.. historian Richard Hofstadter famously described in 1964 as “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”:
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.
The paranoia of the Trump campaign has found expression in the accusation that the Republican establishment in the primaries and now Hillary Clinton and her allies in the general election are committed to rigging the election to prevent Trump’s rightful accession to the White House.
.. Hofstadter describes the paranoid style as
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.
.. Trump’s strongest supporters do in fact feel abominably persecuted. They are unlikely to fade away gracefully.
.. Roger Stone, a Trump confidant, shared his own thinking with Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart News on July 29:
I think we have widespread voter fraud, but the first thing that Trump needs to do is begin talking about it constantly.
.. Stone’s advice was that Trump should say,
I am leading in Florida. The polls all show it. If I lose Florida, we will know that there’s voter fraud. If there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate, the election of the winner will be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government.
.. The poll found that 56 percent of Trump supporters believed the election would be rigged. Among all voters, 34 percent predicted a rigged election; 60 percent rejected the notion.
.. Part of the reason that our nation has been relatively free of political violence is that losers of contests have nearly always accepted their loss and opposed the victor through legitimate means, such as challenging them in future elections or working against their agenda in Congress. The 2000 election was very close and obviously very controversial, but Al Gore nonetheless conceded after the Supreme Court’s ruling. Were Trump and his supporters to continue to argue that the election had been stolen from them, it would mean that they reject nonviolent solutions to political differences. It could jeopardize future elections, undermine the legitimacy of the federal government, and create an environment in which political violence becomes more likely.
.. the so called alt-right — white nationalists and hard-line opponents of immigration who oppose multiculturalism and defend a particular vision of western values — has become an influential force in politics.
.. He’s certainly creating a movement that will continue independently of him even if he does fold at some point.
.. Hans Noel, a political scientist at Georgetown .. points to the problems a narrow Trump loss could pose for the Republican Party
.. The conviction that Democrats and the Washington establishment will rig the election in Clinton’s favor is by no means limited to the alt-right. Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker, and Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, have both promoted the idea.
“There’s a long tradition on the part of Democratic machines of trying to steal elections,” Gingrich told Sean Hannity on Fox News on Aug. 2:
I mean, if you assume that she is a crook, as he says, if you assume that she lies, as he says, why would you expect her to have an honest election?
.. Fifty-two years ago, writing in the year of the Johnson-Goldwater election, Hofstadter proved remarkably prescient: the right wing, he argued,
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 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.
Why the GOP Will Never Accept President Hillary Clinton
One of the roots of this argument can be found in the famous list of words that the then-Rep. Newt Gingrich and pollster/communications strategist Frank Luntz offered Republican candidates in the run-up to the 1994 midterms. “These are powerful words,” they said, “words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party. … decay… failure (fail)… collapse(ing)… deeper… crisis…… corrupt…destructive… destroy… sick… pathetic… lie… … betray… traitors…”
.. They paint the opposition not simply as incompetent, but as malevolent. And it is an approach to politics that fits perfectly with the rise of right-wing talk radio
.. Conspiracy theories emerged suggesting that Obama, the Chicago community organizer, had managed to get his liberal, black friends at ACORN (the now-defunct Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) to steal the national election. A year after an election that Obama had won by 10 million votes ..
.. “Do you think that Barack Obama legitimately won the presidential election last year, or do you think that ACORN stole it for him?” Among Republicans, only 27 percent say Obama actually won the race, with 52 percent—an outright majority—saying ACORN had stolen it, and 21 percent were undecided.
.. 43 percent of Republicans believe Obama is a Muslim
.. more than half of Republicans do not think Obama was born in the United States.
.. That may help explain why they have nominated a candidate who in 2011 repeatedly and insistently argued that he had unearthed evidence so astounding that “you wouldn’t believe” what his investigators had turned up. We still haven’t seen it.
.. wouldn’t the Republican Party use every device at its command to thwart the Democratic president’s malevolent goals? Threaten to default on the government’s debt, thus risking the collapse of the global financial system? Sure; that’s the way to force Obama to sign the repeal of Obamacare. Refuse to hold hearings on a Supreme Court nominee with a year left in the president’s term?
.. “The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier in American politics — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
.. Much like the most militantly revolutionary radicals of the late 1960s and early 70s, Trump’s most ardent supporters are convinced that they are battling an irredeemably corrupt system, which must be combated “by any means necessary.” If the only way they can lose (as Trump said of Pennsylvania) is to be cheated out of their victory, the normal reconciliation between victor and vanquished does not apply.
How Do Trump’s Conspiracy Theories Go Over in the Middle East? Dangerously.
In November 2015, a cartoon in Al-Ahram, an Egyptian state-owned newspaper, depicted an Islamic State ogre with “Made in America” emblazoned on his back. It wasn’t unusual. A look at Middle Eastern news media shows that this idea is startlingly common.
.. Mr. Trump is drawing on a tradition in American politics that tars political opponents as treasonous and un-American. As the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote when describing an earlier flare-up in 1964, “it is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.”
.. Michele Bachmann, a Republican from Minnesota, told an interviewer, “it appears that there has been a deep penetration in the halls of our United States government by the Muslim Brotherhood.” Without offering any credible evidence, Mrs. Bachmann and other House colleagues called for the Justice Department to investigate
.. Egyptian news outlets showed clips of Representative Louie Gohmert, a Republican from Texas, on the House floor alleging United States support for the Muslim Brotherhood to malign the United States as the sinister hidden hand behind Egypt’s turmoil.
To this day, such accusations damage United States-Egypt relations, providing fuel for the prosecution of Egyptians who have worked with the United States and complicating cooperation on counterterrorism and counter-radicalization.
.. The Arab world has been primed to receive these conspiracy theories by lying authoritarian governments and, in some cases, American military interventions under flimsy premises.
.. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, publicly endorsed Mr. Trump’s remarks: “This is an American presidential candidate. This was spoken on behalf of the Republican Party. He has data and documents.”
The Paranoid Style in American Politics
Were the plot successful, Morse said, some scion of the House of Hapsburg would soon be installed as Emperor of the United States.
.. the anti-Catholics invented an immense lore about libertine priests, the confessional as an opportunity for seduction, licentious convents and monasteries.
.. 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.
.. 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 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.
.. 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.
.. 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.”
.. 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.”
.. 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.”
.. 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
.. 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.
.. 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.
.. 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.
.. 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.
.. 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.
.. 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 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
.. 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.
.. 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.
.. A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen.