The tradition of con men and con women in American literature has deep roots.
Last year, when reflecting on the edifying support for Trump, the notion of bad faith appeared germane. When looking at the Senate Republicans, and Dershowitz notwithstanding, this is highly relevant. Yet, the events of the last year suggest another way of being in the world is critical.
Bad faith requires conscience and work to disregard it. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, first published in 1866. comes to mind as the quintessential study of the dynamic. What we are looking at today leaves this behind. We inhabit a different world with different compulsions. In 1857, the harbinger of the modern, Herbert Melville, describes this world in The Confidence Man. Guilt isn’t an endgame for the sufferer, but something another can use to weaponize trust.
WE LIVE IN A TIME OF EXCEPTIONAL, UNPRECEDENTED GRIFT, so much so that our era is turning the history of the United States into one long con, culminating in a lousy sordid ratfuck everyone can watch on television and follow on their smartphones.
It would appear that long ago in America conscience was vestigial, continuing to function, but in a diminished way. It is then a short leap to rapacious, relentless criminal self-interest, and it runs rampant throughout the society, in people’s everyday lives and their institutions.
There appears to be no practical road back from grift to moral responsibility, at least not in any particular situation. What’s left is to determine whether any residual guilt and bad faith lead to more maniacal instances of the con, or that conscience is truly evacuated and grift just builds on grift. Trump’s post acquittal vomit fest still leaves this as an open question.