Rethink.

Richard Hof­s­tadter, “The Para­noid Style in Amer­i­can Politics”

The essay is a bit dated; Hof­s­tadter says there’s “some­thing to be said… for the nativist desire to develop in North Amer­ica a homo­ge­neous civ­i­liza­tion” in ref­er­ence to anti-Catholic con­spir­acy the­ory (don’t ask, I don’t want to know what he means). He also seems to imply that Alger Hiss wasn’t guilty (Alger Hiss, of course, really was a Com­mu­nist agent at a fairly high level of gov­ern­ment; Hof­s­tadter says, to his credit, that “actual lax­ity in secu­rity allowed some Com­mu­nists to find a place in gov­ern­men­tal cir­cles”). I bring up the Hiss affair not to say that Hof­s­tadter is soft on Com­mu­nism or even that he thinks Alger Hiss inno­cent, but rather to raise the impor­tant ques­tion of whether extrem­ists are jus­ti­fied in say­ing they’re needed to find other extrem­ists. Is “extrem­ism in defense of lib­erty no vice,” as many would tell us with­out any sec­ond thought?

On the whole, the essay is an exer­cise in sobri­ety that is enter­tain­ing, infor­ma­tive and thought­ful: in all seri­ous­ness, that peo­ple want to jump to con­spir­acy the­o­ries instead of read­ing things like this is the great­est indict­ment of extrem­ism there is. For Xenophon’s Socrates, wis­dom is mod­er­a­tion, and wis­dom may involve hav­ing insight that sees the present and past so well it actu­ally can see the future:

If, after our his­tor­i­cally dis­con­tin­u­ous exam­ples of the para­noid style, 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 that they stood for causes and per­sonal types that were still in pos­ses­sion of their country–that they were fend­ing off threats to a still estab­lished way of life. 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 to repos­sess it and to pre­vent the final destruc­tive act of sub­ver­sion. The old Amer­i­can virtues have already been eaten away by cos­mopoli­tans and intel­lec­tu­als; the old com­pet­i­tive cap­i­tal­ism has been grad­u­ally under­mined by social­is­tic and com­mu­nis­tic schemers; the old national secu­rity and inde­pen­dence have been destroyed by trea­so­nous plots, hav­ing as their most pow­er­ful agents not merely out­siders and for­eign­ers as of old but major states­men who are at the very cen­ters of Amer­i­can power. Their pre­de­ces­sors had dis­cov­ered con­spir­a­cies; the mod­ern rad­i­cal right finds con­spir­acy to be betrayal from on high.

Impor­tant changes may also be traced to the effects of the mass media. The vil­lains of the mod­ern right are much more vivid than those of their para­noid pre­de­ces­sors, much bet­ter known to the pub­lic; the lit­er­a­ture of the para­noid style is by the same token richer and more cir­cum­stan­tial in per­sonal descrip­tion and per­sonal invec­tive. For the vaguely delin­eated vil­lains of the anti-Masons, for the obscure and dis­guised Jesuit agents, the little-known papal del­e­gates of the anti-Catholics, for the shad­owy inter­na­tional bankers of the mon­e­tary con­spir­a­cies, we may now sub­sti­tute emi­nent pub­lic fig­ures like Pres­i­dents Roo­sevelt, Tru­man, and Eisen­hower, sec­re­taries of State like Mar­shall, Ache­son, and Dulles, Jus­tices of the Supreme Court like Frank­furter and War­ren, and the whole bat­tery of lesser but still famous and vivid alleged con­spir­a­tors headed by Alger Hiss.

Some of you prob­a­bly don’t know what Hof­s­tadter is talk­ing about in that last part, which is a shame, because I know some read­ers of this blog are Glenn Beck devo­tees, and Beck par­rots John Birch Soci­ety talk­ing points — i.e. “the Rock­e­fellers were Com­mu­nists” junk. The John Birch Soci­ety held that no less than Dwight Eisen­hower, a Pres­i­dent of the United States, was a Communist:

Today, the man­tle of McCarthy has fallen on a retired candy man­u­fac­turer, Robert H. Welch, Jr., who is less strate­gi­cally placed and has a much smaller but bet­ter orga­nized fol­low­ing than the Sen­a­tor. A few years ago Welch pro­claimed that “Com­mu­nist influ­ences are now in almost com­plete con­trol of our government”–note the care and scrupu­lous­ness of that “almost.” He has offered a full scale inter­pre­ta­tion of our recent his­tory in which Com­mu­nists fig­ure at every turn: They started a run on Amer­i­can banks in 1933 that forced their clo­sure; they con­trived the recog­ni­tion of the Soviet Union by the United States in the same year, just in time to save the Sovi­ets from eco­nomic col­lapse; they have stirred up the fuss over seg­re­ga­tion in the South; they have taken over the Supreme Court and made it “one of the most impor­tant agen­cies of Communism.”

