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"American politics has often been an arena for angry minds."
I didn't say that, but who could argue with it? The Republicans just rode a wave of anger into control of the House.
"It is a notorious fact that the Muslims are at this very moment plotting our destruction and threatening the extinction of our political, civil, and religious institutions."
I didn't say that either, but haven't you heard it?
Forty-one percent of Republicans believe that Obama was definitely or probably not born in the U.S.--according to an August, 2010 CNN poll. In another August poll--from Pew--only 27 percent believe he's a Christian. Thirty-one percent think he's a Muslim, and 39 percent don't know his religion.
So it's no surprise to see something like this:
"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 Islam."
But I cheated. The quotes about Muslim plots and presidential corruption are from a Texas newspaper from 1855, and were actually about the menace of Catholicism.
All are from "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," written in 1964 by the historian, Richard Hofstadter. He's also the one who talked about the "arena for American minds."
Some things never change. Paranoid thinking is and remains a theme of American politics and not only on the right. Hofstadter would have no problem including 911 truthers--people who believe that the assault on the World Trade Center was either planned or deliberately not prevented by the government. Back in the day, he became an opponent of the logic behind student sit-ins at Columbia, where he was on the faculty.
But Hofstadter is more troubled not by the fringe but by those at the center of power--not the truthers, but the Republicans in Congress.
Hofstadter makes this key distinction between the fringe and those at the center of things: "The idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant."
Dying young of leukemia in 1970, at age 54, Hofstadter missed the specter of radical Islam but historically traces the paranoid style from 18th century fear of Illuminism, which was a mix of enlightenment thinking and anticlericism, to 19th century alarm about Masons, Catholics, and international bankers, to the 20th Communist menace..
But did you know that the Soviet Union is not dead, and that Obama is kowtowing to it? Just the other day, Congressman Todd Akin slipped--not verbally but in a prepared, written statement--and couldn't help himself from worrying about the Soviet Union, now gone for twenty years: "The decision by the Obama administration to gut NASA's manned flight program does more than jeopardize the long term goals of solar system exploration, the cancellation of the space shuttles replacement will effectively leave the United States reliant upon the Soviet Union to grant us access to low earth orbit."
Even those who know that Soviet Union is long gone can't quite decide whether Obama is a Communist, Nazi, Anti-Colonialist, African Nationalist, or--for those of us who unlike me understand Hegelian/Marxist dialectics--some synthesis of some or all of those designations.
And not only from the fringe, but from "more or less normal people."
Dinesh D'Souza, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Dartmouth, recently wrote in Forbes that Obama, channeling his Kenyan biological father, is "the last colonialist." Okay, so maybe D'Souza is an out of the mainstream, right-wing apparatchik, but someone who was Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, picked up on this when he referred to Obama's "Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior."
We have already seen the number of people who have called Obama a Muslim, but did you know that you can believe in fundamentalist Islam, and also be a Communist--or a Nazi?
Rush Limbaugh--fringe? or not fringe?--is sophisticated enough about Marxism to make the distinction that "We are going to be seeing more of the Trotsky brand of Communism than the Stalinist brand." Does he mean we're going to see a Trotskyist push for international revolution rather than Stalin's socialism in one state? Those squarely in the political mainstream--"more or less normal people"--drop the Communism and go with some variant of Socialism, such as the Republican leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, who, in a speech to the Federalist Society, said, "Government is getting bigger costlier and more intrusive, and the trend needs to be reversed if we want to keep from turning ourselves into France." Maybe he forgot, or doesn't care, that France's president, Nikolas Sarkozy, is a right-winger--unless he means that the French right is to America's left.
And if you want Fascist or Nazi, no problem. Glenn Beck sees a group of school kids singing about Obama and said it reminded him of "the former regime in Germany, the Third Reich. This is Hitler Youth." His boss, Roger Ailes, commenting on the firing of Juan Williams, a Fox News analyst whose day job was at NPR, said, "They are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism."
Which makes the mind spin in wonderment: Are they Nazis or Communists? Can you be both?
To paraphrase Obama's catchphrase, "Yes they can!"
Ann Coulter, right-wing flame thrower is asked if she is concerned that both the CEO of General Electric and the president of the AFL-CIO are on Obama's board of economic advisers. She laughs, and responds, "What could be better for a socialist president, we really are moving to a fascist president--the corporate government union."
In this vein, Jonah Goldberg, right-wing intellectual, wrote Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. The title comes close to saying it all, that both modern-day liberalism and fascism stem from the root of progressivism. I'm sure that the prototypical American progressive, Theodore Roosevelt, would be surprised to see that he spawned both Adolph Hitler and Barack Obama.
So why do they do this?
Let's stipulate that it doesn't matter whether Obama is Muslim, Nazi, Communist, or some combination of all three (even as some on the left lament Obama's moderation). What matters is that they believe it. What's on their collective minds?
Hofstadter cites a comment by fellow historian Daniel Bell that the politically paranoid feel "dispossessed." He elaborates on this feeling: "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. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high."
Tea party, anyone?
Betrayal on high was Eisenhower--and his varying number of Communists in government--for Joseph McCarthy. Could it be Obama, and his czars, and George Soros, and labor unions for the modern right?
And it's not just a public policy threat for the politically paranoid. It's not whether we raise or lower taxes, spend more or spend less, have or have not health insurance for all. It's a matter of the life and death of our civilization.
"The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms--he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point," writes Hofstadter.
I'll admit I watch Glenn Beck. I won't even call it a guilty pleasure. He claims to be only a "rodeo clown," and I'm willing to let him entertain me. If you mute the sound, he's kind of goofy and there's lots of eye candy on the set--all those blackboards with posters of the enemy and all those arrows connecting them in a vast conspiracy against simple American values--all, including Obama, in thrall to the puppet master, George Soros. But I'll also confess it sometimes is like a busman's holiday for a clinical psychologist like me--something perilously close to the scene in A Beautiful Mind where the brilliant John Nash, afflicted with schizophrenia, delusionally and compulsively searches for patterns in newspapers and magazines of Soviet plot.
Beck thinks he's the canary in the coal mine. Hofstadter has his number: "As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish."
That explains all those connect-the-dots lectures on Beck, but, again, leaving the fringe--although the center appears to be moving where Beck stands--here's a statement from the Mitch McConnell, Senate Republican leader: "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."
Would you characterize that confrontational attitude as one that considers "social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician"?
Hofstadter expands on the all or nothing approach of the paranoid mine with the observation that the "central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise."
The dispossessed--the Tea Party?--feel "shut out of the political process. Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed. They see only the consequences of power--and this through distorting lenses--and have no chance to observe its actual machinery."
Of course, sometimes these dispossessed ride a wave of mass paranoia to the seats of power. Joe McCarthy, Sarah Palin, and their minions now in Congress do come to mind.
So we will see paranoia--which means no compromise--in action?
Why compromise with a Muslim, African, Communist, Nazi?
Early in 2009, almost a score of Republican Congressmen signed onto a bill demanding that presidential candidates produce their birth certificates. Their numbers have increased.
Many in the new Congress will be happy to vote against raising the debt ceiling and shutting the government down. After all, it's not only Obama that's evil, it's the government too.
Darrell Issa, who will chair the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform--if he has any money after the government shuts down--is planning on hundreds of investigations into the Obama administration. "I want seven hearings a week, times 40 weeks."
The paranoid mind in action, and in power.
I'll admit that this was a rather easy post to write. I pretty much substituted today's particular names and issues with Hofstadter's from half a century ago. He would not be surprised with what's happening today.
The paranoid are always with us: "This glimpse across a long span of time emboldens me to make the conjecture--it is no more than that--that a mentality disposed to see the world in this way may be a persistent psychic phenomenon, more or less constantly affecting a modest minority of the population."
Beyond the fringe, he does see the potential for a mass movement: "But certain religious traditions, certain social structures and national inheritances, certain historical catastrophes or frustrations may be conducive to the release of such psychic energies, and to situations in which they can more readily be built into mass movements or political parties."
Or as another more acerbic commentator on American culture, H.L. Mencken, observed, almost another half-century before Hofstadter, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard."
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My book, Nasty, Brutish, and Long: Adventures In Eldercare (Avery/Penguin, 2009) was a Finalist for the 2010 Connecticut Book Award. Click here to read the first chapter.first chapter. It provides a unique, insider's perspective on aging in America. It is an account of my work as a psychologist in nursing homes, the story of caregiving to my frail, elderly parents--all to the accompaniment of ruminations on my own mortality. Thomas Lynch, author of The Undertaking calls it "A book for policy makers, caregivers, the halt and lame, the upright and unemcumbered: anyone who ever intends to get old."
