The title of this post is that of a very influential lecture by Richard Hofstadter that he gave in 1963 that was later revised and expanded into an essay and was later published in an abridged form in 1964. The full essay can be found in the collection of his essays Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. What is noteworthy is how remarkably relevant it is to what is going on today. It is a long essay and I have excerpted below just the main aspects, omitting much of the historical arguments that he provides to support his case.
We are currently living in a time in the US when we are awash in grand conspiratorial theories that are being pushed by prominent individuals, like Donald Trump about the election being stolen, to anonymous creators of fantastical ideas such as that there is a vast conspiracy of pedophiles at the highest levels of government and public life or that there is an organized movement to replace white Christians with people of color and other religions or that the Covid-19 virus was deliberately created and released and that the vaccines to combat it is also part of some diabolical plot. Going by Hofstadter, these are the just the most recent manifestations of a long-standing tendency in US politics.
Here is the main line of Hofstadter’s argument.
Although American political life has rarely been touched by the most acute varieties of class conflict, it has served again and again as an arena for uncommonly angry minds. Today this fact is most evident on the extreme right wing, which has shown, particularly in the Goldwater movement, how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. Behind such movements there is a style of mind, not always right-wing in its affiliations, that has a long and varied history. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style,” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes…. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to people with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.
When I speak of the paranoid style, I use the term much as historian of art might speak of the baroque or the mannerist style. It is, above all, a way of seeing the world and of expressing oneself. Webster defines paranoia, the clinical entity, as a chronic mental disorder characterized by systematized delusions of persecution and of one’s own greatness. In the paranoid style, as I conceive it, the feeling of persecution is central, and it is indeed systematized in grandiose theories of conspiracy. But there is a vital difference between the paranoid spokesman in politics and the clinical paranoiac: although they both tend to be overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic in expression, the clinical paranoid sees the hostile and conspiratorial world in which he feels himself to be living as directed specifically against him; whereas the spokesman of the paranoid style finds it directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate affects not himself alone but millions of others. Insofar as he does not usually see himself singled out as the individual victim of a personal conspiracy, he is somewhat more rational and much more disinterested. His sense that his political passions are unselfish and patriotic, in fact, goes far to intensify his feeling of righteousness and his moral indignation.
Of course, the term “paranoid style” is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing entirely prevents a sound program or a sound issue from being advocated in the paranoid style, and it is admittedly impossible to settle the merits of an argument because we think we hear in its presentation the characteristic paranoid accents. Style has to do with the way in which ideas are believed and advocated rather than with the truth or falsity of their content.
He then gives plenty of examples of this style in American history starting in the 19th century, such as the fears that the Illuminati, Masons, Catholics, and Communists were each at different times on the verge of taking over the country. It is striking how widespread those ideas became.
He quotes extensively from the contemporary literature of those periods before extracting a common feature.
These writers illustrate a central preoccupation of the paranoid style – the existence of a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character.
We saw similar things following the 2020 election when rightwing media outlets like Fox News, OAN, and Newsmax day in and day out spread wild conspiracy theories about rigged voting machines, ballot-stuffed suitcases, and the like, all being done by shadowy foreign and local people. Those media outlets are now facing billion dollar lawsuits, from Dominion, a company that manufactures voting machines, and Smartmatic, a company that creates software for voting systems. Both companies were targeted by name
Hosfstadter then moves on to examines what is going on at present, keeping in mind that he is writing this in 1963, though it seems very relevant today.
If we now take the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country – that they were still fending off threats to a still well-established way of life in which they played an important part. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try and repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.
…Let us now abstract the basic elements in the paranoid style. The central image is that of a vast and sinister conspiracy, a gigantic and yet subtle machinery of influence set in motion to undermine and destroy a way of life. One may object that there are conspiratorial acts in history, and there is nothing paranoid about taking note of them. This is true. All political behavior requires strategy, many strategic acts depend for their effect upon a period of secrecy, and anything that is secret may be described, often with but little exaggeration, as conspiratorial. The distinguishing thing about the paranoid style is not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they regard a “vast” or “gigantic” conspiracy as the motive force in historical events. History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power, and what is felt to be needed to defeat it is not the usual methods of political give-and-take, but an all-out crusade. The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of this 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: it is now or never in organizing resistance to conspiracy. Time is forever just running out. Like religious millenarians, he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse… The apocalypticism of the paranoid style runs dangerously near to hopeless pessimism, but usually stops short of it. Apocalyptic warnings arouse passion and militancy, and strike at susceptibility to similar themes in Christianity. Properly expressed, such warnings serve somewhat the same function as a description of the horrible consequences of sin in a revivalist sermon: they portray that which impends but which may still be avoided. They are a secular and demonic version of adventism.
