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The Paranoid Style in American Politics
By Richard Hofstadter? Harper?s Magazine, November 1964, pp.
77-86.
It had been around a long time before the Radical Right
discovered it?and its targets have ranged from ?the
international bankers? to Masons, Jesuits, and munitions
makers.
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. But behind this I believe
there is a style of mind that is far from new and that
is not necessarily right-wind. I call it the paranoid
style simply because no other word adequately evokes the
sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and
conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the
expression ?paranoid style? I am not speaking in a
clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other
purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire
to classify any figures of the past or present as
certifiable lunatics., In fact, the idea of the paranoid
style as a force in politics would have little
contemporary relevance or historical value if it were
applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It
is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or
less normal people that makes the phenomenon
significant. Of course this term is pejorative, and it
is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater
affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing really
prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated
in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way
in which ideas are believed than with the truth or
falsity of their content. I am interested here in
getting at our political psychology through our
political rhetoric. The paranoid style is an old and
recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been
frequently linked with movements of suspicious
discontent.
Here is Senator McCarthy, speaking in June 1951 about the
parlous situation of the United States:
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.
Now turn back fifty years to a manifesto signed in 1895 by a
number of leaders of the Populist party:
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.
Next, a Texas newspaper article of 1855:
?It is a notorious fact that the Monarchs of Europe and the
Pope of Rome are at this very moment plotting our
destruction and threatening the extinction of our political,
civil, and religious institutions. We have the best reasons
for believing that corruption has found its way into our
Executive Chamber, and that our Executive head is tainted
with the infectious venom of Catholicism.?The Pope has
recently sent his ambassador of state to this country on a
secret commission, the effect of which is an extraordinary
boldness of the Catholic church throughout the United
States.?These minions of the Pope are boldly insulting our
Senators; reprimanding our Statesmen; propagating the
adulterous union of Church and State; abusing with foul
calumny all governments but Catholic, and spewing out the
bitterest execrations on all Protestantism. The Catholics in
the United States receive from abroad more than $200,000
annually for the propagation of their creed. Add to this the
vast revenues collected here.?
These quotations give the keynote of the style. In the
history of the United States one find it, for example, in
the anti-Masonic movement, the nativist and anti-Catholic
movement, in certain spokesmen of abolitionism who regarded
the United States as being in the grip of a slaveholders?
conspiracy, in many alarmists about the Mormons, in some
Greenback and Populist writers who constructed a great
conspiracy of international bankers, in the exposure of a
munitions makers? conspiracy of World War I, in the popular
left-wing press, in the contemporary American right wing,
and on both sides of the race controversy today, among White
Citizens? Councils and Black Muslims. I do not propose to
try to trace the variations of the paranoid style that can
be found in all these movements, but will confine myself to
a few leading episodes in our past history in which the
style emerged in full and archetypal splendor. Illuminism
and Masonry
I begin with a particularly revealing episode?the panic
that broke out in some quarters at the end of the
eighteenth century over the allegedly subversive
activities of the Bavarian Illuminati. This panic was a
part of the general reaction to the French Revolution.
In the United States it was heightened by the response
of certain men, mostly in New England and among the
established clergy, to the rise of Jeffersonian
democracy. Illuminism had been started in 1776 by Adam
Weishaupt, a professor of law at the University of
Ingolstadt. Its teachings today seem to be no more than
another version of Enlightenment rationalism, spiced
with the anticlerical atmosphere of eighteenth-century
Bavaria. It was a somewhat naïve and utopian movement
which aspired ultimately to bring the human race under
the rules of reason. Its humanitarian rationalism
appears to have acquired a fairly wide influence in
Masonic lodges. Americans first learned of Illumism in
1797, from a volume published in Edinburgh (later
reprinted in New York) under the title, Proofs of a
Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of
Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free
Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies. Its author
was a well-known Scottish scientist, John Robison, who
had himself been a somewhat casual adherent of Masonry
in Britain, but whose imagination had been inflamed by
what he considered to be the far less innocent Masonic
movement on the Continent. Robison seems to have made
his work as factual as he could, but when he came to
estimating the moral character and the political
influence of Illuminism, he made the characteristic
paranoid leap into fantasy. The association, he thought,
was formed ?for the express purpose of rooting out all
religious establishments, and overturning all the
existing governments of europe.? It had become ?one
