The liberal media freakout about the loss of historically radical legislation is providing a sad case study of psychosis.
Witness what Jon Meacham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian usually promoted as a voice of thoughtful centrism, said on MSNBC Friday morning. As one of the panelists for Joe Scarborough on Morning Joe, Meacham was lamenting the inability of President Joe Biden and congressional “progressives” to bully into law one of the most expensive bills in history, not to mention one with some of the most controversial policy choices.
As a backdrop, consider that under the status quo, meaning if Biden’s $5.5 trillion social spending bill does not pass, the federal government will still be spending more money than at any time in history, while running by far the biggest debt in U.S. history, for a nation already enjoying an encouraging 5.2% unemployment rate — below what was once considered “full employment.” In sum, the greater risk is too much spending for too little reason, not the other way around.
But to Meacham, the thought of this unprecedented, radical bill not passing brings fears of the “end days” — or something.
After prefacing his comments with the disclaimer that “I don’t want to be hyperbolic,” Meacham did just that. He said that Democrats “right now have democracy with a lower-case ‘d’ in their hands.” Then he offered a completely off-point segue about how too many people still believe former President Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen. Meacham made it sound as if, just by virtue of opposing Trump, Biden deserved to have his own radical agenda passed.
Biden, he said, “has promised the American people, insofar as any human being can promise, that constitutional republic, that this democracy, can deliver for them.” Unless the bill passes, he said, it’s almost impossible to “argue that the system works.”
As if “delivering” a radical bill opposed by half the country is the measure of whether the constitutional republic can survive. Never mind the reality that giving opponents the chance to slow down the train until the public actually knows what’s in the bill is exactly how the system was deliberately, and wisely, designed.
Perversely pretending that the far Left of the Democratic Party has offered compromise, Meacham continued: “If you’re a progressive Democrat, you’re thinking, ‘Wait a minute, this whole other party is just this implacably opposed illiberal, nonreasoning force. Why do we have to give in? Why do we have to compromise on everything?’ Well, in this case, history and experience have put the fate of the Constitution in your hands. And so that’s why. This is not about politics. This is not a fiscal cliff. This might be a constitutional cliff.”
For emphasis, he said the two less-liberal holdouts among Senate Democrats, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, “have become two of the most important people in the Western world, you know, since Hobbs and Locke.” Really. Then: “Western liberalism has not had so much riding on two people.”
By “Western liberalism,” Meacham meant not left-wing ideology but the modern political philosophy of the whole post-Enlightenment Western world.
A few years ago, someone popularized the expression “nonsense on stilts,” which by comparison makes Meacham’s scaremongering an example of poppycock on a rocket ship. If Biden’s monstrosity doesn’t pass, both sides will regroup and maybe even negotiate, and then something more modest will result while the “system” operates as it has for 233 years.
But if there’s a Pulitzer Prize for hyperventilation and hyperbole, Meacham will win it, hands down.
