Looking for Barry Goldwater - Democrats looking, that is

Barry Goldwater 1962

The references I'm seeing from liberals to the 1964 Goldwater movement are starting to worry me. Faced with an historic opportunity for progressive politics greater than any since 1965, some liberals and progressives seem to be getting stuck in the mud of decades past. On the one hand, there seems to be a fond illusion that the Tea Party movement represents a fringe crackpot movement that will bring electoral loss to the Republicans like in 1964. On the other, among some who recognize the potential majority appeal of a Jeb Bush or Sarah Palin, there's the panic that defending women's rights or the rule of law will make the Democrats lose on "culture war" grounds just like in 1968, or so that narrative goes. Maybe we're condemned to relive "the 60s" for decades more. But framing the present too strictly in terms of the past can be risky.

We saw Frank Rich doing this a couple of weeks ago, including a telltale quotation from Richard Hofstadter. Even Paul Krugman pulled out a Hofstadter quote in Paranoia Strikes Deep New York Times 11/09/09. His basic point is well taken. If the Republican Party nationally over the next four years shrinks to a chronically minority party, a rump party largely based on the votes of white Southern conservatives, they could adopt even more of a wrecker strategy than they currently follow. He uses California state government as an example of how that can happen, and how damaging that can be. But he also writes, "while the paranoid style [of politics] isn’t new, its role within the G.O.P. is." Krugman recognizes that even as a rump party, the Republicans can have a tremendously destructive effect, so he's not ready to indulge in Frank Rich's triumphalism. But he does accept the notion of the Sarah Palin/Tea Party types as a radical minority of a different kind than already runs the Republican Party.

Sarah Palin with her close ties to the neo-Confederate Alaska Independence Party and to "Third Wave" Pentecostalist theocratic religion does represent an intensification of the radicalization of the Republican Party. Max Blumenthal has a good piece on the appeal of Palin to the Christian Right base in How Sarah Palin Made Herself Indispensable While Destroying the Republican Party TomDispatch 11/15/09. The headline doesn't actually reflect his analysis. He writes, "If she doesn't prove to be the Party's future queen, she may have positioned herself to be its future king-maker - and potentially its destroyer." That is, unless conditions are such to make her an acceptable alternative on Presidential Election Day in 2012 or 2016.

Richard Kim and Betsy Reed in The Perils of Palinism The Nation 11/11/09 (11/30/09 issue) recognize that the Democrats are looking to Palin as the new "Goldwater":

In one way of looking at it, Sarah Palin is the best thing that ever happened to the Democratic Party.

Electorally, she is the GOP gift that keeps on giving. ...

With enemies like this, who needs friends? ...

It's tempting to cheer Sarah Barracuda on as she cannibalizes what remains of the Republican Party. The Going Rogue book tour, the 2010 targeting of moderates like Florida's Charlie Crist, a 2012 bid for the presidency--bring it on! While the percentage of Republican voters who say they would seriously consider voting for Palin for president stands at 65 percent, among all voters the figure is mired at 33 percent.

But they at least recognizes that in our current political culture - they don't mention the dysfunctional nature of our national press as a culprit - that some of Palin's most crackpot ideas get treated more seriously than their content deserves:

Those of us who reside in the parts of America Palin regards as unreal [i.e., not "real Americans"] may secretly enjoy watching the bubble bounce along, relishing her run-on sentences and looney-tunes lines. But the more we chuckle, the more indignant and impassioned the Palin army becomes. That's the bedeviling thing about Sarah Palin, and the secret to her success: neither the left nor the right can get enough of her.

Glenn Beck's current schtick also represents an intensification of the radicalization, with his promotion of outright John Birch Society style conspiracy theories, including those of the Bircher partisan Willard Cleon Skousen.

Greg Lewis in Following Limbaugh on his journey to the edge Media Matters 11/13/09 even suggests that Party chief Rush Limbaugh is going beyond what good loyal Republicans find acceptable! I would like to believe that is true.

The problem I see with all this is that while Palin and Beck may engage in a more crackpot form of marketing than we've seen previously, the radicalization of the Republican Party isn't new. Rush Limbaugh has been a commanding figure in the Party for two decades, even if his recent rhetoric is more rancid.

But, short of abolishing the Constitutional forms altogether, how much more radical can it get than the basic claims and many of the practices of the Cheney-Bush administration? Cheney's Unitary Executive theory was that the President can break any law and the Constitution itself as long as he claims it's for "national security" purposes. Their administration abandoned the Geneva Convention on treatment of prisoners of war, they instituted a blatantly criminal torture program, they set up a massive domestic surveillance program whose scope and nature we still don't really know, they instituted a pattern of partisan-political prosecutions, they invaded Iraq based on lies and in violation of international law and of the Congressional war resolution of October 2002. The Republican Party, including that bold Maverick John McCain and alleged "moderates" like Chuck Hagel and now-Democratic Arlen Specter, accepted a framework for authoritarian Party rule as well as the implementation of important elements of it during the Cheney-Bush years.

