The Paranoid Style in American Politics

See also: Richard Hofstadter

"The Paranoid Style in American Politics" is an essay on American political behavior by Richard Hofstadter, published in 1964 in Harper's Magazine, adapted from a lecture at Oxford University in November 1963. The work is frequently mentioned in terms of current right-wing activity such as the Tea Party Movement or current U.S. Republican Party,. or historically in terms of McCarthyism, but it decidedly is not limited to one part of the political spectrum. To take a recent example of the style, well after Hofstadter's work, Hillary Clinton said, in 1998, that Bill Clinton president was the victim of a "politically motivated" prosecutor allied with a "vast right-wing conspiracy."

Remember that he wrote this in 1964, when there was no 24-hour news cycle on cable television, no Internet, and no talk radio. Even with much more primitive communications, however, demagoguery based on suspicion has supported many political figures.

The phenomenon is not unique to the United States. The idea of a moral panic easily fits into political appeals, and creating an Other or Enemy is classic for totalitarian states with active propaganda machines.

Hofstadter's introduction

He introduces the concept in terms of the contemporary right wing, "In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wind. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind."

Still more or less on the right, he moves to Joe McCarthy in 1951,

How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, which it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.…What can be made of this unbroken series of decisions and acts contributing to the strategy of defeat? They cannot be attributed to incompetence.…The laws of probability would dictate that part of…[the] decisions would serve the country’s interest.

This, however, he contrasts with the Populist Party fifty years earlier,

As early as 1865-66 a conspiracy was entered into between the gold gamblers of Europe and America.…For nearly thirty years these conspirators have kept the people quarreling over less important matters while they have pursued with unrelenting zeal their one central purpose.…Every device of treachery, every resource of statecraft, and every artifice known to the secret cabals of the international gold ring are being used to deal a blow to the prosperity of the people and the financial and commercial independence of the country.

And then a Texas newspaper article of 1855:

…It is a notorious fact that the Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome are at this very moment plotting our destruction and threatening the extinction of our political, civil, and religious institutions. We have the best reasons for believing that corruption has found its way into our Executive Chamber, and that our Executive head is tainted with the infectious venom of Catholicism.…The Pope has recently sent his ambassador of state to this country on a secret commission, the effect of which is an extraordinary boldness of the Catholic church throughout the United States.…These minions of the Pope are boldly insulting our Senators; reprimanding our Statesmen; propagating the adulterous union of Church and State; abusing with foul calumny all governments but Catholic, and spewing out the bitterest execrations on all Protestantism. The Catholics in the United States receive from abroad more than $200,000 annually for the propagation of their creed. Add to this the vast revenues collected here.…

"Why They Feel Dispossessed"

Returning to the then-contemporary right wing, he observed

the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country—that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, 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 of subversion.

This resonates with current discussions of culture war.