‘History Is a Conspiracy,’ or, The Paranoid Suffer Twice
by Harry Siegel
The future wasn’t just foreseeable but foreseen; some selected and presently relevant excerpts from Richard Hofstadter’s 1965 essay on The Paranoid Style in American Politics as “time is forever running out.”
There is a style of mind, not always right-wing in its affiliations… I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy I have in mind…
…nothing entirely prevents a sound program or a sound issue from being advanced in the paranoid style, and it is admittedly impossible to settle the merits of an argument because we hear in its presentation the characteristic paranoid accents. Style has to do with the way in which ideas are believed and advocated rather than with the truth or falsity of their content…
…The modern right wing… feels dispossessed: America has largely been taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try and repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialist and communist schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners but major statesmen seated at the very center of American power. Their predecessors discovered foreign conspiracies; the modern radical right finds that conspiracy also embraces betrayal at home.
Keep us breathing fire!
For $3/month you can read this whole post and get our weekdaily newsletter too!