The Tail of Antichrist

 Since many far-right influencers have recently gone from viewing Trump as God's anointed on Earth to the literal Antichrist (viz. Tucker's recent musings on the subject)—and meanwhile, Peter Thiel is purporting to lecture on the subject in Rome—I thought it might be a good time to read up on the vicissitudes of the early modern Antichrist, as told by Christopher Hill. 

And it turns out that Hill's book on the subject, Antichrist in Seventeenth Century England, explains even more about the fate of Trump's MAGA movement than I thought. Indeed, the book offers a window into the sort of archetypical progression (or retrogression) that every revolutionary movement undergoes once it obtains power.

In the Elizabethan era, after all—Hill explains—there was very little confusion as to the identity of Antichrist. He was obviously the Pope in Rome.

This notion served just about every English subject's ends (except the Catholic ones, of course). It rallied popular patriotism against the invading Spanish; it served to justify the beginnings of British colonial expansion; it provided a ready-made external and internal scapegoat in British politics; in short, it provided a conveniently self-justifying narrative for a new and isolated Protestant power in Europe. 

But as a more radical and thoroughgoing version of Protestantism achieved political power in England, Hill writes—the revolutionary Puritans faced a certain dilemma. Now, they were the ones wielding temporal and spiritual authority. And so, the same arguments they had used to execrate bishops and kings as agents of Antichrist could now be turned against them. 

"Papism" may have been removed from England. And so, by the standards of Elizabethan divines, Antichrist had been ejected from the country. 

But were there not still bishops? Were there not still vicars? Did they not still wear vestments?

In short, everywhere you looked, it seemed the face of the English church was still poxy all over with the Mark of the Beast. And so, the Puritan divines started to talk about the need to remove the "tail of Antichrist." His claws, hooves, and whiskers may have already been cast out with the papists, you see—but the tail remained!

This led to what Christopher Hill called the "doctrine of continuous reformation" among the Puritans: namely, the idea that even after a nominally Protestant and Calvinist government took power, there was still unfinished work to be done in purging the church of all the remnants, marks, and badges of Roman Catholicism. 

It is the same notion that the elder Samuel Butler would satirize, in Hudibras, with the lines: 

A godly thorough reformation,

Which always must be carried on,

And still be doing, never done;

As if religion were intended

For nothing else but to be mended.

To post-twentieth century ears, the doctrine readily evokes Chairman Mao's notion of the permanent revolution: a parallel that was surely not lost on the Marxist historian Hill, writing at the time of the Sino-Soviet split and the Chinese Cultural Revolution—though he chooses not to belabor it. 

("I have barely hinted at modern analogies," he writes, "and this is no place to develop them." But he adds: "The reader interested in the comparative history of revolutionary ideologies should find much in my story that is worth pondering.")

Such, at least, was one possible response to the problem that England had become a Puritan country but still had vestments—that "new presbyter" was but "old priest writ large" and all that: namely, to insist upon a continuous reformation or permanent revolution until the last shred of papist ritual or superstition had been eliminated. 

Another possible response to the predicament would be to move in the opposite direction: that is, to be become a conservative. This likewise happens in every successful revolutionary movement that achieves power. Some of its members—particularly those now holding positions of prestige and influence under the new order, consider the work of the revolution finished, and say the imperative of government now must be to preserve the fruits of victory. 

The English divines who became conservative Arminians and willingly embraced the trappings of high church ritual and clericalism, with which their more radical erstwhile friends reproached them, often took this path. As Hill puts it: "gradually the 'responsibilities of office' and resentment at the criticisms of their old comrades in exile" did the work of hardening the more conservative and institutionalist branch of the Puritan movement into a distinct faction. 

Something similar happened to the American Left, of course*—and has happened to it over and again, every time the White House has changed hands between the two major parties. If all could agree in 2008 that George W. Bush was the Antichrist, by 2010 more than a few Leftists had begun to entertain the suspicion that a "tail" or whisker or two of Antichrist seemed to have remained behind on the Oval Office rug when he left. Viz. Obama's drone strikes. 

These criticisms, of course, mostly came from liberals and leftists who were out of power during the Obama years. Those who came into office and gained prestige from his administration, by contrast, pivoted quickly to defending the government. "Give us time," they said. "Rome wasn't built in a day." The former revolutionaries quickly morphed into conservatives and institutionalists—once the institutions were nominally Democratic. 

It should be quite obvious that much the same thing is happening to Trump's MAGA movement today—now that it confronts the challenge of actually wielding power. 

At the start of Trump's second term, just about everyone in his coalition could agree that Hillary Clinton or Obama or the "deep state" was the Antichrist (as Hill observes, the "imprecision" of the concept has been helpful to many a politico-religious movement past). And so, defeating them in an election and installing good MAGA "patriots" would be all that was required to change the countenance of America and restore our pristine virtue. 

