The Paranoid Style 2.0: This time, it’s everyone
The US presidential election of 1964 was one of the most contentious and divisive election seasons in modern history. It played out in the tumult that followed President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the ongoing Civil Rights Movement, an intensifying cold war, and an escalating insurgency in South Vietnam.
That election season saw the Republican party nominate Barry Goldwater, US Senator from Arizona and a right-wing stalwart, over the establishment candidate, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. It was a highly tumultuous and hostile primary, with Goldwater rallying social and political conservatives behind his rather extreme agenda of repealing the New Deal institutions, militant anti-communism, and worryingly relaxed attitude toward the use of nuclear weapons.
At the nominating convention in San Francisco, party leaders tried in vain to stop Goldwater from securing the nomination, but the Arizona senator’s enthusiastic supporters took control of the convention and pushed through an uncompromising party platform, further alienating moderate and liberal republicans. The video below, titled Confessions of a Republican, is a campaign ad put out by Lyndon B. Johnson, the incumbent president and Goldwater’s opponent in the General Election, and vividly captures the sense of crisis that gripped the Republican establishment after Goldwater’s nomination:
The actor’s jittery nervousness over the candidate’s contradictory and extreme statements and the fact that a Republican candidate had been endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan, might seem eerily familiar to many following the current Republican primary season. Although Barry Goldwater and Donald Trump are very different as politicians, as ideologues, and as people, they tap into the same political style and socio-psychological current, and it is provoking a similar reaction among the conservative establishment of today (see #NeverTrump or anything Lindsey Graham says about the Donald).
Roughly 50 years ago Richard Hofstadter, an American political scientist/sociologist, published an essay in Harper’s Bazaar, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”. In it, he attempted to not only describe a particular approach to political discourse but also demonstrate how it has cropped up again and again in American politics. Describing this “political pathology”, he does not use the word Paranoid in its medical sense:
I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind…I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.
Although persecution is the key element in both clinical and political paranoia, exponents of the paranoid style in politics proclaim the conspiracy they are purportedly crusading against is “directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate affects not himself alone but millions of others”.
Hofstadter traces examples of this paranoid style back through American political history, from the anti-communist hysteria of the 1940’s and 50's, through the anti-Catholic paranoia of the late 19th century and the fears of a Jesuit plot in the mid-19th century, all the way back to the early 19th century belief in a Masonic and Illuminati conspiracy to overthrow the young Republic.
However, he does mark an important difference between the conspiracist movements of the past and that of the right-wing in 1960’s America.
The modern right wing…feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.
This sense of dispossession and the existence of a criminal and evil plot to strip hard-working Americans of their birthright might have been a unique characteristic of the right wing in the era of McCarthy and Goldwater. However, in the currently uber-polarized American political climate, the paranoid style is increasingly infecting the Democratic party as well. The focal point of their paranoia is not LGBTQ rights, creeping socialism, Obamacare, or any of the other bogeymen of the right. The conspiracy that has gained traction on the left can be distilled from Bernie Sanders’ comments to the New York Daily News Editorial team.
I do believe that, to a significant degree, the business model of Wall Street is fraud. — Bernie Sanders, April, 2016
It has been argued that the Great Recession was caused by numerous failings: policy, regulatory, legislative, political, not to mention the moral ones that Sanders believe to be paramount. But by using the word Fraud to describe the inherent driving force behind an entire segment of the American economy involving millions of people, he is insinuating at the top of his voice that all of these people were party to a massive conspiracy to steal from the American people. He places the blame for the sub-prime mortgage crisis, and the ensuing Great Recession, squarely at the feet of the financial industry, charging them with intentionally and maliciously misleading the American public, and watching with glee as they lost their homes and jobs. That this self-same industry and its leaders were then bailed out and protected from prosecution by the political class — referred to as “Washington” — implicates the entire political and economic elite in fraud. Betrayal from on high indeed.
The resonance of contemporary paranoid Republican demagogues Trump — and to a lesser extent Cruz — demonstrates the continued effectiveness of the paranoid style in American politics, particularly on the right. However, Sanders has shown that the paranoid style is surprisingly effective in mobilizing the left as well. Trump’s campaign has prompted much questioning about why his message resonates so well. Some writers point to a fundamental difference between the parties; republicans are more interested in ideological purity while democrats are a coalition of interest groups more interested in pursuing specific policy changes. This distinction can be traced back to the conservative revolution, launched by Goldwater’s 1964 campaign and culminating in Reaganomics and the wholesale embrace by the Republican party of neo-liberalism.
