5 Feet of Fury

Manichaean candidates: “When it comes to Trump, liberals can’t see shades of gray”

Charlotte Allen writes:

With the speed of a wildfire, the word “Manichaean” spread through the liberal punditry to characterize Bush’s supposedly simplistic and intellectually challenged analysis. (…)

Then 2016 arrived, and with it, Donald Trump’s winning run for the White House. Suddenly the words “complexity” and “ambiguity” — not to mention “nuanced” — disappeared from the vocabularies of the so-called sophisticates, washed away in the swirling high tide of the return of that simplistic word: “evil.” (…)

There’s a lesson or two to be learned here. With all due respect to Brzezinski, the right doesn’t have a lock on paranoia. And dualism — our side good, your side evil — is actually baked into human nature and doesn’t really have much to do with how smart you are or how many shades of moral gray you think you can discern.