The People of the Light and the Demons of the Dark: Manicheanism in Contemporary America

For whatever reason, biological or cultural, humans tend to think in either/or or binary terms. Since humans settled down into agricultural or trading communities and multiplied as a result, human groups whether clans, tribes, city-states, kingdoms, states, or nations, have had to, in order to define themselves, have had to, in order to identify themselves corporately as a group, had to define themselves against some other.

Generally such us and them distinctions code the us as good and the not us, the other, in more negative hues. The ancient world, for instance, had its Athenians and its Spartans and its Greeks and its "barbaros". The Mediaeval era had its Orthodox Christians and Roman Catholic Christians, its Christians and Jews, and its Christians and Muslims. The modern era had its English and Dutch, its English and Spanish, its English and French, and its French and Germans.

The United States, a European settler society, has also been characterised by a manichean binarism and it was characterised by Manichean binarism even before it was born. The Colonial era, for instance, had its Protestants and Catholics and its English and French. The American 19th century had its WASP "true Americans" and its Catholics, Mormons, Masons, Chinese, Japanese, Irish, and its Southern and Eastern European un Americans. Catholics, Mormons, Masons, and Chinese faced mob violence and death--an extermination order was issued against Mormons and the Mormon leader and prophet Joseph Smith was assassinated in the mid 19th century--during the era while Southern and Eastern Europeans were, in the late 19th and early 20th century, limited from entering the sacred precincts of WASP America. Chinese and Japanese weren't even allowed in the US at all thanks to agreements between political elites. In the early and mid 20th century Jehovah's Witnesses faced mob violence because of their refusal to salute the holy and sacred American flag, symbol of the American religion of nationalism. In the late 19th century such "un-Amrican groups" as communists, anarchists, and socialists were attacked, targeted by the forces of order, and found guilty of insurrection in a series of American show trials.

Some Americans want to believe that such violence, verbal and physical, ended with World War II. In really, however, it didn't. In retrospect, the depression era and particularly the World War Two era and 1950s, which ended in 1964, seemed like an era of American consensus and the end of ideology to those Americans living in the age of the so called greatest generation and the early years of the baby boom generation. In truth, the era from the New Deal to the end of the Great Society actually was, to some extent, an era of consensus and an end to ideology if one forgets that the John Birch Society and Southern evangelicals were building their strength and biding their time during that era. With the cultural war of the 1960s, which ended in the early 1970s, however, the culture wars came back with a vengeance in the US as the hard hat "silent majority" attacked countercultural protesters in the streets of New York City.

By the 1970s and 1980s, stimulated by Supreme Court decisions which restored the separation of religion and state and which legalised abortion in the US, Southern White evangelicals came back with a vengeance. Southern White evangelicals became an important fraction of the Republican Party in the era thanks to Richard Nixon's and Keven Phillips's Southern strategy and thanks to the Republican Party morphing, in part, into latter-day Dixiecrats with significant managerial support. The Democrats, on the other hand, declined in the old Dixiecrat South where they once held and monopoly on power and increasingly carried the flag for postmodern elites, who were cultural liberal but economically neoliberal, and a host of identity groups including, increasingly, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians.

The 1970s through the 2000s saw a culture war on several fronts in the US including over religion in the public schools, abortion, art, freedom of speech, movies, television, religion in the public sphere. Increasingly, as recent data show, Democrats and Republicans divided, intermarrying less and living together in the same geographics less. Today, once again, America is, as it was before the Civil War and the era of Jim Crow, politically and ideologically divided.

I have spent the last two years doing ethnography on social media, particularly on Facebook. While I wouldn’t argue that what I have seen and heard on Facebook is a random sample I do think it is representative of what is happening on the political and cultural levels in the US at the moment. What I have found among Democrats on Facebook is patented binarism. Democratic posters, for instance, have already anti-anointed the profane Trump as the worse president in history as though the notion of the best and worst presidential poll is akin to an ideological beauty contest while at the same time expressing a limited nostalgia for the New Deal era of FDR, the Great Society era of LBJ, and the, though this is elided, the neoliberal eras of Clinton and Obama, years that saw the end of welfare as the New Deal and the Great Society knew it and the end of the firewall between commercial and investment banks as the New Deal, Great Society, and even the Reagan and Bush the First years knew it.

I found that Democratic posters divide the American world into “us” and “them”, those who are with us and those who fellow travel with us, and those who are not with us and who, as a result, are damned to the hells of idiocy, moronicity, racism, sexism, and regress. The biggest demonic enemy by far at this moment for most Democrat ideologues and demagogues and their groupies is clearly the Russians. For them the profane Russians stole the election from Hillary Clinton and brought their favourite or the man they have something on, Donald Trump, to power.

I found that you can’t really have a dispassionate and empirically grounded discussion with these increasingly manichean Democrats any more than you can argue with the Westboro Baptist Church, libertarians, or Trumpians. Only the content between these various groups is different, their form is the same. For instance, if you point out, assuming that twelve or so Russian operative attempted to create chaos on social media in the days leading up to the 2016 election, that this doesn’t prove that Clinton beat Trump in the battleground states like Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida, they ignore you. If you point out that a recount asked for by the Green Party candidate Jill Stein, 2016’s Ralph Nader, another in a long list of individuals who stabbed poor Hillary in the back, found that Trump actually gained votes in Wisconsin during the recount, they ignore you. If you point out that the US and Russia are great powers who have interfered in the politics and economics of a host of sovereign nations since the end of World War II if not before, they ignore you. If you point out that the US interfered in the Russian election of 1996, they ignore you. If you point out that Democrats and Republicans are both neoliberal, they don’t care. For the manichean Democrats the US, well the Democrat led US and its FBI and CIA fellow travellers are the good guys while the evil Russkies are the black hated really bad guys. As is almost always the case, after all, culture and ideology create "reality"for most people.