Another Reason I Detest Doomsdaying

Perhaps the magnitude of the [degrading claims] gave the [leaders] second thoughts...One man, for one, concluded that, despite all the flaws of the court's procedures, which he always acknowledged, the sheer volume of [degrading claims] demonstrated just how important the...task was. As [he] explained in print and [on Twitter], those [claims] showed the [corrupt party] was laying a plot for "rotting out the [correct way of thinking] in this country." In its place, [the corrupt party] could substitute "perhaps a more gross [outrage] than ever the world saw before." Given the scale of the immediate crisis, it scarcely mattered that, by the man's interpretation [of expert opinions], which he was sharing at the time, the [end of the world] would probably begin in five years.

So who is being described here--who is the passage about? Is it Trump going after the woke generation? Is the woke generation going after, well, everybody? Is it someone from the right? From the left? Is it the news?

It's Cotton Mather, getting upset about witches.

The point: the language that THE END OF TIMES IS JUST AROUND THE CORNER! And THAT GROUP IS RESPONSIBLE! And EVERYBODY WHO DOESN'T AGREE IS GOING TO MY VERSION OF HELL! has been around for a very long time.

It gets trotted out pretty much all the time. I grew up hearing it (not at home) from religious people and secular people. It was a kind of tepid, upstate New York, middle-class bourgeois "I'm going to college next year" version of how bad everything was and subsequently easily disregarded.

It can become more passionate and determined. Interestingly enough, it tends to build up not necessarily at the height of a culture's dominance but as that dominance begins to disintegrate.

In Hot Protestants, Michael Winship makes an argument that is echoed in other books about Salem but is especially well-stated in his fascinating analysis:

The Salem disaster is often treated as the defining expression of American puritanism. But it was an expression of American puritanism in its fevered death throes, after it had been thrown in to a disastrous terrifying imperial war and the old brakes on witch-hunts had been removed, both by powers beyond puritanism's control. 

With Salem, the conviction rate of witches in New England rose from 25 percent to 100 percent. The magistrates were not true believers. They were political animals.

Of course, Cotton Mather was a true believer.

The end of everything did not arrive 5 years later.