The Enemies List

 At the stroke of 12 today, Trump takes the oath of office. Talk about darkness at noon. 

One of the things he may immediately start doing, after being sworn in, is to lay the groundwork for his long-threatened "retribution" against his various critics (many of them members of his own party and even of his own prior administration, viz. Mike Pence and Bill Barr). Many observers fear that, if Kash Patel is actually confirmed as FBI director, he may quickly work his way down his notorious "enemies list" of former officials—including former Trump administration officials—whom he regards as obstacles to Trump's personal authority. 

It strikes me that it would be a sort of honor to appear on such a list, and a dishonor to be left off it (in much the same way that Brecht, in one of his poems, says he was offended not to see his name on the list of proscribed works at a book-burning rally). If you end up flagged as an enemy of the new regime, surely it means that you have been doing something right. You performed your previous office with some semblance of honor and integrity, instead of just immediately bowing to the lawless demands of a particularly ludicrous self-appointed autocrat.  

But unfortunately, there is a vicious circle, in which the more Trump's goons sense the moral superiority and honorableness of the people they are targeting, the more they feel the need to attack and suppress them. 

J.D. Vance, for one, must realize how much better all of these people seem than him, and how ridiculous he appears in the eyes of posterity by contrast, since he sold his conscience for a pittance, whereas Pence and Barr kept their honor. Vance must know that he is a hypocrite—that the evidence of his past criticism of Trump is there for anyone to read in the public record. And so, he seeks to stifle any voice that might draw attention to it. He tries to convince the Justice Department, say, to prosecute a Washington Post columnist for "incitement to insurrection," just because the latter called Trump a would-be dictator. 

But then, this attempt at suppression just underlines Vance's hypocrisy even more. He is truly caught in a moral doom-loop. 

I have compared Vance in this regard many times before to the poet Robert Southey—that great political hypocrite of the Romantic age, who started life as a radical anti-monarchist, but who became an arch-conservative defender of the Throne with age. (Many of Southey's observers were unable to avoid the impression that self-interest had played a role in this political transformation. After all, Southey went on to become the nation's Poet Laureate, and thereby became entitled both to the flattery of monarchs and to the traditional emolument of the "pot of sack.")

But I didn't realize just how snugly the shoe fit until I was revisiting Byron's "Vision of Judgement" yesterday—and was reminded that Southey too had an "enemies list," just like the incoming Trump goons. In his preface to the poem (which was itself a parody of a particularly fawning piece of pro-monarchist sycophancy that Southey had written), Byron notes that Southey had also provided a list of writers he counted among the members of the "Satanic School,"—"the which," Byron writes, "he doth recommend to the notice of the legislature, thereby adding to his other laurels the ambition of those of an informer."

One is very keenly reminded of Vance firing off his petulant little letter to Merrick Garland telling him to prosecute Robert Kagan for daring to criticize Daddy Trump in a newspaper. "The gross flattery, the dull impudence, the renegado intolerance and impious cant" that Byron attributes to Southey appears to have been passed down to his contemporary equivalent. 

What makes Southey's role as "informer" so preposterous—and Byron does not hesitate to make hay of it—is that he should be prosecuted as well according to his own standards. Byron points to the fact that Southey's own prior radical writings were deemed to be "Jacobin" and "seditious" in the courts, and that he himself appeared to praise the practice of regicide in verse. Perhaps, Byron implies, he should have brought his own name to the "notice of the legislature" too. 

Here again, one is reminded very much of Vance and his letter. After all, if Robert Kagan was "inciting insurrection" in a criminal sense, by calling Trump an aspiring dictator in print—then shouldn't Vance be prosecuted as well, for calling Trump "America's Hitler"? Vance repeatedly said that Democrats had directly provoked this summer's assassination attempt against Trump by calling him a "fascist." But didn't Vance make the Trump-to-Hitler comparison before any of the rest of us? Would he not have to be hauled before the inquisitors too, under his own theory? What exactly does he think the statute of limitations ought to be for "inciting insurrection"? 

Southey had his list of the members of the "Satanic School"—by the definition of which he was himself a member. And so too, Vance and the rest of the Trump thugs have their "enemies list"—by the definition of which, Vance himself should be on it. He, too, has incited insurrection, by his own definitions of the terms. The question merely becomes how much subsequent bootlicking is required in both cases to expunge the memory of youthful extravagancies. 

But all of this groveling will only make Vance more ludicrous and mockable, as he knows. It only increases the impression of "dull impudence" that already surrounds him. And so, he will only try harder to suppress any voice of criticism that might remind him of this fact. The "Satanic School" list as well as the "enemies" list become self-perpetuating. When once the turncoat turns, he has no choice but to double down even harder on his newfound loyalty. He has no choice but to try to stomp out and destroy all of his erstwhile allies, before they can remind him of his betrayal and his hypocrisy. 

That is why Southey, as Thomas Love Peacock put it (in his satire of the Romantic poets, Nightmare Abbey) was forever "yell[ing] for the blood of his old friends." That is why Vance, likewise, must forever be shrieking for the prosecution and jailing of people like Robert Kagan, who—after all—had said nothing more in print than exactly what Vance himself had said just a few years earlier. 

Vance and the rest of Trump's goons can't escape from themselves—they can't escape from the knowledge of how much they are morally humiliating and debasing themselves in the eyes of conscience and the future. They can see for themselves their own cant and sycophancy and hypocrisy. They can't suppress this inner knowledge. But they can try to pluck out the eyes and cut off the tongue of any others who might see these facts too and point them out. 

So that is what they proceed to do. Like Southey, they turn inquisitor. They put together their "enemies list." And so Vance—one-time noted memoirist and venture capitalist and U.S. Senator from Ohio—has "add[ed] to his other laurels," as Byron would put it, "the ambition of those of an informer."