The recent election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency of the United States has spurred a renewed interest in literature. Novels such as Brave New World, 1984, and It Can’t Happen Here are frequently discussed and probably occasionally read. They all seemed to portend things to come, especially the newspeak from Orwell’s 1984. Coming from Trump’s mouth, the English language seemed to have developed a malleability that allowed him to say—with a straight face—anything he wanted, without even a slight worry about reality.

Because I didn’t take Trump seriously for a long time, I just thought of it as Humpty Dumpty language. (“When I choose a word, it means exactly what I say it means. Neither more or less.”)

But I was obviously wrong in not taking Trump seriously and in underestimating the credulity of people who would accept things they wanted to hear, even in the face of reality to the contrary. Such as the coal miners who believed that with a stroke of a pen Trump could bring back the glory days of mining coal and getting black lung disease.

That made me think of another book that seemed to be relevant to our times, even though it was written in another country about 250 years ago. I can imagine Voltaire sitting at his desk with his quill in one hand and scratching his head with the other, wondering why there were people out there whose minds seemed to believe what their eyes and ears should have belied. They had lived through the Seven Years War, the Lisbon earthquake, and a lot of other things that weren’t as much fun as they should have been; yet they believed with an optimistic fervor.

There are any number of things in this old book that recommend it for our current society. For instance, there is wealth inequality. Candide, illegitimate son of a Baron, manages about a new adventure per page and eventually finds himself in South America, in a country run by priests, known collectively as Los Padres. It doesn’t take long for him to understand the economic structure of the company.

Los Padres owned everything. and the poor owned everything else.

And there’s Candide’s look at religion and charity. At this point the poor soul is down on his luck, having been kicked out of the palace for kissing the Baron’s daughter. He wanders, penniless, until he comes to a preacher preaching charity. He humbly begs for some money for food, and the preacher asks him a theological question. When Candide doesn’t answer in accord with the preacher’s beliefs, the preacher chases him off. For good measure, the preacher’s wife dumps a chamber pot on his head.

And there’s the peculiar logic propounded by the characters. “The nose was formed so that we might have spectacles. Our legs were formed so that we might have trousers.” It is a world of cause and effect, but it’s questionable as to which was which.

But none of those things made me think of Candide, a book I hadn’t read in some sixty years. What did make me think of it was a brief post on Facebook that said, “Donald Trump is the best president this country’s ever had.” I thought, “My goodness, Pangloss lives!”

Pangloss is, to me, the most interesting character in Candide, even though he’s absent from the entire middle of the book. We leave him early on, when he is being hanged because it’s raining too hard to burn him, and we meet him again near the end of the book where he is a galley slave (and not a very good one).

The thing about Pangloss is that he is so blinded by his ideology that he must conform his beliefs to that no matter what violence he must do to reality to make it fit. An example:

Pangloss is explaining to Candide how Pangloss had become infected with syphilis. He recites the sequence of infection all the back to a crewmember on one of Columbus’ boat, but says that he’ll pass it to no one, because he is dying of it.

Candide makes sympathetic noises, but is assured by Pangloss that this is way that it should be. “It (symphilis) is an indispensable feature of the best of all possible worlds, a necessary ingredient: for if Columbus, in an island off the Americas, had not contracted this disease—which poisons the source of all procreation, and often even prevents procreation, contrary though this be to nature’s greatest plan—we would have neither chocolate nor cochineal.”

Chocolate is, of course, chocolate. Cochineal is an insect from which they made red dye. This is the equivalency of death and sterility, Charcot joints and dementia, and blindness and heart failure.

Pangloss is, however, cured by an Anabaptist, and the cure only costs him an eye and an arm.

Pangloss, even after the syphilis, being hanged, being dissected by the barber who thought he was dead, and being sold into slavery, hung on to his ideology, that this is the best of all possible worlds. You get the feeling that he had to; if he let that go, he would have been left with nothing. It’s not until the last few pages of the book that Voltaire reveals his solution to all of this. Candide; the Baron; the once-beautiful, now-ugly Cunegonde; and Paquette, the housemaid who gave syphilis to Pangloss finally abandoned their ideology and retired to a farm to cultivate their garden. And they prospered.

Although the latter-day Panglosses seem to have a different philosophy—Save us, save us, we’re all going to die—they tend to hold on to it in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

It is true that we’re all going to die, but not of the things that Donald Trump is peddling.

One of the sadder things we have to face is that when Candide was written, it was intentionally broad satire. Now, it’s pretty much our political reality.