Richard Hofstadter and the "paranoid style" of politics

We're used to the notion of things changing at e-speed. But just as people are noticing more and more similarities between the Iraq War and its follies to those of earlier wars, it's also possible to get some insight into current politics by looking at how people were processing things 40 or 50 years ago.

History does have more usages than just providing bad historical analogies for op-ed pieces. The work of historian Richard Hofstadter in books like Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) and The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965) can offer some insight into today's Republican Party, dominated as it is by "postsegregationist" Southerners, imperialist dreamers and crony-capitalist businesspeople who want to have taxpayers' money mainlined into corporate treasuries on the easiest terms possible.

The Paranoid Style, which is actually a compilation of several essays, has been an influential book. An important part of Hofstadter's scholarly work focused on extremist movements, like the pre-Civil War Anti-Masonic Party. That particular group had a driving ideology that saw the Freemasons as a powerful, conspiratorial group that was having a major and malign effect on American life. A number of well-known Americans, including Andrew Jackson, had been Masons. The Masons were a men's social club that was sort of like today's Rotary Clubs, only with secret ceremonies for entertainment.

The Freemasons still pop up in rightwing conspiracies theories today. German and Austrian Nazi types, for instance, use the Freemasons as a kind of nudge-nudge wink-wink proxy for Jews in their propaganda. The Anti-Masonics eventually were absorbed, more or less, by the new Republican Party, which today seems strangely appropriate. Other than perhaps adding a conspiratorial turn to entirely justified suspicious of the actions of the "Slave Power" (the Southern slaveowners), they don't seem to have had a huge influence on the new party's program.

The "paranoid style"

Hofstadter writes in a piece dating from 1963 that he views the "paranoid" political style not as a clinical matter, but rather as "a style of mind, not always right-wing in its affiliations, that has a long and varied history." But he uses that term "simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind." (All Hofstadter quotes in this post are from Paranoid Style.) He writes:

It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

[T]he paranoid style ... is, above all, a way of seeing the world and of expressing oneself. ... In the paranoid style, as I conceive it, the feeling of persecution is central, and it is indeed systematized in grandiose theories of conspiracy. But there is a vital difference between the paranoid spokesman in politics and the clinical paranoic: although they both tend to be overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic in expression, the clinical paranoid 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. Insofar as he does not usually see himself singled out as the individual victim of a personal conspiracy, he is somewhat more rational and much more disinterested. His sense that his political passions are unselfish and patriotic, in fact goes far to intensify his feeling of righteousness and his moral indignation.

One of the most pervasive of such "grandiose theories of conspiracy" is the idea, blared constantly by conservative TV, radio, think tanks, blogs and various and sundry propagandists, is the notion of the Liberal Media. The fact that every real live liberal - that excludes "Fox liberals" - finds the notion absurd, in either the laughable or tragic sense or both, is taken to be part of the conspiracy, of course.

I should also mention that the practice of the paranoid style doesn't imply a clinical condition, it obviously doesn't exclude it either. If "overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic in expression" sounds like a present-day description of Rush Limbaugh, his addiction to "hillbilly heroin" (Oxycontin) may have contributed to it in some way. But the clinical condition can be considered separately from the political one.

Hofstadter notes that if the term "paranoid style" sounds negative, it's meant to be. Because "the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good."

In that essay, he quotes a number of examples, from the days of the first Adams administration to rightwingers in the 1960s who saw a sinister Communist plot in the fluoridation of water, to illustrate the paranoid style in practice.

Hallmarks of the paranoid style

The international conspiracy: From the earnest patriots who imagined a conspiracy of the Illuminati behind the French Revolution and much else besides, to the McCarthyists hunting Communists everywhere in the early 1950s, Hofstadter says it is a "central preconception of the paranoid style - the existence of a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character."

This is one place where the use of the paranoid style by the Bush administration is pretty clear. The War on Terror against a shadowy, secretive, international conspiracy of The Terrorists is being used to justify everything the Bush administration wants to do, from restricting the Freedom of Information Act to invading Iraq in violation of international law to authorizing torture in the gulag to building a missile defense system which may qualify as the most wasteful use of public monies in the history of humankind.

We also should remember the old saying, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you." Al Qaeda is trying to kill Americans, and they are an international conspiratorial organization. It's the use of The Terrorists as a limitless threat to justify any and every official misdeed and every wasteful Pentagon boondoggle project and every lie to the public and Congress that make the administration's use of it an exercise in the paranoid style.

