Trump’s endless tweeting , Conway’s epistemological contortionism, Sanders’s snowfake outrage, Giuliani’s media Blitz (Fox isn’t worried…): Is this all déjà vu, or something new?
Note: Links in this post may be affiliate links, which means I’ll receive a commission, at no extra charge to you, if you make a purchase through such a link. Learn more here.
Dan Eggen, an editor at the Washington Post, seems to favor the first option: “Stop saying the Trump era is ‘not normal’ or ‘not who we are,'” he tweeted out. “We’ve been here before.”
Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU, doesn’t agree. He acknowledges “parallels” and “recurrent tensions that go way back.” But this is not normal. “‘There are precedents’ is not thinking historically,” he argues.
I side with Rosen.
Eggen and Rosen are arguing primarily about journalism, and how journalists should do their work while under direct, sustained attack by an administration who is willing to say basically anything. I’ve been trying to wrap my head around this in a more general sense—including journalism, but also beyond it, in our day-to-day interactions with colleagues and family and friends.
The best source for making sense of this dumpster fire—at least, the best that I’ve found so far—is a half-century-old essay from an American historian, Richard Hofstadter.
Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (1964) is a brilliant piece of political history, and it’s well worth reading on its own merits. (If you really like the essay, he expanded it into a book.) But I find it useful in a couple specific ways: First, his analysis of the McCarthy Era resonates deeply with our current situation in the Trump Era; and second, the way he traces the development of the paranoid style over time allows us to think historically, as Rosen encourages us to do.
As an analysis of thought and speech that arises from “angry minds,” the essay sets the stage for understanding the rhetoric of outrage—Congress’s inability to compromise, “fake” news, the “deep state,” and so on—which is founded in what Hofstadter calls a “paranoid style”—a style that has, if anything, spread like cancer since the essay was written.
The “paranoid style,” according to Hofstadter, is a “style of mind,” a political philosophy based in anger and suspicion, that reveals itself through a distinct mode of political rhetoric. He traces this paranoid political philosophy back through America’s entire history (actually, even further back than that), listing quite a few victims of these paranoid attacks: Masons, Mormons, Jesuits, international bankers, WWI munitions makers, the popular left-wing press, and many others (and one gets the sense his list is not complete).
One passage, contrasting the paranoia during the McCarthy Era with earlier versions, in particular echoes where we are today. It’s worth quoting fully (emphasis added):
The spokesmen of those earlier movements [e.g., anti-Masonic, anti-Catholic, etc.] 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 [1960s, post-McCarthy] 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.
Some of that sounds awfully familiar. “Make America Great Again” is largely about dispossession and repossession; “they”—Obama, Clinton, socialists, immigrants, intellectuals, elites, SJWs—have basically destroyed the America that belongs to “us”—primarily whites, males, and/or Christians.
Aside from that resonance, though, it’s important to note the ways that the paranoid style morphs over time. This helps clarify Rosen’s idea that, despite “parallels” and “recurrent tensions that go way back,” something has changed.
Déjà vu and something new.
Hofstadter’s essay identifies several characteristics of the paranoid style, many of which Trump has taken advantage of (déjà vu):
- a sense of dispossession caused today not only by intellectuals and socialists (though there is still that), but by the increased influence of (and, for some, the increased threat from) women and people of color
- a sense of betrayal from on high—from elites in media and journalism, and especially from the “illegitimate” Obama
- an unwillingness to compromise, which the Tea Party brought to Congress, and which (perhaps ironically) set the stage for Trump
- the unrealistic goals and demands that come from that unwillingness to compromise—and which, when unfulfilled, become fodder for increased frustration
- an apocalyptic rhetoric—e.g., the various “wars” on our way of life (war on Christmas, war on Christianity, war on whites)
But there are a couple characteristics of the paranoid style, as described by Hofstadter looking at the McCarthy Era, that have definitely evolved (something new).
When Hofstadter wrote his essay, the influence of mass media made the enemy “vivid” and well-known to the public. Previous incarnations, without the benefits of mass media, the dangerous folk were “vaguely delineated villains”—hidden, secretive, conspiratorial. But in the 1960s, the traitors were known by name; their pictures were in the papers and on television.
Now, of course, with the addition of the Internet, things are even more dramatic. Industrial-scale Macedonian generators of fake news, or Facebook’s algorithms and targeted ads, or viral memes of lies and invective, not to mention Uncle Bob’s racist rants—all of these ratchet up the outrage, a result of an echo chamber for angry minds.
More interesting, though: Hofstadter’s “spokesmen of paranoia” have long had a pedantic tradition, amassing unbelievably coherent evidence and narratives—unbelievable because, as Hofstadter writes, “in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world.” In the McCarthy Era and after, he writes,”the entire right-wing movement of our time is a parade of experts, study groups, monographs, footnotes, and bibliographies.”
Before Trump, that tradition was still in operation—I’m thinking in particular of Bill O’Reilly’s so-called “history” books, or Glenn Beck’s intricate diagrams. But with Trump, that concern to be seen as accurate or factual is gone.
Put these two things together—a willingness to say anything on the part of our leaders, and a willingness to repeat anything on the part of the echo chambers—and we have the next iteration of the paranoid style.
Déjà vu and something new.
For other posts in this series, see: