Monday
One of the paradoxes of today’s GOP is that, at the same time they complain that Democrats represent a threat to their freedom, they want to hand over all power to their authoritarian cult leader. Donald Trump, it so happens, is not interested in anyone’s freedom but his own. This is one of the many ways he resembles Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost.
To be sure, Satan talks a good game. Always he frames himself as a heroic freedom fighter contending with a tyrannical God. For instance, after having been defeated and thrown into Hell, he rationalizes to his second-in-command Beelzebub, “Here at last we shall be free.” The sentiment is repeated by another fallen angel (Belial), who says that in hell they can live
Free, and to none accountable, preferring
Hard liberty before the easy yoke
Of servile pomp.
Satan, however, has no desire to set up an egalitarian republic. He means to be the very tyrant that he regards God as being. If we are to find equivalents with our own situation, we could say that Milton’s God, for us, is the Constitution—in other words, a system set up to promote life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—whereas Satan, like Trump, is a wannabe dictator.
What triggers Satan’s rebellion is God appointing Jesus as His representative. As God announces to the angels, “to him [Jesus] shall bow/All knees in Heav’n, and shall confess him Lord.” Archangel Satan, feeling that he’s been lowered a notch with Jesus’s arrival, seethes with resentment:
[Satan] could not bear
Through pride that sight, & thought himself impaired
Deep malice thence conceiving and disdain…
…[H]e resolved
With all his legions to dislodge, and leave
Unworshipped, unobeyed the throne supreme
Contemptuous…
Satan instills the same resentment in his followers, who make up a third of the heavenly host. They too will be lowered with Jesus on the scene, he tells them. It’s like the way White supremacists see themselves lowered if a person of color (say, Barack Obama) achieves an elevated position. Satan tells other resentful angels that their “magnific titles” will be worthless (“merely titular”) when Jesus assumes power:
Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers,
If these magnific titles yet remain
Not merely titular, since by decree
Another now hath to himself engrossed
All power, and us eclipsed under the name
Of king anointed…
Satan emphasizing their humiliation is not unlike the way that Rush Limbaugh used to talk about Obama humiliating Whites. In Satan’s words,
Knee-tribute yet unpaid, prostration vile,
Too much to one, but double how endured,
To one and to his image now proclaimed?
Time to storm the Capitol, in other words. Or Heaven in this case:
But what if better counsels might erect
Our minds and teach us to cast off this yoke?
Will ye submit your necks, and choose to bend
The supple knee? ye will not, if I trust
To know ye right, or if ye know your selves
Natives and sons of Heav’n possessed before
By none, and if not equal all, yet free,
Equally free…
Notice how Satan gets a little squirrely with his language here. After all, he doesn’t want to do away with all ranks, given that he owes his leadership position to his own bestowed rank. As he puts it earlier in the poem, “Me though just right, and the fixed laws of Heav’n/Did first create your Leader.” (Recall that the very God he is rebelling against established “just right, and the fixed laws of Heav’n.”) So he must go on to say that “orders and degrees [i.e., his rank] jar not with liberty, but well consist.”
If this sounds contradictory, it is, but no more so than Trump claiming to be simultaneously a duly elected president and an authority before whom all must yield. Forget about logic here as it’s no more than a ploy to elevate Satan to top rank. And like Trump, Satan plays fast and loose with the truth. Or as Milton puts it, “[A]nd with lies/Drew after him the third part of Heaven’s Host.”
Standing up against this is the minor angel Abdiel, who speaks truth to power. Think of him as defending the Constitution in the face of Trump’s assaults. “Shalt thou,” he asks Satan
give law to God, shalt thou dispute
With him the points of liberty, who made
Thee what thou art, and formed the powers of Heav’n
Such as he pleased, and circumscribed their being?
We know from experience, Abdiel goes on to say, how much we benefit from God’s law:
Yet by experience taught we know how good,
And of our good, and of our dignity
How provident he is, how far from thought
To make us less, bent rather to exalt
Our happy state…
Abdiel concludes, “[A]ll honor to him done/Returns our own,” and we could say that same about our Constitution. We all benefit when we honor our democracy.
Satan, needless to say, is not impressed by Abdiel’s words and proceeds to take all credit for his current elevated state. It’s like people who think they pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps without acknowledging being surrounded by a system that made it all possible. “Who saw,” Satan asks Abdiel,
When this creation was? rememberest thou
Thy making, while the Maker gave thee being?
We know no time when we were not as now;
Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised
By our own quick’ning power…
Our puissance is our own, our own right hand
Shall teach us highest deeds, by proof to try
Who is our equal: then thou shalt behold
Whether by supplication we intend
Address, and to begird th’ Almighty Throne
Beseeching or besieging.
The besieging occurs is short order as Satan, like Trump, attacks Heaven’s Capitol. Trump has not been thrown into a hellish prison–not yet, anyway–but the January 6 Congressional hearings have established beyond all doubt that, like Satan, he was the primary instigator of the insurrection.
Our own response must be to cleave to the Constitution as Abdiel cleaves to God. In Milton’s words,
Among the faithless, faithful only he;
Among innumerable false, unmoved,
Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified
His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal;
Nor number, nor example with him wrought
To swerve from truth, or change his constant mind
Though single.
“His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal.” Yes!