This piece was published on Daily Kos in December, 2025.
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For more than twenty years, much of my effort has been driven by the premise that the good conservatives I thought I knew were being deceived about what they were supporting. If they only saw what their party had become, I believed, they’d reject it.
When I launched my website in 2005, I declared the need for a “prophetic social movement” that would speak moral truth to amoral power. What was needed, I said, was to show “good, conservative Americans” that the politicians they were supporting were hiding—beneath the sheep’s clothing of false righteousness—the wolf of unbridled appetite for self-aggrandizement.
That same belief led me to run for Congress in 2012. In a speech of mine that went viral near the end of the campaign, I again insisted that truth-telling could turn our politics onto a better path if we showed those good people that the party winning their votes was not the friend of their own deep values. Not respectful of tradition. Not patriotic. Willing even to damage the nation in the pursuit of power.
And since that campaign, I’ve continued on that same premise: if only one could succeed in getting the good people of the Republican world to see how consistently dark and destructive—checking most of the boxes of evil—their party had become, they would unite with the good on the other side of our polarized politics so that, combined, Good could triumph over Evil.
On that premise, for more than a dozen years I have been publishing opinion pieces every week, in a very red part of Virginia, as “Messages to the Conservatives” aimed at persuading people to reject the falsehoods their leaders were selling and to be true to their own values as patriotic Americans and good Christians.
But maybe I’ve been wrong about this all along. Maybe it hasn’t been that these “good conservatives” failed to see the increasingly “evil” character of their party, but rather that they see it and choose to embrace that evil by giving it their reliable support.
Which raises a difficult psychological mystery: I have known these “good people,” and a wealth of experience has shown me that they are Good People—in every other realm of their lives. If one knew them only in church, in business, or as neighbors, one would see people of principle and virtue—the very image of the conservative ideal of good character.
How are we to understand how people who live by good values in most of their lives can be guided by the opposite kind of spirit in the political realm?
For years—believing that the problem was that they didn’t see—I have boggled my mind trying to answer: How can people who show real intelligence believe so many obvious lies? Three-quarters of Republicans believed Trump’s Big Lie that the election had been stolen from him, despite mountains of evidence showing that he had lost and was attacking the foundations of our democracy by becoming the first presidential loser to refuse to accept defeat. How could so many believe so obvious a falsehood?
What if the issue isn’t that they don’t SEE the evil, but rather that the evil attracts them?
What if some part of them actually delighted in the darkness built on the Lie, and delighted in siding with a tyrant with an iron fist and a vengeful spirit, like Putin and his American ally?
But the deep mystery remains—how are we to understand that combination of goodness ruling in some domains of people’s lives, while in the political realm they are drawn to the opposite?
For people to become unified within themselves is something of an achievement, and if that integration has not been attained, different “spirits” can rule in different domains of life.
And that raises the question: what is it that can lead to a failure to integrate the Good (the part of the self that internalizes morality) and the Evil (the part of the self where impulses forbidden by morality persist)?
One can see how that particular split might come about: when people are taught a morality that is incompatible with inborn human needs. A person who internalizes a morality too harsh to be reconciled with human nature will not be able to be “of one piece” when it comes to Good and Evil.
When integration fails, that unassimilated part of the psyche becomes a force that can threaten the good order of a person’s self-governance — a subversive element within the larger population of the self that, under disturbed circumstances, can arise as an insurgency. It is there that the part aligned with Evil can seize a province in an otherwise well-governed country.
That lack of integration creates a vulnerability — a territory exposed to capture by those who know how to feed the forbidden impulses of hatred, rage, and the lust for power. And that is what has happened in America over the past thirty years, as an exceptionally effective campaign of propaganda — Limbaugh, Gingrich, Fox, Rove, Trump — has continually inflamed the parts of good people that had never been brought into harmony with their demanding morality.
But it is about both: choosing and not seeing. For this divided self depends on the right hand not recognizing how the left hand is striking a blow for Evil.
