The Apostate

 Okay, so I thought Haley Stevens was perfectly entitled to her own opinions on El-Sayed's campaign in Michigan. I even thought it was legitimate for her to try to influence him to tone down or shift his rhetoric or positions. But to switch sides and back his MAGA opponent—as she did yesterday—just two days out from the election—is indeed what Sen. Chuck Schumer called it: a "despicable betrayal" of party and principle. 

There's something almost eerie about the psychology that could go back on one's own prior words so brazenly. Time and again, Stevens had denounced the GOP candidate for a host of valid reasons. Now, at the last minute, she declares that she wants him to be a U.S. Senator. As Lord Byron wrote of the erstwhile Jacobin-cum-Laureate Robert Southey: he "turned his coat — and would have turned his skin"—and that seems to be what happened here too. 

I'm not sure what Stevens thinks she will get from this—a seat on some Fox News roundtable? A fresh bite at the apple of a Senate seat on some future Republican ticket? Regardless, she is not likely to get it, or to end up, indeed, with anything more than Southey did. He found himself—as reward for his treachery—as Byron put it: "Fed, paid, and pampered by the very men / By whom his muse and morals had been mauled."

As Thomas Love Peacock wrote on the same subject, in a footnote to his Nightmare Abbey: "doubtless, [Southey] thinks his name very terrible to the enemy, when he flourishes his criticopoeticopolitical tomahawk, and sets up his [...] yell for the blood of his old friends: but, at best, he is a mere political scarecrow, a man of straw, ridiculous to all who know of what materials he is made; and to none more so, than to those who have stuffed him, and set him up[.]"

Shelley, likewise, in his Peter Bell the Third, refers to Southey and Wordsworth (another political turncoat) as the Rat and the Apostate. And that is essentially what Stevens has become. 

Many people have observed that Stevens's astonishing political volte-face seems to have been motivated above all by personal antagonism. As Nate Silver wrote in a post on his blog yesterday: "to me at least, she comes across as fairly petty and vindictive." 

This too, is in keeping with the personality structure of the typical Apostate. As the philosopher Max Scheler writes, in his book Ressentiment: "the true 'apostate' is not primarily committed to the positive contents of his new belief and to the realization of its aims. He is motivated by a struggle against the old belief and lives only for its negation. [... H]e is engaged in a continuous chain of acts of revenge against his own spiritual past." (Coser trans.)

This certainly describes the characteristic ressentiment of erstwhile-"Never-Trumper" J.D. Vance as well—another great apostate of the Trump era. It helps account for those otherwise quite mysterious outbursts of feeble hostility that one hears from him—that vicious backbiting that he gives voice to on every rally stage, when he is in front of a friendly audience, and which he hides again—being a coward—as soon as he is actually in the room with the object of his attacks. 

Vance, too, is another one of those "political scarecrows," those humiliated props, who are sneered at most of all by their newfound handlers who stuffed and mounted him. He, too, is "fed, paid, and pampered by the very men / By whom his muse and morals have been mauled." 

Fortunately, if last-minute polling is to be believed, Stevens's defection is not likely to be a significant enough factor in itself to change the outcome of the race. Nate Silver estimated that it could at most shift the results by a single percentage point (though he admits this is only an "educated guess"), and El-Sayed is already ahead in the polls by more than that amount. 

And so, when Democrats secure their Senate majority tomorrow, in spite of this betrayal, we can say what Browning did of Wordsworth, in his poem "The Lost Leader": 

We shall march prospering,—not thro' his presence;

Songs may inspirit us,—not from his lyre;

[...]

Then let him receive the new knowledge and wait us,

Pardoned in heaven, the first by the throne!