I want to repeat that because I don't mean it as hyperbole. Short of abolishing the Constitutional forms altogether, how much more radical can it get than the basic claims and many of the practices of the Cheney-Bush administration? Obviously, there are many worse things an administration can do to its own citizens than what happened during 2001-9. (Again the qualifier: we don't know the actual extent of the abuses.) But in terms of a theoretical/legal framework, and in terms of the Party accepting the authority of the Party above even the authority of the Constitution, how much more radical can it get?

Sarah Palin 2007

So Democrats and progressives should not be thinking or pretending to think that Palin and the Tea Partiers represent a radicalizing faction in a Party that is otherwise committed to democratic processes and concepts. Their version of the Party ideology would be a change in degree and in marketing, but not in kind. Even Beck's flirtation with isolationism doesn't change that. Old Right isolationism of the Beck/Bircher kind is just rabid nationalism and jingoism with different cosmetics.

In terms of understanding relevant political lessons of the 1960s, Frank Rich's triumphalist model based on a 1965 assumption of the political impotence of Goldwater-style "movement conservatism", is not a good one. Because the Republican resurgence began in earnest in mid-term elections of 1966, built on the basis of Goldwater's "movement conservatism". Not only did Republicans pick up impressive gains in Congress in 1966. Ronald Reagan also won the Governorship of California on a Goldwaterite platform, campaigning against rioting black people and stinking dirty hippies. One of his most Reagan and his "culture war" issues proved hard to ignore in the following years.

And neither Barry Goldwater nor Ronald Reagan espoused the Unitary Executive doctrine that is now the Republican template for Republican Presidents. Cheney and his faithful mouthpiece David Addington first elaborated that doctrine in the Republicans' minority report on the Iran-Contra Congressional investigating committee. The practice started as a major but isolated aspect of the Reagan administration's secret wars in Central America. But Reagan and his senior officials worried that he might actually be impeached and removed from office over the incident.

Today, the Republican Party is completely supportive of the Unitary Executive practice of the Presidency. We saw it during the Cheney-Bush administration where Iran-Contra was effectively the template for their entire foreign policy. A Sarah Palin-Liz Cheney administration taking office in 2013 will not have to worry about being impeached and removed from office for breaking the law if conditions remain the same as they are today.

Eric Boehlert in The GOP's looming (media) civil war Media Matters 11/10/09 makes a confusing argument. He argues that the FOXists and the OxyContin crowd are driving unable to nominate candidates who can win, using the recent example of Doug Hoffman in the New York 23rd district special Congressional election.

But he also points to John McCain's winning the Republican nomination in 2008 against the opposition of the most enthusiastic rightists as evidence that the FOXists are out of touch with the Republican base. But that doesn't set very well together with the other argument. After all, the supposedly less-rightist Republican base also nominated a candidate who lost.

He also mentions Barry Goldwater in 1964. Democrats in 1980 were also looking to the Republicans' 1964 fiasco for hope in the Reagan-Carter contest. Reagan had also been identified throughout his political career with the Goldwater wing of the Party. And he won the election.

Then we have Oliver Willis in Liberal Elitism? No. Some People Are, Sadly, Stupid Huffington Post 11/12/09 recognizing that radicalism doesn't mean that the Republican Party is doomed to disappear, arguing:

Far from the liberals in the '70s who were clearly not responsive enough to the middle class, leading to the rise of Nixon and resentment politics, today's left has gone to great lengths to be a big tent. So much so that some of our biggest fault lines are internal and don't involve the Republicans at all. But far from the pre-Clinton great society types, today's liberals understand that without blue collar people on our side we don't advance as a movement. ...

While the concerns of many white, middle-class people are worthy causes and should be addressed by liberals (and are), it is not elitism to treat this roving band of conspiracy nuts for the cretins they are or associate with. This would be akin to President Johnson in 1964 undertaking a federal committee to study the mind control powers of fluoridated water. That would be asinine.

Liberals have in the past allowed the ivory tower set to exert too much control over the Democratic party. [my emphasis]

All this sounds very Broderian and "sensible" by Beltway standards. But were Republican victories in 1966 and after because the Democrats were "not responsive enough to the middle class"? Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats got Medicare passed, which is one of the major government programs benefiting "the middle class" (a vague term in itself). Lyndon Johnson won his landslide victory in 1964 running against Goldwater primarily on two issues: support of civil rights for African-Americans and opposition to Goldwater's demands to escalate the Vietnam War.

