It has come to my attention that a significant number of people are getting worked up about the upcoming presidential election in the US. Although it may be hard to see what could possibly be so exciting about what promises to be an unusually fraudulent pseudo-contest between two oddly incoherent elderly buffoons, great masses of people are busy shouting past each other and generally carrying on as if this contest actually matters. This Bedlam-like political cacophony is creating a major mental health hazard for much of the population, which is already stressed by the unfolding economic collapse and the strenuous efforts to exploit the largely contrived coronavirus issue to cover up for it. And so, in an effort to spare you the mental anguish of obsessing over a completely meaningless contest, I want to offer you a different perspective that I hope will put your mind at ease and allow you to direct your efforts toward something more pleasant or useful, and ideally both.
I understand that I am treading on dangerous ground here, but I’ve trod it before. I lost a number of friends when Trump got elected and in place of the expected righteous indignation I indicated that Trump was most suitable as a figurehead for a country that is circling the drain. I had previously (entirely facetiously) endorsed Trump’s candidacy as a powerless ridiculous figurehead of a collapsing former superpower. During the intervening interval, Trump has performed exactly as I expected. Read my pseudo-endorsement and laugh!—or cry—but you’ll be forced to concede that I had nailed it. Although Trump didn’t take my advice and pick Kim Kardashian as his running mate, it’s not too late. Now that mentally unstable Kanye is out of the picture Trump can even divorce demure Melania and marry the more suitably flamboyant Kim (as I previously advised) making her the first ever vice president and first lady! Emperor Caligula once married his horse Incitatus and tried to appoint it to the Roman Senate, so there is a precedent for this sort of thing in the annals of decadent empires. This would make the White House reality show even more fun to watch—as Washington burns.
I am sure that some people will balk at such a light-hearted take on a choice that they see as a very serious question. Noam Chomsky, the MIT linguist and prolific lefty author and lecturer, should certainly be one of them. Back in 2016, quoth he: “If you have any moral understanding, you want to keep the greater evil out.” And he recently doubled down: “Failure to vote for [less evil] Biden in this election in a swing state amounts to voting for [more evil] Trump.” He even formulated a general ideology of Voting for the Lesser Evil (VLE) with many subtle tenets. But Chomsky doesn’t seem to be any sort of expert on the nature of evil: when asked about it in an interview, he rambled on about the variability of human nature and its political ramifications. It seems that to Chomsky “evil” is just an abstract noun denoting something very bad.
Chomsky is a Jew and Judaism lacks any developed notion of demonology. Perhaps it is this culturally conditioned blindspot in his world view that has allowed him to seriously entertain the notion of VLE. To him, choosing a lesser evil is simply a matter of choosing the proper political strategy (by which he means a proper tactic, since a proper strategy would lead to the elimination of evil rather than a half-hearted endorsement of it). Unlike Chomsky’s Judaism, both Christianity and Islam cultivate a nuanced awareness of the Satan/Shaitan—the Evil One, along with the minions he commands. It therefore makes more sense to me to regard the manifest evil of American democracy from a demonological perspective. Viewed through this lens, to choose a lesser evil is to choose evil. This makes the idea that it is possible to choose the right sort of evil through the exercise of Chomsky’s “moral understanding” look like a monstrous form of sophistry because no matter which of Satan’s minions you vote for, you are still consenting to be ruled by Satan.
What follows is a guide to American politics from the point of view of demonology and a prescription for avoiding demonic possession.
