Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be.
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One of the many (many, many) things I find most distressing about our current condition is the way that paranoia and reasonable concern have become almost indistinguishable.
In Hofstadter’s formulation (as I explained in a previous post), outrage at a sense of dispossession, at a sense that the country is slipping from one’s hands, leads to a political rhetoric, the “paranoid style,” that seeks to resist the ways that “they,” whoever “they” may be—historically, “they” have been Masons, Mormons, Jesuits, international bankers, etc.— are stealing the country from “us”—true Americans, patriots, the people.
Hofstadter’s essay focuses on the way this style has played out most dramatically, and consistently on the political right, especially in the United States. After all, when Hofstadter wrote the essay, the country had only relatively recently emerged from the virtuosic conspiracy theorism of the McCarthy Era.
And, of course, the right continues its paranoid rhetoric today, decrying immigrants spilling across our borders to vote Democrat, or the Deep State, or Pizzagate, and so on.
But Hofstadter does note that the political right does not have a monopoly on paranoia. As an example. I would submit Hillary Clinton’s claim of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” against her husband.
She first raised this specter 20 years ago, but I hear echoes of it in her complaint, reported by the NY Times’s Amy Chozick in her book about Clinton, that “They were never going to let me be president.”
That said, there does seem to be a lot of murky activity on the political stage right now: the Koch brothers, ALEC, Fox News, and, of course, our ol’ adversary Russia, with its influence on elections, on Trump, on the NRA, and on Brexit.
And then there’s the IRS’s recent decision to drop the requirement for many nonprofits to identify major donors—including foreign donors—making it harder to track who is supporting what.
Just because you’re paranoid…
But here’s where I really struggle. Hofstadter notes how the paranoid style arises from outrage and a fear of dispossession. And I feel both of those.
I feel outrage at (and this is an almost random, incomplete sample) a stolen Supreme Court seat, a lying president (he exceeded 3000 false or misleading claims back in May, and the rate of lies per word spoken continues to increase), and an immigration policy that has separated families and tortures children.
And it does not seem far-fetched to fear that we’re losing our country: white nationalism, with its related violence, is on the rise; and the Republican party refuses to check our erratic president, who cozies up to authoritarian regimes and undermines our relationships with allies.
All this outrage and fear—renewed each day in ways both significant and mundane—makes it virtually impossible to hold a reasonable conversation or debate because the rhetoric of right and left is—at least structurally—pretty much the same. Both sides seem to be communicating in the paranoid style.
I am not saying that both sides are equivalent. Obviously, I believe that my left-ish outrage and fear are, for the most part, justified.
But they believe the same about their outrage and fear.
What’s especially scary is that I think my position is at a disadvantage because there are few effective responses. On the one hand, ignoring the right’s extreme rhetoric normalizes it; without some resistance, the right’s claims would simply become the dominant narrative—as it is for those who have encased themselves in the right’s information bubble. On the other hand, resisting the right’s rhetoric plays into the paranoid narrative that they’ve invented: that we (libtards, socialists, coddlers of MS-13) are out to get them through our “rigged” system of “fake news.”
It’s a bit like an argument that Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo has made about street violence: while using violence to resist fascism is not equivalent to to using violence to advance fascism, at a pragmatic level, violence in the streets ends up favoring the fascists. The whole point of the fascists’ violence is to push “civil society from talk and voting to violence,” so fighting back in the streets becomes, in a sense, a defeat.
Similarly, a group with a willingness to say anything—to lie, mislead, exaggerate, or invent, even if it contradicts what they just finished saying—has a distinct advantage over those who try to challenge those lies.
Take, for example, the media’s attempt to hold the president to even a minimal standard of truth: Since the media has, for so long, presented itself (incorrectly, I’ll add) as “objective” and “detached” (see Jay Rosen’s discussion of the “View from Nowhere”), any challenge to the president’s veracity becomes vulnerable to the accusation of bias, often by the media’s own standards. How can you say you “don’t take sides” if you’re calling our president a liar?
And it’s even worse when a reporter makes an error. When ABC news correspondent Brian Ross incorrectly reported about Flynn—a report which ABC News termed a “serious error,” and for which Ross was suspended for four weeks without pay—Sarah Huckabee Sanders took that as an opportunity to berate the media for “purposefully misleading the American people.” Mistakes reinforce the right’s paranoid narrative of “fake news.”
The political right’s willingness to say anything—or, perhaps more to the point, its willingness to say everything—creates an additional dilemma. Usually we want to hold presidents to their campaign promises, but it’s awkward to criticize Trump for failing to keep abhorrent promises. Yes, he promised to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it. But how does one handle that promise? I’m pleased that there has been so little progress on that front. So, even setting aside the danger of goading him into action, mocking a person for not doing what we don’t want him to do creates a cognitive dissonance—one that I, at least, can’t quite get past.
In my “Different Worlds” post, I wrote about trying to enter these conversations with curiosity. Sarah Silverman is doing this in her new Hulu show, “I Love you America.” It’s both fun and enlightening, but it kind of suggests that connections can only be forged through individual interactions.
That’s a long haul. Outrage and fear have become woven into our political or, perhaps more generally, public discourse. Our rhetoric has become that of self-defense and counter-aggression.
Unfortunately, there is a lot to be outraged about. There’s a lot to be afraid of. But my sense is that a rhetoric based on outrage and fear—the paranoid style, even if justified—is not a winning strategy, especially for the left.
I’m not sure what is, though. I’m open to suggestions.
For other posts in this series, see:
- “The Paranoid Style”: Déjà vu and something new
- “The Paranoid Style,” part 2: Broflakes and snowfakes