It was probably inevitable in retrospect that there would be the famous "white backlash" against civil rights legislation. But if Johnson had withdrawn from Vietnam rather than escalated the war, the entire political scene would have looked different in both 1966 and especially 1968. I know this is "what-if" history. But Democratic Presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey barely lost to Nixon. If it hadn't been for the war issue - or if Johnson had been willing to publicize what he knew about the Nixon campaign's interventions to delay the peace talks - it's very conceivable that Johnson could have won.

And when I see comments like, "But far from the pre-Clinton great society types, today's liberals understand that without blue collar people on our side we don't advance as a movement." If Oliver Willis thinks that Great Society "types", otherwise known as liberal, pro-labor Democrats were unaware of the need for blue collar voters or unresponsive to their economic needs, he needs to do more research. So far, the post-"great society types" in the Obama administration haven't been able to get health care reform passed, they are escalating a needless war in Afghanistan much like LBJ did in Vietnam, they're playing patty-cake with the fiscal hawks who want to phase out Social Security, and they are postponing (indefinitely?) fulfilling their pledge to Labor on the Employee Free Choice Act to facilitate union organizing and selling out women's rights to a handful of Blue Dog Democrats.

If there's a strategy by the Democrats that could make even Sarah Palin President in 2013, it would look a whole lot like this one of the post-"great society types". Willis sees that the new "Goldwaters" could threaten the Democrats. It's just his answer seems to be following policies that would toss independent voters into their laps.

My favorite media critic, Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby, seems to veer between taking civil-rights concerns seriously and worrying that they are a distraction from the important issues. This past week was a "bad hair week" for him in that regard. Scolding the hapless star pundit Ruth Marcus for just now noticing that the Republicans have been lying their hineys off about health care reform, he concludes:

Warning: If Marcus decides to address this disgrace, she’ll find herself with little help. Now that she is fully awake, she will see how much of our world is really about culture war - about looking away from corporate rule, about keeping us rubes entertained. [my emphasis]

Women's rights, immigrant rights and civil rights are not about "looking away from corporate rule". And if the Democrats want to build a long-term coalition that not only won't flinch at hearing the phrase "corporate rule" like our Blue Dogs would but actually do something to increase people's power against corporate rule, selling out the rights of women, Latinos and African-Americans - most of whom would count as "workers" by any reasonable definition and certainly as "middle class" and/or poor - isn't going to get them there.

I'm all for learning lessons from "the Sixties". But I prefer reality-based lessons, not Blue Dog ideology for keeping Republican policies dominant for decades to come.

Tags: democratic party, paranoid style, republican party, sarah palin

Imagining the Enemy Within

Do Republicans really wet their pants every time they hear bad news? Or do they just act that way when they are trying to drum up a hate campaign against some group or the other?

Human Events is one of the long-time favorite organs for rightwing Republicans. The lead story at their Web site as of this writing is Hasan's Personal Jihad by Clare Lopez 11/12/09:

A week after a Muslim jihadi gunned down more than 40 fellow citizens at Ft. Hood, Texas, America’s national security leadership still won’t admit that the attack had anything to do with Islam. By failing to acknowledge that connection, those with a constitutional duty to defend this nation “against all enemies foreign and domestic” consistently substitute a policy of political correctness at the expense of military readiness. The fact is that the 5 November 2009 attack that took the lives of thirteen American patriots was not just an act of terrorism: it was an act of war. When a gunman from the ranks of Islamic Jihad mounts an armed assault against a military target in complete consistency with the enemy doctrine of war, it is time to recognize that the U.S. actually is at war -- not just in Afghanistan or Iraq, but with all those who follow the call of Jihad. These are the Jihad Wars and the stakes are clear: shall Americans live in security under the Constitution or shall the enemy within and without compel us to submit to Shari’a (Islamic law)?

There is no evidence at this point that the accused shooter, who has just been formally charged by the military with 13 counts of premeditated murder, is a "Muslim jihadi". We know he's Muslim. But what role if any his religion may have played in his actions isn't known, based on what's in the public record (although it's likely that it played some role).

I've yet to see that there's any evidence of the Army having promoted "political correctness at the expense of military readiness", although since rightwingers mean politically INcorrect when they say "politically correct" and they aren't always referring to politics, it's hard to know what the writer is actually trying to say. As I suggested in an earlier post, I can speculate that the desire to turn a blind eye to excessive Christian proselytizing in the military and the need to retain people fluent in Arabic could have played a role in ignoring danger signs.