The impossible goal: The definition of goals is also important, and one of the characteristics that we see in the zealots of the preventive war policy:

Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, the quality needed is not a willingness to compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Nothing but complete victory will do. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated - if not from the world, at least from the theater of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for unqualified victories leads to the formulation of hopelessly demanding and unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid's frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same sense of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

The contemporary examples practically leap off the page in this description. The "totally evil" enemy and the need for complete victory? The title of the book by David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil (2003), is already a good example. In it, they write:

For us, terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil, our generation's great cause. We do not believe that Americans are fighting this evil to minimize it or to manage it. We believe they are fighting to win - to end this evil before it kills again and on a genocidal scale. There is no middle way for Americans: It is victory or holocaust.

And these are not fringe crackpots. Crackpots they may be. But Frum was President Bush's speechwriter, and Richard Perle is one of the leading figures of the neoconservatives, and in his role on the Defense Policy Board and in the Pentagon's lie factory, the Office of Special Plans, he was one of the architects of the Iraq War and the preventive war policy.

The Enemy: The nature of the Enemy is a key part of the style for Hofstadter:

This enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman: sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He is a free, active, demonic agent.

And for the political paranoid, this ultra-sinister Enemy becomes the model for Our Side's own conduct: "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." If the Enemy includes clever intellectuals, the defender of the Truth "will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry." If the Enemy uses secret societies, so will Our Side. If the Enemy wears distinctive robes, so will We; here he uses the example of the anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan adopting priest-like garments for their ceremonies.

Violent fantasies: Hofstadter identifies this as a common feature of the paranoid style. "Much of the function of the enemy lies not in what can be imitated but in what can be wholly condemned." And the sexual misdeeds of the Enemy is often prominent. "Thus Catholics and Mormons - later Negroes and Jews - lent themselves to a preoccupation with illicit sex. Very often the fantasies of true believers serve as strong sadomasochistic outlets."

On this point, he quotes David Brion Davis, summarizing some of the practices credited to the Enemy by various practitioners of the paranoid style. The first sentence of this quote will be very familiar to those who have responded to criticisms of American torture practices in Iraq with reminders of one of the more grisly practices of some of the insurgents:

Masons disemboweled or slit the throats of their victims; Catholics cut unborn infants from their mothers' wombs and threw them to the dogs before their parents' eyes; Mormons raped and lashed recalcitrant women, or seared their mouths with red-hot irons. This obsession with details of sadism, which reached pathological proportions in much of the literature, showed a furious determination to purge the enemy of every admirable quality.

The renegade: The political paranoids make much of those who have converted from the Enemy's cause to Our Side. We haven't really seen so much of that in the War on Terror so far. But we do see some elements in it with people like David Horowitz, who has made a career as a shrill rightwinger by playing the repentant leftist. He has some tract out now about how leftwingers are in bed with Islamic jihadists, thus merging the image of the previous Enemy (The Commies) with that of The Terrorist. Given the zealots' identification of the Democratic Party as being on Bin Laden's side, Zell Miller would function as a similar kind of convert, I suppose.

Obsession with "proofs": This is a point that I think people often miss who aren't so familiar with extremist styles. The opponents of evolution don't just dismiss it out of hand. They go to amazing lengths to try to show that science absolutely agrees with their viewpoint. His description of this part of the paranoid style is excellent:

One of the most impressive things about paranoid literature is precisely the elaborate concern with demonstration it almost invariably shows. One should not be misled by the fantastic conclusions that are so characteristic of this political style into imagining that it is not, so to speak, argued out along factual lines. The very fantastic character of its conclusions leads to heroic strivings for "evidence" to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. [This reads today like an introduction to the account of how the claims for Iraq's massive stores of WMDs were sold to the public.] Of course, there are highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow paranoids, as there are likely to be in any political tendency, and paranoid movements from the Middle Ages onward have had a magnetic attraction for demi-intellectuals.

I think the concept of "middlebrow" is an excellent one. In fact, I would say that one way to understand the effect of Oxycontin radio and Fox News and the like since the late 1980s is to see it as a major expansion of the "middlebrow" version of such propaganda. The British Holocaust denier David Irving is probably the best-known example of the "highbrow" approach.

