Political demons

In January the most powerful people on earth—every former living president and vice president, foreign dignitaries, billionaires, and career bureaucrats—gathered to welcome Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Joe Biden smiled as he said, “Welcome home.” A Michigan pastor, Lorenzo Sewell, hawked his own meme coin seconds after delivering his benediction (as the President’s own meme coin soared to more than $10 billion in market value). Elon Musk, the richest man on earth, greeted the crowd with a Nazi salute he later promised on X, the platform he owns, was simply a greeting straight from his heart.

Streaming the whole charade on C-SPAN, I was struck by how these ostentatious displays of power only underscored a deeper powerlessness. All weekend the attendees celebrated the machine of immiseration and war whose levers they’ve spent their whole lives striving to pull. They seemed to celebrate their own degradation, relishing nothing so much as their servility before that machine, their stupefied willingness to pull its levers just as it demands. It felt like the skin-crawling finale to a horror movie, when those who seem to sit at the heights of wealth and power are revealed to be the abject servants of demonic powers. 

I realize that might sound melodramatic. Talk of “the demonic” isn’t very fashionable on the left these days. But watching the inauguration, I kept thinking of a commentary on Revelation that was published during the height of the Vietnam War by theologian and civil rights activist William Stringfellow. Stringfellow was frustrated by Christians who read biblical accounts of demons either as anachronistic metaphors for mental illness and social problems or as crudely literal portraits of otherworldly monsters. He read the Bible’s description of the demonic as a sophisticated social critique, one that gives the key to understanding the dehumanizing systems that run our world and the moral bankruptcy of the supposed leaders who serve them. Like his contemporary Walter Wink, Stringfellow insisted that understanding America means taking seriously the Bible’s warnings about demons, powers, and principalities. The Christian left would do well to study his political demonology.