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, the quality needed is not a willingness to compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Nothing but complete victory will do. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theater of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for unqualified victories leads to the formulation of hopelessly demanding and unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same sense of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.
This enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman: sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He is a free, active, demonic agent. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history himself, or deflects the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is in this sense distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he directs the public mind through “managed news”; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional); he is gaining a stranglehold on the educational system.
This enemy seems to be on many counts a projection of the self: both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. A fundamental paradox of the paranoid style is the imitation of the enemy. The enemy, for example, may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry.
…A final aspect of the paranoid style is related to that quality of pedantry to which I have already referred. One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is precisely the elaborate concern with demonstration it almost invariably shows. One should not be misled by the fantastic conclusions that are so characteristic of this political style into imagining that it is not, so to speak, argued out along factual lines. The very fantastic character of its conclusions leads to heroic strivings for “evidence” to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Of course, there are highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow paranoids, as there are likely to be in any political tendency, and paranoid movements from the Middle Ages onward have had a magnetic attraction for demi-intellectuals. But respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can be justified to many non-paranoids but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates “evidence.” Paranoid writing begins with certain defensible judgments. There was something to be said for the anti-Masons. After all, a secret society composed of influential men bound by special obligations could conceivably pose some kind of threat to the civil order in which they were suspended. There was also something to be said for the Protestant principles of individuality and freedom, as well as for the nativist desire to develop in North America a homogeneous civilization. Again, in our time innumerable decisions of the Second World War and the cold war can be faulted, and it is easy for the suspicious to believe that such decisions are not simply the mistakes of well-meaning men but the plans of traitors.
The typical procedure of the higher paranoid scholarship is to start with such defensible assumptions and with a careful accumulation of facts, or at least of what appear to be facts, and to marshal these facts toward an overwhelming “proof” of the particular conspiracy that is to be established. It is nothing if not coherent—in fact, the paranoid mentality is far more coherent than the real world, since it leaves no room for mistakes, failures, or ambiguities. It is, if not wholly rational, at least intensely rationalistic; it believes that it is up against an enemy who is as infallibly rational as he is totally evil, and it seeks to match his imputed total competence with its own, leaving nothing unexplained and comprehending all of reality in one overarching, consistent theory. It is nothing if not “scholarly” in technique.
…What distinguishes the paranoid style is not, then, the absence of verifiable facts (though it is occasionally true that in his extravagant passion for facts the paranoid occasionally manufactures them), but rather the curious leap in imagination that is always made at some critical point in the recital of events. John Robison’s tract on the Illuminati followed a pattern that has been repeated for over a century and a half. For page after page he patiently records the details he has been able to accumulate about the history of the Illuminati. Then, suddenly, the French Revolution has taken place, and the Illuminati have brought it about. What is missing is not veracious information about the organization, but sensible judgment about what can cause a revolution. The plausibility the paranoid style has for those who find it plausible lies, in good measure, in this appearance of the most careful, conscientious, and seemingly coherent application to detail, the laborious accumulation of what can be taken as convincing evidence for the most fantastic conclusions, the careful preparation for the big leap from the undeniable to the unbelievable. The singular thing about all this laborious work is that the passion for factual evidence does not, as in most intellectual exchanges, have the effect of putting the paranoid spokesman into effective two-way communication with the world outside his group—least of all with those who doubt his views. He has little real hope that his evidence will convince a hostile world. His effort to amass it has rather the quality of a defensive act which shuts off his receptive apparatus and protects him from having to attend to disturbing considerations that do not fortify his ideas. He has all the evidence he needs; he is not a receiver, he is a transmitter.
Since I have drawn so heavily on American examples, I would like to emphasize again that the paranoid style is an international phenomenon. Nor is it confined to modern times.
