Catastrophe or Utopia: How the Permanent Campaign Changed Our View of Good and Evil
Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unsplash
It is easy to forget how politics changed in the early 1990s. In the previous decades, national political campaigns came every four years—a few months of grotesque rhetoric about the catastrophe that will descend on us if the other party wins, and the utopia that will break out if our party does. On the first Tuesday of November they ended. The rhetorical temperature would drop, and Americans would return to their blissful unawareness of Washington, DC.
In those decades, the “news cycle” was dominated by the three major networks’ 6 pm newscasts. For thirty minutes, American eyeballs were all focused on the same three anchors. At this pace, people would digest an event or two every day, knowing they would hear more developments tomorrow.
CNN came to dominance with its revolutionary format of constant news. An anchor was always at the desk. Something new was happening all the time, all around the world. By the late 1980s, people were talking about the “24-hour news cycle,” with developments coming every hour, not just 6 pm. Several cable channels adopted this format, and older media like AM radio sprang back to life.
The political campaign that had once run for a few months and then mercifully stopped now went longer and longer. In the 1990s, the campaign became permanent. Good vs. Evil, catastrophe or utopia, 24/7. Filling 24 hours required interviews and debates with experts to elide the fact that there was little actual news. Their opinions became news. Experts eventually yielded to “personalities” who made increasingly outlandish predictions. The catastrophes became existential threats, and the utopias became fundamental rights that you were being denied.
The permanent campaign is fraud. It is driven by the voracious appetite of media—now social media, where everyone is an anchor and a “personality.” The catastrophes are fake and the utopias are lies.
The most important casualty of this relentless politicization of life is our view of good and evil. We cry Evil! on the basis of nothing, zero, nada: a tweet some idiot thumbed out in 27 seconds, a video deceitfully edited, a clickbait headline that is not substantiated by the post it links to.
In every moral tradition, calling a person’s action “evil” is a solemn matter. It has always required a factual basis. By crying Evil! so flippantly we have become evil.
The impact is even worse. Because of the permanent campaign, we see our crowd as good. We are The People and our virtue is beyond question. No one else matters—especially not our vile enemies, who always abuse us. When the campaign went on for a few months, it was a circus of virtue with partisans parading around conventions in funny hats and shouting, “I like Ike!” or singing, “He’s got high hopes!” But the circus eventually left town and The People forgot about their virtues for a while. Now that the campaign is permanent, the virtue-fest never ends. It’s more like a Nuremberg rally.
No moral tradition has ever taught that goodness should be defined by mobs. Crying Good! so flippantly is also evil.
For Christians who want to stand against evil today, the first evil we have to confront is our own. We can’t fight sin by watching TV or scrolling Twitter. On the contrary, the more we cry Catastrophe! and Utopia! the more we join the sinning.