“Oceania” in George Orwell’s 1984 had its annual Hate Week. The build-up to the Presidential election is America’s quadrennial Hate Season, lasting a year and a half. And the two have roughly the same function.

The modern State’s electoral ritual is a safety valve. The pent up rage and frustration of years of misrule is directed away from its appropriate target — the regime itself — and safely vented at bogeymen and scapegoats, including the most odious opposing candidates (Trump, Sanders, Jeb, Hillary, etc.) as well as the population subsets they are perceived to represent (businessmen, immigrants, etc).

Oceania’s annual Hate Week and daily Two Minutes Hate focused on Emmanuel Goldstein as the figurehead bogeyman and scapegoat, representing nebulous threats foreign (Eurasia/Eastasia) and domestic (the Brotherhood). One such figure was enough for Oceania’s one-party system. But the American multi-party Hate Season requires multiple personified menaces: at least one for each faction.

That is because the power of the modern State depends on factional animosity. As Randolph Bourne said, “War is the health of the State.” And that includes the “orderly and procedural” civil war of mutual plunder that characterizes modern democracy. That kind of war too is the health of the State.

By giving its subjects access to the mechanism of “legal plunder” and coercion, the democratic State stimulates and gives free reign to their cupidity and cowardice toward each other. They huddle into “herds” (factions, interest groups, political parties, etc) in order to gain the strength in numbers and unity of purpose necessary to plunder and persecute by proxy, and to defend against like treatment at the hands of enemy herds.

The menace of rival herds causes each herd to huddle even tighter and become even more hostile to outsiders. But really accentuating this effect requires the menace to be personified, to have a face and a name: thus the importance of each faction’s “Goldstein” (Obama, Trump, etc).

This is how the State divides and rules. The herds become too preoccupied with their war against each other to face their true nemesis, the State itself. Indeed, each herd becomes positively devoted to the State as its chief weapon against its foes, just as the people of Oceania were devoted to the Party as their chief defender against its enemies.

The accentuation of this effect also requires personification. Each herd needs at least one champion “shepherd” with a face and a name to be the focal point of its filial piety to the State (as Big Brother was for the Party): a prospective or current officer of the State (Obama, Trump, etc) who will lead his herd’s victorious stampede once in power. So each faction’s Goldstein does double duty for the State by also serving as another faction’s Big Brother.

The State-fomented factionalism worsens when the herds grow hungry, as is happening now in Great Recession America. This explains the mirror image Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders phenomena. Each candidate’s constituency is flocking around the shepherd it sees as most likely to deliver a feast at the expense of a rival herd. The Trump herd is bleating at immigrants “stealing” their jobs, while the Sanders herd is lowing at businessmen who won’t cough up enough taxes.

The electoral “changing of the guard” has still another safety valve function. The previous office holder leaves, taking with him or dissipating much of the opprobrium heaped up throughout his administration, thus removing its burden from the State itself. The new office holder’s “honeymoon period” then begins, and power gets a fresh face with less baggage. There is a shiny new “smiley face on the lapel of the oligarchy,” to use Lew Rockwell’s phrase.