great and wicked project fermenting and working all over
Europe.? And to it he attributed a central role in
bringing about the French Revolution. He saw it as a
libertine, anti-Christian movement, given to the
corruption of women, the cultivation of sensual
pleasures, and the violation of property rights. Its
members had plans for making a tea that caused
abortion?a secret substance that ?blinds or kills when
spurted in the face,? and a device that sounds like a
stench bomb?a ?method for filling a bedchamber with
pestilential vapours.? These notions were quick to make
themselves felt in America. In May 1798, a minister of
the Massachusetts Congregational establishment in
Boston, Jedidiah Morse, delivered a timely sermon to the
young country, which was then sharply divided between
Jeffersonians and Federalists, Francophiles and
Anglomen. Having read Robison, Morse was convinced of a
Jacobinical plot touched off by Illuminism, and that the
country should be rallied to defend itself. His warnings
were heeded throughout New England wherever Federalists
brooded about the rising tide of religious infidelity or
Jeffersonian democracy. Timothy Dwight, the president of
Yale, followed Morse?s sermon with a Fourth-of-July
discourse on The Duty of Americans in the Present
Crisis, in which he held forth against the Antichrist in
his own glowing rhetoric. Soon the pulpits of New
England were ringing with denunciations of the
Illuminati, as though the country were swarming with
them. The anti-Masonic movement of the late 1820s and
the 1830s took up and extended the obsession with
conspiracy. At first, this movement may seem to be no
more than an extension or repetition of the anti-Masonic
theme sounded in the outcry against the Bavarian
Illuminati. But whereas the panic of the 1790s was
confined mainly to New England and linked to an
ultraconservative point of view, the later anti-Masonic
movement affected many parts of the northern United
States, and was intimately linked with popular democracy
and rural egalitarianism. Although anti-Masonry happened
to be anti-Jacksonian (Jackson was a Mason), it
manifested the same animus against the closure of
opportunity for the common man and against aristocratic
institutions that one finds in the Jacksonian crusade
against the Bank of the United States. The anti-Masonic
movement was a product not merely of natural enthusiasm
but also of the vicissitudes of party politics. It was
joined and used by a great many men who did not fully
share its original anti-Masonic feelings. It attracted
the support of several reputable statement who had only
mild sympathy with its fundamental bias, but who as
politicians could not afford to ignore it. Still, it was
a folk movement of considerable power, and the rural
enthusiasts who provided its real impetus believed in it
wholeheartedly. As a secret society, Masonry was
considered to be a standing conspiracy against
republican government. It was held to be particularly
liable to treason?for example, Aaron Burr?s famous
conspiracy was alleged to have been conducted by Masons.
Masonry was accused of constituting a separate system of
loyalty, a separate imperium within the framework of
federal and state governments, which was inconsistent
with loyalty to them. Quite plausibly it was argued that
the Masons had set up a jurisdiction of their own, with
their own obligations and punishments, liable to
enforcement even by the penalty of death. So basic was
the conflict felt to be between secrecy and democracy
that other, more innocent societies such as Phi Beta
Kappa came under attack. Since Masons were pledged to
come to each other?s aid under circumstances of
distress, and to extend fraternal indulgence at all
times, is was held that the order nullified the
enforcement of regular law. Masonic constables,
sheriffs, juries, and judges must all be in league with
Masonic criminals and fugitives. The press was believed
to have been so ?muzzled? by Masonic editors and
proprietors that news of Masonic malfeasance could be
suppressed. At a moment when almost every alleged
citadel of privilege in America was under democratic
assault, Masonry was attacked as a fraternity of the
privileged, closing business opportunities and nearly
monopolizing political offices. Certain elements of
truth and reality there may have been in these views of
Masonry. What must be emphasized here, however, is the
apocalyptic and absolutistic framework in which this
hostility was commonly expressed. Anti-Masons were not
content simply to say that secret societies were rather
a bad idea. The author of the standard exposition of
anti-Masonry declared that Freemasonry was ?not only the
most abominable but also the most dangerous institution
that ever was imposed on man.?It may truly be said to be
hell?s master piece.? The Jesuit Threat
Fear of a Masonic plot had hardly been quieted when the
rumors arose of a Catholic plot against American values.
One meets here again the same frame of mind, but a
different villain. The anti-Catholic movement converged
with a growing nativism, and while they were not
identical, together they cut such a wide swath in
American life that they were bound to embrace many
moderates to whom the paranoid style, in its full glory,
did not appeal. Moreover, we need not dismiss out of
hand as totally parochial or mean-spirited the desire of
Yankee Americans to maintain an ethnically and
religiously homogeneous society nor the particular
Protestant commitments to individualism and freedom that
were brought into play. But the movement had a large
paranoid infusion, and the most influential anti-
Catholic militants certainly had a strong affinity for
the paranoid style. Two books which appeared in 1835
described the new danger to the ?American way of life
and may be taken as expressions of the anti-Catholic
mentality. One, Foreign Conspiracies against the
Liberties of the United States, was from the hand of the
celebrated painter and inventor of the telegraph, S.F.B.
