Emergence of Manichean Political Rhetoric – Theoretical Modeling of Predictive Frameworks

Manichean political rhetoric can be best summarized as a generalized trend, by an agent with political power in a given field, to increasingly express themselves in their official capacity as a political actor through a binary lens: presenting issues and/or solutions to the public in that field of power as being either “A or B”. This reductionism in presentation of problems and solutions appears, historically, to coincide with a rise in autocratic behavior on the part of the political actor. To this day, however, a true predictive test for the emergence of Manichean political rhetoric, does not exist. While we can often observe and critic the presence of it, and the transition from complex to binary rhetoric after such rheto-ric has been used, a predictive determinative framework (one that can say with a high degree of accura-cy that this shift is about to happen) still does not exist. This articles is an attempt to do two things: understand more accurately the difficulties that arise in attempting to create such a predictive frame-work and provide theoretical modeling of such frameworks to assess their potential functionality as predictive tools.