John McCain doesn’t believe America’s political elite is capable of surviving without enemies; his view is the sort of crass, facile anti-American pabulum you wouldn’t expect out of a young Trotskyite from Britain, let alone a successful politician ostensibly in the American mainstream.

We are to believe, per McCain, that America is incapable of coexisting with any independent power; that we have nothing but nemeses and vassals; that the world can be productively divided into the Country of God and the Land of Eternal War.

If you ask him about class, no doubt he’d tell you (if he weren’t lying through his teeth, that is) that each class is locked in an eternal, essential struggle to protect their own interests - and that unless the poor are trampled underfoot with sufficient vigor, his wealthy overclass is doomed to suffer - and this is bound to have a knock-on effect for him.

It’s a ridiculous spectacle to watch someone who honestly buys into Marxism of the master class; they invariably wind up beggaring parody, straining and taxing themselves immeasurably to cut the throats of people with nothing against them. We know that his version of America involves not just defending My Lai and Haditha, Kent State and Florida, but relying on it - that he literally cannot imagine respecting a country that doesn’t incinerate orphans, brutalize dissent, and rend the world astride like a damnable colossus. The malign behavior of the overclass is, for him, not a means justified by any end but an end in and of itself. Nixon bombed Cambodia for some tangible advantage; McCain would have done it to teach those fucking gook-a-likes a lesson.

One imagines, if he survives another decade, he’ll look for a nuclear plant to run on the cheap with a gay manservant.

‘Owners of the world, unite,’ cautions Jesus in McCain’s world. ‘You have nothing worth keeping but your slaves.’

I used to think that the way right-wingers described Satanism was simply stupid and unimaginative - I had never imagined that it was envious.