Barton Swaim: "The American Left's Fantastic Threats"

Book bans? Jim Crow redux? A crackdown on gay vacationers? Joe Biden and his party are seeing things.

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.