But then came the inevitable. MAGA won an election; but the problems that its supporters claimed to have identified did not vanish overnight. And so, they needed someone within the Trump coalition to blame. They sought for the "tail of Antichrist" in the new administration—the remnants of the previous Satanic order that someone from the Pod Save America crew must have left behind them when Obama or Biden departed from office. 

MAGA had entered its "continuous reformation" or "permanent revolution" stage: it needed a fresh supply of scapegoats each day to keep the sense of militancy and crusading zeal alive; but Democrats would no longer suffice, since they were so completely out of power. And so, MAGA—like many a revolutionary movement past—had no choice but to eat itself. 

At first Todd Blanche was the scapegoat. Pam Bondi. Kash Patel. Then Israel. The Jews—those perennial scapegoats, who—as Christopher Hill shows—were more likely to figure as the Antichrist in Roman Catholic polemics than Protestant ones in the seventeenth century (if only because anti-Catholic bigotry in England was potent enough at the time to eclipse even anti-Semitism). 

But in the seventeenth century parallel, there came a point when many Puritan divines concluded that the struggle within England's Church was hopeless. The institution was too thoroughly rancid with papism to ever be fully purged. The only way to escape the lingering vestments was the sail to America. And so, they moved from preaching permanent revolution to demanding separatism and voluntary exile. 

This too appears to be what happened with the Tucker Carlson/Alex Jones wing of MAGA at the start of the Iran war. It no longer sufficed to try to remain loyal to the administration and reform it from within. Plainly, the rot had penetrated too deeply. The corruption of the ideal had now reached the highest levels. ("What ideal?" the rest of us might be tempted to ask; "when did Trump purport to be anything other than a self-dealing narcissistic maniac?" But remember: we're dealing with the inner logic of a revolutionary ideology here, which must follow its inevitable course, rationality be damned.)

And so, Tucker moved from being the internal loyal opposition—the "continuous" reformer of MAGA—to preaching separation. The narrative stopped being: "Trump is plainly still fighting the Antichrist but too many stray hairs and nail clippings from the Antichrist have been left behind from Biden and Hillary and Obama"; and became instead: "Trump himself is the Antichrist. That alone can explain why his administration is proving so impossible to purge of its corrupt elements." 

Obviously, this is all absurd. Trump is not the Antichrist, because no one is. Trump did not "betray" some noble MAGA cause because he suddenly fell under the influence of a sinister "globalist" cabal: rather, he did precisely what he promised to do from the beginning: he acted as the sadistic, murderous lout he always has been, and used the power of his office to enrich himself and create havoc across the globe out of predictably self-interested motives. 

But as ludicrous as the inner contortions of any revolutionary ideology must seem to an outsider—they can in fact yield some positive outcomes in the end. What Hill shows about the vicissitudes of Antichrist in the seventeenth century is that in the oscillating course of revolutionary ardor and disillusionment, the doctrine underwent a spiritualizing process. Antichrist, at the start of the century, was understood literally. He was a man: the Pope, sitting in Rome. By the end of the century, however, he had become a metaphor: he was the temptation to sin and greed in the human heart. 

And perhaps we are witnessing something similar happen with MAGA today. Back when Democrats were still in power, the Trump movement could personify all evil and dysfunction in society by projecting it onto their political adversaries. They could imagine that things like inflation, war, pandemics, etc. were not the fault of complex human societies with many interlocking parts, but a single set of political actors. 

Yet, once they discovered that many of these problems continued to beset their lives, even after the White House changed hands and the Trump administration came to power, they had to realize that Satan could not be localized so easily in one person or party. Satan must be abroad among us all—a perennial temptation of power to which any party or individual can succumb. "The kingdom of Antichrist, like the kingdom of heaven, was within each individual," as Hill writes. 

And here, I can only think, is the beginning of political and ethical wisdom—even if it is far from the high water-mark of the same. The New York Times last week ran an opinion column that lamented—based on Tucker Carlson's invocation of demonology in many of his rants—that we are witnessing a recrudescence of irrational "medievalism" in this country; and it's hard to disagree with the diagnosis. But sometimes—as Hill's book shows—the only way out is through. 

Excesses of religious irrationalism, like revolutionary zeal, have a way of burning themselves out and provoking their opposite. Eventually, so many things in seventeenth century England had been called the Antichrist that nothing could be. Once every chalice and surplice was Satanic, nothing was. Antichrist became a byword, only showing up in satire and tongue-in-cheek polemics against religious fanaticism. 

So too: if MAGA goes on blaming Satan for everything that goes wrong in society, and Satan's power appears to be undiminished regardless of who's in office, people may begin eventually to suspect that Satan is either all of us or none of us. Perhaps it's time to "own a more eternal foe," as Shelley once put it, that cannot be so easily superseded by a single revolution or change of government. Shelley called it: "old custom, legal crime." 

I think he was referring to the same evil Lord Acton had in mind: namely, that "power corrupts."

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*The seventeenth century Puritans even had their own version of the modern Left's "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" doctrine. Hill quotes one of them as follows: "we shall never use... Antichrist's broom to sweep Christ's house with[.]"