Morse. ?A conspiracy exists,? Morse proclaimed , and
?its plans are already in operation?we are attacked in a
vulnerable quarter which cannot be defended by our
ships, our forts, or our armies.? The main source of the
conspiracy Morse found in Metternich?s government:
?Austria is now acting in this country. She has devised
a grand scheme. She has organized a great plan for doing
something here.?She has her Jesuit missionaries
traveling through the land; she has supplied them with
money, and has furnished a fountain for a regular
supply.? Were the plot successful, Morse said, some
scion of the House of Hapsburg would soon be installed
as Emperor of the United States.
?It is an ascertained fact,? wrote another Protestant
militant,
that Jesuits are prowling about all parts of the United
States in every possible disguise, expressly to ascertain
the advantageous situations and modes to disseminate Popery.
A minister of the Gospel from Ohio has informed us that he
discovered one carrying on his devices in his congregation;
and he says that the western country swarms with them under
the name of puppet show men, dancing masters, music
teachers, peddlers of images and ornaments, barrel organ
players, and similar practitioners.
Lyman Beecher, the elder of a famous family and the father
of Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote in the same year his Plea
for the West, in which he considered the possibility that
the Christian millennium might come in the American states.
Everything depended, in his judgment, upon what influences
dominated the great West, where the future of the country
lay. There Protestantism was engaged in a life-or-death
struggle with Catholicism. ?Whatever we do, it must be done
quickly.?? A great tide of immigration, hostile to free
institutions, was sweeping in upon the country, subsidized
and sent by ?the potentates of Europe,? multiplying tumult
and violence, filling jails, crowding poorhouses,
quadrupling taxation, and sending increasing thousands of
voters to ?lay their inexperienced hand upon the helm of our
power.?
**************** The Paranoid Style in Action
The John Birch Society is attempting to suppress a
television series about the United Nations by means of a
mass letter-writing campaign to the sponsor,?The Xerox
Corporation. The corporation, however, intends to go ahead
with the programs.?
The July issue of the John Birch Society Bulletin?said an
?avalanche of mail ought to convince them of the unwisdom of
their proposed action?just as United Air Lines was persuaded
to back down and take the U.N. insignia off their planes.?
(A United Air Lines spokesman confirmed that the U.N. emblem
was removed from its planes, following ?considerable public
reaction against it.?)
Birch official John Rousselot said, ?We hate to see a
corporation of this country promote the U.N. when we know
that it is an instrument of the Soviet Communist
conspiracy.?
?San Francisco Chronicle, July 31, 1964
****************
Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the
Puritan. Whereas the anti-Masons had envisaged drinking
bouts and had entertained themselves with sado-
masochistic fantasies about the actual enforcement of
grisly Masonic oaths,* the anti-Catholics invented an
immense lore about libertine priests, the confessional
as an opportunity for seduction, licentious convents and
monasteries. Probably the most widely read contemporary
book in the United States before Uncle Tom?s Cabin was a
work supposedly written by one Maria Monk, entitled
Awful Disclosures, which appeared in 1836. The author,
who purported to have escaped from the Hotel Dieu
nunnery in Montreal after five years there as novice and
nun, reported her convent life in elaborate and
circumstantial detail. She reported having been told by
the Mother Superior that she must ?obey the priests in
all things?; to her ?utter astonishment and horror,? she
soon found what the nature of such obedience was.
Infants born of convent liaisons were baptized and then
killed, she said, so that they might ascend at once to
heaven. Her book, hotly attacked and defended ,
continued to be read and believed even after her mother
gave testimony that Maria had been somewhat addled ever
since childhood after she had rammed a pencil into her
head. Maria died in prison in 1849, after having been
arrested in a brothel as a pickpocket. Anti-Catholicism,
like anti-Masonry, mixed its fortunes with American
party politics, and it became an enduring factor in
American politics. The American Protective Association
of the 1890s revived it with ideological variations more
suitable to the times?the depression of 1893, for
example, was alleged to be an international creation of
the Catholics who began it by starting a run on the
banks. Some spokesmen of the movement circulated a bogus
encyclical attributed to Leo XIII instructing American
Catholics on a certain date in 1893 to exterminate all
heretics, and a great many anti-Catholics daily expected
a nationwide uprising. The myth of an impending Catholic
war of mutilation and extermination of heretics
persisted into the twentieth century. Why They Feel
Dispossessed
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.
