One danger that conservatives face is that Trump’s blunders will call forth a massive reaction from the left — remember, Trump really did lose the popular vote — and bring to power Democrats who are ideologically fired up and eager to punish. In other words, we wouldn’t be looking at a restoration of establishment governance in terms of restoring the status quo, but a relative radicalization of the establishment. If I were a liberal Democrat, I would want nothing to do with anything Clintonian; I would be demanding stronger stuff.
.. Here’s a prediction, based on my early reading of René Girard’s work. If Trump continues on this path of antagonism and incompetence, social divisions will intensify. We will either come apart, or we will unite around scapegoating Trump. We will agree that he is responsible for our problems, and that only by ridding ourselves of him and those associated with him can we restore the peace. Whether or not this is true, this will be the story most of us agree on, because the alternative is communal disintegration. And Evangelical Christians, for whom the left has particular contempt (and who are unbeloved by elite Republicans), will be scapegoated along with Trump, whom they embraced as their champion.
How to Read Girard
Christianity as Destroyer of Sacred Myths —”[T]he election of a scapegoat may in fact have worked to found culture in the days before biblical revelation, but the Gospels reveal how it works, and an understanding of how it works destroys the possibility of it working. If we know the victim to be innocent, we can still pronounce him guilty, but we will not succeed in being drawn together—we will not succeed in founding a culture—with the pronouncement.” ( Joseph Bottum, “Girard Among the Girardians” )
.. Already the Old Testament shows this turning inside-out of the mythic accounts with regard to the innocence of the victims (Abel, Joseph, Job, . . . )
.. The death of Christ on the cross exposed the lie of the scapegoat mechanism from within and offered humanity the chance to establish a new and more mature relationship to the divine.
“Competition Is for Losers”
According to Girard’s exegesis of this famous section of the Sermon on the Mount, the point Jesus was trying to make is that the world actively invites violence. That is why the examples that Jesus uses are so drastic. Jesus refers to someone who slaps a person without provocation and who sues a person for his tunic, which at the time was among the few articles of clothing that people owned. Conduct of that sort can only be motivated by something more than what meets the eye. What the aggressor really wants is to draw us into an endless cycle of violence. “Only the conduct enjoined by Jesus” offers an exit strategy, maintains Girard.
.. Thiel says most business rivalries resemble Romeo and Juliet. “The two houses are alike, yet they hate each other.”
Thiel’s business philosophy is a thorough working out of Girard’s anthropology. Thiel argues, for example, that competition is most often a losing proposition for the competitors. Among mimetic rivals in business, it drives down prices and eats away profitability. And among mimetic rivals within the same company, it breeds needless jockeying for the top job.
.. Companies are better formed, in Thiel’s view, by friends who enjoy each other’s company and share a unique idea, than by type-A loners who just want to improve upon what everyone else is already doing.
.. every religion which is persecuted becomes itself persecuting; for as soon as by some accidental turn it arises from persecution, it attacks the religion which persecuted it; not as religion, but as tyranny.
René Girard’s theories still explain the violence all around us
René Girard, the French-born scholar who died late last year, spent his career trying to understand what makes violence a chronic problem of human societies. While we might assume that violence stems from having vastly different points of view, Girard’s central insight is that violence actually grows from similarity.
His explanation, in a word, is imitation. Out of this insight, Girard spun a theory comprehending literature and religion, anthropology and international relations.
“When the whole world is globalized,” Girard said, “you’re going to be able to set fire to the whole thing with a single match.”
.. The book claimed that all the great novelists — in a tradition running from Cervantes through Dostoevsky to Proust — had made the same discovery: human beings, contrary to romantic myth, have no “authentic” core, no deep source of original, self-invented desire.
Our desires are borrowed from one another: I will desire what my models desire.
.. Girard took the final step in the construction of his theory in 1978 with the publication of a book named after a New Testament verse in which Jesus said he will reveal Things Hidden From the Foundation of the World. Its central argument is that Christianity completes what has already begun in the Hebrew Scriptures: the unveiling and disabling of the scapegoat mechanism on which all cultures had previously been based.