the paranoid style in american politics explained

It would all be ridiculous if it hadn’t acquired a hold on so many people - particularly people who have gained control of the Republican Party. government and world affairs.Ī lot of this is in line with the “preoccupation with illicit sex” that Hofstadter noted in 1964 as characteristic of the paranoid style: “The sexual freedom often attributed to the enemy, his lack of moral inhibition, his possession of especially effective techniques for fulfilling his desires, give exponents of the paranoid style an opportunity to project and express unacknowledgeable aspects of their own psychological concerns.” So we get Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson accused of being soft on child predators, Florida teachers forbidden to mention homosexuality to students (“ Don’t Say Gay”), attacks on transsexuals, and accusations that Democratic political figures are “ groomers” (pedophiles who “groom” children for sexual exploitation). Add to that white supremacists, MAGA enthusiasts who see a gigantic conspiracy to steal the 2020 election, and QAnon adherents who believe Satan-worshipping child sex traffickers are the sinister force controlling U.S. Hofstadter saw evidence of the paranoid style in radical movements, mostly on the political right, throughout American history - the Anti-Masonic Party, the Know Nothing Party, the Populist Party, nativist, anti-Catholic, anti-Mormon and anti-Semitic movements, investigations in the 1930s of “merchants of death” (munitions makers and bankers who had supplied and financed World War I), McCarthyism, the John Birch Society. The political paranoiac can’t stomach society as it is and thus seeks to destroy it under the guise of some looming threat, a deep state, antifa, migrant caravans, transgender bathrooms, an international pedophile ring … Those taken with the paranoid style channel their victimhood by believing the world is one vast conspiracy.”

Hofstadter wrote, “It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.” A contemporary historian, Bennett Parten of Yale University, wrote last year, “Hofstadter tells us that, at its core, the paranoid style uses conspiracy to engage in subversion.

It is with Trump that Hofstadter’s “paranoid style” became most visible and powerful. The far right finally came to power in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump, whose conservative credentials were not very deep.

The paranoid style in american politics explained