Richard Hofstadter published
a famous essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, in the Harpers Monthlyof November, 1964. A year before, John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in
Dallas. The Republican Party, in 1964, nominated Barry Goldwater for President.
For the establishment liberal, the court intellectuals of Kennedy’s Camelot,
Goldwater was a Southwestern, ruddy-cheeked repeat of Joe McCarthy (Camelot
ignored Bobby Kennedy’s own admiration of Joe McCarthy). Although Goldwater
brandished no list of Communists in the State Department at the convention, he
did bite out a line that became famous: Extremism in defense of liberty is no
vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
Karl Hess,
Goldwater’s speechwriter, came up with that magnificent sentence. Johnson, of
course, won overwhelmingly; his campaigned aired tv ads linking Goldwater to
nuclear war, implying Goldwater was for it.
Karl Hess had an
interesting career post-Goldwater. In an interview once, he summed it up: “I
moved in a direction which the FBI chooses to call leftward. What I actually
did was go to work as a commercial welder, get arrested for demonstrating against
the Indochina war, work with the Black Panthers and teach a course on
anarchism.”
Hess’s career
choices mark a good shadow line against which to measure Hofstadter’s essay. That
essay, to my mind, codified a certain establishmentarian view of postwar
American history that continues even to this day, when the Cold War ostensibly
lies in ruins behind us. Substitute “Trump” for “Goldwater” in the first
paragraph of Hofstadter’s essay and one could easily imagine it being published
yesterday in some newspaper opinion page, or in the New Yorker’s Talk of the
Town, or in the Atlantic, et al.
‘Although American
political life has rarely been touched by the most acute vagaries of class
conflict, it has served again and again as an arena for uncommonly angry minds.
Today this fact is most evident in the extreme rightwing, 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. 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.”
This is an almost
perfect establishmentarian credo. You could easily draw a line between this and
Cass Sunstein, between the politics of Cold war realpolitik and the politics of
nudgery. It shifts the notion of class conflict almost completely to the side
of one class – the workers – while endowing Capital with a pleasing political
colorlessness. It posits a small group as troublemakers, wrapping an old FBI
trope in columnar marble, suitable for thinktankery. It makes the small minority
of policy-makers into de fact “representatives” of the majority. And it
attributes suspiciousness and conspiracy-thinking to an outsider group – while the
insider group, implicitly, is dedicated to sweet reason. Of course, by November
1964 Congress had passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution which wedged the US into
Vietnam. And of course that incident was a lie, one motivated by suspiciousness
of the “enemy” and one that threw America, once again, into conflict with the “communist
conspiracy” – which was combatted, then, for eight years via massive bombing,
shifting and building barbed wire around villages, death squads, and casualty
count incentivizing the drafted troops. If we are to see the sixties clearly,
Hoftstadter is a pisspoor guide, whereas Karl Hess seems much more levelheaded
about assessing America’s cold war history.
Hofstadter goes on
to justify his use of paranoid by reference to Webster instead of Freud. It consists
of “systematized delusion of persecution and one’s own greatness.” I take this
shorthand as more descriptive of the D.C. mindset, and the interlocking culture
of media, politics and capital, than I do of the Goldwater rightwing. The U.S.
had, by the time Hoftstadter wrote his article, spent at least ten trillion
dollars to build up the most dangerous military system in the world. During
this buildup the U.S. had sustained and supported numerous coups throughout the
world, from Guatemala to Iran, bringing about widespread and continuous
violence, all in the name of anti-communism. It had instituted a system of atom
bomb tests which meant sending military people into the fallout of atom blasts
merely hours, or even minutes, after they happened, and letting radioactive
fallout drift over large parts of the Pacific and over the continental U.S. I’m
not even going to speak of the Jim Crow regime, or its justification through the
pseudo-science of race.
What other country
has so instituted paranoia that a considerable and influential think
tank-academic sector spends mucho time developing suitable images of America’s “enemies”
and celebrates the invigorating power of this orientation? In a recent NYT
article about Russia and Ukraine, the bright side of the conflict is seen in
these terms:
It may be just what
a lagging alliance has needed. Repeat that five times. See if it is any less
insane the fifth time than the first time. If you find it becoming more and
more rational, you might have a job waiting for you at Brookings!
The
establishmentarian viewpoint pervades “acceptable” politics from conservative
to liberal in the U.S. It is what comes out of the mouths of talk show hosts
and serious “experts”. It is the kind of attitude that accepts a figure like John
Bolton as a rational ‘dissident’ to that crazy Trump. I call this the Denial style in American Politics.
It is an exhausted style, so often thrown to the mat by reality that it should
long ago have given up – but it is always coming out of its corner for the next
round. It is, still, nearing its end and dragging us with it. And I say:
Fuck it.
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