…The recurrence of the paranoid style over a long span of time and in different places suggests that a mentality disposed to see the world in the paranoid’s way may always be present in some considerable minority of the population. But the fact that movements employing the paranoid style are not constant but come in successive episodic waves suggests that the paranoid disposition is mobilized into action chiefly by social conflicts that involve ultimate schemes of values and that bring fundamental fears and hatreds, rather than negotiable interests, into political action. Catastrophe or the fear of catastrophe is most likely to elicit the syndrome of paranoid rhetoric.
In American experience, ethnic and religious conflicts, with their threat of the submergence of whole systems of values, have plainly been the major focus for militant and suspicious minds of this sort, but elsewhere class conflicts have also mobilized such energies. The paranoid tendency 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. The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular political interest—perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of their demands—cannot make themselves felt in the political process. Feeling that they have no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception of the world of power as omnipotent, sinister, and malicious fully confirmed.
It all sounds depressingly familiar. At present, we see one overarching driving fear that is driving paranoid thinking in the so-called ‘replacement theory’ that postulates that white Christian Americans, who are perceived as the rightful ‘owners’ of the country, are being steadily replaced by others. Abortion, immigration, and growing LGBTQ acceptance are all seen as seeking to lower the birth rate among white people compared to that of other groups and thus must be combated.
I’m surprised that neither Saul Alinsky nor the Cloward-Piven Strategy were mentioned.
The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of this 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: it is now or never in organizing resistance to conspiracy. Time is forever just running out.
One could, and no doubt some will, see all that in the climate-change-defense movement. Alas, they have the evidence of both major disasters and well-entrenched power centers perpetrating and perpetuating same; it’s kind of surprising we don’t see more outright paranoiac conspiracism in such circles. (Or maybe it exists and I’ve missed it…)
txpiper @ # 1 -- Alinsky, Cloward, and Piven were all In On It with Hofstadter!
Let no one feel surprised that txpiper is surprised that a lecture given in 1963 does not mention persons who remained quite obscure until their respective books came out in 1971 and 1966.
After all, those persons all worked with Barack Hussein Obama (born 1961), and numerous Authorities clearly proved during the Birth Certificate Scandal that Barack Hussein Obama used a Time Machine to carry out his dastardly scheme!
Boring. Cowardly. Gosh this excerpt does not make me want to read the whole thing at all.
The author trendily-for-the-time uses the “authority of psychology” by using psychologicallic words psychologicishly, to pompously diagnoserate people for which he has no clinical information and for which there was none nor will there ever be any. He uses the same logic he claims that “they” use attempting to back himself up most thoroughly using this pretext instead of the pretext(s)-unnamed-but-folks-like-us-just-know ? he is supposing that they mysteriously-to-him have, which pretext(s) must be faulty because at the time of his writing he had never heard of post-modernism.
What I get from this is this. He wants to say ‘they’re just dumbfucks’, with ‘the mentally disabled will always with us’ as a side dish, but doesn’t dare. Maybe part of this is because this is from a time in which not anyone could get published and he would be more forthright and braver if he were here and now?
Pierce R. Butler,
I was referencing the list of “grand conspiratorial theories”, not things mentioned in Hofstadter’s lecture.
seachange @#4,
I think you are misreading Hofstadter’s piece. He specifically denied that he was doing any kind of clinical diagnosis or that he was referring to any level of mental incompetence. He explicitly says in one of the above excerpts:
“In using the expression “paranoid style,” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes…. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to people with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.”
I’m surprised that neither Saul Alinsky nor the Cloward-Piven Strategy were mentioned.
Alinsky was, at that time, a local neighborhood organizer, not the apocalyptic leftist godzilla the right wing is so afraid of.
The Hofstadters were neighbors, when I was a kid. We were on the 11th floor and they were on the 9th. We used to go down the staircase (exciting!) when we went to visit. I used to ride on his shoulders, sometimes, while the historians talked about whatever. Sadly, none of his brilliance rubbed off.
That’s all well and good, but it’s still used to the same effect. You’re attempting to identify problem behaviors here, are you not? And the vague talk of “style” and so forth just provides more room for this sort of thing to be used very loosely against political opponents, without much of a commitment to actually relying on evidence to make the case. You (Mano) are probably a lot more careful about this sort of thing than most people are, but there are still “most people” out there to worry about, not just you.