Events since 1939 have given the contemporary right-wing
paranoid a vast theatre for his imagination, full of
rich and proliferating detail, replete with realistic
cues and undeniable proofs of the validity of his
suspicions. The theatre of action is now the entire
world, and he can draw not only on the events of World
War II, but also on those of the Korean War and the Cold
War. Any historian of warfare knows it is in good part a
comedy of errors and a museum of incompetence; but if
for every error and every act of incompetence one can
substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating
interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination. In
the end, the real mystery, for one who reads the primary
works of paranoid scholarship, is not how the United
States has been brought to its present dangerous
position but how it has managed to survive at all. The
basic elements of contemporary right-wing thought can be
reduced to three: First, there has been the now-familiar
sustained conspiracy, running over more than a
generation, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt?s New
Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy
under the direction of the federal government, and to
pave the way for socialism or communism. A great many
right-wingers would agree with Frank Chodorov, the
author of The Income Tax: The Root of All Evil, that
this campaign began with the passage of the income-tax
amendment to the Constitution in 1913. The second
contention is that top government officialdom has been
so infiltrated by Communists that American policy, at
least since the days leading up to Pearl Harbor, has
been dominated by men who were shrewdly and consistently
selling out American national interests. Finally, the
country is infused with a network of Communist agents,
just as in the old days it was infiltrated by Jesuit
agents, so that the whole apparatus of education,
religion, the press, and the mass media is engaged in a
common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal
Americans. Perhaps the most representative document of
the McCarthyist phase was a long indictment of Secretary
of State George C. Marshall, delivered in 1951 in the
Senate by senator McCarthy, and later published in a
somewhat different form. McCarthy pictured Marshall was
the focal figure in a betrayal of American interests
stretching in time from the strategic plans for World
War II to the formulation of the Marshall Plan. Marshal
was associated with practically every American failure
or defeat, McCarthy insisted, and none of this was
either accident or incompetence. There was a ?baffling
pattern? of Marshall?s interventions in the war, which
always conduced to the well-being of the Kremlin. The
sharp decline in America?s relative strength from 1945
to 1951 did not ?just happen?; it was ?brought about,
step by step, by will and intention,? the consequence
not of mistakes but of a treasonous conspiracy, ?a
conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any
previous such venture in the history of man.? 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 n 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.? Emulating the Enemy
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). It is hard to resist the
conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the
projection of the self; both the ideal and the
unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him.
The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the
paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship,
even of pedantry. Secret organizations set up to combat
secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux
Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning
priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and
an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society
emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation
through ?front? groups, and preaches a ruthless
prosecution of the ideological war along lines very
similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy.*
Spokesmen of the various fundamentalist anti-Communist
?crusades? openly express their admiration for the
dedication and discipline the Communist cause calls
forth. On the other hand, the sexual freedom often
attributed to the enemy, his lack of moral inhibition,
his possession of especially effective techniques for
fulfilling his desires, give exponents of the paranoid
style an opportunity to project and express
unacknowledgeable aspects of their own psychological
concerns. Catholics and Mormons?later, Negroes and
Jews?have lent themselves to a preoccupation with
illicit sex. Very often the fantasies of true believers
reveal strong sadomasochistic outlets, vividly
expressed, for example, in the delight of anti-Masons
with the cruelty of Masonic punishments. Renegades and
Pedants
A special significance attaches to the figure of the
renegade from the enemy cause. The anti-Masonic movement
seemed at times to be the creation of ex-Masons;
certainly the highest significance was attributed to
their revelations, and every word they said was
believed. Anti-Catholicism used the runaway nun and the
apostate priest; the place of ex-Communists in the
avant-garde anti-Communist movements of our time is well
known. In some part, the special authority accorded the
renegade derives from the obsession with secrecy so
characteristics of such movements: the renegade is the
man or woman who has been in the Arcanum, and brings
forth with him or her the final verification of
suspicions which might otherwise have been doubted by a
skeptical world. But I think there is a deeper
eschatological significance that attaches to the person
of the renegade: in the spiritual wrestling match
between good and evil which is the paranoid?s archetypal
model of the world, the renegade is living proof that
all the conversions are not made by the wrong side. He
brings with him the promise of redemption and victory. A
final characteristic of the paranoid style is related to
the quality of its pedantry. One of the impressive
things about paranoid literature is the contrast between
its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching
concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces
heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the
unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Of
course, there are highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow
paranoids, as there are likely to be in any political
tendency. But respectable paranoid literature not only
starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be
justified but also carefully and all but obsessively
accumulates :evidence.? The difference between this
?evidence? and that commonly employed by others is that
it seems less a means of entering into normal political
controversy than a means of warding off the profane
intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid
seems to have little expectation of actually convincing
a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order
to protect his cherished convictions from it. Paranoid
writing begins with certain broad defensible judgments.
