“American politics has often been an arena for angry minds.” So begins the influential (and eerily prescient) 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which first appeared in “Harper’s” magazine (available here) and a year later led off historian Richard Hofstadter’s collection of the same name.
In it, Hofstadter takes readers on a condensed but powerful tour (just over 16 book pages) through the landscape of an America roiling just beneath its veneer of civility and constitutional order. Irrational, extremist fears and delusions have always darkened those caverns of the nation’s psyche, most often (but not always) emanating from the right-wing, nativist end of the political spectrum.
He writes:
“I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy I have in mind.”
That suspiciousness has characteristically burst forth in American history to scapegoat various groups accused of grand-scale conspiracies to subjugate our people in the service of a laundry list of “isms”—Jeffersonianism, Catholicism, Masonism, Mormonism, Marxism, libertinism, communism, socialism and more.
Almost invariably, the paranoid style has warned darkly that the nation’s basic welfare and survival are in grave danger from the incursions of these “isms,” which have to be fought as a matter of national and even personal survival.
The stakes are thus elevated to a fever pitch, in which the normal political back-and-forth of competing but legitimate interests gives way to fights unto death against embodiments of evil, no compromises possible or allowed.
Hofstadter references the anti-Masonic movement of the 1820s-1830s as but one illustration of this dynamic. The Freemasons are an ancient social and philanthropic organization dating back to 1390, whose members have included Presidents George Washington, James Monroe and William McKinley. Their somewhat secretive sheen (symbolized by peculiar handshakes, gestures, code words, etc.) led those of a paranoid bent to suspect the darkest possible motives at the movement’s core.
However much the Masons’ sense of exclusivity and privilege may have tarnished their identity over centuries, Hofstadter cites the extremes to which their opponents expressed their antagonism as a cogent example of the “paranoid style.”
‘What must be emphasized…is the apocalyptic and and absolutistic framework in which this hostility was commonly expressed. Anti-Masons were not content to simply say that secretive societies were rather a bad idea. The author of the standard exposition of anti-Masonry declared that Freemasonry was ‘not only the most abominable but also the most dangerous institution that ever was imposed on man…It may truly be said to be HELL’S MASTER PIECE.'”
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This paranoia was exemplified all the more by the infamous “Red Scare” of the early 1950s. That’s when Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy launched a concerted effort that ruined lives and reputations with allegations of a vast communist conspiracy that had infiltrated not only the Hollywood movie industry, but also the highest levels of government.
In that paranoid period, even war hero and Secretary of State George C. Marshall, he of the famous Marshall Plan that rebuilt post-war Europe, came under suspicion of directly undermining American values of capitalism and rugged individualism. Eventually, other targets came to include the Supreme Court, the United Nations, and even the income tax, all of them allegedly reflecting collectivist and internationalist policies inimical to freedom.
Hofstadter again, on McCarthy’s savaging of Marshall:
“Marshall was associated with practically every American failure or defeat…and none of this was either accident or incompetence. There was a ‘baffling pattern’ of Marshall’s interventions in the war, which always conduced to the well-being of the Kremlin. The sharp decline in America’s relative strength from 1945 to 1951 did not ‘just happen’; it was ‘brought about, step by step, by will and intention,’ the consequences not of mistakes but of a treasonous conspiracy, ‘a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.'”
Let’s fast-forward now to July, 2023, and an article from the newsletter of an organization named “Texans for Fiscal Responsibility.” It features an illustration of President Biden wrapped in something resembling the flag of the old Soviet Union, sitting next to what would appear to be a representation of Karl Marx himself.
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The headline is self-explanatory above, with the text a few paragraphs into the article proclaiming:
“In fact, ‘Bidenomics’ is nothing new. It is simply repackaged big-government communism, inspired by Karl Marx—but with a new name and face. Just consider some of the main policy ‘achievements’ of the Biden administration. It is full of spending increases and socialist policies. Billions in direct payments to individuals and businesses, $65 billion for businesses to expand broadband, $52 billion in corporate welfare for computer chip companies, billions in expanding socialized medicine, $80 billion for the IRS, and more green-energy incentives at the expense of taxpayers.”
This conflation of any kind of government assistance directed to the betterment of its people with “communism” is intellectually bankrupt and a classic example of the paranoid style.
Communism, for one thing, remains an abstraction, with a dismal record of never actually having been put into place due to the kleptocracy and brutality it always seems to engender amidst imperfect human beings. Its promise to abolish private enterprise in the name of equality invariably results instead in mass poverty, wealthy cadres of oligarchs, and either gulags or extermination for all opposition voices in a society.
You know—just like Biden did his level best to do the past four years.
Then-candidate Trump parroted the same basic line in speech after speech through the 2024 campaign. He tosses “fascist” into his commingling of Marxism, communism and socialism below, while sounding the same dark, conspiratorial theme of “the enemy within.”
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One could find this rhetorical excess repeated ad nauseum through the campaign—this by a candidate who had made a concerted effort to overturn a presidential election for the first time in the nation’s history, followed by his refusal to follow the constitutionally mandated peaceful, orderly transfer of power.
And was then re-elected to serve a second term.
Wrote Hofstadter—and need I remind you again this was 60 years ago?—about the positing of political opponents as existential enemies:
“The paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish.”
Today, Trump still claims he won the 2020 election, as does his incoming vice-president J.D. Vance, who lent his own voice to absolutist thinking with this little nugget from 2021 when discussing his hopes for a second Trump administration:
“Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. Then when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
(Historical footnote: the Jackson quote has never been sourced directly to him.)
This prospect of defying an order from the Supreme Court would, by definition, set off a constitutional crisis. But if the difference between winning and losing an election is, in Trump’s oft-repeated words, that losing means “you won’t have a country anymore,” then one can be excused, in his and Vance’s calculations, for doing anything and everything possible to forestall that loss.
As of today, with Trump-Vance’s electoral victory in hand, defiance on their end means installing fiercely combative and uniquely unqualified candidates to fill key cabinet and administrative posts, and their continued threat of tearing down the dreaded “deep state.”
To the 49.9% of the country who might, as of today, nod approvingly at such a prospect, a well-worn maxim applies: Be careful what you wish for.
Tearing anything down is infinitely easier than constructing it in the first place. Destruction is easy, construction hard.
Functioning societies are not that different than sand castles lovingly tended on the seashore—hours, even days of dedicated toil, washed away in mere seconds by an incoming tide. In the case of the United States, those days of building actually represent centuries of unique presence and unparalleled influence on world affairs and historical consciousness.
Will yet another iteration of the “paranoid style” finally see it all come to ruin?
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Distrust of everything associated with our government is not a new concept to our nation’s history. Neither is paranoia. However, in the past, when moments of paranoia and distrust crept into the American landscape, they were just that…moments. This feels different. I fear Trumpism has awoken the darkest aspects of our past (e.g. slavery, destruction of the native American culture, and Japanese internment) and breathed new life into them; hatred is now an acceptable form of expression for millions of our fellow citizens. I feel Trump’s America bears too close a resemblance to the hell Milton describes in “Paradise Lost.” Will Washington D.C. now become Pandæmonium, Milton’s name for the capital city of Hell? It was there that Satan’s words found an audience and with the aid of Beelzebub and his like did their utmost to destroy Mankind. While this epic poem ends on a note of hope, it is fiction, and the MAGA movement is not. I’m angry and uncertain when this ugliness will burn itself out. Some say talking it out is the most productive way to create understanding and free us from this morass. I’m not convinced. I live in a Houston suburb where too many see Trump as the new Lincoln. Some probably like him better than Abe; Abe freed the slaves. Maybe I’ll just have to comfort myself in the fact that my close friends and family possessed the common sense to see through the blouse of MAGA.