But what were the supposed danger signs? Marcy Wheeler in Nidal Hasan’s Dots Emptywheel 11/10/09 gives a roundup of what we know that may be relevant to the actions of which Hasan is accused. Her discussion focuses on data sharing among federal agencies. But her reality-based list of focal points in analyzing Hasan's background is telling. Taken together, they give us a strong circumstantial reason to believe that some ideological motive (religious and/or political) was at work in his planning for the shooting. But the only one of the types of evidence she lists looks to me like an obvious red flag in itself: his purchase of a so-called "cop-killer" gun with several 20-round magazines of ammunition on August 1 of this year. But conservatives have committed themselves to such an expansive reading of the Second Amendment that they will presumably be hesitant to jump up and down over that as a sign of anything other than good citizenship by a citizen diligent to protect his Second Amendment rights. Although I would guess the gun purchase is going to be part of the prosecution's case for premeditation.

Is Hasan "from the ranks of" some group called "Islamic Jihad"? No evidence that I know of. Who are "all those who follow the call of Jihad"? Since "jihad" (struggle) is a concept with multiples meanings in Islam - Islamic tradition says that the Prophet Muhammad called the struggle to live in accord with God's laws was the "greater jihad" as distinct from the "lesser jihad" of war - American (non-Muslim) rightwingers typically apply such accusations to Muslims generally.

And it has to be clear to anyone whose brain is not pickling in ideological OxyContin that Christian theocracy is a greater threat to American freedoms that Muslim religious law (Sharia).

The Lopez article is useless as an analysis of the Fort Hood shooting. But it illustrates how conservatives use the image of an infinitely threatening, horrible Muslim enemy in pretty much exactly the same way they used the Communist menace during the Cold War. In fact, some of the polemics could be boilerplate, with words like "Muslims" and "Sharia" substituted for "Communist" and "Communism".

The Pentagon is largely echoing that aspect of this argument. This is a case that has the hard right accusing the Pentagon of being soft on Communism Islamic extremism. Which brings to mind that it was Joe McCarthy's reckless investigation of the Army that wrecked his credibility and brought him an official Senate censure.

The politics of this are already complicated. Liberals and progressives generally wouldn't want to enable a new round of paranoid fear-mongering about The Terrorists. Remember Attorney General John Ashcroft's warning after the 9/11 attacks that there could be thousands of Al Qa'ida sleeper agents in the US, a claim that had no basis in fact?

But there is a real problem also with the fact that the Army's tendency in these things is to keep as much secret from the public as possible. It's not only a deeply ingrained habit. But more than one senior Army officer at Fort Hood must fear for their careers right now after such a disaster occurred on their watch. We've already seen what looks like a very clumsy attempt to spin the capture of Hasan in a way that didn't align with the facts. (See Greg Mitchell Massive Media 'Fail' on Fort Hood Pressing Issues 11/12/09; James McKinley, Jr., Second Officer Gives an Account of the Shooting at Ft. Hood New York Times 11/12/09)

One of my big concerns here is that with the Republicans obviously trying hard to spin this as evidence of a Terrorist Conspiracy So Vast, the Army's reflexive secrecy and tendency to creative embellish their stories released to the public could wind up feeding paranoid conspiracy theories. When your framework is that the Army is being "politically correct" in covering up a known Terrorist Conspiracy in their ranks, any false information they release on the case will then become evidence of the dark conspiracy. The Army can't stop political paranoids from being what they are. But it doesn't have to facilitate their propaganda by sloppy public relations nonsense, either.

Tags: fort hood massacre, paranoid style

Nothing to worry about

Good ole Pat Boone, the clean-cut Christian pop singer who must be about 100 years old by now, just had a column at World NutDaily and also at NewsMax saying that the "vermin" in the White House need to gassed with a "very powerful fumigant" to get rid of its "invaders" and "alien rodents". Republicans on OxyContin, it ain't a pretty sight.

Fortunately, we know from Frank Rich's column Sunday that characters who talk this way are marginal figures in the Republican Party. You know, like Rush Limbaugh, who hardly any Republicans listen to, much less share his attitudes and ideas. Otherwise I might worry.

Tags: frank rich, paranoid style, pat boone, radical right

Frank Rich vs. GOP "Stalinists"

I'm not so thrilled about Frank Rich's New York Times column The G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York 10/31/09. The short version of my discomfort with it is that he seems to be looking for that now-extinct political species, the "moderate" Republican.

