Democracy and the Paranoid Style

More than fifty years ago the political scientist Richard Hofstadter delivered a lecture at Oxford University on the American public’s fondness for conspiracy theories. Reprinted in Harper’s magazine with the memorable title “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” Hofstadter’s analysis quickly became a classic, not only for the historical depth of its analysis but because it continued to sound as though it had been written last week.

Writing from within the shadow of the Goldwater campaign, Hofstadter watched the transformation of US politics into “an arena for uncommonly angry minds” in which populists could extract considerable leverage out of the “animosities and passions of a small minority.” He proposed that where a clinical paranoiac might feel that the hostility of the world was directed at him alone, the “spokesman of the paranoid style” felt these injustices were “directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate affects not himself alone but millions of others.” Speaking up for voters who felt similarly besieged, the populist saw his own passions as “unselfish and patriotic” a tactic that helped to “intensify his feeling of righteousness and his moral indignation.”

Strikingly, Hofstadter’s first illustration of the style was the decision of three men to drive 2,500 miles from Arizona to Washington to denounce a gun control bill  drafted after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. One of the men warned that infringements on the Second Amendment were part of a subversive attempt to “make us part of one world socialistic government” and to foster the political chaos that would allow “our enemies to seize power.”

Sifting through examples of similar anxieties, all the way back to the eighteenth century, Hofstadter noted that a key ingredient for a good conspiracy theory was “the existence of a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character.” Whether run by the Bavarian Illuminati, Masons, Jesuits (or the Chinese, European, and Iranian bureaucrats and diplomats who are their modern counterparts), such theories gave an instant and all-compassing explanation for America’s economic and moral decline. Ingeniously, the absence of mainstream evidence for such diabolical goings-on was often held up as proof that the manipulators had co-opted or muzzled the press to ensure that their crimes would remain unnoticed.

Hofstadter observed that contemporary uses of the paranoid style were different because instead of “fending off threats to a well-established way of life” the modern spokesmen perceived a need to recapture a country that had been surrendered during the culture wars. Only a genuine outsider, like Joseph McCarthy, could do what was needed to purge the communists and socialists who had infiltrated the government. Only a dogmatic and singleminded leader could address the fact that “the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press and the mass media are engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans.” Crucially, since the stakes involve “a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, the quality needed [in such a leader] is not a willingness to compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Nothing but complete victory will do.”

After the most depressing presidential campaign in American history it is mildly reassuring to learn that the United States has already survived its fair share of overheated rhetoric. Even so, the ease with which one candidate in the current race has mocked his opponent, threatened her with jail, dismissed the political system as rigged and hinted that he may not accept a peaceful transition, suggest that the paranoid style may have reached its peak with the Trump campaign. (Those who believe that the responsibility of government would temper such excesses might take note of the style of President Duterte in the Philippines, a man whose tasteless off-the-cuff remarks have almost become standard operating procedure since his assumption of power.)

Whatever the outcome of the upcoming election, Mr Trump’s unprecedented vulgarity, his ignorance of governance and policy, his unwillingness to prepare for debates ought to remind voters in less well-established democracies that basic competence, political experience and well-informed civility cannot be dispensed with lightly. When a mature democracy’s political style can be debased so quickly, there are good reasons to fear that many of its core institutions could suffer a similar fate.