There was something to be said for the anti-Masons.
After all, a secret society composed of influential men
bound by special obligations could conceivable pose some
kind of threat to the civil order in which they were
suspended. There was also something to be said for the
Protestant principles of individuality and freedom, as
well as for the nativist desire to develop in North
America a homogeneous civilization. Again, in our time
an actual laxity in security allowed some Communists to
find a place in governmental circles, and innumerable
decisions of World War II and the Cold War could be
faulted. The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if
not coherent?in fact the paranoid mind is far more
coherent than the real world. It is nothing if not
scholarly in technique. McCarthy?s 96-page pamphlet,
McCarthyism, contains no less than 313 footnote
references, and Mr. Welch?s incredible assault on
Eisenhower, The Politician, has one hundred pages of
bibliography and notes. The entire right-wing movement
of our time is a parade of experts, study groups,
monographs, footnotes, and bibliographies. Sometimes the
right-wing striving for scholarly depth and an inclusive
world view has startling consequences: Mr. Welch, for
example, has charged that the popularity of Arnold
Toynbee?s historical work is the consequence of a plot
on the part of Fabians, ?Labour party bosses in
England,? and various members of the Anglo-American
?liberal establishment? to overshadow the much more
truthful and illuminating work of Oswald Spengler. The
Double Sufferer
The paranoid style is not confined to our own country
and time; it is an international phenomenon. Studying
the millennial sects of Europe from the eleventh to the
sixteenth century, Norman Cohn believed he found a
persistent psychic complex that corresponds broadly with
what I have been considering?a style made up of certain
preoccupations and fantasies: ?the megalomaniac view of
oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably
persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the
attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the
adversary; the refusal to accept the ineluctable
limitations and imperfections of human existence, such
as transience, dissention, conflict, fallibility whether
intellectual or moral; the obsession with inerrable
prophecies?systematized misinterpretations, always gross
and often grotesque.? This glimpse across a long span of
time emboldens me to make the conjecture?it is no more
than that?that a mentality disposed to see the world in
this way may be a persistent psychic phenomenon, more or
less constantly affecting a modest minority of the
population. But certain religious traditions, certain
social structures and national inheritances, certain
historical catastrophes or frustrations may be conducive
to the release of such psychic energies, and to
situations in which they can more readily be built into
mass movements or political parties. In American
experience ethnic and religious conflict have plainly
been a major focus for militant and suspicious minds of
this sort, but class conflicts also can mobilize such
energies. Perhaps the central situation conducive to the
diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a confrontation of
opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally
irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to
the normal political processes of bargain and
compromise. The situation becomes worse when the
representatives of a particular social interest?perhaps
because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature
of its demands?are shut out of the political process.
Having no access to political bargaining or the making
of decisions, they find their original conception that
the world of power is sinister and malicious fully
confirmed. They see only the consequences of power?and
this through distorting lenses?and have no chance to
observe its actual machinery. A distinguished historian
has said that one of the most valuable things about
history is that it teaches us how things do not happen.
It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid
fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his
own, of course, to developing such awareness, but
circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events
that might enlighten him?and in any case he resists
enlightenment. We are all sufferers from history, but
the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted
not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by
his fantasies as well.
? Richard Hofstadter is DeWitt Clinton Professor of American
History at Columbia University. His latest book, ?Anti-
intellectualism in American Life,? was awarded the Pulitzer
Prize for General Nonfiction earlier this year. This essay
is adapted from the Herbert Spencer Lecture delivered at
Oxford University in November 1963.
* Many anti-Masons had been fascinated by the penalties
involved if Masons failed to live up to their obligations.
My own favorite is the oath attributed to a royal archmason
who invited ?having my skull smote off and my brains exposed
to the scorching rays of the sun.?
* In his recent book, How to Win an Election, Stephen C.
Shadegg cites a statement attributed to Mao Tse-tung: ?Give
me just two or three men in a village and I will take the
village.? Shadegg comments: ? In the Goldwater campaigns of
1952 and 1958 and in all other campaigns where I have served
as consultant I have followed the advice of Mao Tse-tung.?
?I would suggest,? writes senator Goldwater in Why Not
Victory? ?that we analyze and copy the strategy of the
enemy; theirs has worked and ours has not.
http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/conspiracy_theory/the_paranoid_
mentality/The_paranoid_style.html
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