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rfmcdonaldKonrad Yakabuski's recent article in the Globe and Mail, "Paranoid style is in again", is principally concerned with the craziness that currently is infested the United States' Republican Party.
Yes, well. "Death panels"? I suppose thatwanting an equitable national health care system for our southern neighbours hoping that our neighbours see the good in rendering useless eaters into transplant organs is a crime, then? Certainly the American system is superior, anyway; Stephen Hawking certainly couldn't have survived in the United Kingdom!
Ahem.
Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", an essay originally published in Harper's Magazine in 1964 and available in full here. Yes, Yakabuski seems quite right to connect this essay on the American tradition of paranoia to what's going on with the tea-partiers.
This sort of anti-elite conspiratorial populism isn't unique to the United States. I'm thinking of the popular right in interwar and 1950s Europe, fighting against the cosmopolitans and the elites with their aims to undermine the way things should be. The MetaFilter article "Sarah Palin's Poujadist Agenda" pointed to Jonathan Raban's London Review of Books essay "Cut, Kill, Dig, Drill", which connects Palin to the right-wing/little-man populism of Poujadism in 1950s France.
I can't disagree with what Yakabuski concludes, not least about what this paranoia's doing to the Republican Party. (Palin in 2012?)
That will do bad things. Still worse is the fact that these attitudes of conspiracies by powerful elites are also being replicated on the left, with stories of the malign influence of Leo Strauss or the secret networks of Christian fundamentalists who secretly control the United States or wars against the secretive corporations or "9-11 Was An Inside Job." So many of these networks of friends and influences that people describe are the sorts of things necessary for civil society, products of shared interests and experiences uniting people of diverse backgrounds into networks aimed at achieving common goals, in a rich, ever-fluctuating, web. This is normal, very normal. Destroying these networks would make organized public life quite difficult. Can you imagine achieving anything in public life without connections?
It isn't only in the United States, either, as suspicion of democratically elected governments and regimes, even, as out of touch and corrupt and unaccountable seem to be spreading worldwide. Even in Canada; Harper wouldn't have gotten away with this prorogation, as early and unprecedented as it was, years ago, certainly not with the support of the party. Arguments don't matter nearly so much as charisma, the ability to convince your followers that the other side is completely wrong, so wrong as to be illegitimate and undeserving of power, of any influence on the country or the world. "The world must be manichaean if there is to be a world, and guess whose side I'm on?" And there goes the public space. Poujade the prophet?
Thoughts?
Americans looking for evocative language from their public figures in 2009 had to turn to the anti-Obamas. It wasn't hard to find them – they have dominated the national soapbox since mid-year, outdoing each other in their preposterousness.
Picking the choicest quotes of 2009 is, hence, not quite the uplifting affair it might have been in 2008, when Mr. Obama was still compelling and Republicans still aspired to more than the political equivalent of demolition derby. The past 12 months have served up more sinister stuff.
Take Glenn Beck, the Fox News host who emerged last year as the U.S. right's conspiracy-theorist-in-chief. Government ownership of General Motors, he warned, enables the Obama administration to spy on Americans by way of the OnStar GPS devices installed in GM products: “I just don't believe in giving that kind of technology to this government.”
Sarah Palin launched her crusade against Obamacare with this: “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's death panel so his bureaucrats can decide … whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”
And Michele Bachmann, another syntactically challenged Republican politician on the rise, greeted a Dec. 15 rally against the Democrats' proposed health-care reform by crying: “That is our wish for fellow citizens here in the United States – for freedom, not for government enslavement.”
Yes, well. "Death panels"? I suppose that
Ahem.
Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", an essay originally published in Harper's Magazine in 1964 and available in full here. Yes, Yakabuski seems quite right to connect this essay on the American tradition of paranoia to what's going on with the tea-partiers.
The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of 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. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse. (“Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.”)
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, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. 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 theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling 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.
The 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 wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect 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 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 has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).
This sort of anti-elite conspiratorial populism isn't unique to the United States. I'm thinking of the popular right in interwar and 1950s Europe, fighting against the cosmopolitans and the elites with their aims to undermine the way things should be. The MetaFilter article "Sarah Palin's Poujadist Agenda" pointed to Jonathan Raban's London Review of Books essay "Cut, Kill, Dig, Drill", which connects Palin to the right-wing/little-man populism of Poujadism in 1950s France.
