RUTHFULLY YOURS

It was a perfect expression of the paranoid state in which American progressivism finds itself. Leave aside for a moment the line about “dictating what healthcare decisions women can make,” a euphemistic reference to abortion. The other threats on Mr. Biden’s list—“banning” books, “telling people who they can love” and voter suppression—are literally nonexistent. Mr. Biden isn’t engaged in the time-honored political craft of exaggeration. He’s seeing things that aren’t there.

Liberal commentators have been ridiculing conservatives for fearing negligible or nonexistent threats for as long as I can remember: communist infiltration during the Cold War, Islamic extremism in the 2000s, illegal immigration in the 2010s, gender ideology in the 2020s. The right might or might not have exaggerated the urgency of these problems. But they were, or are, problems. That isn’t the case with an array of issues Democratic politicians and progressive intellectuals are exercised about in 2023. You often feel they’re so invested in the idea of a delusional right that they can’t perceive their own penchant for dreaming up nonexistent threats.

Mr. Biden is worried about book bans. The American Library Association recently claimed in a report that 2,571 books were “challenged” in American libraries last year. These challenges the ALA calls “attempted book bans,” nearly all of which involve a request by a patron that a public library or school library remove a book from its shelves because it is obscene or otherwise offensive. I’m not sure such requests are improper—young-adult fiction has become sexually avant-garde and shockingly coarse over the past two decades. Anyway, to ask that a taxpayer-supported library not facilitate children’s access to a sexually explicit book isn’t to “ban” it. An interested patron may buy it and read it in public if he wishes.

Further, as Micah Mattix noted in his Substack of April 26, there are 117,341 libraries in the U.S., 76,807 of which are public elementary- and secondary-school libraries. “Some books are challenged multiple times,” Mr. Mattix explains. “Others are challenged once. How many unique books and resources were challenged last year? 2,571. How many challenges were filed in total? 1,269.” If, as seems likely, some libraries reported several challenges, that means less than 1% of all libraries received even a single challenge. Other organizations, particularly PEN America, assert that local and state governments are eagerly “banning” books, typically those of female, black, gay and transgender authors. All such statements engage in the verbal legerdemain of defining as a “ban” any request that children at a public institution not have access to books about sex.

This strange urge to tremble at the presence of imaginary beasts is accompanied by an astonishing lack of self-awareness. The closest thing to real book bans in the U.S. today is perpetrated by precisely the sort of people who bewail book bans. Major publishers have canceled books by authors ranging from J.K. Rowling to Sen. Josh Hawley because they ran afoul of progressive sensibilities. Amazon refuses to sell Ryan Anderson’s book “When Harry Became Sally” (2018), a measured and serious critique of the transgender movement. In 2021 the American Booksellers Association sent out paperback copies of Abigail Shrier’s “Irreversible Damage,” on the same subject. Activists targeted the ABA, and the trade group issued an obsequious apology for the alleged offense. ALA and PEN America say nothing about these attempts literally to ban books.

The president also noted, as a justification for his re-election, “MAGA extremists” wishing to tell people “who they can love.” That’s a reference to same-sex marriage, which the Supreme Court legalized nationwide in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), and which faces virtually no political resistance. One assumes Mr. Biden was alluding to Justice Clarence Thomas’s suggestion, in a lone opinion last year, that the court should “reconsider” its reasoning in Obergefell, which was rooted in a doctrine called substantive due process.

The idea that one statement by one justice about an abstruse legal subject signifies a mass political movement aimed at rolling back same-sex marriage is a species of madness. A certain variety of conservative may wish there were such a movement. But there isn’t one. Mr. Biden is seeing things.

What about those MAGA extremists “making it more difficult for you to be able to vote”? The nonexistence of observable voter suppression has been demonstrated many times, in this newspaper and elsewhere, but two recent data points are worth remembering. In January 2022 Joe Biden characterized a Georgia election-reform bill as “Jim Crow 2.0” and likened its supporters to George Wallace, Bull Connor and Jefferson Davis. The law passed, and in the midterm elections later that year more black voters cast ballots than before the law. A subsequent University of Georgia survey found that 0% of black voters reported a poor voting experience in 2022, whereas 72% of black voters said it was “excellent,” the same as white voters. Yet the president names voter suppression as a reason for his candidacy in 2024.

Right-wingers of a cynical mindset will insist that Mr. Biden and the Democrats are deliberately manufacturing these threats. I’m not sure. I tend to think the impetus is some mixture of short-term opportunism, a post-religious need to find righteous causes, and genuine delusion.

Two years ago in these pages I suggested that modern liberalism had reached a stage at which all of its major goals had long since been accomplished and that today’s liberals, now defensibly called progressives, are on a thus-far ineffectual search for new policy aims. What I didn’t appreciate then was the degree to which this teleological exhaustion impels the political left to perceive threats that aren’t there.

