Thursday
Never Trumper and former conservative talk show host Charlie Sykes recently applied W. B. Yeats’s “Second Coming” to his old party last week on Nicole Wallace’s MSNBC show. Returning to the poem, I realize that it’s more relevant than ever.
Yeats wrote the poem about Irish nationalists in 1919, three years after the failed Easter Uprising. As far as the moderate Yeats could see, Irish politicos were either fanatics or cynics. He sums them up in the passage cited by Sykes: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”
The worst in our case are the white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and Trump cultists, those who fear White Replacement Theory and storm the Capitol and circulate QAnon craziness. The best—although I’m not sure they can be called best—are those Republican cynics who exploit the worst for their own electoral advantage. The best quietly get vaccinated while exhorting the worst to “resist the tyranny,” with the result that many end up in Intensive Care Units.
By filibustering raising the debt ceiling, the worst and the best are working together to make sure that the center indeed cannot hold. They are loosing “mere anarchy” upon the world (“mere” because it takes so little effort on their part to bring about disaster).
Donald Trump would like to be that rough beast, slouching toward Bethlehem for his second coming. Will Yeats’s apocalyptic fears play out. Right now it feels like it.
Here’s one silver lining: although the world looked grim when Yeats wrote the poem—in fact, the world was even in the midst of the Spanish Flu, the last worldwide pandemic—three years later Ireland achieved independence. Sometimes the darkest hour is just before the dawn.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?