Democrats, on the other hand, have inclusiveness and prioritization of facts — be they about Global Warming, inequality, reproductive health or the War on Drugs — and how those facts inform policy. However, in this election cycle, the Democratic party is seeing the emergence of its own breed of ideological purist: the Berniac. As many as 33% of Sanders’ supporters would rather not vote at all than vote for someone other than their prophet, definitely not for the succubus of the establishment — Hillary Clinton — who has betrayed her complicity in the conspiracy by refusing to release the transcripts of her paid speeches to Wall Street overlords Goldman Sachs.
The paranoid style of Sanders’ supporters is also visible in the widespread contention that polls are unfairly skewed against Bernie, misrepresenting his actual level of support. They also claim that the mainstream media is underreporting his campaign, which leads to an inaccurate portrayal of the strength of the very political revolution that is the linchpin of Sanders’ electoral strategy. That is not to say that these biases do not exist, as Vox’s Ezra Klein eloquently explains, but that they are not the result of a sinister establishment plot to prevent Bernie from becoming the Democratic nominee. Nor does it change the objective fact that the Democratic primary contest will most likely end with Clinton as the nominee if delegates are to actually count for something. However, the underlying question is to what degree Bernie’s paranoid style will end up warping the Democratic Party’s embrace of issue-oriented pragmatism? Will Sanders’ quixotic challenge launch the Democratic equivalent of the Goldwater-inspired conservative revolution, whose aftershocks we are still seeing today?
Judging by the willingness of Sanders’ supporters to stake out all-or-nothing positions based on a Manichean, conspiracist political philosophy, it does not seem like a stretch to imagine impassioned Sanders-supporters identifying with Goldwater’s famous battle cry from the 1964 Convention that launched the transformation of the Republican Party, in the words of John McCain, “ from an Eastern elitist organization to the breeding ground for the election of Ronald Reagan”:
I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue — Barry Goldwater, July 1964
Hofstadter’s conjectured that “a mentality disposed to see the world in this way may be a persistent psychic phenomenon, more or less constantly affecting a modest minority of the population”. That modest minority, long thought to have been heavily concentrated in the right-wing spectrum of American politics, clearly has no specific party allegiance. This might not be very satisfying for those who see the blossoming of the paranoid style as something that must be counteracted. However, given its apparently constant historical presence, it might be more purposeful to try and understand what societal dynamics amplify political paranoia rather than self-righteously denouncing one side or the other as uniquely demagogic. Hofstadter says
The central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise. The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular social interest — perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands — are shut out of the political process. Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed. They see only the consequences of power — and this through distorting lenses — and have no chance to observe its actual machinery. A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen. It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him — and in any case he resists enlightenment.
In essence, what Hofstadter is saying is that irreconcilable interests married to political exclusion and/or impotence breeds paranoia. This also suggests that combating paranoia requires concerted efforts to moderate political conflicts and actively promote political inclusiveness, even though it might be taken as a betrayal by paranoid partisans. I find it heartening that Lyndon B. Johnson beat Barry Goldwater by one of the most lopsided margins in the electoral history of the United States: Johnson won 61.1% of the popular vote while Goldwater carried only 6 states, and Johnson went on to usher in the Great Society, one of the largest expansions of the federal welfare state in history. The outcome of a Trump v. Clinton contest would, on paper at least, likely result in the closest thing to historical deja-vu that American politics has seen.
Ironically, that outcome of Goldwater v Johnson is exactly what Bernie Sanders is purportedly crusading for, although he possesses none of the necessary political qualities Lyndon Johnson did to make it a reality. The issue at stake is not whether Donald Trump will become president of the United States, or whether Bernie Sanders will. Neither event is likely. What is more noteworthy is that Bernie Sanders has proven the effectiveness and the resonance that the paranoid style has within a party that has long defined itself in opposition to it. What the long-term consequences of this remain to be seen, but I am not one of those that think the transformation of the Democratic party into a more ideological, left-wing one is a positive development for American political culture. However, its short-term consequence might well to help push America closer to actual greatness again.