To pick one of your examples:
Notice how this works. Instead of talking about the actual cover-ups and conspiracies involving the WIV lab, EcoHealth Alliance, individuals like Fauci and Daszak, various government agencies in China and the US and elsewhere, etc., we are only presented with that sort of description above: that it was deliberately released (like a bio-weapon) and that this is also somehow connected with the vaccines. There’s also no recognition of the real need, whether or not this particular outbreak was caused by any sort of lab leak, for ending the dangerous and unnecessary research in question and generally having much better oversight and security for these places.
So we can’t very well say this is helping people to think any more clearly about the subject or to rely on the evidence for their conclusions. Intentionally or not, the real issues are being substituted with fake ones that are easy to discredit as the bonkers kind of conspiracy theory which should just be laughed at, dismissed, or ignored. It is thought to be (or at least spoken about as) merely bordering on a medical problem for people who think such thoughts, which basically cashes out to you saying that you don’t need an actual diagnosis about them (much less to take a hard look at their evidence). Yet you still get the desired well-poisoning effect of making it sound like none of it should be taken seriously and the effect of deflecting attention away from any attempts to address the real problems. (Again, I’m using “you” here a lot for simplicity, but it’s about how this all tends to work in the hands of most people, not you personally, Mano.)
Or for another kind of example, talk of inequality or class can be met with similar allegations that it is just so much baseless, paranoid/conspiratorial thinking, given the fact that (usually) oligarchs aren’t all sitting in the same big room like a bunch of cartoon supervillains and planning out literally everything that will happen. Even when that sort of thing is spoken of as a systemic problem with rich people in power who simply have parallel interests (with or without the sort of deliberate, coordinated, secretive scheming associated with “conspiracy”), that is still treated as if it were a claim about a great, system-wide conspiracy and as such something to be disregarded. There isn’t a way to win this game if you’re simply outgunned or in the minority, because the starting point (the whole way these things are framed) is one of presumed correctness/saneness for one group, while the only apparent job for that group to do is smearing or disparaging its opponents instead of actually trying to figure out what’s right.
OT: Mano, why do your archives only go back to May 2021?
Those conspiracy theories are harder to dismiss because they follow on from a possibility that could indeed be true.
-- it is known that scientists have experimented with many viruses
-- not all experiments are performed under ideal conditions
-- viruses have escaped from labs before
-- the Wuhan labs were experimenting with bat coronaviruses (cf. Discovery of a Rich Gene Pool of Bat SARS-Related Coronaviruses Provides New Insights into the Origin of SARS Coronavirus)
-- according to Politico, the Wuhan labs had previously asked for assistance from American labs because they were having difficulty achieving a biosecurity level 4 environment
So claiming that the Covid-19 virus was deliberately created is not actually that much of a stretch. However because nobody wants to admit this might be a possibility (China particularly not), the paranoid-type conspiracies that emerge from that don’t get worthwhile rational debate (for example, that while there is reasonable cause to think that it could have been released, an accidental release makes by far the most sense, that even if it was accidentally released rather than emerging from the markets, knowing that wouldn’t defeat the pandemic, and that there’s masses of evidence showing that the vaccines for it (and almost all other vaccines) are predominantly helpful and extremely rarely harmful) because there has been so much effort attempting to rebut, without evidence, the first part. When people believe they are being lied to they make up their narratives.
file thirteen:
As in, it’s not beyond the laws of physics.
Not for a conspiracy-minded paranoid person, I suppose not.
For the rest of us, it’s about as silly as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion — I mean, that’s got about the same possibility of indeed being true.
And the paranoid types make up paranoid narratives, and then there are those such as you, who endorse them.
txpiper @ # 5: I was referencing the list of “grand conspiratorial theories” …
Sure you were.
Our esteemed host wrote of “grand conspiratorial theories that are being pushed by prominent individuals”, for which he gave a “list” of one example. The rest was “… anonymous creators of fantastical ideas …” Neither rubric applies to working political activists and academics carefully basing their concepts on reality-based research, whether one agrees with their conclusions or not.
