We use the expression “created a monster” so frequently that we sometimes forget the literary work that gave rise to it. Since both the Republicans and the Democrats are currently facing monsters of their own creation, it is illuminating to go back and look at Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to get a clear sense of how we get into such messes.
The GOP’s monster is its rightwing fringe. For three decades, the GOP has exploited this fringe—especially its racist elements—to win elections. (A fascinating article in the most recent New Republic shows how Republicans, once active supporters of Civil Rights, evolved to Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy.”) Now this fringe is demanding a major place at the table, even though its views on immigration, gay rights, women’s reproductive freedom, gun control, and general governance are in accord with neither the Republican establishment nor the country as a whole. Karl Rove, who successfully harnessed Tea Party types to support his candidate George W. Bush, now finds himself fighting them as he sets out to support candidates who can win in general elections.
Barack Obama, meanwhile, has unleashed a monster in the drone strikes, which appear to come without political cost, given that American soldiers do not die and most Americans support them. But they are fanning anti-American sentiment in a number of Muslim countries and are also raising very troubling Constitutional questions, especially when they target American citizens.
Obama, like Dr. Frankenstein, may assure himself that he is unleashing this impressive technology for a good cause. After all, isn’t it good to neutralize terrorists? But as Dr. Frankenstein learns, issues of life and death are never clean.
Here is Mary Shelley’s scientist in the the throes of his initial enthusiasm. Notice how, in addition to playing with life and death, he feeds his vanity with pleasing visions of the gratitude that will result:
No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success. Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs. Pursuing these reflections, I thought that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption.
And now, look at how he responds when he comes face to face with the consequences of his work:
I started from my sleep with horror; a cold dew covered my forehead, my teeth chattered, and every limb became convulsed; when, by the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window shutters, I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped and rushed downstairs. I took refuge in the courtyard belonging to the house which I inhabited, where I remained during the rest of the night, walking up and down in the greatest agitation, listening attentively, catching and fearing each sound as if it were to announce the approach of the demoniacal corpse to which I had so miserably given life.
Oh! No mortal could support the horror of that countenance. A mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch. I had gazed on him while unfinished; he was ugly then, but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived.
I don’t know if Karl Rove views in this light those Tea Party candidates who have cost the GOP a shot at regaining the Senate: Christine O’Donnell, Ken Buck, and Sharron Angle in 2010, Richard Mourdock and Todd Akin in 2012. One imagines him gazing at them and having Dr. Frankenstein’s reaction: “No mortal could support the horror of that countenance.”
Obama has not yet faced a reckoning over his drone program. But if there’s one thing we know from Mary Shelley’s story, it will take on a monster’s face.