But I wanted to comment on Savonarola. I’m pretty sure he gets burned at the stake, but I don’t want to look it up. I am presently at the point where Lorenzo and Bertoldo are both dead, and Michaelangelo has just started on Hercules.
Be that as it may, listening to his fire and brimstone sermon, his “you are all sinners, and the end of the world is coming” it occurred to me that the moral sentiment is not all that different from modern socialists. On both accounts–Savonarola’s and, say, Bernie Sanders–the world is a dark place filled with corrupt people, and that only the light made possible by following a carefully orchestrated program to be implemented by the only sane, moral people left–Savonarola himself, of course, and Bernie himself, of course–will allow the survival of everything everyone holds dear.
I’m sure I’ve commented on the religious nature of socialist enthusiasms, but I don’t recall feeling it so clearly, feeling so clearly the kinship of “voluptuary ascetics” in the realm of actual religion, and the same spirits in the political realm. They feel a joy in denial, a joy in telling the world no to everything. Yes, Bernie promised free everything. Savonarola promised moral cleansing and universal redemption. But free stuff, in our fallen society, is more or less the same as redemption, and there can be no doubt that the flip side of Bernie’s program was sticking pointed sticks up the asses of all business people who did not toe his line immediately and completely. I get that metaphor, by the way, from a picture from my Black Book of Communism, where Communist enthusiasts did precisely that to someone who did not agree enough, fast enough. Then they strung his naked body up.
I am being a bit fuzzy here in my thinking and following language. I will need to ponder all this a bit more. But I will wonder aloud if there is an instinctual religious impulse–one likely connected to the tribalizing impulse–which is served and expressed by political enthusiasm understood in a religious sense.