I really thought Trump would lose in November. I thought his partnership with the late, great Hannibal Lecter might raise more than a few eyebrows. I should have known better. These are the guys who praised Trump’s “Chug Clorox and Cure COVID” medical advice and wore t-shirts with the image of a rifle cope superimposed over Anthony Fauci’s face. Even his shower-room fascination with Arnold Palmer’s putter didn’t seem to hurt him. Oh, almost forgot, he said that Dems controlled the path of Hurricane Helene. I do know this without a single quark of doubt. We’re in deep shit. The toilet’s clogged. The plunger’s lost. And I don’t own a paddle. Perhaps, when the creek’s dried up, I can take a deep breath and say to myself things aren’t as bad as they seem. I’m clinging to the hope that it’s all just a temporary pain like an ingrown toenail. Maybe it’s just a mild case of conflicting philosophies. But I feel like a stranger in a strange land who’s waiting for Godot. I fear there’s no exit, and ethics have vanished like an echo or a dream. But don’t forget that a Musk is a matted haired rat or a foul-smelling ox.
Zero argument with any of your always learned and entertaining analysis, Robert. One looks around at the Trumpian horror show and it’s difficult to know what of the countless travesties to focus on. For my own part lately, I’ve been struck by Trump’s overheated emphasis and promises to restore Confederate generals’ names on forts and ships & such after they had been removed in recent years under the perfectly sensible, morally righteous and long overdue guidelines not to honor anyone who rose up to overthrow the government and its Constitution in order to perpetuate slavery. The offensiveness of this stance, and the mere fact that he would propagate it with so far zero pushback from anyone in his party, speaks volumes about the whole lot of them. I suspect when push comes to shove this proposal will prove to be mere rhetoric, a bone to toss to the romantic fantasies of the Lost Cause, but it’s just one more odious reminder of just how far Trump is happy to go to in his assaults on basic human decency.
I am a liberal Republican who never voted for, nor could stand Trump for president. I felt that due to his Psychotic Narcissism he was incapable of the job of president. The January 6 event was an example of his disease taking control of him and like an alcoholic, he was in an altered state figuratively drinking up the attention he was getting. He thought the whole event was 2 factions fighting over him. His ego was soaring. He drank it in.
But he never had the necessary legal intent for crime of insurrection to take hold because he had no plan for after the protests. It was just an ego binge and ego binges are not illegal in themselves. It frustrated the courts and the Jan 6 committee to no end.
I wrote an article to the editor of my local paper about this and they said I was not qualified to diagnose him. Yet when I read the book “The Case Against Donald Trump”: 30 psychiatrists who all said the same thing, none could actually diagnosis him because they had not seen him in person in a session so as professionals they were not allowed to diagnose him.
So how do we stop this person with Psychotic Narcissism? In the movie “A Royal Affair”, the Danish king has schizophrenia but no one can stop him. It is a great movie to see how helpless we are around mental illness in world leaders: kings or presidents, Narcissism or schizophrenia.
So when Trump was disappointedly reelected, it seemed like time to put all our political energy into the 25th amendment. I trust the rule of law and our constitution and wanted to use it to get us out of this Trump hole. If everyone on this blog can write out specific tasks of the president that he is failing at, we can get a chance at disqualifying him under the 25th amendment. But it is too tempting to just keep hating him calling him indecent or a baby or orange or nazi etc. Or accusing him of bringing back slavery or hating women. Just name the specific presidential tasks he cannot do because of his mental illness: like he is incapable of using his judgement when there is a protest at the white house. He is incapable of building a lasting management team, he has committed perjury 100 times.
Read the 25th amendment and lets work respectfully within the constitution to have him removed. It is important to treat mental patients with respect.
This blog is a perfect place to start the removal process. Fast! We only have 2 weeks, but we on Andrews blog can do it!
Love you guys for sticking it out
Mary
Thanks for hashing through this Mary; I appreciate it. I agree with some of your assessment and do think the 25th Amendment applies here as well—indeed, it should have disqualified him a long time ago. But it’s also true that the basic rule of law could and should have disqualified him long ago as well. Both of Jack Smith’s cases on the secret documents and for Trump fomenting the insurrection were more than enough to hang him out to dry. The documents case was railroaded only by an obviously biased Trump-appointed judge and the Jan. 6 case declared dead with Trump’s re-election, though it was previously aided and abetted by the most shocking, twisted rationale for unlimited presidential power ever to come out of the Supreme Court. (I’m still shaking my head on that one…) In a just world, both of those cases were slam dunks, but Trump’s apparent nine lives have seen him slip out from under accountability yet again, and now we are faced with the hounds of hell, unbound, about which we can only hope that his own basic incompetence as a manager can help limit the damage.