A Mind-Blowing Collaboration Between a Human and an AI
My Op/Ed Messages
Andy Schmookler’s Podcast Interviews
The American Crisis, and a Secular Understanding of the Battle Between Good and Evil
None So Blind – Blog 2005-2011 on the rising threat to American Democracy
How the Market Economy Itself Shapes Our Destiny
The Sacred Space of Lovers
The River and Its Channel: Bottom-Up (Flow) and Top-Down (Control) in Fostering the Good
Ongoing Commentary to Illuminate the American Crisis
What’s True About Meaning and Value
Andy’s YouTube Channel
The Fateful Step
How the Ugliness of Civilized History is not Human Nature Writ Large
Major Relevant Essays
Healing the Wounds, Inflicted by the Reign of Power, that Drive Us to War
Our Life-Serving Inborn Experiential Tendencies
A Quest to Bridge America’s Moral Divide – 1999
The Heirloom Project
Knowing What’s Right to do Is Not a No-Brainer
When Evil is a Feature, Not a Bug
This piece was published on Daily Kos in December, 2025.
*************************
For more than twenty years, much of my effort has been driven by the premise that the good conservatives I thought I knew were being deceived about what they were supporting. If they only saw what their party had become, I believed, they’d reject it.
When I launched my website in 2005, I declared the need for a “prophetic social movement” that would speak moral truth to amoral power. What was needed, I said, was to show “good, conservative Americans” that the politicians they were supporting were hiding—beneath the sheep’s clothing of false righteousness—the wolf of unbridled appetite for self-aggrandizement.
That same belief led me to run for Congress in 2012. In a speech of mine that went viral near the end of the campaign, I again insisted that truth-telling could turn our politics onto a better path if we showed those good people that the party winning their votes was not the friend of their own deep values. Not respectful of tradition. Not patriotic. Willing even to damage the nation in the pursuit of power.
And since that campaign, I’ve continued on that same premise: if only one could succeed in getting the good people of the Republican world to see how consistently dark and destructive—checking most of the boxes of evil—their party had become, they would unite with the good on the other side of our polarized politics so that, combined, Good could triumph over Evil.
On that premise, for more than a dozen years I have been publishing opinion pieces every week, in a very red part of Virginia, as “Messages to the Conservatives” aimed at persuading people to reject the falsehoods their leaders were selling and to be true to their own values as patriotic Americans and good Christians.
But maybe I’ve been wrong about this all along. Maybe it hasn’t been that these “good conservatives” failed to see the increasingly “evil” character of their party, but rather that they see it and choose to embrace that evil by giving it their reliable support.
Which raises a difficult psychological mystery: I have known these “good people,” and a wealth of experience has shown me that they are Good People—in every other realm of their lives. If one knew them only in church, in business, or as neighbors, one would see people of principle and virtue—the very image of the conservative ideal of good character.
How are we to understand how people who live by good values in most of their lives can be guided by the opposite kind of spirit in the political realm?
For years—believing that the problem was that they didn’t see—I have boggled my mind trying to answer: How can people who show real intelligence believe so many obvious lies? Three-quarters of Republicans believed Trump’s Big Lie that the election had been stolen from him, despite mountains of evidence showing that he had lost and was attacking the foundations of our democracy by becoming the first presidential loser to refuse to accept defeat. How could so many believe so obvious a falsehood?
What if the issue isn’t that they don’t SEE the evil, but rather that the evil attracts them?
What if some part of them actually delighted in the darkness built on the Lie, and delighted in siding with a tyrant with an iron fist and a vengeful spirit, like Putin and his American ally?
But the deep mystery remains—how are we to understand that combination of goodness ruling in some domains of people’s lives, while in the political realm they are drawn to the opposite?
For people to become unified within themselves is something of an achievement, and if that integration has not been attained, different “spirits” can rule in different domains of life.
And that raises the question: what is it that can lead to a failure to integrate the Good (the part of the self that internalizes morality) and the Evil (the part of the self where impulses forbidden by morality persist)?
One can see how that particular split might come about: when people are taught a morality that is incompatible with inborn human needs. A person who internalizes a morality too harsh to be reconciled with human nature will not be able to be “of one piece” when it comes to Good and Evil.
When integration fails, that unassimilated part of the psyche becomes a force that can threaten the good order of a person’s self-governance — a subversive element within the larger population of the self that, under disturbed circumstances, can arise as an insurgency. It is there that the part aligned with Evil can seize a province in an otherwise well-governed country.
That lack of integration creates a vulnerability — a territory exposed to capture by those who know how to feed the forbidden impulses of hatred, rage, and the lust for power. And that is what has happened in America over the past thirty years, as an exceptionally effective campaign of propaganda — Limbaugh, Gingrich, Fox, Rove, Trump — has continually inflamed the parts of good people that had never been brought into harmony with their demanding morality.
But it is about both: choosing and not seeing. For this divided self depends on the right hand not recognizing how the left hand is striking a blow for Evil.