By Chris Satullo
Sometimes, when you’re trying to figure out what the hell is going on in our polarized republic, a little theology can help.
But first, some telling data:
In 2021, a Center for Politics poll found that three out of four people who voted for either Trump or Biden in 2020 feel that people who strongly supported the other candidate “threaten the American way of life.”
- More in Common’s very broad “Perception Gap” study found that Americans on each side believe that nearly twice as many people on the other side hold “extreme views” as actually do. The more political media people consumed, the wider their perception gap.
- In 2018 (which qualifies as a halcyon Era of Good Feeling compared to today), an Axios poll found that more than 20 percent of both Democrats and Republicans deemed voters on the other side to be actively “evil.”
Now, for the theology:
Ever heard of Manichaeism? It’s an ancient religion that began in what is now Iran and had quite a run in the Middle East and Mediterranean from the third to fifth centuries CE. Manichaeism posits that the world is a battleground between a non-omnipotent God and a nearly equal Prince of Darkness. In the world, and inside each person, the forces of light contest with the forces of darkness, with the outcome not preordained.
Based on the writings of a third-century Persian named Mani, the faith (which acknowledges Jesus as a prophet) was resisted fiercely by the early Christian fathers as a heresy and later was persecuted by the Christianized Roman Empire. Elements of it cropped up in many Christian sects through the Middle Ages.
Old wine is constantly poured into new bottles. Now, in America, we are experiencing an upsurge of what a wise and prolific public intellectual named Cass Sunstein calls “political Manichaeism.”
Political Manichaeism, as I am understanding it here, can be found whenever disagreements about political issues are seen not as reasonable disputes among fellow citizens, but instead as pitting decent people with decent character against horrible people with horrible character.
The focus of political Manicheans, he observes, settles much more on decrying the awfulness of the other side rather than offering any positive agenda of one’s own.
In American politics, this penchant for us/good-vs.-them/evil thinking may be most congenial to evangelical conservatives, whose religious orientation predisposes them to think of all aspects of life as a struggle between the holy and the unholy, the elect and the damned.
The Manichean construct offers the consolations of a doubt-banishing simplicity. Even if the other side occasionally makes a cogent point or has a prediction come true, that dissonant data can be swiftly brushed aside with an appeal to the eternal verities of the Manichean mindset.
Donald Trump did not invent the conservative penchant for calling the other guys over-the-top names or lashing out at “enemies of the people.” That pipe organ had been tuned up long before Trump began playing it with such maniacal relish. Four decades of right-wing punditry and think-tankery, of talk-show rants, fervent blogging, and snarky meme-making, laid the foundation long before Trump descended that infernal escalator.
Sunstein is quick to observe, and here I will readily follow, that right-wing Manichaeism has its counterparts on the other end of the spectrum. Here, I will invoke once again my First Newtonian Principle of American Politics: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
So, it is here: The unrelenting, self-righteous, epithet-laden rhetoric of right-wing voices summons from the left its blue-tinted mirror image. After one is called unfair names, it is human nature to respond in the vein of “Evil? Who you calling evil? I’ll tell you what and who are evil!!” Thus, the cycle just keeps spiraling viciously down.
To be sure, secular progressives shun the vocabulary of faith and sanctity, but they fashion and cling to creeds just as fiercely as any fire-breathing preacher – all while denying they would ever do such a thing.
To hear Bernie Sanders’ unchanging riffs about the eternal perfidy of corporations is to catch a strong whiff of the Manichean. Anti-racism, though founded upon bracing, necessary and overdue insights about systemic racism, soon congealed in some quarters into an inflexible, punitive creed, ever eager to cast out and punish heretics.
All that said, I’m not here today to beat up on Bernie, who is a genial enough guy with some useful ideas. I’m here to crush…I mean explain…Tucker Carlson, and some of the bizarre things he’s said lately during his bout of playing footsie with Vladimir Putin. Carlson has backed off in the last few days, noticing that most of America – including many Fox viewers – are moved by and cheering on the heroism of the Ukrainian people and their leaders.