He apparently thinks that two of the current off-year elections coming on Tuesday have Republicans who are practically Democrats:

No wonder even the very conservative Republican contenders in the two big gubernatorial contests this week have frantically tried to disguise their own convictions. The candidate in Virginia, Bob McDonnell, is a graduate of Pat Robertson’s university whose career has been devoted to curbing abortion rights, gay civil rights and even birth control. But in this campaign he ditched those issues, disinvited Palin for a campaign appearance, praised Obama’s Nobel Prize, and ran a closing campaign ad trumpeting “Hope.” Chris Christie, McDonnell’s counterpart in New Jersey, posted a campaign video celebrating “Change” in which Obama’s face and most stirring campaign sound bites so dominate you’d think the president had endorsed the Republican over his Democratic opponent, Jon Corzine. [my emphasis]

It seems to go right by him that in order to find an example of Republican politicians who are seemingly willing to distance themselves from the likes of Sarah Palin, he has to find them among two that he describes as very conservative Republicans.

And does Frank Rich really think its a novel thing for one Party to borrow popular but largely content-free symbolism from the other Party's ad campaigns? I mean, using "Hope" in a campaign commercial isn't exactly the same as supporting health care reform and strong financial regulation, or opposing the war in Afghanistan. You know, the stuff that actually affects people's lives?

How does this position from Bob McDonnell's campaign Web site differ in substance from Sarah Palin's, Rush Limbaugh's or Glenn Beck's:

Bob McDonnell has concerns that Washington’s proposed reforms will drive the cost of health care up and jeopardize quality and access. Reforms being discussed in Washington could raise costs for those who already have insurance, harm small business owners and make it harder to create jobs, or shift millions of Virginians from their private insurance into a government run system, raise taxes and increase our deficit even further. Rather than centralizing control of health care at the federal level, or saddling Virginia businesses and workers with new mandates to pay for plans the government thinks they want, we should let individuals and families control their health care decisions.

I beginning to wish for a moratorium on citations to Richard Hofstadter's essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics".

Richard Hofstadter(1916-1970)

Which might sound a tad strange for someone who's been making references to Hofstadter and his writing on the "paranoid style" for pretty much as long as I've been blogging, as in Richard Hofstadter and the "paranoid style" of politics 12/29/04, in which I discuss the theory generally. When I checked, I was a bit surprised at how many of my posts over the years contain a reference to his work. Here's how Rich uses Hofstadter:

The more rightists who win G.O.P. primaries, the greater the Democrats’ prospects next year. But the electoral math is less interesting than the pathology of this movement. Its antecedent can be found in the early 1960s, when radical-right hysteria carried some of the same traits we’re seeing now: seething rage, fear of minorities, maniacal contempt for government, and a Freudian tendency to mimic the excesses of political foes. Writing in 1964 of that era’s equivalent to today’s tea party cells, the historian Richard Hofstadter observed that the John Birch Society’s “ruthless prosecution” of its own ideological war often mimicked the tactics of its Communist enemies.

While his narrow analogy between the Tea Partiers and the Birchers is a valid enough use of Hofstadter's work, the emphasis should be on narrow.

Because the main essay in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965) was about the kind of politics practiced by the Barry Goldwater faction of the Republican Party that dominated the Presidential nominating convention in San Francisco in 1964, including a very public clash with the "eastern Establishment" wing of the Party lined up behind Nelson Rockefeller's Presidential candidacy. That was a key turning point for the present-day "movement conservatism". The movement conservatism that has dominated the Republican Party since 1980!

The Beltway Village is in thrall to the faith of High Broderism: American politics is dominated by the "vital center"; bipartisanship is the high and best form of politics; the "extremes of the right and the left" have to be avoided but especially those of the left.

One of the many problems of that conceptual framing of the world of American politics is that as the Republican Party became dominated by what was it's scruffy, still-not-respectable right wing back in 1964, and then became more and more radicalized to the point of embracing criminal torture as one of its core values (not unrelated to the embrace of lynching by the segregationists of 1964) and launching an overt war of aggression in Iraq based on straight-up fabricated claims, the priests and devotees of High Broderism have continued to define the Republican Party as being part of that "vital center." "Vital center" was a phrase that Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. popularized in a book by that title, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (1949), which was one of the founding texts we might say of Cold War liberalism. In his last book published during his lifetime, War and the American Presidency (2004), Schlesinger left no doubt of his own ability to distinguish between today's Republican Party and some kind of centrist conservatism. He described the Party then led by Dick Cheney and George W. Bush this way:

For all his buffoonish side, the president is secure in himself, disciplined, decisive, and crafty, and capable of concentrating on a few priorities. He has maintained control of a rag-tag Republican coalition, well described by Kevin Phillips ... as consisting of "Wall Street, Big Energy, multinational corporations, the Military-Industrial Complex, the Religious Right, the Market Extremist think-tanks, and the Rush Limbaugh Axis." All these groups agree in their strong support of their president, though they sharply disagree among themselves.

