Looking at the coming landslide for Sleepy Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, I have been ruefully trying to sort through the thought process of people who imagine that there is a meaningful difference between the Blue and the Red, and it occurred to me that American politics has abandoned the mundane and the corporeal and moved on to metaphysics. The difference between a loyal Democrat and loyal MAGA hat wearer is entirely divorced from both facts and policy preferences -- it is a cosmic struggle between opposing conceptions of Good and Evil.

How anybody can possibly imagine that either party is anything but evil as hell baffles me. But obviously people like me remain a very thin minority in this country, and very few people believe that both parties are really just a single class of grifters, liars and psychopaths. Many believe that one party or the other fits that description, of course.

I think we have to look past the boundaries of geography and time to consider why human beings are so naive about their own political party.

A century and a half ago, Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote The Brothers Karamazov, widely considered one of the greatest novels of all time. I read it in college in the early 1970s, and I remember most vividly a 20 page section of the godawfully long book called, "The Grand Inquisitor."

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The tale is told by Ivan with brief interruptive questions by Alyosha. In the tale, Christ comes back to Earth in Seville at the time of the Inquisition. He performs a number of miracles (echoing miracles from the Gospels). The people recognize him and adore him at the Seville Cathedral, but he is arrested by Inquisition leaders and sentenced to be burnt to death the next day. The Grand Inquisitor visits him in his cell to tell him that the Church no longer needs him. The main portion of the text is devoted to the Inquisitor explaining to Jesus why his return would interfere with the mission of the Church.

The Inquisitor founds his denunciation of Jesus on the three questions that Satan asked Jesus during the temptation of Christ in the desert. These three are the temptation to turn stones into bread, the temptation to cast Himself from the Temple and be saved by the angels, and the temptation to rule over all the kingdoms of the world. The Inquisitor states that Jesus rejected these three temptations in favor of freedom, but the Inquisitor thinks that Jesus has misjudged human nature. He does not believe that the vast majority of humanity can handle the freedom which Jesus has given them. The Inquisitor thus implies that Jesus, in giving humans freedom to choose, has excluded the majority of humanity from redemption and doomed it to suffer.

Despite declaring the Inquisitor to be a nonbeliever, Ivan also has the Inquisitor saying that the Catholic Church follows "the wise spirit, the dread spirit of death and destruction." He says: "We are not with Thee, but with him, and that is our secret! For centuries have we abandoned Thee to follow him." For he, through compulsion, provided the tools to end all human suffering and for humanity to unite under the banner of the Church. The multitude then is guided through the Church by the few who are strong enough to take on the burden of freedom. The Inquisitor says that under him, all mankind will live and die happily in ignorance. Though he leads them only to "death and destruction", they will be happy along the way. The Inquisitor will be a self-martyr, spending his life to keep choice from humanity. He states that "anyone who can appease a man's conscience can take his freedom away from him".

The Inquisitor advances this argument by explaining why Christ was wrong to reject each temptation by Satan. Christ should have turned stones into bread, as men will always follow those who will feed their bellies. The Inquisitor recalls how Christ rejected this, saying "man cannot live on bread alone", and explains to Christ: "Feed men, and then ask of them virtue! That's what they'll write on the banner they'll raise against Thee and with which they will destroy Thy temple. Where Thy temple stood will rise a new building; the terrible tower of Babel will be built again, and though, like the one of old, it will not be finished". Casting himself down from the temple to be caught by angels would cement his godhood in the minds of people, who would follow him forever. Ruling over all the kingdoms of the Earth would ensure their salvation, the Grand Inquisitor claims.

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Yes, the Dems switched sides quite some time ago and now serve "the wise spirit, the dread spirit of death and destruction." This of course leads to some members of the Democratic faith to confusion as the deeds of the Party contradict the faith's tenets. The solution? The Iron Fist of Power, personified by the miserable old Inquisitor, using his Satanic Wisdom to control humanity.

Fighting Satan/Goldstein/Trump/Putin requires constant vigilance -- just this week Hillary Clinton got on TV again to warn us of the metaphysical danger of Putin and the Russians putting wrong thoughts into the heads of Americans, towards the end of keeping Donald Trump in office. The mysteries of digital technology allow for The Grand Inquisitor Party to describe the invisible force of "hacking" as an immanent threat to our democracy.

Such preposterous bullshit does not fly with anybody but the true believers in the Blue Faith, but among those devout Democrats, it is Gospel. When confronted with the materialistic nit picking of evidence, they all follow the example of the Pope who told Galileo after looking through his telescope that Satan put the crescent image of the planet Venus into his head -- and dammit, the Earth is the center of the solar system, you heretic!

The Enlightenment supposedly enthroned objective reality as the final arbiter of truth. Like the Grand Inquisitor, the Democratic Leadership Council decided that there was no point in trying to get simple minded voters to understand the government. People were so foolish as to vote for Ronald Reagan -- so we should start saying what he says.

Four decades later, the idea that human beings are too weak and stupid to govern themselves is in control of both parties. Maybe the Grand Inquisitor was right, and this is the best we can do.

Nevertheless, I dissent.