The Devil, imagined by Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky's novel, The Brothers Karamazov, says that he is a vaudevillian, a tummler out to make trouble, and without him life would be an intolerable, insufferable bore.
So it is with some surprise that the American Left is so intent on the truth, righteous behavior, and a serious moral code of conduct. Such purists are not unknown or uncommon in America and have been around since the arrival of the Puritans four hundred years ago.
Those early settlers were fierce moral absolutists - there was only one way, the right way, and they abjured any other. The witch trials in Salem were only a superficial indication of the harsh, punitive Protestantism that arrived on the Mayflower. The religious tenor of Plymouth and the Massachusetts Bay Colony was strict, unbending, and abiding; but even then John Davenport and his followers felt it was not strict enough and set off to found new, more disciplined settlements.
New Haven was a perfect site for the new, more fundamental colony that Davenport envisaged - deep water port, moderate climate, peaceful Indians, and the chance for a new, more God-fearing home. The New Haven Plantations as they were called fulfilled his every dream, and the colony became a fierce enabler of deep Puritan belief.
The deacons and proctors of the Salem trials were after the truth, for in those pre-modern days, there was believed to be such a thing - if God said it, it was true, and their job was to rid the town of falsehood, apostasy, and the very presence of the Devil who represented all that was false.
They devised specious tests of faith and fidelity that no woman could pass, and summarily convicted them of Satanic possession. Not a little misogyny was in the trial judgements - most men of the town were glad to be rid of what they considered to be natural born sexual witches, harridans, and unfaithful slatterns.
'We are doing God's work', said Hiram Potter, Chief Judge and Prosecutor at the trials, 'and let there be no doubt about it. The Devil and his evil vessels will go up in smoke, burned at the stake, never more to curse the sacred ground of Salem'
And so four-hundred years later American progressives, the heirs of Hiram Potter and the burning judges of Salem, carry out their own witch trials. From the same presumptuous moral posture - the possession of the truth - they go about in search of the Devil.
The persecution of Donald Trump in the years prior to his second inauguration was a perfect example of Salem-esque witch hunting. Progressives made an a priori assumption - that Donald Trump was evil and possessed of the Devil - and that any measure of censure, attack, or moral villainy was justified in the name of truth.
Yet this moral certitude and missionary zeal did not stop with the President of the United States. It extended to the population at large, one which, according to progressives, was a society of retrograde sinners - vile haters of women, gay men, blacks, believers in white supremacy.
The campaign to institute a New Age of blackness, gayness, and female authority was not just a movement to promote a new, more inclusive way of thinking. It was a hateful campaign designed to marginalize, humiliate, and eliminate any and all who did not see and accept this particular version of the truth.
Enter Donald Trump, a man with not one sanctimonious, obeisant bone in his body; a man of outrageous ego, middlebrow tastes, and Borscht Belt humor; a man for whom any claim to 'the truth' was fanciful and ignorant.
There was no such thing and there never was. It didn't take Browning, Durrell, or Kurosawa to write about the nature of perceptive plurality - four different people will see four different events - to convince him or anyone else about the subjective nature of truth. Every criminal trial's 'eyewitnesses' see what they want to see, and express as though it were the absolute truth, some confected version conditioned by prejudice, a gassy meal, a blandishing wife, or getting out of the wrong side of the bed.
Not only that, Trump made a mockery of progressive sanctimony about 'the truth'. He told enormous whoppers, impossibly exaggerated tales, and marvelously fantastical versions of every political issue. He made fun of the formerly protected classes of progressive inclusivity - tarted up cross-dressing men were ridiculous; black people didn't belong on the top of the human pyramid but in jail; diversity was nothing more than a stew of leftovers. Compassion, consideration, and accommodation were for nice guys who always finish last.
Trump supporters got the picture - it was not what he said but what he meant, and they were accomplished deconstructionists. His wild harangues were meant to rile up the opposition and to send them into paroxysms of frustration and hysteria. His agenda was twofold - first to honor conservative principles; and second to humiliate the poseurs of the Left. With joy his troops ransacked the progressive holy of holies - the bureaucracy, the home of caretaker government, the bloated do-nothing cubicles of waste and fraud.
With delight he sent ICE out to round up illegal immigrants and the National Guard to clean up the pestilential slums of American cities; and as a last, defining blow to progressive sensibilities, he tore down the East Wing of the White House to replace it with an oversized, garish, tarted up, tacky ballroom.
He was not out to destroy government and install himself as regent of a monarchy, but to reduce government to a manageable size and return it to originalist non-interventionary principles. Immigrants weren't all rapists, drug dealers, and pornographers, but it helped to portray them as such, stressing the point that Biden's open door policy had led to an unvetted jamboree.
He criticized the addled, dysfunctional ghetto and its ho's, pimps, and pushers but stressed equal opportunity for those willing to conform to standard middle class values. He singled out the most outrageous queens of the transgender movement, incensed that they could be teaching kindergarteners, but had no desire for pogroms or Kristallnacht roundups.
Every American except for the fevered Left got it. Only progressives, arbiters of 'the truth' saw devilishness, hatred, monomania, and regressive immorality. Ordinary Americans had had quite enough of the preposterous propositions of the Left and were insulted that these lame ideas were being promoted as the truth, the right way, and the only way.
What Trump supporters like best about the man is his absolute absence of sanctimony and self-righteousness. They love his bombast, his Borscht Belt no-holds-barred comedy, his political incorrectness, and his circus act performances. Americans had suffered through four years of the most pitifully morose breast-beating, fault-finding, and unhinged presumptuousness, and were delighted that the lid was off.
Their man says whatever he wants whenever he wants. He is the very epitome of the outspoken, fiercely independent American, an unabashed lover of glitz, glamour, arm candy, yachts, and garish resorts. One of us....one of us.
Principle can exist within a wild and wooly environment of impossible fiction - and the great comedic act of Donald Trump does nothing to diminish his commitment to serious conservatism; but since life is nothing but exaggeration, subjective conclusions, and a jamboree of tinsel, sequins, and fake everything, why not enjoy the ride?
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