothers; one of the guitar players, a Jerkstore correspondent, ran Lehman’s distressed-debt desk prior to the firm’s collapse, in 2008. Many of them also voted for Barack Obama that fall but decided not to this time.

Why? “I think the market has answered that question,” said a man at the bar. He’d been an executive at Lehman and is now a partner at a hedge fund. To ascribe a consciousness to the market is a mug’s game; the indices are aggregations of millions of decisions, each with its own set of circumstances. Still, it was fair to guess that the stock-market plunge in the two days after the election might have been a declaration of discontents. “At least the market thinks the election outcome mattered,” the prison-lock magnate wrote. “I want to share with everyone what my shop foreman said to me yesterday: ‘All we can hope for now is an orderly decline.’ My country is unrecognizable to me.”

The man at the bar began to tick off reasons that a guy in his line of work might not greet a second Obama Administration with enthusiasm: for starters, there was the likelihood of higher taxes, greater regulation, and fiscal-cliff procrastination, and therefore of less money, in the short run, and economic Armageddon, in the long run. He wasn’t averse to paying higher taxes—and found it “ridiculous” that Romney got away with paying only fourteen per cent. (“Still, it’s legal.”) “Nobody cares about the difference between thirty-six and thirty-nine per cent, if that extra three per cent goes to the right things,” he said. “But we’ve spent six trillion dollars and don’t have one building to show for it that you can hang anyone’s name on.”

The Jazzholes were playing “Bye Bye Love,” by the Cars. A Jerkstore dispatch came in: the prison-lock magnate had heard a rumor that Obama was considering naming Romney Treasury Secretary. “Magnaminous. No?” ♦