[Orig to FB]
This morning’s Imma-up-this goes out to Mark Lemley:
People can secular-snark all they like, but president-adjacent figures have conventionally treated the risk of bringing about the end of the world as the ultimate check-and-balance — something most of us regard as a good thing. In pop terms, this is literal (or, better, cartoonish) supervillain stuff: kill everyone for private gain! But understood a little more formally it’s terrifying, because it inverts traditional feedback loops like deterrence. When an advisor comes to the president and says “Sir, doing X would risk nuclear war,” the correct response is not for the president to rub his hands together gleefully and mutter “excellent…”
JDV has made a lot of hay about converting to Catholicism — a denomination that hasn’t been associated with apocalypticism in a very long time. This kind of millenarian noise he’s generating is much more associated with Protestantism and, in particular, evangelical sects. So this fusion he’s spouting is dangerous in several ways. Right when the evangelical movement is finally losing some steam, this kind of effort to reinforce it with reactionary Catholicism is not what we need at all.
It also reveals another way in which Trumpism has become institutionalized. In the past, it was absolutely mandatory for elected officials at that level to show respect for clergies and, in particular, the Vatican. No more: now that they’ve cast the pope and liberal clergy members as “woke,” anything goes — with the feedback loop going in the wrong direction.
I’m not religious, but I studied some theology, and that’s pretty much the working definition of evil I arrived at: making the machinery of good run in reverse. Officials who are actively, deliberately, and explicitly evil are a growing problem, and I don’t think our messy mix of elections and judicial review is up to the task of dealing effectively with them.