The Devil They Need
The Left's permanent enemy is not a flaw in its political program. It is the program.
Glenn Ellmers, writing at TomKlingenstein.com, has delivered a diagnosis worth sitting with. The American Left, having discarded God, nature, and tradition, installed in their place a new pantheon of demons: the fascist, the racist, the sexist. The perpetual discovery of these figures supplies the moral oxygen its adherents cannot live without. There can be no return to the old normal, Ellmers argues, because a substantial portion of the country has come to require permanent enemies the way earlier generations required communion. To surrender the demonology would be to stare into the emptiness that the post-Christian intellectual project opened beneath them.
The analysis is theological. The implications are institutional.
Ellmers draws on the Greeks: the chthonic deities, the Furies, the older and darker supernatural economy beneath the Olympian order. He is right that the Enlightenment’s rational society turned out to be a thinner broth than its engineers promised. Human beings require a transcendent frame. Deprived of one, they will manufacture one, and the substitutes tend to be cruder, more vindictive, and less forgiving than the creeds they replace.
What should give Lyceum readers pause is how thoroughly the manufactured creed has been operationalized. The Left’s Devil is not merely a figure of imagination haunting graduate seminars. He has been given an office, a budget, and a staff. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion bureaucracies at universities, corporations, and federal agencies exist precisely to hunt him. “Disinformation” units inside partner government offices and private foundations exist to prosecute his speech. Accreditation bodies, human resources departments, and foundation-funded NGOs exist to identify his disciples and extract their confessions. Tax-exempt money from the Ford, Mellon, and Open Society foundations does not merely fund art exhibits and fellowships. It funds the institutional apparatus of exorcism.
A political theology that required only private devotion would be harmless. A political theology underwritten by tax-exempt endowments, enforced through hiring decisions, lending decisions, and professional licensure, is something else. It is a regime.
Historical comparison helps. The Puritan divines of the 17th century at least had the candor to name the sin and hold the trial in public. The Soviet diagnosis of “wrecking” and “counter-revolutionary sentiment” required party cadres willing to acknowledge that the category existed for a reason. Our present inquisition demands neither candor nor courage. Its priests, clothed in the dull vocabulary of compliance, insist that they are merely administering neutral principles. The Devil must be found; the search must be endless; the accuser may never be questioned. All of this is framed as housekeeping.
The practical consequences are visible in the lives of ordinary Americans. A loan officer who declines to fund a domestic energy project for reasons that have nothing to do with credit risk. A school board that replaces literature with struggle sessions and then charges the complaining parent with extremism. A medical board that strips a physician’s license for noticing something the consensus has decided may not be noticed. Each of these is a small exorcism. Each produces a small pool of the excommunicated. The cumulative effect is a civilization in which the most productive citizens discover that their livelihoods depend on ritual agreement with claims they know to be false.
Ellmers closes with the observation that the first step in confronting a problem is to understand it. That is correct, and his essay is a contribution. Understanding alone, however, will not unseat a theology backed by permanent funding and institutional enforcement. What is required next is the political work of defunding the temples, dismantling the priesthood, and restoring the civic frame that the Enlightenment inherited from Christianity and then imagined it could do without. That work is neither ritual purification nor counter-demonology. It is, simply, the patient reconstruction of a republic.