Where I completely depart from you is in the political reality that I think fatally constrains any realistic use of the 25th Amendment. The man just won an election with 49.9% of the vote and his party almost completely behind him (well, knuckled under to him, in reality, but still, firmly in his camp). For the moment, MAGA rules the incoming administration and controls both houses of congress, which leaves basically zero chance, in my estimation, of anyone mounting or even being listened to about a removal effort. There’s just no political will for it, even, I would bet, among Democrats. Better, I think, our energies go to effectively opposing the worst of his appointments and legislative efforts, and limiting the damage from those that do succeed.
AND: supporting organizations that do the same on a professional, sustained level.
Sure, it will be a hard four years, but it’s incumbent upon us to do what we can, without feeling sorry for ourselves or lapsing into despair. This isn’t Russia or China or Iran, after all—we should go tell those folks our tales of woe before we get too deep into self-pity. So: onwards, and Happy 2025—whatever comes down the pike!
A couple years ago I took an online course called Conspiracy Planet. Hofstadter’s Paranoid Style essay was among the readings. Another was Elizabeth Olmsted’s book Real Enemies, which references Hofstadter’s piece (a good read). Real Enemies covers various historical events from WWI through 911 that have fed and illustrated Americans’ embrace of antigovernment-targeted conspiracy thought. The general gist of the book is that over the years those in power really have planned or perpetrated a lot of screwy shit and politicians are happy to exploit it when the other side is caught. This provides fodder for distrust, paranoid thinking, and further exploitation. That paves the road to Crazytown conspiracies (Hofstadter’s “big leap from the undeniable to the unbelievable”), which distract from real crimes and injustices. e.g. In the 1960s, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff’s “Operation Northwoods” did include plans to launch attacks in the U.S. and blame them on Castro, the U.S. government wasn’t behind the 911 attacks, but some see examples such as “Operation Northwoods” as evidence of the possibility. Then there’s the doozies the administration conjured to justify the Iraq War, a real tragedy.
My favorite conspiracy covered in the Conspiracy Planet course is one propagated by British, former sports broadcaster David Icke, who uncovered the “real story” behind the death of Princess Diana. Icke proposes that Lady Di witnessed Queen Elizabeth morph into a 12-foot lizard. Since the royal family is apparently obsessed with keeping their lizard roots a secret, Diana had to go. In Icke’s world, her killing is actually just a small part of a much larger theory involving a whole race of lizard people who control the world.
According to professor Matthew Lasar, who taught the Conspiracy Planet course, in 2013 Public Policy Polling (PPP) surveyed 1,247 American voters on a variety of questions. Included in the questions was, “Do lizard people control our society?” Four percent of those polled said yes. (Fyi, 14% believe Bigfoot exists.) Lasar extrapolates that, based on 153 million voters in 2012, six million Americans believe lizard people control our society. Come January 20, you can add me to that group.
I think you put your (and Olmstead’s) finger on several helpful points, Blake, one of them being governments really do a number, or at least just enough, stupid and/or illegal things to get a certain segment of the population believing everything’s a conspiracy and the government has all manner of diabolical plans worked out to control every lever of power. Hofstadter sets things more properly in context using the subject of warfare, though it applies to most all other human endeavors as well:
“Any historian of warfare knows it is in good part a comedy of errors and a museum of incompetence, but if for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination.”
None of that is to impugn the countless hard-working bureaucrats and workers who get the highways built, gather intelligence, run the airports, collect taxes and get the mail delivered. But it is in the nature of humanity to err a certain percentage of the time, and that’s all the fodder the paranoid mindset needs to think it’s all corrupt (or run by lizard people!), especially when they’re fed anti-government propaganda around the clock by modern media.
As for those lizard people, well, none of that surprises me anymore. 49.9% of the population just voted for someone they think cares about them and their welfare, and that we’ll all be in clover soon because, “He’s a good businessman.”