Sarah Palin has put a new face and voice to the long-standing, powerful, but inchoate movement in US political life that one might see as a mutant variety of Poujadism, inflected with a modern American accent. There are echoes of the Poujadist agenda of 1950s France in its contempt for metropolitan elites, fuelling the resentment of the provinces towards the capital and the countryside towards the city, in its xenophobic strain of nationalism, sturdy, paysan resistance to taxation, hostility to big business, and conviction that politicians are out to exploit the common man.
[. . .]
Most large American cities, especially in the West, are situated in counties that extend far beyond the city limits. Liberal urban governments with high property-tax rates and progressive environmental policies wield great power (some say tyranny) over their rural hinterlands, delivering ukases about land use and conservation: brush-cutting is to be limited to 40 per cent of the property; ‘setbacks’ of 100 feet are required from streams and wetlands; new churches are denied building permission because they are deemed ‘large footprint items’ in ‘critical habitat areas’ etc. So the householder or farmer sees ‘the city’ making unwarranted infringements of his God-given right to manage his land as he pleases, and imagines his precious tax-dollars being squandered on such urban fripperies as streetcar lines and monorails. These local quarrels spread to infect whole states. In Washington state, where I live, almost every ill that befalls people in the timberlands and agricultural regions, far from any city, is confidently attributed to ‘liberals from Seattle’, a nefarious conspiracy of wealthy, tree-hugging elitists with law degrees from East Coast universities, whose chief aim is to destroy the traditional livelihoods of honest citizens living on either side of the Puget Sound urban corridor.
I can't disagree with what Yakabuski concludes, not least about what this paranoia's doing to the Republican Party. (Palin in 2012?)
When Ms. Bachmann accuses Mr. Obama of holding “anti-American views,” or when Ms. Palin decries “the agenda-driven policies being pursued in Copenhagen,” they feed into the same anger that drives thousands of Americans to show up for “tea parties,” where they give voice to many who feel dispossessed. “They refuse to listen” is the slogan of the Tea Party Patriots. It expresses the frustration of those who feel their country and their government have been usurped by Mr. Obama and his “socialist” cohorts.
The tea party movement has sent the Republican establishment (what's left of it) into a state of panic. You know what they say about imitation? A recent Republican National Committee Internet ad against Mr. Obama's health-care reform features a series of speakers uttering, in succession, the same plea: “Listen to me!”
That such a volatile and vitriolic faction as the tea party movement is now influencing the conduct of the party of Lincoln is indicative of the desperate state of Republicanism, which has embraced the paranoid style in a manner that would make even Mr. Goldwater cringe. At the party's meeting this month in Hawaii – which, at least if you believe what's written on his birth certificate, is where Mr. Obama came into the world – Republicans will decide whether to impose a “purity test” on prospective candidates seeking the GOP nomination in the 2010 congressional elections. If adopted, those who fail to profess their faith in at least eight of 10 core beliefs would be deprived of RNC backing and money.
That will do bad things. Still worse is the fact that these attitudes of conspiracies by powerful elites are also being replicated on the left, with stories of the malign influence of Leo Strauss or the secret networks of Christian fundamentalists who secretly control the United States or wars against the secretive corporations or "9-11 Was An Inside Job." So many of these networks of friends and influences that people describe are the sorts of things necessary for civil society, products of shared interests and experiences uniting people of diverse backgrounds into networks aimed at achieving common goals, in a rich, ever-fluctuating, web. This is normal, very normal. Destroying these networks would make organized public life quite difficult. Can you imagine achieving anything in public life without connections?
It isn't only in the United States, either, as suspicion of democratically elected governments and regimes, even, as out of touch and corrupt and unaccountable seem to be spreading worldwide. Even in Canada; Harper wouldn't have gotten away with this prorogation, as early and unprecedented as it was, years ago, certainly not with the support of the party. Arguments don't matter nearly so much as charisma, the ability to convince your followers that the other side is completely wrong, so wrong as to be illegitimate and undeserving of power, of any influence on the country or the world. "The world must be manichaean if there is to be a world, and guess whose side I'm on?" And there goes the public space. Poujade the prophet?
Thoughts?
