What is it that compels so many leftist politicians to make up heroic stuff like this? Why are progressives in particular so extraordinarily needy? It might just be the insecurity latent in many politicians, but I think there is a subtle or unconscious ideological explanation: when a progressive take as a premise that there is a “side of History” going in a progressive direction, then why do we need progressive politicians? The progressive worldview implicitly—and often explicitly—denigrates human agency: hence the progressive obsession with victim classes and “structures” of oppression. Progressive politicians view themselves as heroes to speed up the inexorable march of the “side of History” (just go back and take in Woodrow Wilson’s revealing profession of exactly this disposition in his essay “Leaders of Men“), but this instantiates a deep psychological need to impute some personal heroism to their own stories that are otherwise lacking. Spending another billion dollars reaches a point of diminishing personal satisfaction pretty fast.

Margaret Thatcher famously remarked that the problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money. The corollary for leftist politicians like Biden and Walz is that leftists quickly run out of real heroism of their own.