The paranoid style in American politics
It's back, updated for a new generation
Jan 5th 2006
From The Economist print edition
RICHARD HOFSTADTER'S classic essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, was aimed at the American right (it was published in November 1964 in the wake of the Goldwater insurgency). But it is hard to read it these days without first thinking of the other side of the political divide.
Hofstadter argued that the “paranoid style” expresses itself in three habits: “heated exaggeration”, “suspiciousness” and “conspiratorial fantasy”. Victims of the paranoid style have attacked shifting groups throughout American history—from international bankers to freemasons, from the Illuminati to effete liberals—but today they are targeting the White House.
Begin with the fuss over wiretapping. According to Robert Byrd, a Democratic senator from West Virginia, George Bush has assumed “unchecked power” that is “reserved only for kings and potentates”. Barbara Boxer of California says there is “no excuse” for Mr Bush's actions. A growing chorus of outrage, including Congressman John Lewis and John Dean (of Watergate fame), has suggested impeachment. Over at the Nation, Jonathan Schell argues that “Bush's abuses of presidential power are the most extensive in American history”. The administration “is not a dictatorship”, he concedes, before adding that “it does manifest the characteristics of one in embryonic form.”
And the proof of dictatorship? On more than 30 different occasions, Mr Bush authorised the tapping of telephone calls made by American citizens. Tapping domestic telephone calls without getting a warrant is illegal. But Mr Bush claims that his constitutional powers as commander-in-chief allowed him to do so because all these calls were international ones. He maintains that going to the courts would have been cumbersome and that his first priority was to prevent another terrorist attack.
You can pick at this reasoning—for instance, there are retrospective warrants that might have done the trick. But it is hard to claim that Mr Bush is being outlandish on any of these scores. John Schmidt, an associate attorney-general under Bill Clinton, thinks Mr Bush has the constitutional power to approve such taps; General Michael Hayden, the deputy director of national intelligence, has argued that the programme “has been successful in detecting and preventing attacks inside the United States”.
That assertion is for Congress to probe, but the real argument here is surely one of nuance: it has to do with how much freedom you should reasonably curtail in the name of security. Mr Bush may have crossed a line, but he has hardly smashed through it. Most European countries have more intrusive surveillance regimes than America's. As for impeachment, the prospect of having to defend Mr Bush against the charge that he went a tad too far trying to avert a terrorist attack is the sort of thing Karl Rove salivates about.
Moreover, the paranoid style is finding an ever larger home in popular culture. In 2004, American cinema-goers trooped off to see Michael Moore's “Fahrenheit 9/11”, a fearless exposé of the hidden forces behind the war on terrorism, and an update of “The Manchurian Candidate”, the quintessential paranoid film. Now they are crowding to “Syriana”, an analysis of American policy in the Middle East, featuring George Clooney. The villains vary: “Fahrenheit 9/11” went for the Carlyle Group, the Saudi royal family and virtually anybody who had met Mr Bush; “The Manchurian Candidate” attacked big business; “Syriana” dislikes oil firms and the CIA. But they all agree that America is run by a sinister cabal that will stop at nothing.
Paranoid optimism
In one way, paranoia is one of America's great strengths—part of its long-standing suspicion of government. America was born in a revolution against George III's tyranny. Hostility towards central government has been a constant of American history. Most periods of heightened executive power during wartime have been followed by sharp reactions. Abraham Lincoln, who suspended habeas corpus, was accused of dictatorship and his Republican Party lost seats in 1862; Richard Nixon's abuses of power spawned a host of reforms, including the wiretapping-oversight system that Mr Bush has tangled with.
But there is something less healthy at work on both the left and the right. Hofstadter argued that the politics of paranoia is fuelled by a sense of dispossession—by fury at your loss of relative power to rising groups. In the 1960s, the right was driven by a sense that it was being eclipsed by cosmopolitans and intellectuals. Now the left thinks it is losing power to businessmen and suburbanites. It cannot believe that the north-east—the vortex of civilised America—is losing influence to the South and the West, to people who believe in God and guns, to Mr Bush.
That does not let the president off the hook. Put simply, a man who claimed he would unite the country has given his enemies far too much to be paranoid about. There may well be a case for wire-tapping people in contact with al-Qaeda; but what about refusing to reveal who is on the energy task-force, let alone the (possibly legal but ghastly) treatment of inmates at Guantánamo? There may be a case for asking people to rally around the flag at a time of war; but how does that square with Mr Bush using terrorism to divide his opponents and advance his party's political interests, as he did in 2002 and 2004?
Hofstadter argued that the paranoid style “has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content”. The problem for America's left is not the lack of justified complaints about Mr Bush. It is that their paranoid style—with its propensity to exaggeration and conspiracy-mongering and its inability to distinguish between justified complaints and hysteria—means that their cries are seldom listened to except by people who suffer from the same affliction. Which is sometimes a pity.
