Wednesday night’s vice presidential debate already feels like it took place in the Cretaceous era, but it is worth reflecting on the back-and-forth over the COVID-19 pandemic because it reflects a troubling arrogance on the part of the Democratic Party that may control much of Washington in the near future.

The debate was not so much a clash of different ideas as the clash between different realities. In Vice President Mike Pence’s world, President Trump has led bravely and well in response to the pandemic. He banned travel from China, “reinvented” testing, and launched “Operation Warp Speed” to develop new treatments and a vaccine that will be widely available by the end of the year. Pence invoked the names of Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx to claim that, absent shutting down half of the economy, more than 2 million people in the country would have died, and even if we did everything right, we could still lose more than 200,000 people. This is roughly the number we have lost to the disease thus far, so clearly, we did everything right.