Hillary and Donald both represent villainy as seen by their respective opposing sides.
Indeed, they seem called up out of Central Casting.
Central Casting has been taken over by Grim Ironists, Inc.
Donald Trump is the corrupting, womanizing, vulgar Evil Capitalist as imagined by the Left for decades, if not centuries. He is Simon Legree for the Age of Celebrity. From his gropings to his breaches of contract, he fulfills every common man’s fear of the rich man. And he is rich enough that even your average richman Democrat can think of him as “too rich.” This is the Devil as imagined by insecure urbanites.
Too rich is right!
Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is the corrupt insider worried about by normal citizens (folks with normal jobs and families). She personifies the use of a common trust (working for government) as a means for self-advancement at others’ expense. Scandal after scandal shows a dark strain of avarice combined with an elitism that secures the cultural cachet to cover up all enormities. And as if to conform to every stereotype, not only does she demonstrate a recklessness with the rules (the emails), her scandals include both those of outright corruption (cattle futures as quid-pro-quo bribes) and sexual misconduct (covering up for her powerful husband’s many flashings, gropings, and even accusations of rape). She has it all. She is the rural/suburbanite’s Devil incarnate, the abuser of the public trust par excellence.
Yes, it’s all here, folks!
It’s as if the Anointed One, Hillary Clinton, taken up as the Center Left/cultural progressive avatar heedless of likely backlash — the de rigueur advocate for dim class interests under cover of scarcely believable “common good” rhetoric — was designed for no better purpose than to thumb the nose and raise the middle finger to Center Right/cultural traditional values. Her selection was inevitably provocative in a way even Obama’s (a “community organizer” with a long history of far left connections) was not, for she does not represent to her enemies anything earnest or sincere, not even plausibly so.
And so, if one side conjures up as their Messiah their opposition’s Devil, then why should that other side not call up the opposing Devil? And that’s precisely how it turned out. It is as if the night mind of traditional America saw the writing on the wall (Mene, mene, tekel, parsin) and not seeing Darius riding in to unseat the Corrupt, drew from the depths a Nemesis to mirror the enemy.
You fight fire with fire; you fight missiles with missiles: you fight the Devil with the Devil’s Own Shadow Fiend.
Or so goes the night mind of modern politics, a rich vein of paranoia, hatred, and suspicion transformed into a travesty of idealism. Here, the shadows of two ways of life are mounted upon high horses under the gonfalons of Hope and Justice and The American Way, propped up by shit shovels.
Nothing could be clearer. Has not some literary critic already drawn out the archetypes here? The theme is clear: it is all borne of values upturned. The roots are raised as leaf and branch, and the green has been stuffed into the manure. Calling Hieronymous: we need the right kind of realism here.
This is the Election from Hell, where bipartisan democracy has finally abandoned all sense and both sides praise Evil and battle Evil and mire themselves further in Evil, ensuring only Evil. Both sides having cut themselves so far off, in their imaginations and empathy, from their opponents, the two now can only see the worst, and, seeing only the worst, prop up as the Good what the other side sees as Evil, calling it a Day.
Name the Day. Go ahead, name it. I dare you.
The next question, as Theodore Sturgeon of Sturgeon’s Law liked to say . . . What is the next question?
It is not whether Democracy or The Republic can survive. It is: should either? Or both? Or none?
twv
Wirkman Comment 