Susan Glasser, of the New Yorker, embodies a very strange creature you find only in the legacy media: a consummate Beltway insider who nevertheless has no idea how politics actually work.

Glasser isn’t dumb, per se. She’s very smart on paper. Harvard and all that; writer of Serious Books. But to see her talk on the Sunday shows or — my word — to read her tweets is to witness a kind of Joy Behar–level incurious liberalism paired with a childlike ingenuousness about the motives of real-live political actors.

The Behar bit is best evinced by her seemingly inexhaustible ability to be scandalized by the verbal improvisations of Donald Trump. Nearly a decade after most observers learned that the key to Trump is to not think any harder about the things he says than he did before he said them, Glasser hasn’t run out of pearls to clutch.

The guilelessness bit is evinced by her Ron Burgundian ability to repeat the official Democratic Party line on any conceivable issue or topic without a stutter, much less reflection.

This combination of taking both Trump and his enemies at their word makes her a kind of Mean Gene Okerlund, the late ringside announcer of the World Wrestling Federation, whose job was to sell the suspension of disbelief to audiences by treating both “face” and “heel” as if the body slams and steel folding chairs were real and not what wrestlers and carnies call “works.”

The difference is that, unlike Mean Gene, Glasser never gave us reason to suppose she was in on the act. Until recently.

You see, Glasser wrote a post-Trump-Harris-debate column in the New Yorker that numbered among the “crazy and unhinged” things claimed by Trump that “the Vice-President ‘wants to do [taxpayer-funded] transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.’”

“What the hell was he talking about?” Glasser wonders in the column, before answering her own question: “No one knows.”

Ironically, in this case Trump wasn’t freestyling, and Glasser should’ve taken him at his word. Because as no less than CNN soon after reported, Harris expressed exactly that view in a 2019 ACLU questionnaire.

The Washington Free Beacon’s bulldogging correspondent Joe Simonson pressed Glasser and her editors on whether they would correct the column. Glasser dodged and evaded, and ultimately the New Yorker, once famed for the rigors of its “fact-checking process,” chose to stand pat, stating it saw no need for a correction.

That’s not the earnest naïveté I thought I’d seen radiating from Glasser. It’s something a bit more complex, and sinister.

A number of commentators have talked about the affair as an example of left-wing policy so extreme that the Left’s own confrères assume discussion of it is right-wing misinformation.

Are some of the people who do try to disqualify discussion of these very real policy positions just lying for cynical reasons? Surely. But I think it’s both deeper and more pathological than that.

I’ve adopted a semi-obscure term of art from Martin Heidegger, the “always-already,” to describe the difficulty the Left has at looking backward into its own past and, indeed, even at understanding that such a past existed or could have. The Left merely wakes up each day “always-already” on the right side of history. To give an example in the living memory of many teenagers, leading-light Democrats didn’t all switch positions on gay marriage around 2013, they were always-already in favor of it. (Though maybe, with Dick Cheney’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, they’ll now be able to acknowledge that he beat Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to “love is love” by some years.)

This selective goldfish memory is bound up with a thoroughly postmodern theory of truth and its functions. The overriding credo of which is that what’s true today is what’s useful today or, as the left-wing political theorist Richard Rorty put it, that the “truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with saying.”

The now constant command of discourse police to “read the room” is another summary of and slogan for this way of thinking.

Of course, Trumpism has brought a version of this into the GOP. (“This didn’t happen and it’s awesome that it did” is just as much a feature of MAGA as it is of the woke Left in recent years.) But it’s actually antithetical to the conservative view, rightly understood. Which is at its core about unchanging human nature, ancient and eternal truths, and the preservation of the venerable against dangerous novelties.