But whether an idea is sound is not determined by how many phony claims someone can accumulate to support it. (See the Bush administration's case on Iraqi WMDs.) And part of normal critical thinking is to distinguish bogus reasoning from the more solid versions. Hofstadter gives us some guidelines:

The typical procedure of the higher paranoid scholarship is to start with such defensible assumptions and with a careful accumulation of facts, or at least of what appear to be facts, and to marshal these facts toward an overwhelming "proof" of the particular conspiracy that is to be established. It is nothing if not coherent - in fact, the paranoid mentality is far more coherent than the real world, since it leaves no room for mistakes, failures, or ambiguities. It is, if not wholly rational, at least intensely rationalistic; it believes that it is up against an enemy who is as infallibly rational as he is totally evil, and it seeks to match his imputed total competence with its own, leaving nothing unexplained and comprehending all of reality in one overreaching, consistent theory. It is nothing if not "scholarly" in technique. [Joseph] McCarthy's 96-page pamphlet McCarthyism contains no less than 313 footnote references, and [John Birch Society head] Mr. [Robert] Welch's fantastic assault on Eisenhower, The Politician, is weighed down by a hundred pages of bibliography and notes. The entire right-wing movement of our time is a parade of experts, study groups, monographs, footnotes, and bibliographies.

I think Hofstadter's observations on this point are an important clue to conservative obsession with comma-dancing, with nit-picking often minor or irrelevant points. For a certain kind of viewpoint, that counts as discrediting unpleasant information and provides a rationalization for ignoring it.

This following point is also key for understanding the trick behind this approach. (Apparently from this quote, Hofstadter regarded the rightwingers of 1963 as somewhat more scrupulous with facts than today's rightwing echo chamber, e.g., the Swift Boat Liars for Bush.)

What distinguishes the paranoid style is not, then, the absence of verifiable facts (though it is occasionally true than in his extravagant passion for facts the paranoid occasionally manufactures them), but rather the curious leap in imagination that is always made at some critical point in the recital of events. John Robison's tract on the Illuminati followed a pattern that has been repeated for over a century and a half. For page after page he patiently records the details he has been able to accumulate about the history of the Illuminati. Then, suddenly, the French Revolution has taken place, and the Illuminati have brought it about.

What is missing is not veracious information about the organization, but sensible judgment about what can cause a revolution. The plausibility the paranoid style has for those who find it plausible lies, in good measure, in this appearance of the most careful, conscientious, and seemingly coherent application to detail, the laborious accumulation of what can be taken as convincing evidence for the most fantastic conclusions, the careful preparation for the big leap from the undeniable to the unbelievable. The singular thing about all this laborious work is that the passion for factual evidence does not, as in most intellectual exchanges, have the effect of putting the paranoid spokesman into effective two-way communication with the world outside his group - least of all with those who doubt his views. He has little real hope that his evidence will convince a hostile world. His effort to amass it has rather the quality of a defensive act which shuts off his receptive apparatus and protects him from having to attend to disturbing considerations that do not fortify his ideas. He has all the evidence he needs; his is not a receiver, he is a transmitter.

The John Robison to whom he refers there was a Scottish scientist who authored the book 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 (1797). To show how enduring a popular conspiracy theory can be, Pat Robertson used the Illuminati causing the French Revolution in his 1992 book, The New World Order. I also heard the guitarist Carlos Santana at a concert in the 1990s hold forth in a monologue about the Illuminati and how they were still driving many of the events in the world of today.

Hofstadter would not have been surprised that the 9/11 attacks provided a golden opportunity for the paranoid style to flourish: "Catastrophe or the fear of catastrophe is most likely to elicit the syndrome of paranoid rhetoric."

What does it mean for now?

I wouldn't expect any rabid Bush fans to pick up Hofstadter's book and suddenly "see the light" and repentof their war-loving, Social Security-hating ways. On the contrary, they will be quick to say, no, it those terrible liberals who have the paranoid style. After all, didn't Hillary talk about a "vast rightwing conspiracy" (aka, the VRWC)?

But it is useful for those of us in the reality-based community to understand some of the political processes going on in today's Republican Party.

[12/30/04 - I have edited this post to correct a comment that identified the Anti-Masonic Party with the Know-Nothings; the latter nickname was applied to the nativist American Party. The Anti-Masonic Party had largely faded away by the late 1830s; the American Party flourished later. So any clear effect of the Anti-Masonic Party on the later Republican Party founded in 1854 could certainly be questioned.]

Tags: richard hofstadter, paranoid style, radical right, republican+party