Many people believe they are remarkable and great individuals. However they are in fact, like most of us, mediocre. They need an explanation to explain why their greatness has not made them rich, popular and happy. They create an explanation which explains their status to them. They can not believe that it is their fault; it’s (insert paranoid conspiracy theory of choice). We all want to understand our place in the world; these people, for many various reasons, choose to blame others rather than whatever other coping strategy they might choose.
Pierce R. Butler@13,
Since neither Alinsky nor Cloward and Piven propounded any conspiracy theories, I took txpiper to be alluding to the bizarre right-wing campaign against Alinsky, decades after his death in 1972, blaming everything the right dislikes on this long-dead activist (who just happened to be Jewish) -- rather similar to the attempts to blame Trump’s loss of the 2020 election on Hugo Chavez. But I admit I don’t know where Cloward and Piven (who I had to look up) fit in.
“white Christian Americans, who are perceived as the rightful ‘owners’ of the country”
Of course I’m a white non-christian non-American, but that think it should have been “rightful” owners of the country.
file thirteen @ 11
The proponents of these bat-shit crazy conspiracy theories seem to be narcissistically unaware of how mind-numbingly tediously dull their ideas are.
I’m surprised that neither Saul Alinsky nor the Cloward-Piven Strategy were mentioned.
Okay, txpiper, go ahead and tell us why they’re relevant. We’re waiting…
The author trendily-for-the-time uses the “authority of psychology” by using psychologicallic words psychologicishly, to pompously diagnoserate people for which he has no clinical information and for which there was none nor will there ever be any.
Go to bed, seachange. The author explicitly admitted he was using the term differently from is usage in psychology, and clearly was not claiming “authority of psychology.”
I also can’t help but notice your failure to point out where, specifically, the author was actually wrong.
The proponents of these bat-shit crazy conspiracy theories seem to be narcissistically unaware of how mind-numbingly tediously dull their ideas are.
To the proponents of a loony conspiracy theory, the theory is not at all dull — it’s the lightning-bolt that lights up the night sky, gives their lives meaning, and allows the believers, and only the believers, to see the hidden truth all the other sheeple refuse to see.
So claiming that the Covid-19 virus was deliberately created is not actually that much of a stretch. However because nobody wants to admit this might be a possibility…
That’s utter bullshit. Most people HAVE admitted that a lab-leak is a “possibility.” But we’ve also admitted that animal-to-human transmission at the nearby live-animal-meat market is a far more likely possibility. Animal-to-human transmission is also a known thing, remember? And it happens far more often than lab-leaks too.
Rob @#10,
The archives do go all the way back to 2005. If you scroll to the very bottom of the home page you will see that there are 1485 pages of posts that go back in sequence.
The widget on the sidebar that is organized by months however only goes back to May 2021.
#13 Pierce, #18 Raging
Actually, txpiper was referring to this passage in Mano’s post:
………………………..nuts.
KG @ # 15: … I don’t know where Cloward and Piven (who I had to look up) fit in.
C & P, among the leading sociologists of the left from the ’60s on, had a sharp analysis of institutionalized poverty and advocated in depth for a robust welfare state, so they got demonized, by those who specialize in such things, almost as much as Alinsky. Evidently our friend txpiper chugged some of that Kool-Aid too.
Though overt socialists, C&P struck me as moderating influences, compared to some of the real rhetorical bomb-throwers of the ’60s and ’70s. F’rinstance, their analysis of the politics of food left me feeling for quite a while that the hungry in the USA had relatively little to fear: though they lacked all political influence, they had an army of lobbyists for and from the supermarket chains looking out for them. (Of course, Reagan & the Reaganistas undid much of that.)
@ 10 Rob Grigjanis
Mano:
Or, to more precise, lists the most recent 15 months, just as ‘recent posts’ and ‘recent comments’ display ten of each.
Since I’ve been attacked in insulting terms by you, among others, for saying that the possibility of a lab leak (or animal-to-human transmission to a lab employee in the process of sample collection, without the virus ever being held in the lab) should not be dismissed, I’m inclined to think file thirteen@11 has a point. And it’s worth asking how often animal-to-human transmission in the vicinity of one of the handful of labs worldwide collecting, growing and experimenting on the same kind of pathogen as that transmitted has occurred.