The Depths of American Paranoia
Conspiratorial thinking seems to be proliferating in the current political culture. But its influence on American politics has been long and deep.
The present political moment produces images that feel genuinely novel — think a horde of Trumpists breaching police barriers and storming the halls of the Capitol. What is also new are the objects of their obsessions, like the Q-Anon conspiracy theory or wide-spread anti-vaccine sentiment — ideas that are peddled through recently developed internet platforms and systems of communication which allow for their rapid spread. But the bizarre novelty of the images should not obscure the fact that obsessive conspiracy thinking has always been a feature of the human mind. Our brain, the same organ that can produce ingenious insights, can also be led terribly astray. A great reminder is the essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, written in 1964 by the historian Richard Hofstadter. For even though the text was written decades ago, many of its insights and the historical grounding still sound eerily familiar today.
Hofstadter builds his case using American examples, but his analysis is timeless. For the paranoid style, he writes, “the feeling of persecution is central, and it is indeed systematized in grandiose theories of conspiracy”. The clinical paranoid, he says, “sees the hostile and conspiratorial world in which he feels himself to be living as directed specifically against him; whereas the spokesman of the paranoid style finds it directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate affects not himself alone but millions of others.”
Hofstadter admits that, in some cases, hypothesizing about potential conspiracies may be reasonable, since secret plots do in fact exist. Yet what distinguishes the paranoid style “is not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they regard a ‘vast’ or ‘gigantic’ conspiracy as the moving force in historical events. History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power”. The paranoid spokesman therefore has a millenarian mindset, he constantly feels encroached by these satanic forces, and the final apocalyptical battle is always just around the corner. The conspiracy ideologue considers herself at the helm of an enlightened avantgarde, “capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public”.
As Hofstadter takes his inquiry deeper into the troubled mind, his deliberations become at once shakier and more interesting. Regarding the perceived enemies the paranoids dream up for themselves, he remarks:
“This enemy seems to be on many counts a projection of the self: both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. A fundamental paradox of the paranoid style is the imitation of the enemy. The enemy, for example, may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry.”
We may recognize the same motif in antisemitic conspiracies theories: Who would rather fantasize about the threat of sexually potent, money-grabbing jews than a pathetic petit-bourgeois past the prime of his virility?
To some degree, paranoid thinking everywhere has a religious bend. This is certainly true in America, as Hofstadter demonstrates when he talks about local believers’ fear of a secret Illuminati plot to destroy their religion. The Bavarian Illuminati was an association founded by Adam Weishaupt in the year of American independence in the sleepy town of Ingolstadt. Their aim was to throw the light of reason on religious superstition and to loosen the clergy’s firm grip on society. Not surprisingly, in Bavaria the Illuminati were quickly persecuted by the same reactionaries they were agitating against — but their members continued to meet in Masonic lodges elsewhere. In the newly founded United States, fear of the godless Illuminati quickly took hold among fervent believers who also worried about the secular character of the American republic and about Francophile Jeffersonian democracy.
Required reading for the paranoid of the day was a screed by the Scottish scientist John Robinson titled “Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies”. His book length exposé of the Illuminati found its way to America. As Hofstadter writes, Robinson saw the Illuminati as a “libertine, anti-Christian movement, given to the corruption of women, the cultivation of sensual pleasures, and the violation of property rights”. (As if we needed more convincing.)
Robinson’s paranoia took a decidedly religious bend, as he saw the Illuminati not only as soundly anti-Christian, but somehow also heavily infiltrated by Jesuits. (Internal consistency was never a strong point of conspiracy theorists, it seems.) A generation later, with the anti-Illuminist sentiment having hardly cooled down, paranoid protestants began to transfer their rage onto another canvas — this time, they fantasized about a grand Catholic plot against America. Until the 20th century, says Hofstadter, there persisted a myth about an impending Catholic war to exterminate all heretics in the U.S. on the orders of the pope.
Hofstadter’s essay demonstrates that conspiracy theories about the Illuminati are hardly new. They saw a revival in the 1960s and 70s, when Kerry Thornley, a co-founder of the satirical religion Discordianism, and his colleague Robert Anton Wilson launched “Operation Mindfuck”. The two men planted fake conspiracy theories in obscure newspapers, attributing “all national calamities, assassinations, or conspiracies” to the Illuminati. Thornley and Wilson wanted to peddle obviously ludicrous conspiracy theories to prove the spurious nature of all such paranoid ravings — but they were dismayed as people actually started believing in a grand Illuminati plot.
The filmmaker Adam Curtis picks up “Operation Mindfuck” in his highly recommendable 2021 documentary series “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head”. In this BBC production, Curtis attempts to explain the current political moment by tracing the line between reality and the imaginary, not only in people’s heads, but also in the political culture at large. Thornley’s joke took an unexpected turn, Curtis says, as reports emerged about covert CIA operations like MKUltra, in which CIA agents performed LSD experiments on unwitting subjects with the aim of mentally reprogramming them. “The line between the reality of political corruption and a dream world of conspiracy theories started to get blurred in America.”
Curtis puts his focus on the United States in the 1950s. Under the seemingly stable veneer of the suburban nuclear family there was a profound unease, as evidenced by rampant valium addiction. The isolated suburban dwellers would prove fertile mental ground for the anti-Communist paranoia of Senator Joseph McCarthy or Robert H. Welch’s John Birch Society. Welch believed that President Eisenhower was “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy”, a conclusion, he added, “based on an accumulation of detailed evidence so extensive and so palpable that it seems to put this conviction beyond any reasonable doubt”. The same social milieu would later be the base for Richard Nixon’s sweeping electoral victory. Nixon, of course, under an uneasy façade of stability, mirrored many of the same insecurities of his electorate. The tapes he recorded of his conversations in the Oval Office are the mental scan of a man who is obsessed with the Jews and with media elite plots against him.
In recent years, this 1950’s suburban anxiety has probably been best rendered into pop culture by Lana Del Rey. Her song “Chemtrails Over the Country Club” on an album by the same name takes us into the sentimental, sepia-filtered world of a seemingly careless white upper-middle-class America — a “Laschian conservative” dream world. But under the apparent frivolity lurks a profound unease: “It’s beautiful how this deep normality settles down over me”, she sings, and a few lines later:
Suburbia, The Brentwood Market
What to do next? Maybe we’ll love it
White picket chemtrails over the country club
If Curtis is right to identify the individualized isolation of American suburbia as one of the mental drivers of conspiratorial thinking, then the current social structure and media landscape seem to be even more conducive to trigger people’s latent paranoid tendencies. The trends seem to be magnified nowadays in two crucial ways: On the one hand, people seem to be even more isolated in the times of institutional breakdown and rigid pandemic measures. On the other hand, these frightened, insulated individuals — huddled in front of the blue glow of their phone screens — find comfort in online forums and sub-forums where their particular pathologies are validated, and dissenting opinions appear to them only as grotesque mirages — Hofstadter’s “demonic forces”.
What Hofstadter writes about the right-wing manifestation of the paranoid style still rings true today. The modern right “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”. This is at heart a variation of the millenarian mindset — it is always five minutes to twelve, the country is being stolen and slipping away and a final, decisive battle for the soul of the nation is imminent. An argument could be made that at least something about paranoid thinking is right-wing by definition, since left-wing and liberal thought historically tries to apply reason, while conservative and reactionary thinking leaves more space for aesthetics, feelings and an instinctive Burkean appreciation for a supposedly organic tradition. And, as should have become clear already, the conspiratorial mindset is married to religious thinking — for who rather than the religious would believe that mighty and nebulous powers govern their everyday lives?
Yet Hofstadter makes a qualification which we could also apply to some contemporary left-wing advocates, when he remarks that “nothing entirely prevents a sound program or a sound issue from being advocated in the paranoid style, and it is admittedly impossible to settle the merits of an argument because we think we hear in its presentation the characteristic paranoid accents”. Some of the woke obsessions today almost seem to be the definition of a just cause wrapped in a paranoid mantle. Applied to the United States, it is simply a fact to state that America has a deeply racist history — after all, its material foundation was largely built by unpaid black labor under the whip, and pay day is long overdue. But does this imply that America’s history is reducible to this shameful strain? That its real founding was not 1776, but 1619, as a notorious project by the same name claimed? That white supremacy still reigns unfettered today? In all these hyperboles one can easily detect the paranoid style.
Perhaps this is an insight to guard in mind, that no political camp is immune to conspiratorial suspicion. Paranoia has always distorted human thinking and probably always will, since — fundamentally, biologically — it appears to be an aberration of a useful trait, a healthy instinct to question and to suspect, without which we would be credulous pushovers. Thus, beware: no one is safe, and anyone can fall prey to it — the paranoid style is out to get you.
