The Monsters on Maple Street are US: Democrats in the Age of Trump

There are a number of famous episodes of the American television series The Twilight Zone, writer Rod Sterling's brainchild which ran from 1959-1964 on CBS television in the US and which has been running in syndication almost ever since. One of the most famous and one of the most politically charged and politically relevant episodes of the series is "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" from the first season of the show which was broadcast on 4 March 1960.

"The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" follows the ever increasing hysteria of a group of residents on Maple Street, everywhere USA, as they try to figure out and explain a series of strange incidents on their all American avenue. Over the course of the twenty-five minute episode the residents of Maple Street anywhere USA become increasingly paranoid and hysteric "monsters' who ultimately scapegoat and blame their own neighbours for the seemingly inexplicable things that are happening on Maple Street USA. "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" is, in other words, a parable of the witch hunts that have periodically surfaced in the US since even before the US was a nation-state.

I have been thinking about "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" because once again in the era of Donald Trump, paranoia, hysteria, scapegoating, and conspiracy theories have reared their ugly head. A recent iteration of these witch hunts arose in the last several days when reputable if sensationalistic sources claimed that the American Congress had been informed that Russia was interfering in America's 2020 presidential race and that Russia was interfering in Bernie Sanders's campaign to be the Democratic nominee for president. Facebook, by the way, claimed it had not seen any evidence of attempts by Russia to aid the Sanders campaign on its site.

In the ensuing hysteria, if reports are to be believed, the Sanders's campaign claimed that the nasty things Sanders's operatives allegedly said about other Democratic candidates running to be the nominee of the party for president was part of a Russian dissembling campaign. Some sources claimed that Russians were trying to aid the campaign of Sanders despite the fact that Sanders is no friend of autocracy and oligarchy in general and Russian authoritarianism and oligarchism in particular. Meanwhile, social media was set alight by posters claiming that Russians wanted Sanders to be the nominee because he would be the easiest to beat despite polls showing that Joe Biden and Sanders would beat Trump by 9% and 8% respectively, the largest margins for any of the Democrats running to be president. Donald Trump dismissed the whole affair in patented Trumpian fashion as fake news

This is, I suspect, just the beginning of the paranoia, hysteria, scapegoating, and conspiracy theories that will be prevalent during the 2020 presidential election. So, as Bette Davis said in All About Eve, fasten your seatbelts, it is going to be a bumpy ride for all of us 320 million plus Americans who live on Maple Street, everywhere USA.