Tuesday
In last Thursday’s post I wondered whether Trump supporters would experience Fantine’s cognitive dysfunction (in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables) when Joe Biden’s helpful programs collide with their image of him as a tyrannical socialist. Fantine is not Hugo’s only character to be confronted with such a dilemma. Javert, the law-and-order inspector, suffers an even more severe case when he discover the convict Jean Valjean to be a virtual saint.
By the end of the novel, Javert must confront the fact that this galley-slave saved his life when he could have taken it. Javert, when he finally captures the former convict, responds by allowing mercy to supersede justice—even though his entire identity rests upon upholding the law—and lets him go. His resulting inner torments are intense:
In what could one trust! That which had been agreed upon was giving way! What! the defect in society’s armor could be discovered by a magnanimous wretch! What! an honest servitor of the law could suddenly find himself caught between two crimes—the crime of allowing a man to escape and the crime of arresting him! everything was not settled in the orders given by the State to the functionary! There might be blind alleys in duty!
Throwing Javert off his stride is Valjean’s saintliness. The inspector recalls witnessing Valjean, then the benevolent mayor Monsieur Madeleine, giving up his own freedom to save an innocent man from the galleys.
Jean Valjean disconcerted him. All the axioms which had served him as points of support all his life long, had crumbled away in the presence of this man. Jean Valjean’s generosity towards him, Javert, crushed him. Other facts which he now recalled, and which he had formerly treated as lies and folly, now recurred to him as realities. M. Madeleine reappeared behind Jean Valjean, and the two figures were superposed in such fashion that they now formed but one, which was venerable. Javert felt that something terrible was penetrating his soul—admiration for a convict. Respect for a galley-slave—is that a possible thing? He shuddered at it, yet could not escape from it. In vain did he struggle, he was reduced to confess, in his inmost heart, the sublimity of that wretch. This was odious.
A benevolent malefactor, merciful, gentle, helpful, clement, a convict, returning good for evil, giving back pardon for hatred, preferring pity to vengeance, preferring to ruin himself rather than to ruin his enemy, saving him who had smitten him, kneeling on the heights of virtue, more nearly akin to an angel than to a man. Javert was constrained to admit to himself that this monster existed.
Things could not go on in this manner.
I am far from calling Joe Biden an angel, but he is in fact willing to help all Americans, not just those who voted for him. He is certainly not the monster that is depicted in the fever dreams of the extreme right. He is not the monster that, for the longest time, Valjean appears to Javert.
So does this mean that enough of the GOP will rise above ideology, as Javert rises above his training, and declare a truce? A recent twitter thread by one Will Stancil makes me pessimistic.
As Stancil sees it, we cannot expect the kind of principled wrestling that we witness in Javert. because Trump cultists are not driven by principle. They are driven by laziness and prejudice:
Voters aren’t drawn to Trump’s politics because of a specific policy view or really even an ideology. They’re drawn to them because those politics say: “Please, think whatever is easiest. Indulge in your laziest ideas and basest prejudices. There are no rules. Save one.
“You must support the leader. You cannot abandon the leader. Support for the leader absolves you of the burden of rationality and the sin of inconsistency. Indeed, faith in the leader can be proven by embracing irrationality and rejecting consistency. Prove your faith.”
That’s why Trumpism and fascism reliably attract the worst and the weakest, the dumb, the selfish, and the cowardly. It’s an endlessly flexible vessel for their worst vices, willing to forgive anything and let them do anything in exchange for loyalty to the strongman.
Javert is not weak, dumb, selfish, or cowardly. He has principles, and when he find these principles in conflict with something higher—when he finds the human law by which he defines himself in conflict with the human heart—he agonizes:
To be granite and to doubt! to be the statue of Chastisement cast in one piece in the mould of the law, and suddenly to become aware of the fact that one cherishes beneath one’s breast of bronze something absurd and disobedient which almost resembles a heart! To come to the pass of returning good for good, although one has said to oneself up to that day that that good is evil!
Later, Hugo describes the conflict as a locomotive of the law experiencing St. Paul’s road-to-Damascus epiphany:
That which was passing in Javert was…the derailment of a soul, the crushing of a probity which had been irresistibly launched in a straight line and was breaking against God. It certainly was singular that the stoker of order, that the engineer of authority, mounted on the blind iron horse with its rigid road, could be unseated by a flash of light! that the immovable, the direct, the correct, the geometrical, the passive, the perfect, could bend! that there should exist for the locomotive a road to Damascus!
Javert’s path of least resistance would be to turn Jean Valjean over to the law and walk away, higher laws be damned. Instead, unable to tolerate the contradictions, he jumps into the Seine. While there are a few principled Republicans who have been wrestling with their souls, most members of Congress are allowing expedience and Trump voters to dictate their moves. They would turn the galley-slave in, wash their hands, and then pretend that the whole thing never happened.
For the GOP, things could very well go on in this manner.