Hofstadter's Paranoid Style at Work in Today's GOP?

Yesterdays post took a look at two real life examples of how Republicans, since the 1980s,  have built their party on fear and intolerance of the 'other' to fragment the American electorate and use the slim majorities their tactics fostered to shape the direction of political discourse for some three decades. As the nation has entered a new century, the GOP has held on to their political playbook but have been forced to face new electoral realities as the party has fallen from power and the Democratic Party has ascended to controlling both the presidency and the congress. With so few elected political leaders in positions of power, a power vacuum has confronted the Republican's leadership apparatus. The party is still controlled by the conservative-business-evangelical triad that has held power since Reagan; but having been subjected to crushing electoral defeats in the 1998 and 2000 election cycles, a new type of 'public' leadership has emerged to assume the face of the Republican Party.

A number of recent political commentators have drawn on historian Richard Hofstadter's essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" that highlighted the effects of fringe groups that influence American politics to compare present day affairs with those that invoked "...the ghosts of McCarthyism and the more immediate significance of Barry Goldwater's candidacy for president of the United States. The Hofstadter commentary "was particularly concerned about assessing "how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority."

 

Rush Limbaugh

Of course, today "... right-wing radio hosts and cable news commentators like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh give voice to the new millennium's paranoid impulse, "many observers of the American political scene readily suggest. A great deal of attention has gone into examining "the competing forces in American political discourse and how fringe groups can influence — and derail — the larger agendas of a political party. He investigates the politics of the irrational, shedding light on how the behavior of individuals can seem out of proportion with actual political issues, and how such behavior impacts larger groups."

Glenn Beck

Geoffrey Dunn has commented: "Indeed, the paranoid style often rears its ugly head during transformative moments in American history - from the advent of Jeffersonian democracy and the onset of the Civil War, on through to the New Deal presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt and, a generation later, the election of John F. Kennedy. Come now the transformative election of Barack Obama, and the paranoid style has once more found fertile soil in America's political landscape."

Dunn further observed that: "In his essay, Hofstadter was careful to distinguish clinical paranoia in an individual from "paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people." ... The paranoid tendency, Hofstadter contended, is "aroused by 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."

Members of the John Birch Society

Drawing further attention to the influence of fringe groups in American politics Arthur Goldwag observed: “More than half a century ago, the John Birch Society raised an alarm that Dwight Eisenhower wasn't the genial war hero and popular president he seemed, but rather "a conscious, dedicated agent of the Communist conspiracy." Bill Clinton, we were told in the 1990s, ran illicit drugs out of an airport in Mena, Ark., when he wasn't bumping off a long list of enemies and associates who knew too much about his other nefarious activities (Monica Lewinsky accepted, of course). The so-called 9/11 Truth Movement accuses George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Israel, the Federal Reserve and the real estate industry -- virtually anyone except Al-Qaida -- of orchestrating the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, much as conservative journalist John T. Flynn indicted Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940s for treasonously sacrificing Pearl Harbor. A not inconsiderable slice of today's electorate (and many of its elected representatives) believe President Barack Obama not only harbors an implacable hatred for white people -- and is seeking to euthanize their grandparents -- but that he's not even an American citizen.”

David Greenberg

David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers has a different take on the 'paranoid over usage phenomenon.' Greenberg contends: "Richard Hofstadter's classic essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." ... "is often invoked without giving much attention to the essay's actual content" ... "It's hard to deny that the title recommends itself"... "Lately, from the rise of Sarah Palin to the spring's "tea parties" to the "birther" frenzies and health care town halls of this summer to the Joe Wilson contretemps, allusions to Hofstadter have never seemed more widespread... Today's ultraconservative activists exhibit many core elements of the style that Hofstadter identified: the penchant for 'conspiratorial fantasy,' the apocalyptic stakes imagined to be involved in policy debates, the imperiousness to rational persuasion. Nonetheless, Hofstadter's thesis ought to be used carefully and sparingly, Greenberg contends ... "Hofstadter's contribution to The New American Right was "The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt," which actually makes more of an effort than does "The Paranoid Style" to identify the sources and hallmarks of ultraconservative thought that is "situated these individuals within a rapidly shifting culture. Contributing to their frightened, aggressive, and bitter disposition were, among other factors, the "the growth of the mass media of communication," the "long tenure in power" of liberals, and the feeling during the Cold War of "continued crisis" rather than the periodic involvement in world affairs that the United States had enjoyed before 1939."

Greenberg cogently adds: "Ironically, the historical portion of Hofstadter essay, though seldom cited these days by journalists, was groundbreaking, though not very controversial. It traced the tendency in our political culture, on the left and right, to see all-powerful conspiracies devoted to subverting the American way." 

Greenberg continues discussing Hofstadter's most valuable insights raised by his essay: "Hofstadter identifies real aspects of a familiar right-wing type, from the hyper-competence he ascribes to his conspiring enemies ("he is a perfect model of malice; a kind of amoral superman") to his taste for pseudo-pedantry ("McCarthy's 96-page pamphlet McCarthyism contains no less than 313 footnote references, and Mr. Welch's fantastic assault on Eisenhower, The Politician, is weighed down by a hundred pages of bibliography and notes"). And as countless admirers have noted, some of Hofstadter's language about the right of that era—from anti-fluoridation cranks to John Birch Society members—perfectly describes today's extremists. To wit: "The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialist and communist schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners but major states—men seated at the very centers of American power." Direct links between the Goldwater-era conspiracism and today's are easy to find: the right's criticisms of President Obama's health care reform, for example, carries the distinct whiff of Ronald Reagan's early-1960s alarums against "socialized medicine." 

Greenberg chastens: "Those who talk about being frightened today or act as if Obama is the first president to suffer the slings of what Franklin Roosevelt called "nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror" would do well to note that on the back cover of my 1996 reissue of The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays is a quote from Hofstadter's sole equal among his generation of political historians, Arthur Schlesinger:
 

"Recent months have witnessed an attack of 

     unprecedented passion and ferocity against the 

             national government. … Unbridled rhetoric is having 

consequences far beyond anything that 

    antigovernment politicians intend. The flow of 

     angry words seems to have activated and in a 

  sense legitimized what the historian Richard 

             Hofstadter called the "paranoid strain" in American 

                                            politics."

"Schlesinger," Greenberg explains "published his comment in the Wall Street Journal on June 7, 1995.

"The "paranoid" style did not return suddenly this summer," Greenberg correctly observes: "On the contrary, Hofstadter was surely correct when he wrote that while "it comes in waves of different intensity, it appears to be all but ineradicable." 

Richard J. Hofstadter