Screwtape Letters to America 20 -- A Single Authority

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My dear Uncle Screwtape,

In my last letter, I spoke of the four years we spent plotting with the creatures in hope of a new level of chaos. We yearned for days ripe for exploitation beyond measure, when we might surpass our usual mischief and achieve deeds even more infernal. What brilliance arose in the scheming! And what a strangely assorted cast of instruments we found among the creatures. 

Of course, should these instruments fail us, others stand ready with different slogans, opposite banners, yet capable of serving our ends in other ways.

Some of our operations these days carried the scent of older, more delightful times, when the fumes of the Enemy had not yet so thoroughly pervaded the world. A few designs were so delicate that I dare not commit them to paper, should some meddlesome creature ever stumble upon this correspondence.

The key, we quickly decided, was to curtail the accountability they call "checks and balances" in their system. We eagerly desired all the powers of the state to rest in a single person. In ordinary times, we have used this notion of a "balance of power" to confound any advance toward goodness. If virtue arises in one branch, we stifle it through another.

But if ever we might secure free rein in the executive seat? Ah, what marvelous mischief we might accomplish! A single will, unchecked and unrepentant, might achieve in months what divided councils could scarcely contrive in decades. What evils have been wrought in the hands of an absolute ruler, from the day of Ahab to the despots of more recent memory! The pattern has rarely failed us, dear Uncle. Grant a creature absolute power, and he will soon make himself god.

This was one of our chief endeavors. How might accountability be swiftly curtailed? What officers might quickly be removed? How might we in haste install creatures pliable to our will? The creatures themselves, with touching pride, even christened the effort, "Project 2025."

We judged the judiciary already fertile soil, hardly inclined to oppose our aims. A bias was well established toward giving any sympathetic executive free rein. It was a delicious feat of misdirection, for those who imagined they were advancing the cause of the unborn were in fact sowing seeds of far more ambiguous fruit.

Followers of the Enemy rejoiced when that tribunal overturned what others had called the "right" to abortion. Many of them naively believed the practice itself would cease. In reality, the decision merely returned the question to the states, recreating the patchwork that existed half a century earlier. They would be astonished to learn that, since the overturning, the total number of abortions in the nation has in fact risen.

What delight these creatures give us! Convinced the struggle is chiefly about law, they assume that most who seek the act do so out of wanton pleasure, when in truth it is more often out of despair. Those who address causes always accomplish more than those who legislate prohibitions. How greatly it pleases us that so few see the difference. Few victories please us more than a moral crusade that multiplies the very evil it condemns.

The legislature, as ever, was chiefly a matter of control. All it need do is look the other way. We required a body pliant enough to permit the executive’s will, even to dissolve itself should the leader so desire. In partnership with creaturely ingenuity, we foresaw a real possibility. For years, the creatures themselves had been perfecting the art, redrawing their boundaries, reshaping their districts, and bending the rules to secure their own ascendancy. 

How many of our purposes can be accomplished in the name of that charming banner of the "greater good." How little these creatures calculate the evil that follows from concessions made in its name.

We have already discussed the double-mindedness we have so patiently cultivated among many of those who claim the name of the Enemy. Their thoughts have become a syncretistic mixture of ideological zeal, unbridled capitalism, and cultural faith. They rejoice as though a great revival had come upon the land, even as they play a leading part in its undoing.

Others mouthed the Enemy’s name awkwardly, seemingly with little knowledge of Him at all. Their motives seemed much more to advance themselves with the added benefit of hiding past failings. What a boon their success has been to them and, in my view, to us. A harvest of suffering is already following. That prospect delights us almost as much as the power it places within our hands.

Among these cultural Christians and the opportunists were those of hard heart. They soothed consciences -- indeed, inflamed righteous indignation -- by promising to remove the violent offenders among those who were here without legal permission. Such talk made many feel that justice, not malice, was at work. But it would prove to be a campaign of removal far broader and more heartless than the populace supposed.

In harmony with these sentiments was some effort to hide the advances people of color and women have made over the last three quarters of a century. Traces of past injustice are swept away, and advances toward equality in the workplace are dismantled. A blinded segment mistakes this for justice, when it seems rather a program of spite and revenge.

As ever, we assuaged the subconscious fears of those who might have restrained this course. "We survived such times before," they murmured, unaware of our plotting to remove the ballast that had earlier been in place. This time, we would remove steadying voices that preserve sanity. We would take away the counterweights. Our goal was to open wide the door to potential disorder.

A gamble to protect rarely harms if it is not needed. But a gamble in the face of danger yields destruction if it fails.

So far, events have unfolded much as we and the creatures hoped they would. And yet, we dare not rest. There are rumblings that make us fear the Enemy may yet frustrate our grandest designs. As you know too well, the instability of our fatally defective nature so easily turns our triumphs to ruin. I cannot pray for our best. I can only surrender to my own wanton desire.

Your nephew,
Wormwood

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Previous chapters

• 1 -- The Operations
• 2 -- The Veil Technique
• 3 -- The Fog 
• 4 -- Hard Hearts
• 5 -- Focus on Feelings
• 6 -- Blinding Indignation
• 7 -- Spiritual Inoculation
• 8 -- The Fumes of the Enemy
• 9 -- Moral Inversion
• 10 -- Reliable Race
• 11 -- Misdirection
• 12 -- The Very Elect
• 13 -- The Great Wedge
• 14 -- The Revolt
• 15 -- Deepening the Wedge
• 16 -- Church over State
• 17 -- The Great Election
• 18 -- The Great Pestilence
• 19 -- Foiled Plans