Frank Rich writes as though only the Christian Right and the OxyContin Axis are those who practice the "paranoid style". And in this best of all possible High Broderist worlds, they are doomed to political marginalization.

That's not what happened to the paranoid-style politics of the "movement conservatism" of 1964. There aren't any Nelson Rockefellers or Mark Hatfields in the Republican Congressional delegations today. Although Village conventional wisdom John McCain is a bold Maverick who's playing that role. Frank Rich, in other words, can't address the reality of the fanaticism dominating today's Republican Party without going way outside the conventional assumptions of his fellow Villagers.

Dan Froomkin express a much better grasp of that situation as he addresses it in Seven questions for Dan Froomkin The Economist Online 11/01/09 in the context of press coverage of the bama administration and the problem for "balance" in the current climate:

DIA: Do you think the media should strive for objectivity in its reporting?

Mr Froomkin: No. Journalists should strive for accuracy, and fairness. Objectivity is impossible, and is too often confused with balance. And the problem with balance is that we are not living in a balanced time. For instance, is it patently obvious that at this point in our history, the leading luminaries on one side of the American political spectrum are considerably less tethered to reality than those on the other side. Madly trying to split the difference, as so many of my mainstream-media colleagues feel impelled to do, does a disservice to the concept of the truth.

Rich did depart a tiny bit from the Village wisdom on the Obama administration's (mild!) verbal attacks on FOX News:

Only in the alternative universe of the far right is Obama a pariah and Palin the great white hope. It’s become a Beltway truism that the White House’s (mild) spat with Fox News is counterproductive because it drives up the network’s numbers. But if curious moderate and independent voters are now tempted to surf there and encounter Beck’s histrionics for the first time, the president's numbers will benefit as well. To the uninitiated, the tea party crowd comes across like the barflies in “Star Wars.”

This is also a fairly strange statement, largely because Rich observes his obligation as a celebrity pundit not to talk about what the mainstream press is doing. Like, for instance, picking up the phony memes that FOX pumps up furiously. Like his own newspaper the New York Times recently scolding themselves for not paying enough attention to conservative concerns and promising to pay much more attention from now on. And he doesn't note a critical fact, which is that when Glenn Beck and other prominent figures in that "alternative universe" make hysterical and false charges against the Democratic health care reform plans, their viewers and listeners will find it very hard to find clear explanations of the key issues around that issue in the New York Times or other major news outlets. And they do a pitifully poor job of reporting on how the Beckians and the Limbaugh dittoheads actually do affect the political dynamics. Rich's column is an example of that, I'm afraid.

It's also important to remember that the whole Republican Party is keenly attuned to the Beckian/OxyContin "alternative universe", not just those for whom Palin is currently their favorite choice for Presidential candidate.

And I'm not so sure that for the typical TV viewer "the tea party crowd comes across like the barflies in 'Star Wars.'" Since our national press corps does such a very poor job of reporting on that movement, who the activists are and who the groups like Freedom Watch are that finance their protests, I'm not at all sure that's how they come across. One prominent aspect of the Tea Party protests is the extent to which they were organized by the partisan-Republican groups we know as FOX News. But, as we have seen, when the Democrats challenge the "news" channel crass partisanship and political organizing, even very mildly criticize it, the Village lines up to scold Obama and the Democrats for such naughty behavior. As Rich put it, "It’s become a Beltway truism that the White House’s (mild) spat with Fox News is counterproductive ..." Actually, mainstream pundits have said worse than that, that it was on the level of Spiro Agnews back in the day.

And, sure, when you look at Sarah Palin's close cooperation with Birchers and especially the neo-Confederate Alaska Independence Party (AIP), and with the theocratic and cultish aspect of the Third Wave Pentecostal movement of which she has been a very active part, she might look as though she came from an alternative political universe. But our national press corps focused on in 2008 and focuses on still is her verbal gaffes and Tina Fey's spoofs of her from Saturday Night Live. The average news consumer have heard a lot of that. But her "pallin' around" with neo-Confederates? Her theocratic religious commitments? Not so much. Not much at all, actually.

Tags: establishment press, frank rich, paranoid style, radical right, richard hofstadter

The Illuminati, or, Wingnuts of the world, unite!

Graphic from the John Birch Society's magazine, American Opinion - notice the hammer-and-sickle in the left eye and what seems to be Congress in the right

Continuing the theme of historical background on current rightwing trends, I've been looking at a collection edited by historian David Brion Davis published in 1971 called, The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion From the Revolution to the Present. It thought of this theme today when I saw Atrios post, They're All Birchers Now 04/21/07, which references this Glenn Greenwald post about the amazing capacity of our Republicans to swallow preposterous conspiracy theories, Right-wing blogs discover massive conspiracy to hide WMDs in Iraq Salon 04/21/07.