But a week or so ago, his cup was running over with Russian propaganda about how Ukrainewas corrupt, not a democracy, and not worth a moment’s support, while decrying what he called a Democratic disinformation campaign to get Americans to fear and dislike Russia and Putin. Here is Carlson in full flight (spewing a riff that Russian TV networks were pleased to share with their captive audiences):
“Before that happens, it might be worth asking yourself, since it is getting pretty serious: What is this really about? Why do I have to hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs?These are fair questions, and the answer to all of them is no. Vladimir Putin didn’t do any of that. So why does permanent Washington hate him so much?”
Before dissecting this Manichean rot, let me just observe: These are fair questions might be the most unintentionally hilarious thing said on TV since Kramer was in full flight on Seinfeld. Still, this man is positioned to poison millions of minds – and probably harbors designs on the Oval Office. It won’t do just to dismiss him with a joke and a roll of the eyes.
And, mind-blowing as it is, nor can you stop at this irony: A mouthpiece of what was once the party of Tailgunner Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan asking heatedly, “Why in the world should we worry about Russia?”
Some serious voices have asked whether Carlson’s recent pro-Russia rhetoric amounts to treason. I get why that’s come up, but let’s settle down: Tucker is not sharing troop movements with the enemy. He’s just frothing at the mouth, with a Russian accent. And we should never establish a standard that questioning America’s foreign policy of any given moment is tantamount to treason.
Carlson’s recent rants aren’t even really about Russia and Putin. Those two are just props in a comparison he wants to drive home to his frightened, angry audience. He’s not saying Putin never does anything bad. He’s saying Vlad’s badness pales next to the overwhelming evilness of people who pull the D lever in a voting booth.
What he is doing is laying bare the Manichean roots of the nationalist, populist, lily-white agenda to which he and others are working to convert the Republican party. He’s asking the age-old Manichean question: Who is the Prince of Darkness and who are the tools of his will on earth?
Would that prince be a megalomaniacal kleptocrat who steals billions from his people, cheats at elections, poisons dissenters and opponents, and invades sovereign nations on a demented whim? Hell no, Tucker says: Putin is not the enemy; he’s a role model.
No, Satan is whoever happens to be leading the Democratic party at the moment. His legions consist of everyone who opposes Carlson’s views, all the fellow Americans he declines to acknowledge as such. Those meanies, who utter such inconvenient truths as “a guy who parrots white supremacist ‘replacement theory’ rhetoric might just be a racist himself”.
Like all demagogues, Carlson takes scattered incidents and paints them as tsunamis. Have devotees of the anti-racist creed gone after the jobs of some people who didn’t deserve that? Yes, here and there, lamentably. But no more than right-wingers have gone after people on the public payroll who dared utter progressive views.
Like all demagogues, Carlson amplifies Big Lies. Manufactured pandemic? C’mon, man. Close to a million Americans are dead.
Like all demagogues, Carlson utters the absurd in tones of portentous truth telling. Yeah, sure, Tucker, Joe Biden, a weekly attendee at Catholic Mass, secretly seeks to “snuff out Christianity.” And, you betcha, most Brooklyn progressives, when not reading Ibram X. Kendi and working to banish plastic bags from the face of the earth, cook up fentanyl in secret back rooms in their brownstone apartments.
The eating dogs part? I don’t know what to say. Guess Tucker was just on a roll.
Lord knows, it’s easy to bash Carlson’s toxic idiocy. But it’s not a joke. It’s both a symptom and a cause of the distressing polarization underscored by the poll numbers cited above.
No, it’s not in my power, or yours, to shut Carlson up. But what we can do is recognize that we on the blue side of the divide live in constant peril of lapsing into emulation of the other side’s Manichean bad habits.
What should we do about that? Try to spot and tamp down those impulses in ourselves. Recognize when they’ve infected members of “our team” and conduct kind interventions. Offer the baseline respect that’s due every fellow American, no matter how aggravating they seem.
That’s what I try to do pretty often in this space. I know it annoys the heck out of some of you. But, as Mom used to say, it’s for your own good. And for our beloved country’s.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia