Barack Obama has won the 2012 presidential race. We will hear from the left that this amounts to America's rejection of conservative principles. The media will posit that the American people heard Mitt Romney's message, thought about it from each and every angle, and decided on principle and merit to support the president.

Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. For millions of Americans who pulled the lever for Obama in this election, there was never any contemplation about ideology or the merits of Mitt Romney's message. And this election certainly does not signify a center-right nation's rejection of center-right conservatism in favor of Obama's leftist extremism. No, what this election signifies is that we conservatives can no longer find solace in the comforting hope that there are enough rational people in this country to overcome the ideologically infected social engineers that cannibalize American liberty while leading their mindless flock to worship at the redistributive altar.

This mindless flock of the Democratic base is simply too large in terms of sheer numbers, and too far removed from reasonable perception to do anything other than vote for more collectively subsidized "stuff," whether it's food stamps, unemployment checks, health insurance, or contraception and abortions. For them, the impulse to vote Democratic is more a conditioned Pavlovian response than a result of thoughtful exploration. The conditioned stimulus (promises of government entitlements) is coupled with an unconditioned stimulus (free food via food stamps, for example), and in time, either stimulus will, like clockwork, produce the response of a vote for the name that appears on the Democratic ticket.

This is tragic not only for political reasons, but for humanistic ones as well. It is precisely our ability to think and reason as individuals that makes us human. And effectively, the Democratic Party has systematically dehumanized a large part of its constituency by making them obedient dependents -- unable to reason, robbed of individualism in a manufactured groupthink culture, and relegated to the graciousness of a benefactor who claims to have their best interests in mind. In the best way of describing them is as entranced cultists. In the worst, they are willing slaves.

However one might choose to describe them, Barack Obama has certainly been efficient in his efforts to garner their devotion. Taking food stamps alone as an example, he has added more than 15 million new dependents to the government rolls in his tenure as president, each of which now has a vested interest in voting Democrat -- it is their job, and the source of their livelihood. It is only logical to assume that few among them have the good sense to consider, say, a continuation of rising food and energy costs that an Obama re-election portends. Why would they, when they have been conditioned to feel entitled to both if they are without, regardless what it might cost taxpayers? No, these dependents likely never mustered a thought beyond the conditioned assumption that a Democratic vote preserves a continued right to free food. One Twitter user going by the handle @_MaliksWright articulates this position nicely, laced with one of many death threats against Mitt Romney that have been curiously uninteresting to the media at large:

Food stamps are such a beautiful thing. Romney better hope he lose tomorrow, I cock my gun on his ass he take MY food stamps away lol

Certainly, there are millions of those not on the government dole that vote Democrat because the concepts of "fairness" and "social justice" are simply more important to them than those guidelines for liberty enumerated by the Constitution. Count them among the clergy in the progressive cult. But this election has made it as clear as ever that the misguided progressive ambition rests squarely on the shoulders of this army of dehumanized dependents. Every election, we see the intellectual leaders of the self-proclaimed "free thinking" Democratic left unashamedly goad the opiate-and-compliant rabble to the polls with promises of free government handouts -- and this one was no different.

There might be humor in the irony of that, if it were not so shameful and sad.

But it is on the strength of millions of such votes, and only on the strength of millions of such votes, that Democrats can carry such narrow victories as we saw in the presidential election of 2012.

I wish there was a silver lining here, but there is not. With increasing dependency upon the government comes increasing difficulty in defeating a Democratic presidential candidate at the national level. We need but look at Obama's "Life of Julia" slideshow to verify that this is precisely what he has in mind, and as we taxpayers are doomed to endure the full scope and measure of ObamaCare taking effect in the coming years, the wheels are already in motion for American dependency upon the government to unprecedentedly expand. And with it, the chances of a return to conservative governance predicated on individualism and limited government are vastly diminished. In a time very soon, those chances might be nil.

The completion of Obama's fundamental transformation of America is nearly at hand. And we who value what America once represented rightfully mourn its coming demise

William Sullivan blogs at http://politicalpalaverblog.blogspot.com/and can be followed on Twitter.