Manichaean

Indeed, you can read American history — from the Civil War to Reconstruction to the civil rights movement to the age of Trump — as a long, Manichaean struggle between two opposing belief systems.

Manichaean title notwithstanding, it is not an easy fable to parse.

If the founding of the American republic was imbedded with ambiguities that conservatives refuse to acknowledge, the country’s greatest internal crisis ought to appeal to their generally binary, Manichaean worldview.

Mainstream media and members of Congress were almost all enthralled with a Manichaean worldview that has evolved and persisted.

People with paranoid personalities are particularly vulnerable, as are those with a Manichaean worldview—a perception that the entire world is a battle between good and evil.