Destroying the Antichrist

Yesterday morning, there she was. The former communications director of the Biden White House, one Kate Bedingfield was on CNN, offering her expert analysis of the current political scene.

She looked like a perfectly rational human organism, until she opened her mouth. Then she ramped up her hysteria and proclaimed that Donald Trump was an existential threat to American democracy.

Speaking about empowerment. As we celebrate American independence we must recognize that it has given us dolts like Kate Bedingfield who is hard at work, now that she has retired from the White House, fomenting mass hysteria. 

We have already been told that the greatest existential threat to America is bad weather. And we have learned that the Supreme Court just threatened to make the American president into a king. 

Behind the notion that Trump is an existential threat to the Democratic Party-- which is what this really means-- lies a notion coined by one Laurence Tribe, emeritus law professor from Harvard. 

According to Tribe, notable leftist who once declared that Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor did not know as  much as she thought she knew about the law, Donald Trump was the Devil Incarnate, aka, the Antichrist.

To understand this rhetorical ploy we should recall the closing chapters of the book of Revelation. Call it the end of history or the end of days, the Biblical story tells us that when Christ returns to earth he will smite the Antichrist. Then the Heavenly City of Jerusalem will descend on the planet, as the bride of Christ.

Call it the City of God. Call it the Platonic Republic. You might even follow the lead of one Carl Becker who entitled a famous book: The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers.

More recently, one Francis Fukuyama, a born-again neo-Hegelian, said that history was over and that liberal democracy had prevailed. It was Enlightenment era eschatology. It was of a piece with prior reflections about the City of God and the Republic and the Heavenly City.

Follow the logic of the narrative and you will conclude that no one needs to build a great city on the earth; one needs but destroy the obstacle that is preventing it from arriving.

So, it is not about building a city, but about removing an impediment. Once that is done the Heavenly City will, as if by magic, descend on the planet.

That is, you must await the second coming of Christ, or of a secular equivalent. At that point Christ will destroy the Antichrist and will save you the trouble of building anything. 

In today’s political parlance, the Antichrist is named Donald Trump. His detractors believe that he is the root cause of everything that goes wrong. They do not bother to build anything; they are dedicated to the task of destroying Trump.

One understands that this narrative does not need a builder. It must appeal especially to people who are incapable of building anything. 

If you introduce a builder, he is obviously an obstacle to the more important task of ridding the world of the Antichrist. 

Your option is to denounce the root of all evil, the Antichrist, or else, to go out and to build something. The first requires that you live in a fictional world. The second requires you to deal with reality.

So the anti-Trumpers are selling a narrative. They are offering you a place within the narrative. And they promise that once they smite the Antichrist a new world of justice and peace will descend on the planet.

We note that the building option requires far more intelligence and competence than the option that involves destroying the Antichrist. Perhaps that is why people with more limited intelligence and more limited experience in the world are drawn to the solution wherein destroying the Antichrist causes the Heavenly City to descend on the planet… automatically.

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