The Paranoid Style
The Paranoid Style - New York Times
Last week Dennis Hastert, the speaker of the House, explained the real cause of the Foley scandal. “The people who want to see this thing blow up,” he said, “are ABC News and a lot of Democratic operatives, people funded by George Soros.”
Mr. Hastert is a leading figure in a political movement that exemplifies what the historian Richard Hofstadter famously called “the paranoid style in American politics.”
Hofstadter’s essay introducing the term was inspired by his observations of the radical right-wingers who seized control of the Republican Party in 1964. Today, the movement that nominated Barry Goldwater controls both Congress and the White House.
As a result, political paranoia — the “sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” Hofstadter described — has gone mainstream. To read Hofstadter’s essay today is to be struck by the extent to which he seems to be describing the state of mind not of a lunatic fringe, but of key figures in our political and media establishment.
The “paranoid spokesman,” wrote Hofstadter, sees things “in apocalyptic terms. ... He is always manning the barricades of civilization.” Sure enough, Dick Cheney says that “the war on terror is a battle for the future of civilization.”
According to Hofstadter, for the paranoids, “what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil,” and because “the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated.” Three days after 9/11, President Bush promised to “rid the world of evil.”
The paranoid “demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals” — instead of focusing on Al Qaeda, we’ll try to remake the Middle East and eliminate a vast “axis of evil” — “and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration.” Iraq, anyone?
Comments
Isn't this just more of the religious extremism that many Americans criticize of Middle Easterners? The difference, however, is this: we have allowed these extremists to seize power. Any American that has done nothing, and had the means, is quietly complicit. We let them tamper with elections, we permitted them to eliminate our freedoms, and we haven't protested when thrust between a bullet and a target. Will we finally, next month, restore our faith in democracy?
No, of course we won't restore our faith in democracy next month. It's the worst system around, except for all the others, and the military-industrial-lobbyist monster will still be ravenous. So don't expect miracles--the Dems will be better but still horrible, don't you know.
But at least we won't have quite the degree of pandering to the Stupid Lobby. In D.C. fundamentalist religiosity won't be so ever-present, the completely overt corporate welfare giveaways will tone down a wee bit, and perhaps in '08 the paranoiac black/white foreign policy that is rapidly sending our great country down the shithole may shift...especially if we get the balls to break the addiction to oil. Which means confronting Big Fucking Oil and Its many minions.
Politics is tough business, if you don’t have the balls for it get out. The rep’s sat on this long enough to give the advantage to the dem’s so screw the Rep’s. The reps harassed Clinton his entire terms over big nothings until they went in to the gutter! If the dem’s did know they gave the rep’s the chance to handle it internally without scandal and they blow it!