The Trump years were, in one sense, a hallucinatory parade of horribles, a series of existential threats that didn’t exist. Donald Trump’s election itself was a harbinger of authoritarian government or even fascism. More than a few highly credentialed observers were sure they saw brownshirts marching down Pennsylvania Avenue in the near future.

Mr. Trump won the election, some professed to think, only because he colluded with Russian agents, who somehow knew how to turn Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin to the Republican column in the Electoral College. So outrageous and fraudulent was Mr. Trump’s 2016 victory, the same frightened analysts alleged, that “Russian disinformation” briefly became the new great threat to American democracy. The 2020 election having achieved the right result, the interest in Russian black magic has subsided. But three or four years ago it was hard to hyperbolize the press corps’ and Democrats’ preoccupation with Vladimir Putin’s ability to manipulate American elections. That such an ability didn’t exist, even remotely, tells us how badly progressive elites needed something to fear.

Mr. Biden repeatedly warns of “white supremacy,” which he called “the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland” in a May commencement address at Howard University. The statement may be technically correct, as Wilfred Reilly noted in National Review, but only because domestic terrorism is at present a nugatory factor in American life.

The preoccupation with white supremacy in progressive media—an outgrowth of claims about “systemic racism,” “white privilege” and “implicit bias”—has the advantage of unfalsifiability. As observable racism has been pushed to the margins of American society, progressive assertions of its dominance have become confusing and tendentious. Racism is everywhere and infects everything, only you can’t see it because you’re part of the problem. As George Orwell remarked about leftist delusions of the 1940s, “one has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.” The plain reality is that racism, except in its progressive “antiracist” varieties, has no purchase in American life. Tilting at the windmill of white supremacy is evidence of delusion.

A foreign visitor to the U.S. might be forgiven for concluding that the nation’s consensus-hunting elite are on a perpetual and increasingly manic search for new things to be sad and outraged about—and not doing a great job of it. Consider:

• In 2017 a revelry of panic ensued before the Federal Communications Commission voted to reverse net neutrality regulations. The repeal took effect in 2018, life went on as before, and the alarmists proceeded to bemoan the next thing. Eventually the next thing was Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, which the online left again likened to a fascist takeover.

• Throughout the Obama years, and especially in 2020 after George Floyd’s death, the American left proclaimed in a variety of ways that police officers were murdering unarmed black people in numbers so large that racist white cops could fairly be blamed for black America’s failure to achieve social and economic parity with whites. This turned out to be false, as Heather Mac Donald documented in these pages. For her efforts Ms. Mac Donald was defamed by progressive influencers, but her analysis remains irrefutable.

• In recent weeks, as this newspaper has reported, assorted left-leaning activist organizations—the Human Rights Campaign and the NAACP among them—have issued “travel advisories” for gay Americans intending to vacation in Florida. The NAACP asserts that the Sunshine State is “openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals.” These groups cite new state laws barring, for example, children from attending drag shows and men from using women’s bathrooms. A few gay travelers have evidently canceled their plans to vacation in Florida. They are victims of political hoaxers preying on their anxieties.

I take no pleasure in watching an entire class of otherwise smart and capable voters, politicos and opinion makers constantly unnerved by fictitious perils. Some of these unnervings arise intermittently and briefly—the idea, for example, that the GOP would “cut” Social Security if given the opportunity, an outcome that has as much a chance of happening as I have of earning an award from the American Library Association. Others are constant and never-ending. Climate alarmism is a multigenerational tradition. The ice caps never melt away, mass flooding never happens, and the alarmists never give up air travel or sell their coastal properties. But the panic goes on.

At the outset I asked the reader to leave aside Mr. Biden’s line about Republicans “dictating what healthcare decisions women can make.” Even if all the other threats mentioned earlier were make-believe, the attempt to regulate abortion is real. Republicans, most of whom rejoiced when the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade (1973) a year ago, do want to diminish the number of legal abortions in the U.S.

But this also isn’t the threat to liberal values that most Democrats assume it is. The effort to protect legal abortion was premised, in the 1970s and ’80s, on the belief that an unintended pregnancy would doom an otherwise upwardly mobile girl to a life of working-class child-rearing. I don’t defend this premise, considering as I do working-class child-rearing a noble and far from hopeless mode of life. But that was the reasoning.

In the 2020s, that reasoning is nonsense. Social mores no longer divert a young mother from her desired career. She has far greater access to birth control than she had a half-century ago, which means such a choice need rarely arise in the first place. And if for some reason she still doesn’t want the baby, there are many who do. As a consequence of Roe and an attendant reduction in the number of newborns given up for adoption, there are now far more couples eagerly waiting to adopt than there were 50 years ago. Abortion rules, in any case, are substantially stricter in most of Europe than they were under Roe. Yet somehow European women haven’t been boxed out of the workforce or relegated to second-class status.

The fundamental liberal and progressive tenet, as I understand it, is to ensure that every American may pursue happiness in his or her own way. May I suggest to my friends on the left that they permit themselves the happiness of ignoring imaginary threats?