Is it just me, or are lots of people in the new normal of post-Trump America asking themselves if it is just them? Does anyone else scan the headlines and think, “either these guys are crazy or I am?” Every week, it seems, another multi-trillion dollar proposal for new spending emerges from the White House think tank, lovingly watched over by the media, and nobody bats an eye. Has this ever happened before? Can anyone believe that the Left’s most extravagant utopian dreams only awaited the accession to the presidency of a man who appears to be cognitively impaired, but is certainly a political hack, to wave his magic wand and create these once far out-of-reach trillions ex nihilo? And yet the world does believe it, apparently, or enough of the world to prevent those of us who don’t from being heard outside our right-wing media ghetto.
Here’s another example, from the misnamed “Intelligencer” of New York magazine, heading up an article by Jonathan Chait: “How the American Right Lost Its Chance to Get Sane on Climate Change.” See what I mean? If this lunatic—who to me seems bent on the destruction of industrial society and the impoverishment of the whole world for the sake of a slight delay, at best, in the putatively inexorable rise of atmospheric and oceanic temperatures—thinks that he’s the sane one, just as I think of myself, how do I know that I’m not the lunatic? I suppose one can only rely