How Demonology Won the 2024 Election | The MIT Press Reader

The fact that Trump won swiftly and decisively, and beyond that, gained votes across almost every demographic group despite all the vitriol and controversy that swirled in the lead-up to November 5, seems to point to a powerful and growing cult of personality. We make a very different argument in our book, The Shadow Gospel. Trump hasn t built a cult of personality. Trump has inherited a cult of demonology, the origins of which extend back to the Cold War and center on a shape-shifting liberal devil mapped sometimes onto nefarious elites, sometimes onto economic leftism (which also rails against elites, but that s just details), sometimes onto the institutional Democratic Party, and sometimes, simply, onto things demonologists don t like. This is a devil that spans partisan lines and defies logical coherence.

Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump and his surrogates, boosted by a sprawling rightwing media apparatus, seized every opportunity to highlight how the family, God, conservatives, and America were endangered by the liberal devil. All discursive roads inevitably lead back to that threat: what the liberal-leftist-elite-Democrat-Marxist them was doing to pull the country into hell, a framing that simultaneously allowed Trump to position himself as the nation s savior.

via thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

Demons should be included too you know.