One of the longest-running conspiracy theories on which Davis gives some background is that of the Illuminati. Pat Robertson, whose Regent University alumni we've learned in the current US Attorneys scandal apparently now has a decisive say over who gets appointed to be the chief federal prosecutors, used this concept as part of his grand conspiratorial theory of history espoused in books like The New World Order (1991) and The Turning Tide (1993).

Davis traces the Illuminati conspiracy theory to a book by one John Robison, 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, published in Scotland in 1797. He was inspired in turn by a Frenchman name Abbé Barruel who, Davis writes, "helped to popularize the view that every stage of the [French] Revolution had been planned and implemented by secret societies, largely Freemasonic in origin, as part of a master conspiracy to overthrow Christianity and legitimate government." But he thinks that Robinson's book was probably more responsibible for popularizing the notion.

This conspiracy theory was deeply reactionary in its origins and intent. It opposed not only the bloody excesses of the French Revolution but the very notion of democracy and the Enlightenment, a reactionary viewpoint that is at the heart of the Christian dominionist viewpoint of which Pat Robertson is one of the best-known advocates today (though most of them don't describe themselves as "dominionists").

Davis describes the background of Robison's tract this way:

Robison had become alarmed by Masonic "innovations" and by supposed evidence that many lodges had been infiltrated by Jesuits, deists, and heretical sectarians. After a close study of various obscure documents, he concluded in 1797 that Freemasonry had finally been taken over and exploited by the secret Order of Illuminati who sought to destroy Christianity and overturn all the governments of Europe, and who had in fact engineered the French Revolution. In Robison's inflamed mind, the Illuminati appeared as the most dangerous conceivable enemy to British Protestantism: they combined the secular rationalism of the left-wing Enlightenment with all the diabolical traits once ascribed to the Catholic Counter-Reformation.

He summarizes the book and its impact this way:

Although John Robison was not an American, he served as a bridge between English and American concepts of conspiracy, and had an enormous influence on Federalist writers and on the later anti-Masonic movement. Robison was anything but an ignorant fanatic. He was a professor of science (natural philosophy) at the University of Edinburg and secretary to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His book exhibits the careful massing of evidence, the plausible scholarship, and the quick jump to breathtaking conclusions which Richard Hofstadter has described as among the hallmarks of the paranoid style. There is a note of modernity to Robison's protest against a movement governed by the belief that a noble end justifies any means. He also anticipated later patterns of thought when he sensed that systems of ethics could become ideological weapons, and that tests of loyalty should concern one's commitment to "approved principles" rather than to specific leaders or groups.

There is actually no evidence that the Order of the Illuminati was anything more than a short-lived organization dedicated to the humanitarian and rationalistic principles of the Enlightenment. It was certainly not responsible for the French Revolution. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that in the years preceding Robison's book, the repressive measures of the British government had provoked conspiratorial movements among pro-French radicals and oppressed English workers. By defining all social protest as subversive, the Pitt administration drove protest under ground. Pitt's spies and informers gathered extensive evidence on some of the "Secret Assemblies" that worried John Robison. Robison's theories must therefore be understood as a somewhat hysterical and reactionary response to genuine social unrest. It is significant that Robison, as a defender of the existing order, was especially fearful that revolutionary ideas were contaminating the young. The same apprehension would later be shared by American anti-abolitionists and anti-Communists. (my emphasis)

Davis includes a selection from a speech of 06/04/1964 by Robert Welch, the head of the far-right John Birch Society. Welch wasn't satisfied with going back to the 18th-century Enlightenment to find the root of all social evil. He took it back to the dawn of Western civilization in ancient Greece. But he works the Illuminati into his grand theory of an immense conspiracy against good Christian white folks:

The precedent had been set, however [by the collectivism of Sparta], and the vision obviously reoccurred to many evil men during those two thousand years. There were many small sects and heresies and societies and associations of which we catch fleeting glimpses now and then from the early centuries of the Christian era until they proliferated into numerous clumps of unsightly or even poisonous intellectual weeds after 1700. How many of them there were, each of which intended to be the embryo of an organization that would grow in power until it ruled the world, we do not know. How many revolutionary coups or insurrections, or how many more gradual and more peaceful impositions of tyrannical power by ambitious criminals mouthing the hypocrisies of collectivism, may have been "masterminded" by such esoteric groups, we do not know. How extensive or long lasting was the once well-established cult of Satanism, which incorporated into its beliefs, methods, and purposes practically all of the foulness now associated with our contemporary tyranny, Communism, we do not know. For a high degree of secrecy was not only essential to any even temporary success on the part of any of these nefarious collections of criminal con men, but the thrill of belonging to some mysterious and powerful inner circle was one of the strongest appeals any such group could offer to prospective recruits.

