Last month, the bestselling “antiracist” author and National Book Award winner Ibram X. Kendi published an incendiary article in the Atlantic entitled “A Battle Between the Two Souls of America.” The article criticizes those “who religiously believe the myth of the pure American soul,” although we are never told who these people might be. (Does anyone believe that the United States is purely good or purely evil?) Kendi argues that America has no single soul—and certainly not one that can be saved or restored, as both Martin Luther King and Donald Trump hoped to do.
But Kendi is no demythologizer. Manichean oppositions—great struggles of good and evil, light and darkness, purity and pollution—are his stock-in-trade. Kendi proposes a new religious myth: America is in fact a “battlefield” between “two souls, warring with each other.” These are the “soul of justice” and the “soul of injustice.” The “battle of 2020,” he writes, is “the historic battle for America.” It is a battle between forces that are “never turning back,” a final conflict of divine and demonic opponents in which the very “being” of our nation is at stake.
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