The Mind of America in ‘The Paranoid Style’

The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays by Richard Hofstadter (1964)

I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric.

This is a collection of essays by historian Richard Hofstadter. Though I doubt it has ever really lost relevance since it was published in 1964, it has definitely gained a lot in the past year or so. It’s titled after Hofstadter’s most famous essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (which I’ll just refer to as “The Paranoid Style” from now on), and that essay was the reason I picked up this book. The collection adds a bunch of other essays loosely based around the themes that attracted Hofstadter in this period of his career: the cranks, kooks, and mad prophets of American political life.

“The paranoid style” is Hofstadter’s term to describe a kind of populism characterized by, among other qualities, “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.” The practitioner of the paranoid style seeks to gain political leverage by “inflaming the animosities and passions of a small minority.” It is an appeal to the fears of the public, using an irrational mix of pedantry, dishonesty, and anger. It is a vehicle for spreading delusions by political aspirants who are either thus deluded themselves, or are cynical enough to exploit the public’s latent belief that they are being governed by secret cabals of nefarious strangers. It is paranoid because it sees threats in every corner, and conspiracies at every turn:

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.

Hofstadter’s great work, beyond identifying and naming this style of rhetoric, was to list enough “leading examples” from history for his definition to stand. After reading “The Paranoid Style,” you will be persuaded that every generation has had its truthers, birthers, Loose Change-ers, and false flag-ers. Hofstadter traces this type of rhetoric through American history, from Goldwater and McCarthy, to the Ku Klux Klan, the Populists, the anti-Masonic and anti-Catholic movements (“Anti-Catholicism,” he writes, “has always been the pornography of the Puritan”), and beyond. You can just about imagine the guarded whispers creeping between the superstitious settlers of colonial Jamestown.

Importantly, he finds that movements of both the political right and left are susceptible to this rhetoric:

It is a common ingredient of fascism, and of frustrated nationalisms, though it appeals to many who are hardly fascists and it can frequently be seen in the left-wing press.

Both sides, right and left, are tempted by the paranoid style because it preys on psychological, rather than political, weaknesses. But he admits that, at the time he was writing, it was a style most loudly championed by the right wing, where it took on a particular spin: while earlier examples focused on Americans defending their interests from a perceived foreign influence like the Bavarian Illuminati or the Roman Catholics, Hofstadter pegs the modern conservative stance as a desire to recover what “cosmopolitans and intellectuals” have, by a sustained conspiracy, stolen from common Americans:

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.

Read today, Hofstadter’s contemporary examples from the American right wing seem all the more prescient. The spread of, for example, Rupert Murdoch’s media networks, has helped inflame the paranoid fever beyond even what Hofstadter could have envisioned. Certainly the most dated aspect of “The Paranoid Style” is how modest his projections were for the style’s political future. In the 1964 election, Johnson would eviscerate Goldwater, and the paranoid right would remain the persistent fringe that Hofstadter described in his essay. He didn’t live to write about a President Nixon. Forebodingly, the only example he gives of a “consummatory triumph” for the paranoid style was not in the United States, “but in Germany.” He leaves us to finish this thought.

Well, I was reading this book on 6 November 2016, and when the world learned the results of the U.S. election, “The Paranoid Style” went from charmingly relevant to hopelessly quaint. It remains as essential as ever for historical background on the crazed and fanatical bloc of the American electorate. But during Hofstadter’s life there had been no real victory for the paranoid style in American politics. Even Nixon, who became sequestered in liquor-fuelled paranoia by the end of his own presidency, had tried to at least keep his fervor from public view. He was, in a sense, a crook in hiding. The 2016 election inaugurated a confirmed crook, a serial huckster who won on a sloppy mix of lying, fear, salesmanship, and vagueness: the paranoid style for the 21st Century. Paranoia has finally struck gold in America, and I wish Hofstadter was around to revisit his essay once more for us now.

If, like me, you picked up this book for the first essay, the six other pieces in the collection might range from interesting to forgettable. “The Paranoid Style” is followed by three essays, which together make the first section of the book, “Studies in the American Right.” These three all concern another Hofstadter coinage: the “pseudo-conservative.” This is someone who:

…in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.

Hofstadter does this kind of essay well, and the pseudo-conservative, too, is enjoying resurgence today, so these analyses remain au courant to the 2017 reader. But if the collection had included only one of them instead of three, I wouldn’t have missed the omission.

The second section, nebulously titled “Some Problems of the Modern Era,” comprises three more essays. The first of them, “Cuba, the Philippines, and Manifest Destiny” answers the question: how did the Spanish-American War begin with the desire to free Cuba and end with the occupation of the Philippines? Here Hofstadter gives us a fine lesson on how American foreign policy decisions have unforeseen consequences in seemingly unrelated countries. The second essay, “What Happened to the Antitrust Movement?” is a social history of America’s competition laws, which is enjoyable for a subject I know little about. But you can see that our topics are getting more and more esoteric as the book proceeds.

The last essay, “Free Silver and the Mind of ‘Coin’ Harvey,” finishes the transition by exploring a forgotten figure of a forgotten movement: William H. Harvey and the free-silver movement of the 1890s. I admit that even this one had some pleasure in it for me, if only for being such an odd and specific slice of history that I was amused to learn about it.

But we have slid a long way from the classic title essay of this collection. So if none of these other writings interest you, go read “The Paranoid Style”, for free, on the website of Harper’s, the magazine that first ran it. If I had known I could do that, I might have. Instead, I read this whole book. So now I know a little bit more about bimetallism, a little bit more about “Coin” Harvey, and a lot more about American paranoia, than I would have otherwise. Lucky for me, Hofstadter is an uncommonly engaging historian, so even his most obscure journeys are worth going on.