America’s politics is reaching peak paranoia

One of the most striking things about contemporary America is the popularity of conspiracy theories. The list of absurd things that “everybody knows” gets ever longer.

If you’re on the right, you “know” that the Deep State is subverting the administration of US President Donald Trump; that the global elite is set on undermining American sovereignty; and that lockdown during Covid-19 was a dry run for totalitarian rule. If you’re on the left, you “know” that Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin has “kompromat” on Trump, probably involving urination; that the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt was a put-up job; and that the administration will find a way to cancel the midterm elections.

I could go on – as America’s distressingly articulate conspiracy theorists most certainly do.

These effusions are the latest examples of what historian Richard Hofstadter dubbed “the paranoid style of American politics”.

Hofstadter’s eponymous essay, which germinated in the Red Scare years of the 1950s before gaining public attention as a Harper’s article in 1964, has just been republished by Penguin/Random House, along with other writings on the same theme. If anything, it seems even more relevant now than it did then.

Indeed, anybody who wants to understand Trump’s America could do no better than to read this book. “American political life... has served again and again as an arena for uncommonly angry minds,” Hofstadter wrote more than a half-century ago. Today, the angriest mind of them all sits in the Oval Office.

Having got our attention with his colourful phrase, Hofstadter is careful to define his terms. He is not engaged in clinical diagnosis. People who engage in paranoid political thinking may be perfectly sane in regular life. He is not suggesting that all conspiracy theories are devoid of content. He is rather talking about a style of thinking, about the way in which ideas are believed and advocated, rather than the truth or falsity of their content.

Good v evil

The paranoid style begins with a simple proposition: The world is divided between good and evil. The baddies are usually elites who plot in secret. The goodies are regular people who suffer in public. This simple proposition then produces ever more convoluted thinking – the baroque whirligigs of the paranoid style – as inconvenient facts are explained away and unexpected developments fitted into the theory.

Hence one of the great paradoxes of the paranoid style: A way of thinking that begins by appealing to the common sense of ordinary people produces an intellectual elite that specialises in deciphering conspiracies. The champions of the people end up resembling the very people they demonise. The anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments and developing elaborate rituals and hierarchies.

Hofstadter argued that the paranoid style is as old as the country – indeed, that America’s struggle for freedom against a foreign power predisposed its people to indulge in conspiracy theories. Respectable politicians worried about aristocratic plots, Masonic conspiracies and the infant Bank of the United States. Celebrated Protestant divines railed against popish plots.

If American freedom flourished in the ever-expanding West, then so did conspiracy theories, as settlers inveighed against both the East Coast establishment and the corrupt Old World.

By the 1950s, the “paranoid style” was identified with the radical right. Joseph McCarthy, a senator for Wisconsin, talked about a vast conspiracy involving the military and the State Department. Barry Goldwater, a senator for Arizona, claimed that “I fear Washington and centralised government more than I do Moscow”. Robert Welch, a candy manufacturer and John Birch Society supremo, accused Dwight Eisenhower of being a “dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy” – and bulletproofed his book on Eisenhower with 200 pages of footnotes.

It was easy to laugh at Goldwater’s eccentricities and Welch’s madness in the days when Hofstadter held a chair at Columbia University along with liberal giants such as Fritz Stern and Lionel Trilling. McCarthy died a booze-soaked wreck. Goldwater led the GOP to a watershed defeat. Yet nobody is laughing now: In the intervening years, the paranoid style has moved from the margins of America to the very centre of power.

Trump began his takeover of the GOP by questioning Barack Obama’s US citizenship. Since then, he has endorsed almost every wacky idea going and broken bread with the likes of Alex Jones, Kanye West and Nicholas Fuentes. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the secretary of health and human services, has endorsed the idea that childhood vaccines can cause autism and that 5G wireless networks are used to control people’s behaviour.

The paranoid style has also taken over the Democratic Party and the broader left-liberal establishment. The Democratic left sees America not as a land of opportunity but as a fetid place where a combination of structural forces (primarily racism) and malign actors conspire to grind down regular people. US universities, not least Hofstadter’s beloved Columbia, have entire departments devoted to presenting women and minorities as the victims of hostile social forces. One of the most frequently cited scholars in US academia is Michel Foucault, a man who pushed the paranoid style to its limits.

The paranoid right and the paranoid left see eye to eye on a wide range of issues from Zionism to GMOs. RFK Jr. is a sprig of the Democratic establishment who gets some of his most enthusiastic support from left-wing “crunchy moms”.

Why has the paranoid style flourished so luxuriantly in the US?

The American success story

Hofstadter’s answer to the question emphasised three things: radical change, status anxiety and cultural dispossession.

The biggest upticks in paranoid thinking come when the pace of change intensifies. In the Gilded Age, a nation of farmers and smallholders was confronted with the rise of giant companies and a tide of immigrants. Cue worries about J.P. Morgan plotting the destruction of freedom in his glittering library and America awash in a flood of foreign criminals, paupers and degenerates.

In the 1950s, a people who were used to looking inward were confronted with the frustrations of global power. Cue conspiracies about Reds under the bed and traitors in the State Department. The fact that plutocrats did indeed conspire in the Morgan Library and some diplomats worked for the Comintern added to the frenzy.

Americans are a status-obsessed people who are forever trying to better themselves, spurred on by the country’s rags-to-riches mythology and, if they are immigrants, by the mindset that success is the best way to prove that you are a real American. Radical change increases status anxiety to intolerable levels not only because it favours outsiders against insiders but also because it throws into doubt the rules of the status game.

If radical change can help some newcomers to become real Americans, it can also lead established Americans to feel that they are becoming strangers in their own land, robbed of their national identity.

These three explanations continue to hold. The entrepreneurial revolution of the 1980s has produced a new breed of robber barons, while America’s attempt to remould the world has led to frustration, if not disaster. The MAGA (Make America Great Again) and Democratic elites have completely different conceptions about what constitutes both success and “Americanness”. The angriest Trumpists feel that they are being deliberately replaced by immigrants.

Other problems have fed the febrile atmosphere. The proportion of Americans who trust the government to “do the right thing” has fallen from about 75 per cent in 1952 to 17 per cent today.

The left has successfully redefined the biological basis of marriage and seeded college curricula with deterministic doctrines like “intersectionality”. The AI and biotech revolutions, both controlled by mighty companies, are posing fundamental questions about what it is to be human. And all this is happening at a time when Old Media, with its commitment to facts, balance and judgment, is losing power to circus barkers, shock jocks and political courtiers.

In sum: The supply of political anger is increasing rapidly, while the barriers against anger turning into paranoia are being removed.

Throughout their history, Americans have railed against the monsters that threaten to destroy their republic: the cosmopolitan conspirators who met in Masonic temples; the octopus trusts that dominated manufacturing in the Gilded Age; the communist spies who infiltrated the corridors of state.

But all the while the biggest danger to the republic lies elsewhere: in the paranoid mindset that imagines that fellow citizens who disagree with you are, in fact, agents of conspiracies so vast and so vile, so malleable and so multifarious, that the only way to deal with them is to subject them to the political equivalent of a nuclear strike. I hope I am not being paranoid in suggesting that the threat of the paranoid mindset is greater now than ever. BLOOMBERG