The Paranoid Style in American Politics
a timely re-post
When I started this newsletter, it was initially called “Neo-Fascism: A Warning”, and one of my goals was to understand WHO were these MAGA Trump-supporters, and WHY were they so all-in on an obvious conman.
This article was written in December, 2022, and I think it provides some of the deepest insight into the WHO and WHY of Trump’s cult-like MAGA supporters.
I think it may be a timely moment to re-post it:
Sixty years ago, Richard Hofstadter, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, published The Paranoid Style in American Politics (Random House, 1964), a collection of essays (written between 1952 and 1962) dealing with American right-wing extremism, a “chronic, rancid” political movement he called the “paranoid style.” Hofstadter expressed in these essays his fear that “toxic undercurrents … usually confined to the political margins” were becoming a “formidable force” in American politics. That collection of essays, delineating the paranoid style through a decade of right-wing extremism (Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, John Birch Society) is striking in its applicability and relevance to our current political situation. It is well worth taking another look at this prescient and prophetic book to better understand our own precarious political situation.
Hofstadter’s methodology was to use “political rhetoric to get at political pathology.” In so doing he exposed the “psychological and non-rational” dimensions of American political life, a world of “emotional intensity filled with dense and massive irrationality.” At its core, the “animus of the extreme right was driven by feelings of persecution, of losing prestige and standing.” These recurring episodes, these periodic “stampedes to the extreme right” appealed mostly to those who “feel they have been pushed out of their rightful place.” Then as now, right-wing extremists felt displaced and “replaced” by immigrants, unions, intellectuals, elites, special interests, socialists, communists, and especially by a ”gigantic international global conspiracy that would destroy Christian America through a vast, insidious conspiratorial network led by evil and immensely powerful characters who mislead, exploit, and betray” decent law-abiding Americans. Today’s far-right has clearly found their “demonic agent” in the person of Democrat-supporting billionaire George Soros. Or, more recently, in Hunter Biden.
In the early 1950s Senator Joe McCarthy warned of:
“a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man,” and ten years later Barry Goldwater brought his slogan-chanting followers to a lather with warnings of “treason in high places with deeply placed government officials trying to undermine free capitalism and pave the way for socialism.”
The echoes resound today in the ubiquitous right-wing fear of a treacherous “Deep State.” We can hear the old conspiratorial paranoia in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s campaign slogan: “Save America, Stop Socialism.” Or in a recent Republican candidate’s declaration: “I will be the globalist satanists’ worst nightmare for the next 30 years, so get used to it you commie scum.” We hear it too in Ted Cruz’s recent Twitter post that “today’s Democratic Party, today’s Big Tech, today’s corporate America are just like the Communists in China.”
“We are living in a VERY CORRUPT COUNTRY &, AS THEY ARE SAYING ALL OVER THE INTERNET, NOTHING WILL BE DONE ABOUT IT BECAUSE THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT & FBI ARE TOTALLY CORRUPT.”
Donald Trump, Dec. 3, 2022
For the true believers, then as now, invidious enemies threaten not only the economic self-interest of Americans, but far more importantly, “their very sense of belonging as Americans.” Sixty years ago Hofstadter wrote that the “modern right wing feels dispossessed: feels that America has been largely taken away from them and their kind [and] they are determined to repossess it.” And six decades later the world watched as tiki-torch-carrying angry young men marched through a university campus chanting “Jews will not replace us.”
Hofstadter coined the term status politics to describe this dangerous movement driven by feelings of persecution, fear, frustration, discontent, and anger.
“Status politics is expressed in vindictiveness, in searching for scapegoats rather than in realistic proposals for positive action … it seeks not to advance material interests but to express grievances and resentments.”
Then, as now, the list of perceived “enemies of the state” included liberals, immigrants, intellectuals [one of Hofstadter’s eleven books was called Anti-Intellectualism in American Life], Jews, Negroes, and, in the language of the day, “beatniks, pacifists, agitators for social justice, striped-pants diplomats, and Ivy League graduates.”
In response to the often-asked question as to how people can vote against their own self-interest, Hofstadter’s notion of status politics provides a profoundly insightful answer:
economic self-interest will always take a back seat to a “perceived threat to one’s rudimentary sense of belonging to the community, to what we call his Americanism.”
It is in this context of “desperately needing reassurance of their fundamental Americanism” that Hofstadter noted the Right’s exaggerated use of patriotic symbolism, and this need to declare one’s “Americanism” is still evident in today’s flag-draped MAGA-adherents “advertising their loyalty.”
“One of the chief characteristics of American super-patriotism is its constant inner urge toward self-advertisement.”
In this “world of suspicion and imagined danger” the right-wing exponent could “project and freely express unacceptable aspects of their own minds. His fantastic beliefs were not argued along factual lines … he has all the evidence he needs to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed; he is not a receiver, he is a transmitter.”
Such a milieu was ripe for exploitation by politicians who could feed off this fervent “emotional animus [and] turn a tendency toward paranoia into an asset.”
In this arena filled with “uncommonly angry minds, heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy, politicians know how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority with influence out of all proportion to their numbers.”
Hofstadter’s study of Barry Goldwater noted his “success as a partisan evangelist who particularly mobilized those Republicans whose discontent was keenest, whose ideological fervour was strongest, those most dissatisfied who were more concerned to express resentments and punish traitors than to solve actual problems.”
Goldwater gave his angry and discontented followers “the emotional satisfaction denied them in their contemporary social and economic set-up. He offers attitudes, not bread.” It is in this context that we can understand how people will “expend so much emotional energy and crusading idealism upon causes that plainly bring them no material reward.”
Further, and even more relevant to our times, Goldwater gave his frustrated follower a “sense that his political passions are unselfish and patriotic, intensifying his feeling of righteousness and moral indignation.” Goldwater’s infamous declaration that “extremism in defence of liberty is no vice” has echoed down the decades, metastasizing into the self-justifying and self-righteous “patriotic fervor” of those who stormed the Capital on Jan. 6.
Also prescient was Hofstadter’s attention to the complicity of “fundamentalist preachers, ex-preachers, and sons of preachers.” As prominent and influential forces, religious leaders did more than provide a convenient “Biblical justification” for engaging in the “conflict between absolute good and absolute evil,” they also set an example in how to “arouse more fervor and raise more cash.” Hofstadter wrote that the “radical rightism of the 1960s is predominantly a movement of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Republicans,” and once again, in a nation supposedly built on the separation of church and state, evangelical leaders and their fervent followers comprise a significant portion of today’s MAGA movement.
Interestingly, Hofstadter also saw the “media as a conduit for every variety of right-wing conspiracy, along with character assassination of liberals and Democrats … soap boxes for right-wing cranks and political operators.” Today he would surely assign those roles to podcasters like Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, and Tucker Carlson, all enablers and apologists who amplify fear, resentment, anger, and “personal invective” for their own self-serving interests. In Hofstadter’s time, mass media (particularly radio talk shows) had already “made politics a form of entertainment in which spectators feel themselves involved … making it possible to keep the public in an almost constant state of political mobilization.”
Well, I think the point has been made: the “neo-fascism and frustrated nationalism” that Hofstadter described sixty years ago has once again reared its venomous head with its “characteristic paranoid leap into fantasy.” And Hofstadter’s final warning has never been more alarming: with political opportunists and enablers who “exploit the wildest currents of public sentiment for private purposes,”
“a highly organized, vocal, active, and well-financed minority could create a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.”
Richard Hofstadter, 1962
Hofstadter died in 1970, but he would surely recognize the current iteration of “neo-fascism and frustrated nationalism” unfolding in our current political moment, and he would recognize the same rhetoric from our leaders, the same status politics of resentment and rage and search for scapegoats, the same flag-draped American “super-patriotism,” and the same “emotional animus” that led to the January 6 insurrection.
The Paranoid Style of American Politics was written as a warning-alarm for Hofstadter’s time, calling attention to a “formidable force that differs in levels of intensity but appears to be all but ineradicable.” Clearly, this “rancid, toxic” paranoid style of American politics is upon us once again, and Hofstadter’s prescient, prophetic warning is more relevant, and more urgent, than ever.
Thank you for this book review of work by HOFSTADTER. Many of us wonder why so many will vote against their own self-interest, especially against their own economic self-interest. Hofstadter has certain given this issue deep thought. On a simple but not simplistic level, we would do well to examine the issues of how people gain and/or lose self-esteem and self assurance. And, as if they were ones own children, not treat them as "despicable" and stupid. We need a wise politician to address this dilemma. Hofstadter foresaw how seriously this "status politics" of deep resentment can affect our whole way of life--American Democracy as described in our Constitution.
This piece is even more relevant 19 months after its publication!
<< .. economic self-interest will always take a back seat to a “perceived threat to one’s rudimentary sense of belonging to the community, to what we call his Americanism.” This is SO true! Millions of "working stiffs" vote against their own class interests, as though tax breaks for the wealthy will actually "trickle down" (rather than gush up!), and as though they expect to appreciate benefits from the diminution or destruction of Medicare, public education, Social Security, et al. What a system!