Close atten­tion to his­tory wins for Mr. Welch an insight into affairs that is given to few of us. “For many rea­sons and after a lot of study,” he wrote some years ago, “I per­son­ally believe [John Fos­ter] Dulles to be a Com­mu­nist agent.” The job of Pro­fes­sor Arthur F. Burns as head of Eisenhower’s Coun­cil of Eco­nomic Advi­sors was “merely a cover-up for Burns’s liai­son work between Eisen­hower and some of his Com­mu­nist bosses.” Eisenhower’s brother Mil­ton was “actu­ally [his] supe­rior and boss within the Com­mu­nist party.” As for Eisen­hower him­self, Welch char­ac­ter­ized him, in words that have made the candy man­u­fac­turer famous, as “a ded­i­cated, con­scious agent of the Com­mu­nist conspiracy”–a con­clu­sion, he added, “based on an accu­mu­la­tion of detailed evi­dence so exten­sive and so pal­pa­ble that it seems to put this con­vic­tion beyond any rea­son­able doubt.”

Please do read the essay; I real­ize a few of you are of the mind­set that there is no such thing as right-wing extrem­ism today, that the main­stream media has con­cocted this con­cept in order to con­tinue their per­ma­nent cam­paign on behalf of the Pres­i­dent and his party. The quick and dirty response to the fact that the media does lean Left — miss­ing that story about ACORN which was to be had for years for exam­ple — is as fol­lows. Right now, if you just pay atten­tion to main­stream media, it is true you get a Left-leaning nar­ra­tive that par­rots White House talk­ing points, and it is absolutely true that the White House is not cen­trist at the moment (for me, it looks like it is being dragged kick­ing and scream­ing into the cen­ter, forced to take Afghanistan seri­ously and back away some­what from cap-and-trade). How­ever, when the White House is (right­fully) attacked, notice how the Right adds lit­tle things to the attack that slowly dis­tort what’s at stake, lit­tle things that only exist to fur­ther the most idi­otic the­o­ries. The “lit­tle things” regard­ing Pres­i­dent Obama’s past asso­ci­a­tions are meant to make you think that he’s a Com­mu­nist who wants to throw us all in camps — Michele Bach­mann and a few oth­ers seem to be lead­ing to this con­clu­sion with the denun­ci­a­tion of the cen­sus. I shouldn’t have to say this is nuts: it obvi­ously is, and shame on a num­ber of right-wing blog­gers and pun­dits for fear-mongering when effec­tive oppo­si­tion requires the insane to be kept away from polit­i­cal discourse.

More­over, if you need exam­ples of things the right are doing that are absolutely unac­cept­able, take note. I’m pro-life, and there­fore it log­i­cally fol­lows that rais­ing money for unre­pen­tant killers is a dis­grace, and notice what’s for sale at this pro­posed auc­tion. I don’t think I need to bring up the right-wing blogosphere’s spir­ited defense of white supremacy, but what’s amaz­ing to me about the nuts who brought guns to town halls were their mili­tia ties that no one major pur­port­ing to speak for the Right thought should have been more of an issue than MSNBC’s cov­er­age. There’s plenty the Left has done that bugs me: the dis­grace­ful treat­ment of Pres­i­dent Bush (I’m aware I can get bet­ter sources than that link, I’m just lazy right now), the con­tin­ual snip­ing at those who are reli­gious or who have more con­ser­v­a­tive val­ues, the activist orga­ni­za­tions that bully and lie and slan­der, etc. My own thought is that the most prob­lem­atic action of the media and the Left right now is that they’re still par­ti­san, and not help­ing those of us on the Right get rid of the kooks who are tak­ing over (a lot of Ron Paul fans ran those Tea Par­ties). That’s really the sad­dest thing to occur in a coun­try, when we can’t see each other as equals or fel­low cit­i­zens any­more, when we are only com­mit­ted to fac­tion and not “lib­erty and jus­tice for all.”

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