The drama of 'lawful evil cleric joins party of chaotic neutral thieves for profit' has played out more than once this admin. (Jeff Sessions.) Such moral tragedy provokes audiences to ask: how to be true to law, in a crisis, yet without abandoning evil? nytimes.com/2021/01/12/us/…
OK, joking aside, do I really think Pence is evil? Like, EVIL-evil? He and I don't just have policy disagreements? Let's ask, instead: why does it make perfect sense that Jeff Sessions and Mike Pence would both get in bed with Trump, and both find the experience so debasing?
The short answer is that Pence and Sessions are not that different from Trump in SOME ways, though they are his opposite in OTHERS. (This is not a truth caught by Gary Gygax's moral compass.)
They time-share a political id, consisting largely of white, ethnonationalist resentments. And they are both creatures of ego. But Trump is all id and ego, and Pence has a superego.
Trump wants to chaos-farm 'monsters of the id' on the right, so he can crime and bask, egotistically, in the glory of release - 'he did it!' Pence wants to channel those same dark forces, those 'passions', in a more 'orderly', prosocial (by his lights) upwards direction.
Putting it another way: Trump and Pence have dueling 1619 Projects. The US has a dark past, a splinter in its moral mind's eye, due to the stain of slavery. Trump wants to release resentments, to cause chaos; Pence wants to harness them more securely for socially orderly ends.
Thus there comes a moment. The id is loose. Is it just going to run riot (Trump's plan) or it going to be harnessed to power Conservative Christianity at the ballot box (Pence)?
It really is important, I think, that the likes of Pence (and Sessions) are quite obsessed with 'lawful Christian order'. But their instinct is also that there is no realistic alternative but to draw on very dark forces to turn the wheels of that. That is their 'alignment'.
I can't believe I didn't make the first tweet 'lawful evil cleric joins party of chaotic neutral thieves for one campaign'. That is it. He was hoping to do just the one, and pile up some loot, and gain some experience. Level up his character - but no permanent alignment shift!
(If you shift alignment permanently, you lose levels - at least on some systems. D&D ought to have involuntary alignment shifts. Since that's how it always goes, don't it?)
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