The sacrificial victim consecrated to the god of any cult must always be pure, clean, unblemished, the first, best fruits of the harvest. Nothing less will do; anything less would be unworthy, an insult. This is why the firstborn was sacrificed, or the king, or children, or virgins, or captured enemy soldiers who, like an innocent animal, were not sullied by any of the sins of their captors.
In ancient Judah, two goats were needed for the most important sacrifice of the year, on the Day of Atonement, because one of them had to take all the sins of the people to itself and be driven out of the City – this was the scapegoat – to cleanse the City and her people in preparation for the rite, so as to prevent any pollution of the sacrifice of the other pure and unblemished goat. As the goat sacrificed to YHWH had to be ritually clean, so did all the ministers of the sacrifice: the people themselves, the priests, and the High Priest. So before the sacrifice of the goat to YHWH, the sins of the people had to be laid upon the scapegoat, and he driven beyond the firmament of the City’s pale to the desert waste where demons had sway over chaos and desolation. In practice, the scapegoat was driven over a cliff of Mount Azazel, the high place in the Judean desert that was the house and temple of the demon Azazel and his coterie (as Olympos was the mountain house of Zeus, and Zion the mountain house of Melchizedek, the Mighty Righteous – YHWH).
The scapegoat was a sacrifice “for Azazel.” If the scapegoat had not assumed the sins of the people, then they themselves would have been “for Azazel” – for, no man can serve two masters. The ritually impure are doomed to be given to Azazel at the Last Judgement. These are they who have not by then been washed of their sins in the blood of the Lamb.
The Atonement and Eucharist assimilate both goats to Christ. Only if the victim of the sacrifice is himself God can this assimilation be possible. Under the Law of Compensation, a creaturely scapegoat can stand in for another in the negotiation of his debt of sin. But the debt of the sin is not thereby redeemed and settled, is not removed as a causal factor of history – for as among creatures in their mutual transactions, the Law of Conservation of Value cannot be broken. Rather, the debt of sin is merely shifted to the scapegoat. He runs off, is driven out of the City, taking her sins with him, along with their debt. But they remain within the system of the world, as an increase of its chaos, and thus of the pressure bearing down always upon the walls of the City from her Adversary.
But Christ takes the sins of the world altogether away from her, removing them from history completely as causal factors thereof (to the extent, that is, that they are laid upon him via the true repentance of creatures who have accepted the ontological sway and complete efficacy of his Atoning Sacrifice – who have, i.e., accepted that he is indeed LORD). As God, and infinitely capable, he is capable of absorbing all the sins of the world, completely. When all creatures have acknowledged him as LORD, then will he be all in all, and at that point there will be no more sin left in the world. The world will then no longer be saddled, as she now is, with the inheritance of sin. Sin will then have no more power to pull anyone down (Hebrews 2:14), and death will have no more dominion over creation (Romans 6:14).
In this capacity to take away all the sins of the world by taking them upon himself, the LORD is unique among beings. So, for him as for no other actor in the history of the world, there is no need for a separate scapegoat to relieve him of the ritual taint of the sins he has taken, in order to cleanse and purify him and make him fit for the sacrifice. In God, sin and its death are swallowed up in victory. So, no victim other than the Lamb of God is needed for the sacrifice at Calvary.
The unshriven Fallen sin eo ipso, and know it; so this dynamic of sin, ritual purification, and fitness for the liturgy of redemption cannot ever disappear from history for any but those who have been washed perfectly clean in the blood of the Lamb (i.e., the saints). Thus wherever Christian belief is weak, or errant, or partial, or poorly understood – almost everywhere – or a fortiori where it is explicitly rejected, the dynamic appears and operates. It is seen in the phenomenon of the witch hunt, which is a search for expiatory scapegoats. Where there are no witches to be found, any Other will do: the deformed, the mad, the stranger, the Jew, the schismatic, the odd, the eccentric. Where the use of such Others is forbidden, scapegoats must be obtained on other terms from among the people. The modern witch hunt is perfectly exemplified in the ritual persecution and demolition of Gerald Amirault, a child care provider who with his mother was a chosen scapegoat of parents guilty about putting their kids in day care.
