The metaphysical battle between good and evil has many engaged spectators, some of whom are so chronically assured of evil’s triumph that they appear to subconsciously root for it. This is the religious concept of original sin in political grammar. The tragic Manichean believes that everything one’s own government or society does is bad and that all those who oppose it are axiomatically good. A very childlike worldview, it nonetheless caters to a large swath of people who believe that passion is a valid substitute for evidence.

What begins in a tradition of healthy skepticism culminates in a universal suspicion of anything presented as established wisdom. As Francis Wheen puts it in his recent book, Strange Days Indeed: The 1970s: The Golden Age of Paranoia, “You start by reading your horoscope in the newspaper; then you dabble in chakra balancing or feng shui, saying that it is important to keep an open mind; after a while your mind is so open that your brains fall out, and you read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion without noticing anything amiss.”
No graduate of the Anglo-American university system in the past 60 years has lacked for an introduction to this pervasive theorizing of dark and hidden forces, which gallops across the political spectrum from right-wing fantasies about Freemasons to left-wing hysteria over the Warren Report.

The hysterical conspiracist forces his opponents to fritter away their time and resources in debunking his non-theories as “not even wrong.” Popular Mechanics might have devoted a cover story to flying cars or Fermilab cyclotrons in March 2005. Instead it had to teach Rosie O’Donnell how steel girders melt in skyscrapers.

Especially fashionable on the left, this mode of political thought assumes that it is the height of dialectical brilliance to subvert a democratic government’s logic by “comparing” it to that of its totalitarian enemy. Usually bound to a poor grasp of the totalitarian’s ethos and a cursory reading of its core literature, moral equivalence nonetheless masquerades as authoritative assertion, often to compensate for the sentimental insecurity of its purveyor. For instance, a lead sentence might run: "In his Short Course on the History of the All-Russian Communist Party, Josef Stalin describes the kulak in epidemiological terms, as a virus that poses the greatest threat to the organism of the socialist fatherland." Mock solemnity is maintained throughout until the inevitable anticlimax is reached: "The Scientologist is the kulak of the West."

If the tragic Manichean’s accoutrements are v-neck sweaters and the Collected Poems of Pablo Neruda, the triumphal Manichean’s are varsity jackets and the collected works of Glenn Beck. This archconservative elder to his sunken-chested baby brother similarly traffics in either/or dichotomies of political thought, believing that everything his own government or society does is right and all those who criticize it—even from within—are radical communists. This may be because the triumphal Manichean once was one himself.

Charismatic authoritarianism moors political fortune to a single figure whose radical promise is belied by his or her reactionary style. Fidel Castro, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hasan Nasrallah, Ismail Haniyeh, Hugo Chavez, Muamar Qaddafi, Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad have their cheerleaders and apologists, often in the same person who sees little contradiction in supporting such a promiscuous gallery of ideologues all at once. Just as Hitler and Stalin could for short time find a shared base of defenders in fascists and communists, so too can a Venezuelan socialist make common cause with an Islamic theocrat, allied by no more than a third world economy and an abiding hatred of the United States. The result is a kind of Unpopular Front of improvisatory opposition—all pomp, no principle.