Yeah, a lot of people talkin’ ‘bout Heaven ain’t goin’ there, and two of them are Attorney General William Barr and talkin’ if not squawkin’ head Ramesh Ponnuru. A recent article in the Atlantic by Anne Applebaum, “History Will Judge the Complicit”, has been getting a lot of play, and Ramesh, it seems, is a little put out. He’s supposed to be the smart one, not her!
“Anne Applebaum Misfires”, snorts Ramesh, trying very hard to look down his nose at presumptuous little Annie, who apparently thinks that her record as a Pulitzer Prize winning historian of the horrors of 20th century communism somehow gives her the street cred necessary to judge the moral standing of those modern American “conservatives” who first disdained but then embraced the moral atrocity that is Trumpism. As Anne puts it
To the American reader, references to Vichy France, East Germany, fascists, and Communists may seem over-the-top, even ludicrous. But dig a little deeper, and the analogy makes sense. The point is not to compare Trump to Hitler or Stalin; the point is to compare the experiences of high-ranking members of the American Republican Party, especially those who work most closely with the White House, to the experiences of Frenchmen in 1940, or of East Germans in 1945, or of Czesław Miłosz in 1947. These are experiences of people who are forced to accept an alien ideology or a set of values that are in sharp conflict with their own.
Ramesh says, not without a half (but only a half) a grain of justification, that, in fact, it most precisely is Anne’s “point” that there is a significant similarity between those who were patriotic Frenchmen under Pétain and proud socialists under Walter Ulbricht and his successors in East Germany—those who were willing collaborators in deeply corrupt and irredeemably flawed regimes. I will grant Mr. Ponnuru his half grain, if he will grant me what in fact he is most reluctant to either affirm or deny, that he is a willing collaborator in a deeply corrupt and irredeemably flawed regime, one that is neither communist nor fascist, but one that is nothing more or less than the embrace of tribalism, that there is nothing good or bad except as it affects “our side.”
We have seen no previous president, or indeed any major presidential candidate, who would “explain” a deficit in the popular vote of almost three million as the result of “voter fraud”; none who would threaten the torture of innocents as retribution; none who would pardon murderers as a matter of principle; none who would promise to unleash vicious dogs on American citizens. But, of course, Donald Trump has done all these things and more. And yet Ramesh finds it within himself to look away. Indeed, he looks away from both Donald Trump and himself, looking away from the image of what he has become like a latter-day Dorian Gray.
“History Will Judge the Complicit” is not the “failure” that Ramesh pompously pronounces it to be, but rather a painfully accurate field guide to surrender, describing how and why people sell their souls, piece by piece, until there is nothing left to sell.
Mildly Theological Afterwords
Didn’t my head give some promise of theological doings in store? Well, yeah, but I sort of got lost in a whirl of words. Anne argues, with perfect accuracy, in my opinion, that Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Attorney General William Barr are all strongly influenced by what she calls “Vichyite apocalyptic thinking.” Mr. Ponnuru, an earnest Roman Catholic and clearly anxious to show off his theological chops, goes off on a detour and frolic about the “End Times” and the differences between Catholic and Evangelical belief, ignoring the fact that Anne was talking about “Vichyite apocalyptic thinking” rather than the literal Second Coming of Christ. And if the attorney general’s recent speech at Notre Dame, at which he proclaimed that the forces of “moral chaos” are more powerful now than ever before does not constitute “Vichyite apocalyptic thinking,” I don’t know what does.1 Furthermore, I will point out that Norman Podhoretz, not an End Times guy of any stripe, has said of Trump, "I now believe he’s an unworthy vessel chosen by God to save us from the evil on the Left," an unworthy and unclean vessel in which both Norman and Ramesh are now bathing.
I have frequently both slapped and praised Mr. Ponnuru in the past, but find that a few lines I quoted some years ago from MacBeth still fit his situation very well:
For mine own good,
All causes shall give way. I am in blood
Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er.
1. Ramesh is also ticked that Anne suggests that her unholy three, along with Trump, seek to "maintain a white majority" in the U.S. As if Trump did not rise to power by bellowing unceasingly about the dangers of immigration, with particular emphasis, of course, of those coming from "shithole" countries.
