A contract of mutual deceit

This is from a 1992 novel by James Lee Burke titled "A Stained White Radiance"...

"I was guilty of that age old presumption that the origins of social evil can be traced to villainous individuals. That we just need to identify them, lock them in cages, or even march them to the executioner's wall and this time, yes, this time, we'll catch a fresh breeze in our sails and set ourselves on a true course.

But [politician] Bobby Earl is out there by consent. He has his thumb on a dark pulse, and like all confidence men, he knows that his audience wishes to be conned. He learned long ago to listen. He knows that if he listens carefully, they'll tell him what they need to hear. It's a contract of mutual deceit by which they open up their flack vests and take it right through the breastbone. If it weren't he, it would be someone like him. Misanthropic, beguiling, educated. Someone who, as an ex-president's wife once said, allows the rest of us to feel comfortable with our prejudices.

I think the end for Bobby Earl will come in the fashion that it does for all his kind. [His kind] wants power so badly, that at some point in their lives, they make a conscious choice to embrace evil. It's not a gradual seduction. They do it without reservation, and that's when they leave the rest of us. You know it when it happens, too. No amount of cosmetic surgery can mask the psychological deformity in their eye. Then, unbeknownst to themselves, they set about erecting their own scaffold. Their most loyal adherents become their executioners, just as Mussolini's people hanged him upside down in a filling station, and Robespierre's followers trundled him over their heads to the guillotine. Then the audience moves on and seeks a new magician."