The continued leakage of reality

the GND says we cannot survive without.

The GND underscores the rise of the politics of gestures that are as flamboyant as they are empty: Donald Trump has his wall, the left has its GND. Second, it reprises the progressive desire to militarize everything but the military, to conscript everyone into vast collective undertakings that supposedly justify vast excisions from personal liberty and the setting aside of pesky constitutional impediments. See Franklin Roosevelt's call in his first inaugural address for power “as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”

Third, the GND reveals progressives' embrace of Trump's political style, a stew of frivolity and mendacity. Remember his campaign boast that he would erase the national debt— then $19 trillion — in eight years, meaning by more than $2 trillion a year? This was ludicrous, but not more so than the GND, which is not the only example of the Trumpification of the left. The Wall Street Journal's James Freeman notes that last year Elizabeth Warren said this on NBC:

“My mother and daddy were born and raised in Oklahoma. My daddy first saw my mother when they were both teenagers. He fell in love with this tall, quiet girl who played the piano. Head over heels. But his family was bitterly opposed to their relationship because she was part Native American. They eventually eloped.”

“Bitterly”? Because of the mother's Native American “part”? Which could not have been much more than Warren's still-hypothetical miniscule part? As Freeman writes: “If Native American ancestry was so distant on her mother's side that the senator has never been able to name any native relatives— and even now her own DNA expert cannot rule out the possibility that she has no such relatives at all— how would her father's family have known enough to object?”

What a tangled web we weave ... . It is now reasonable to conclude that Warren has made “birther” claims for self-serving reasons that remain opaque, claims that are no more factual or unimportant than the birther fabrications Trump concocted for use against Barack Obama. What explains Trump and his progressive emulators? No doubt many things, but begin with the leakage of reality from American life.