The paranoid style revisited

The latest outrage in Buffalo reminds us of the continuing power of conspiracy theories  - in this case the white replacement theory popularised by the likes of Tucker Carlson - in US politics. As Michael J Totten reminds us, it's nothing new:

Roughly a quarter of Republican voters in the United States believe that “elitists” in government, the media, and Hollywood are a cabal of Satan-worshipping, child-trafficking pedophiles who murder children for their adrenochrome. Meanwhile, 25 percent of Americans believe that it’s “definitely true” or “probably true” that the coronavirus pandemic was “planned.” More than a third of self-identified conservative Republicans are in this camp, as are nearly one-in-five Democrats.

These are not garden-variety conspiracy theories. It’s one thing to believe that, say, the CIA assassinated President John F. Kennedy because they didn’t like his Cold War policies. It’s quite another to believe that a demonic organization of millions is murdering as many people as Nazi Germany did—and without a single government anywhere in the world uttering so much as a peep about it or a single insider blowing the whistle or leaking. If you believe these plots are real, you are not the target audience for historian Richard Hofstadter’s collection of essays, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, first published in the 1950s and 1960s. It’s not often that a magazine asks a writer to review a book published more than a half-century ago, but much of Hofstadter’s work is timelier and more relevant now than it was when he wrote it.

Hofstadter was writing at a time when the anti-communist witch hunts of Joe McCarthy were still fresh in the minds of the American public.

The first episode covered in his title essay won’t surprise anyone since most Americans are already at least passingly familiar with the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s. Most famously, American playwright Arthur Miller metaphorically condemned these proceedings in his 1953 play The Crucible about the actual witch trials held in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692–3. “How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster?” McCarthy fulminated in 1951. “This must be the product of a great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.”

Of course, there were some communist spies in the American government, and no doubt there are still foreign spies operating on American soil, some of whom work for the Russians. That’s what the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program is for. The Americans also had sources inside the Kremlin. That’s espionage for you. But contrary to what the revisionists who claim that “McCarthy was right” insist, this is not what the anti-communist paranoiacs were talking about. Robert Welch of the John Birch Society echoed McCarthy’s apocalyptic exaggeration: “Communist influencers are now in almost complete control of our Federal Government.” Not quite complete control, but almost! And not just the government but also the media, the churches, the courts, and the schools.

This is what characterizes the paranoid style rather than run-of-the-mill conspiratorial theorizing. The problem isn’t some small group up to no good. It’s a monumental conspiracy, and it’s ruining everything. Even adding fluoride to drinking water terrified millions during Hofstadter’s day, for it, too, was supposedly part of a communist “plot.” Somehow, the theory went, fluoride in drinking water would make people more willing to go along with the nationalization of industry and the collectivization of agriculture than fluoride in toothpaste.

These conspiracy theories tend to rise in relatively peaceful times, when real-world enemies are in short supply and have to be fabricated. In real crises - WW2 for instance - there's no need.

[S]nce human beings are wired for conflict and strife, it makes a perverse sort of sense for a certain kind of person to pick oversized fights about relatively trivial matters during peacetime and to hallucinate existential threats when none exist. When there really is an enormous real-world problem, those otherwise prone to paranoia can focus on that rather than on the bogeymen in their minds.

If Hofstadter was right, there is, in all likelihood, no solving this problem any more than we can solve winter aside from patiently waiting for spring. “While [the paranoid style] comes in waves of different intensity,” he wrote, “it appears to be all but ineradicable.” The good news about a problem that arrives in waves is that all waves break eventually. It’s mathematically impossible for any kind of wave, physical or metaphorical, to continue building forever. But since not even a pandemic that killed a million Americans and crashed the global economy was enough to change the American mood, God only knows when this preposterous era will finally expire.

Comments

[Martin Adamson]

The irony is that Hofstadter’s book was published just after it became obvious that a Communist (with a big C) had shot Kennedy. The Left absolutely refused to accept it, and the paranoid style passed wholesale over to the Left, where it ruled for decades in all aspects of popular culture.

[Cygnus_Darkstar]

This argument might have more credibility if American progressives hadn't spent my entire life crowing about how demographic changes due to immigration and birth rate changes would bring them permanent ascendancy. For goodness sake, they published triumphalist books about it!

[Joe Y]

I listened to Carlson's "replacement theory" show -- or one of them anyway -- and it's not "white" replacement theory he's referring to, but the replacement of the current American citizenry, very much including black and Native American ones, with huge numbers of unassimilated migrants. He goes way too far in my opinion, but he makes many strong points about the US government at all levels not making the safety, prosperity, and education of current US citizens a priority, and that's why they want to get rid of him. Nothing to with racism, as he's explicitly non-racist.

[Michael van der Riet]

The pandemic didn't crash the American economy and change the American mood. The American mood crashed the American economy. Hint: Sweden?