THE DELUSIONAL DEMOCRATS
Book bans? Jim Crow redux? A crackdown on gay vacationers? Joe Biden and his party are seeing things.
By
June 23, 2023 .
President Biden’s re-election announcement video warned that “MAGA extremists are lining up” to repeal “bedrock freedoms.” Uh oh—what freedoms? The extremists plan on “dictating what healthcare decisions women can make, banning books, and telling people who they can love, all by making it more difficult for you to be able to vote.”
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.
