Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: The Paranoid Style of American Politics Is Alive and Well With Team Trump’s Conspiratorial Contortions
November 24, 2020
Rudy Giuliani is Trump’s court jester and official buffoon in charge of elaborate and delusional conspiracy theories regarding the election (Gage Skidmore)
By Bill Berkowitz
Last week, the paranoid style of American politics took another step toward unbridled sheer insanity. I know, I know… How could anyone top Pizzagate, QAnon’s all-too-frequent musings about the Democratic Party being a satanic pedophile cult, Infowars’ Alex Jones, Glenn Beck’s huffily diagrammed conspiracy theories, and the Hannity/Ingraham/Fox & Friends axis of conspiracy?
When Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, sweaty Rudy Giuliani, and his band of legal cohorts called a press conference to drum up tales of election rigging, ignorance begat lies, lies begat laughs, and farce begat tragedy. With rivulets of dye dripping down his face, Giuliani told the assembled: “I don’t know what you need to wake you up, to do your job and inform the American people, whether you like it or not, of the things they need to know! This is real! It’s not made up! There’s nobody here who engages in fantasies.”
At one point, the stage was turned over to another anointed Trump lawyer, Sidney Powell. And she was almost able to make Giuliani look like a Rhodes scholar. Powell, who has been a fixture of the conservative media-sphere for years, and who was eventually cut loose by Trump’s legal beagles, clearly went too far for even Team Trump.
After her removal, Powell appeared on Newsmax on Saturday night, where she accused “Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) of taking payoffs to deprive not only Trump of victory in Georgia, but also Rep. Doug Collins (R), who was defeated in his bid for a Senate runoff slot by GOP Sen. Kelly Loeffler.”
In the November 1964 issue of Harpers Magazine, the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote what has become a seminal piece titled “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” At the time the country was just about a decade removed from the Senator Joseph McCarthy hearings, the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and the heightening of the Cold War. With anti-communism and the rise of the Barry Goldwater wing of the Republican Party, Hofstadter wrote “American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority.”
Hofstadter described what he called the “paranoid style” of American politics. This expression was not meant to be clinical, but rather “the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.” He also pointed out that the thread of paranoia had a long history in the country.
In 1895, several leaders of the Populist party signed on to a manifesto that read: “As early as 1865–66 a conspiracy was entered into between the gold gamblers of Europe and America. . . . For nearly thirty years these conspirators have kept the people quarreling over less important matters while they have pursued with unrelenting zeal their one central purpose. . . . Every device of treachery, every resource of statecraft, and every artifice known to the secret cabals of the international gold ring are being used to deal a blow to the prosperity of the people and the financial and commercial independence of the country.”
In June 1951, McCarthy delivered a speech in which he stated “How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, which it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men. . . . What can be made of this unbroken series of decisions and acts contributing to the strategy of defeat? They cannot be attributed to incompetence. . . . The laws of probability would dictate that part of . . . [the] decisions would serve the country’s interest.”
No where is Hofstadter’s thesis more on display than in Donald Trump’s attempted mobilization of his supporters around a “Stop the Steal” movement – trying to invalidate a free and fair election – and in the mobilization of proto-Nazi groups across the country.
Add to that toxic mix the integration of QAnon’s paranoid conspiracy theories into the mainstream of Republican Party politics, and you have the perfect evocation of the paranoid style of American politics.
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