PC is a continuous witch hunt. The politically incorrect are ritually unclean. They cannot be touched, as ancient Hebrews could not touch lepers. They must be shunned, excommunicated, driven out, their lives and livelihoods destroyed, so as to purge the community of their taint.
If by some great and wonderful miracle leftism were to be eradicated, but not replaced with Christian orthodoxy – if, that is, the libertarian or monarchist fantasies of the secular right were perfectly realized – people would be in the same position as they now are under the secular Left: as lacking belief in the LORD, ipso facto lacking an all-sufficient expiation for the sins of the whole world. Their burden of guilt would then, as now, be intolerable, and incurable. They would therefore never be able to cease from engagement in some sort of witch hunt or other. The maw of Moloch is insatiable, for no sin-offering of a mere creature can hope to shift the debt of sin off the shoulders of the sinner for more than a moment.
As impotent to any durable expiation – sin being, for those not wholly washed in the blood of the Lamb, still an inner tyrant, the Lord of this world – the periodic reiteration of the witch hunt is both necessary and vain. A constant supply of scapegoats is needed. With no enemy soldiers to meet the supply these days, it must be met from the ranks of the people: the ritually impure among them must be discovered, and driven out – repudiated, excommunicated, turned into strangers, “otherized” – so that their sacrifice is not itself sinful, and thus a source of further guilt. It is not wicked to destroy the irredeemably wicked. But the people are almost entirely domesticated to the civic cult of PC. Ritual impurities are difficult to find.
This accounts for the proliferation of rococo accretions to the laws of PC ritual purity. Discrimination in word against coloreds is eliminated, if only by forbidding the use of that term, and its replacement by “negro.” But as soon as no one uses the term “colored” any more, the supply of scapegoats on that score drops off unacceptably. The system requires a constant stream of scapegoats. So “negro” is made a sign of ritual impurity by the cognoscenti, who replace it among themselves with “black.” But then in due course the use of “black,” likewise, as everywhere prevalent, becomes almost overnight a sign of ritual impurity, and the ritually pure use “African-American;” meanwhile the high priesthood of the avant-garde use “people of color” (but *never* the appalling “colored folk”) which we may be sure will in a few years become the new standard of vernacular propriety.
In similar fashion, the success of the civil rights movement has generated a need for some other tests of ritual purity, so that those who succeed in avoiding outward notice of other races must now also avoid outward notice of differences in religion, nationality, ethny, sex, sexuality, age, marital status, dress, customs, manners, ability (intentional or not), intelligence, comeliness, health, fitness, stature, and so forth. Eventually we may run out of things to overlook in our fellows; and at that point, ideological purity, which knows no limit, will have to take over. Global warming, food scares, alarums about chemicals (not birth control pills, SSRIs or tattoo ink – those are A-OK), improper personal practices such as homeschooling, outward piety, or chastity – all are grist for that mill. Do you disbelieve in nominalism, of any sort? Do you disbelieve that we ought never to notice any sort of Other? You shall find yourself numbered among the Other.
One way or another, the unshriven need a steady supply of scapegoats, and will somehow find them. In the limit, the only uncleanness left will be in those who reject this system of merely creaturely expiation root and branch, relying as they do upon the omnipotent and absolute Atonement provided by the sacrifice of an ultimate Other: the Christians.
 The Jewish Encyclopedia’s article on Azazel is worth a look.
 Another, alternative victim was indeed present in Jerusalem on Good Friday: Jesus bar Abbas, Jesus Son of the Father, the Zealot revolutionary. But his death was not needful. Rather than being driven out of the City and over a cliff, he was released to mingle freely within the polis.