If the tech mavens are right, we will all soon live in the metaverse. But since the dictionary defines this mystical place as “a highly immersive virtual world where people gather to socialize, play, and work,” you might ask whether we don’t already live there.
For years political and cultural leaders in the real world have been creating a virtual, make-believe one, an artificially constructed reality of fable and allegory in which performative posturing is the modus operandi. The idea is that by operating in this world they…
Amanda Gorman reads her poem ‘The Hill We Climb’ during President Biden’s inauguration at the Capitol, Jan. 20, 2021.
Photo: Patrick Semansky/Associated Press
If the tech mavens are right, we will all soon live in the metaverse. But since the dictionary defines this mystical place as “a highly immersive virtual world where people gather to socialize, play, and work,” you might ask whether we don’t already live there.
For years political and cultural leaders in the real world have been creating a virtual, make-believe one, an artificially constructed reality of fable and allegory in which performative posturing is the modus operandi. The idea is that by operating in this world they signal their own virtue, relevance and even meaning.
The public-policy class seems to have decided that an artificial reality is preferable to the actual one. Take the pandemic. The coronavirus seems essentially to have defied almost all policy measures to mitigate it. So instead our leaders have chosen ersatz rules that signal whether you’re part of their reality: mask wearing, social distancing, vaccine mandates. There’s little evidence to support claims for the efficacy of any of these measures, but they’ll serve nicely as emblems of belonging in your own universe.
Politics more widely seems to be an exercise in amateur dramatics, striking attitudes to impress your public. Democrats in Congress have been doing this for months, pretending to themselves and the rest of us that their measures are both needful and likely to succeed, when they are neither. The process culminated last week in the spectacle of Majority Leader
Chuck Schumer
making Democratic senators go through the motions of voting on measures they all knew were doomed.
The illusionary progressive world is an alternate reality in which they, the heroes, smite the hordes of ignorant, malevolent villains.
Joe Biden’s
dark fairy tale about the country returning to Jim Crow is not merely an egregious political falsehood. It is a part of the elaborately constructed fable that Democrats have established as the political unreality in which they insist we live: a country in imminent peril from a sudden revival of an ancient hatred—the same with the Justice Department’s alarms about the existential threat posed to the republic from white supremacists.
To ridicule this isn’t to deny that there are real threats. But responsible leaders would address these threats while also keeping a sense of perspective. Instead they do the opposite, and the nightmare-scape they have constructed serves their political ends by inducing a kind of paranoia, a permanently heightened sense of national emergency.
Amanda Gorman,
the young woman who declaimed some stanzas of undergraduate verse at Mr. Biden’s inauguration a year ago and was instantly declared the new
Sappho,
wrote in the
New York Times
last week that she was terrified that she was going to be assassinated. Because, you know, angry white supremacists are itching to take out overrated poets.
Republicans create their own fantasy world too. The Jan. 6 operation was mostly a performative exercise in virtual unreality—“LARPing” (live action role-playing), as some have termed it. While many were simply deluded, others, with their costumery and their Gadsden flags, self-shot in real time on their smartphones, surely knew that no amount of shouting “Hang
Mike Pence
” was going to make an iota of difference to the outcome that day. It was a thespian insurrection, not a real one.
In many ways
Donald Trump’s
political career has been built around a clever manipulation of this rich vein of make-believe. Mr. Trump, who triumphed in the fake world of reality television, has always been at his best as a kind of impresario of grudge—personal and cultural—than as an executive with a plausible plan for restoring American greatness.
Members of Congress seem to see themselves primarily as auditioning for positions as cable news hosts, where they can elaborate their fantasies much more lucratively. Where do you see Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in five years—working her way up the ladder to a committee chairmanship, or peddling artificial realities for MSNBC audiences at 20 or 30 times her congressional salary?
Where does this all come from? When did we leave mundane reality and enter this political and cultural metaverse?
Technology, I suspect, has played an important role. Not just the ubiquity of videogames and online identities, but social media, the ultimate reality-distorting platforms.
The same temptation—to create and confine ourselves to a world of our own making—is a powerful force in politics. Governing is hard. Building majorities for ideas, implementing policies in a complex environment, is forbidding. Why not just create our own reality and sell it to our believers?
The ironic reality—I use the word carefully—is that the real America is a much better country than the fabulists of all sorts tell us it is or want it to be. Real Americans aren’t perfect. But neither are they the diabolical fantasy figures that exist in the minds of politicians, journalists and entertainers.
It’s those so-called leaders, experts and authorities who need to create the Manichaean world they feel entitled to remake. Perhaps they could all go and live in the metaverse and leave this world to the rest of us.
Potomac Watch: A rare press conference with President Joe Biden talking about his first year in office highlighted some glaring inconsistencies. Images: Getty Images/Care In Action Composite: Mark Kelly
The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition
