Paranoia Strikes Deep

Next year will mark the 60th anniversary of a seminal work in American political analysis, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” by Richard Hofstadter. The lecture, and subsequent essay version of the same name, present a mode of right-wing rhetoric and thought in the United States that has existed since our country’s earliest days. At the time of writing, Hofstadter had become both worried and fascinated by the rise of reactionary extremism in America, prominent examples being McCarthyism and the John Birch Society. Sadly, his formulation has turned out to be more relevant in 2022 than he could have ever predicted.

Conspiracy theories go back as far as humans have wondered about great powers that shape our lives. They offer a system – sometimes benign, sometimes malign, usually nutty – for understanding the high stakes games going on above our heads. They also offer identity and communion for fellow travelers, even a sense of superiority over non-believers. Of course, there have always been conspiracy-minded people across the political spectrum; in fact, today the new anti-vax movement on the right is finding common cause with the far left, which has banged the anti-vax drum for decades. But in his work, Hofstadter focuses on the right, and proves prescient in doing so. Taking pains to emphasize that he’s a historian, Hofstadter defines the term “paranoid” not as a clinical diagnosis, but rather a description of a “style of mind,” “much like a historian of art might speak of the baroque or the mannerist style.”  

The power of Hofstadter’s essay lies in the way that he dispassionately catalogues historical examples of American right-wing political paranoia. The reader immediately appreciates that the more things change, the more they stay the same – it is uncanny how certain themes have recurred for centuries.

In 1776, Adam Weishaupt, a law professor in Bavaria, founded the Illuminati, a secret society dedicated to Enlightenment ideals. Before long, Illuminism began to take hold in the United States, finding purchase with the Freemasons, among others. In 1797, a book called Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies (whew!) made its way to American shores. The book, by Scottish scientist John Robison, sought to soberly trace the origins of Illuminism. Its projection of the movement’s ramifications, however, was anything but sober. As Robison saw it, Illuminism was created “for the express purpose of ROOTING OUT ALL THE RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS, AND OVERTURNING ALL THE EXISTING GOVERNMENTS OF EUROPE.” Even caps lock usage as indicative of wild-eyed derangement holds true today.

Predictably, anti-Illuminism spread throughout churches and conservative institutions in the US. Jedidiah Morse, a Boston minister, came under the admittedly alarming impression that an international cabal of Illuminism-inspired Jacobins were plotting to take over the country. In 1798, he gave an urgent sermon addressing the issue. The following Fourth of July, Yale’s president, Timothy Dwight, delivered a speech called, The Duty of Americans in the Present Crisis, in which he railed against the Antichrist, asking his audience, “Shall our sons become the disciples of Voltaire . . . our daughters the concubines of the Illuminati?”, and warning that “[t]he sins of these enemies of Christ, and Christians, are of numbers and degrees which mock account and description.”

Already, in the earliest era of American history, one can’t help but note the familiar tropes. Mysterious foreign societies composed of elites possessing Manichean, totalizing aims, thus ushering in Armageddon. Illuminism isn’t a moderately bad development for some people; it’s the worst thing to ever befall the Christian religion, and it also happens to threaten the existence of all governments in Europe. In this context, our last president’s apocalyptic rhetoric now makes more sense:

Our radical Democrat opponents are driven by hatred, prejudice and rage. . . . They want to destroy you and they want to destroy our country as we know it. Not acceptable, it’s not going to happen. Not going to happen.

The line on Voltaire foreshadows the current hysteria over indoctrination of children by liberals, exemplified in the move by Republicans to ban certain books and topics in schools.

By the 1830s, anti-Illuminism had morphed into anti-Masonry. In a popular handbook at the time called Light on Masonry, the author deems Masonry “an engine of Satan . . . blasphemous, murderous, anti-republican and anti-Christian.” An interesting aspect of this conspiracy was the idea that Masonry constituted “a separate system of loyalty, a separate imperium within the framework of American and state governments”. This question of dual loyalty was posed later in the 1960s to JFK for his Catholicism, and continues to be posed today to Muslims accused of seeking to institute Sharia law. Relatedly, there was a fixation in nineteenth century paranoia on Masonic oaths and rituals – for example, drinking wine from human skulls – anticipating contemporary conspiracies like QAnon and Pizzagate, which posit an elite international cabal that practices pedophilia and child sacrifice.

The next conspiracy Hofstadter describes is anti-Catholicism, which “converged with a growing nativism” in the United States. S.F.B. Morse, a painter and the inventor of the telegraph (as well as the son of the minister named Morse mentioned above), authored a book in 1835 called Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States. In it, he accused Austria, through crafty Jesuit agents and ignorant immigrants, of executing “a grand scheme” in the US to ultimately install a Hapsburg emperor to reign over the country. Another commentator concurred: “It is an ascertained fact that Jesuits are prowling about all parts of the United States in every possible disguise, expressly to ascertain the advantageous situations and modes to disseminate Popery.”

The same year, Lyman Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s father, wrote a book called Plea for the West, which contemplated the approach of the Christian millenium in America. The time was growing short, Beecher warned, as Protestantism waged all-out war with Catholicism, and waves of immigrants, sent by European monarchs, were causing chaos and violence, gobbling up resources, and voting en masse for naifs and simpletons. In anti-Catholicism then, we recognize a few of the earlier themes, as well as some new ones, including a more explicit fear and demonization of immigrants.

A striking parallel along those lines exists today in what is called the Great Replacement Theory, popularized by a French author named Renaud Camus in his 2011 book of the same name and espoused by Trump, Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Newt Gingrich, and others on the right. According to this theory, liberals aim to replace the white population in America with non-white people through mass immigration. Trump and his supporters put the idea to use in the run-up to the 2018 midterms, with their persistent fearmongering of a migrant caravan from Central America, the threat of which seemed to disappear immediately after election day. Tragically though, the threat to Hispanic people in the US ratcheted up as a result of this rhetoric. The next year, a terrorist shot 23 people to death in an El Paso Wal-Mart, the deadliest attack on Hispanics in American history. Prior to the massacre, the perpetrator released a screed promoting the Great Replacement Theory, with language echoing Trump’s reference to Hispanic immigrants as invaders.

From anti-Catholicism, Hofstadter leaps ahead to McCarthyism, which replaced the Catholic Church with communism as the all-powerful, yet power-starved enemy. In 1951, Senator McCarthy gave a speech, a version of which he later published, called America’s Retreat from Victory: The Story of George Catlett Marshall. Deeming it “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man”, McCarthy accused the Secretary of State, by his every action, of scheming to advance the interests of the Kremlin to the detriment of the United States.

The red-baiting baton was then passed to Robert Welch, a retired candy manufacturer who founded the notorious John Birch Society in 1958. Welch saw communist specters in every corner of recent American history. They had sparked a run on the banks in 1933, incited the discord over segregation, taken over the Supreme Court, and of late, achieved near total control of the federal government, including co-opting President Eisenhower himself.

Copies lose fidelity with each iteration, and Welch reminds one of a more organized version of Mike Lindell, the manic pillow magnate who continually insisted through 2021 that Trump would be reinstated as president, based on the reams of evidence of election fraud that Lindell never seemed to have time to produce. Another John Kennedy, the Republican senator from Louisiana, has shown that red-baiting can still be effectively employed when, at the confirmation hearing for Biden’s Soviet-born candidate for currency comptroller, Saule Omarova, he baselessly suggested that she was a communist, helping to sink her nomination. And Welch’s notion that there are no real social problems in America, only liberal agitators, mirrors today’s scapegoating of left-wing groups for needlessly sowing division, or even executing “false flag” operations in order to frame the right. Incidentally, the elevation of someone like Welch, Lindell, or Trump to a position of political influence based in large part on purported business success is another feature of the paranoid style, which distrusts experts and views the main problem in Washington not as a lack of wisdom in order to compromise, but rather a lack of “backbone” in order to conquer.

A feeling of persecution (even for those wielding significant power), which is “systematized in grandiose theories of conspiracy,” is another element of the conspiratorial mindset. While a clinical paranoid might see persecution directed against his person, the political paranoid sees it directed against his nation, culture, or way of life, thus portending a cataclysmic end. The distinction therefore imbues the political paranoid with an even greater sense of selflessness and moral outrage, while the “all-or-nothing” stakes serve a related purpose, as we continue to see today. In the case of a right-wing candidate who is particularly unpalatable, rhetoric that paints his left-wing opponent as a demon from hell serves to balance the scales. How many times did we see “man in the diner” interviews with people who acknowledged how awful Trump is, but still vowed to give him their vote, because “Hillary is worse”?

A particularly strange and disturbing instance of the paranoid right’s apocalyptic nature was the QAnon vigil last fall, in which hundreds of adherents gathered in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, where JFK was assassinated, in order to await the return of his deceased son, JFK Jr., who was expected to then shepherd in the reinstatement of Trump as president. After JFK Jr. failed to appear on the given date of November 2nd, much of the crowd remained, presumably figuring that their math had been just a bit off. This dynamic is common among doomsday cults throughout history, whether they’re awaiting the Second Coming or a UFO.

Hofstadter makes mention of conspiracies involving the Jewish people earlier in the essay, but doesn’t delve into specific examples, so I think it’s worth pointing out that anti-Semitism is perhaps the ur-conspiracy, the center of the paranoid Venn diagram to which many other conspiracies connect. Operating on multiple levels, as racism, as xenophobia, and as conspiracy, anti-Semitism traces its roots back to at least the 3rd century BCE in Egypt, home to the largest Jewish diaspora community in the world at the time.

Today, the rise of the paranoid right is accompanied by a not coincidental rise of anti-Semitism. Attacks on synagogues are ramping up, and rabbis are being forced to increase security measures, even training congregants on rapid response. An obvious example of anti-Semitic conspiracy in the American right is the portrayal of George Soros, a rich, Jewish investor (who himself escaped the Holocaust as a child) as a socialist puppet master, funding left wing causes in the US in order to bring about its destruction. And who can forget Charlottesville, when “very fine” Nazis marched with torches, chanting a Jewish Replacement Theory? Or the man inside the Capitol at the January 6th insurrection with the “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt? Or Jewish space lasers? And a more recent Trump anti-Semitic/dual loyalty two-fer.

Needless to say, America is in a dangerous moment right now – unlike in Hofstadter’s time, the paranoid style has been mainstreamed on the right. To be a Republican today, even at the highest levels, you have to at least pretend to believe that Biden stole the election, the Deep State is pulling the strings, vaccines are suspect, and climate change is a hoax. There’s no easy way to unring this bell, to deprogram tens of millions of people. As always though, following the money is never a bad idea. It’s noteworthy that, for example, many prominent right wing anti-vax people and entities, like Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, or Fox, make huge amounts of revenue from “alternative medicine,” like vitamins and supplements. In this way, promoting anti-vax conspiracies, along with a general distrust of mainstream medicine and the pharmaceutical industry at large, dovetails nicely with their own profit motive. But when the bottom lines of Jones, Rogan, or Fox are threatened, they fold. More of this please.