We do know, however, from hundreds of small leaks and published accounts that the doctrines which gave many of these secret groups their cohesiveness and continuity would fall clearly, and bv the most tolerant classification, into the category of evil. Also, that by the eighteenth century A.D. these various doctrines had pretty much coalesced into a uniformly Satanic creed and program, which was to establish the power of the sect through the destruction of all governments, all religion, all morality, all economic systems; and to substitute the sheer physical force of the lash and the bayonet for all other means by which previous governments, good or bad, had contrived to rule mankind. And a most important one of these groups, which is now generally meant when we use the term Illuminati - although many others had called themselves by that same name - was founded on May 1, 1776, by Adam Weishaupt.

Despite the extreme secrecy with which this group cloaked itself from the very beginning, one early raid by the Bavarian government, another raid about three years later, the partial confessions at one arraignment of four men fairly high up in the conspiracy-all of whom, incidentally, were professors - and a few more or less accidental discoveries or disclosures from other sources have made the original nature, purposes, and methods of the Illuminati quite well known. Since by 1800 they were able to pull the veil of secrecy over themselves almost completely and permanently, we do not know to what extent Weishaupt's group became the central core or even one of the main components of a continuing organization with increasing reach and control over all collectivist activities after 1776. But that there have been one or more such organizations, which have now been absorbed into the top echelons of the Communist conspiracy - or vice versa - is supported by too much evidence of too many kinds to permit much doubt. (my emphasis)

One thing to keep in mind about this, although conservative hero Barry Goldwater famously repudiated the John Birch Society in 1964 during his Presidential run, the Birchers' ideas play more than a small part in the thinking of today's Republican Party, especially among the activists of the Christian Right.

Also, where John Robison in 1797 may have really feared the Freemasons and the Illuminati, those are terms which among the far right today are commonly used as synomyms for "the Jews". In Germany and Austria, where overt expressions of support for Nazism or anti-Semitism carry legal jeopardy, it is common for the extreme right to complain about the evildoings of the "Freemasons".

The John Birch Society in its official publications has always tried to avoid overt anti-Semitism, though that was clearly part of their schtick. A closely affiliated organization, the Liberty Lobby, wasn't nearly so discreet about its attitude toward Jews. It's easy to guess that one of the Birchers' main objections to Barry Goldwater, maybe even the main one, is that he parents had been Jewish before they converted to Protestant Christianity.

Welch goes on at length about the sinister designs and actions of the Illuminati-Satanist-Communist-Spartan conspiracy. He traced this evil thread from the French Revolution to the civil right March on Washington of 1963, the one that is remembered today for Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech:

The further truth is that the French people under Louis XVI had as little cause to let themselves be led by conspiratorial destructiv-ists into insane horrors and a murderous clamor for "liberty" as the Negroes in America have today in a demand for "freedom." Both are being stirred and led into the same kind
of cruel idiocy by exactly the same kind of revolutionary criminals, for exactly the same megalomaniacal purposes on the part of the real instigators of these monstrous crimes against God and country. If the march on Washington had been more successful from the point of view of the Communists; if the common sense and basic morality of the American people - white and black - had already been sufficiently eroded by Communist "wiles and propaganda so that the marchers could have been whipped up into the same kind of frenzy as were a smaller contingent of three hundred such marchers recently in the city of Chester, Pennsylvania; and if carefully planted armed goons of the Communists within the ranks of the marchers on Washington could have arranged for the burning of the city, and for murders and atrocities to be perpetuated on a number of loyal congressmen and senators, all to look like the spontaneous actions of an infuriated, resentful mob seeking freedom, then you might easily have seen the date of that great lie established in due course as the new national holiday of a "liberated" United States. And at least you would have seen an almost exact parallel to the sack of the Bastille. The French Revolution turned out to be, in fact, a rehearsal in almost every particular of what the whole world is facing today. Compressed into one city and a period of six years, 1789 through 1794, were all of the lies and crimes and horror and propaganda and destructiveness which are now being applied to the whole world over a period of about six decades. (my emphasis in bold)

The Birchers were never as influential among Southern segregationists as were other extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan or (especially in Mississippi) the White Citizens Council. The Birchers were more literate, though hardly more enlightened. But this kind of thinking was considered within the respectable range of opinion about Southern whites in the segregation days, and much of that thinking has carried into today's Republican Party and the Christian Right, especially the radical clerics.

Tags: conspiracy theories, david brion davis, illuminati, john birch society, paranoid style, robert welch

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