The Paranoid Style in American Politics

The Paranoid Style in American Politics

• The essay is a revised and expanded version of the Herbert Spencer Lecture, delivered at Oxford in November 1963, and was also published in an abridged form in Harper's Magazine in November 1964.
• American political life has rarely been touched by acute class conflict, but it has served as an arena for angry minds.
• The extreme right wing demonstrates how much political leverage can be derived from the animosities and passions of a small minority.
• The "paranoid style" refers to a style of mind characterized by heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.
• The use of "paranoid style" is not intended in a clinical sense, but as a term borrowed for other purposes.

Paranoid Style Relevance

• The paranoid style would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to people with profoundly disturbed minds.
• It is the widespread use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.
• The paranoid style is used as a historian of art might speak of the baroque or the mannerist style: It's a way of seeing the world and of expressing oneself.
• The clinical entity paranoia is defined as a chronic mental disorder characterized by systematized delusions of persecution and of one's own greatness.
• In the paranoid style, the feeling of persecution is central, and it is systematized in grandiose theories of conspiracy.
• A vital difference exists between the paranoid spokesperson in politics and the clinical paranoiac.
• Both the spokesperson and paranoiac tend to be overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic in expression.
• The clinical paranoid sees the hostile, conspiratorial world directed specifically against him.
• The spokesperson of the paranoid style sees the threat directed against a nation, culture, or way of life, affecting millions.
• The spokesperson of the paranoid style does not usually see himself singled out as the individual victim of a personal conspiracy.
• The spokesperson of the paranoid style is somewhat more rational and much more disinterested,
• Political passions of the spokesperson of the paranoid style are unselfish and patriotic, intensifying their feeling of righteousness and moral indignation.

The Term

• The term "paranoid style" is pejorative, with a greater affinity for bad causes.
• Nothing entirely prevents a sound program or a sound issue from being advocated in the paranoid style.
• It is impossible to settle the merits of an argument merely because we hear paranoid accents in its presentation.
• Style has to do with how ideas are believed and advocated rather than with the truth or falsity of their content.

Examples

• Senator Thomas E. Dodd of Connecticut sponsored a bill to tighten federal controls over the sale of firearms through the mail.
• During hearings, three men drove 2,500 miles from Bagdad, Arizona, to testify against the Dodd bill..
• One of the Arizonans argued that the Dodd bill was a subversive attempt to make the US part of one world socialistic government.
• The Arizonan also suggests the Dodd bill threatened to create chaos that would help enemies seize power.
• The movement against the fluoridation of municipal water supplies has been catnip for cranks.
• Some claim fluoridation was an attempt to advance socialism under the guise of public health.
• Others charge that fluoridation was also an attempt to rot out the brains of the community by introducing chemicals in the water supply in order to make people more vulnerable to socialist or communist schemes.
• A distorted style is a possible signal that may alert to distorted judgment, similar to ugly style being a cue to defects of taste in art.
• One of the most impressive facts about the paranoid style is that it represents an old and recurrent mode of expression in public life.
• The paranoid style has frequently been linked with movements of suspicious discontent.
• The content of paranoid style remains much the same even when it is adopted by men of distinctly different purposes.
• While it comes in waves of different intensity, the paranoid style appears to be all but ineradicable.
• The paranoid style can be seen notions about an all-embracing conspiracy on the part of Jesuits or Freemasons, international capitalists, international Jews, or Communists are familiar phenomena in many countries throughout modern history.

Historical Examples

• Senator McCarthy spoke in June 1951 about the situation of the United States.
• McCarthy asks how to account for the present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are plotting disaster.
• McCarthy suggests it must be the product of a conspiracy immense enough to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man.
• Populist party leaders signed a manifesto in 1895 , claiming that as early as 1865-66 a conspiracy occurred between gold gamblers of Europe and America.
• The populist party leaders suggest the conspirators have kept the people quarreling over less important matters for thirty years.
• They claim conspirators has relentlessly pursued their central purpose, using every device of treachery to deal a blow to prosperity and independence.
• A Texas newspaper article of 1855 suggests that the Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome are plotting destruction.
• The article claims that the Pope has sent his ambassador of state on a secret commission, resulting in the Catholic Church throughout the United States acting out an extraordinary boldness.
• A sermon preached in Massachusetts in 1798 claims secret and systematic means have been adopted and pursued by wicked and artful men in other nations.
• Their intent is to undermine the foundations of Christianity, overthrow its altars, and deprive the world of its influence on society.
• The same style of thought has been found in the anti-Masonic movement, the nativist and anti-Catholic movements.
• The paranoid style could be found in certain spokesmen for abolitionism, some alarmed by Mormonism, some Greenback and Populist writers, the exposure of a munitions makers' conspiracy of the First World War, the popular left-wing press, contemporary American right wing, and both sides of the race controversy.
• The Bavarian Illuminati panic broke out in some quarters at the end of the eighteenth century over the alleged activities
• Illuminism had been founded in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, a professor of law at the University of Ingolstadt.
• Americans first learned of Illuminism in 1797, from a volume published in Edinburgh, titled Proofs of a Conspiracy.
• The author was John Robison, a Scottish scientist, whose imagination had been inflamed by what he considered to be the Masonic movement on the Continent.
• Robison thought the association was formed for the purpose of rooting out all the religious establishments, and overturning all the existing governments of Europe.
• According to Robison The most active leaders of the French Revolution were Illuminati members.
• Simultaneously with Robison's book there appeared a four-volume work by Abbé Barruel, Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire du Jacobinisme.
• Barruel traced a "triple conspiracy" of anti-Christians, Freemasons, and Illuminati to destroy religion and order.
• Barruel suggests everything in the French Revolution, the crimes, were foreseen, contemplated, contrived, resolved upon, decreed.
• In May 1798, Jedidiah Morse, minister of the Massachusetts Congregational, delivered a sermon convinced that the United States too was the victim of a Jacobinical plot touched off by Illuminism.
• Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale, followed Morse's sermon with Fourth of July discourse, Duty of Americans in the Present Crisis, in which he held forth against Antichrist.
• The anti-Masonic movement of the late 1820's and 1830's took up and extended the obsession with conspiracy.
• The anti-Masonic movement affected many parts of the northern United States and was congenial to popular democracy and rural egalitarianism.
• In 1826 William Morgan was working on a book exposing the order, when he disappeared.
• In his Anti-Masonic Review, Henry Dana Ward suggests the private correspondence of the Aaron Burr conspiracy was carried on in the Royal Arch cipher, and the agents were exalted Freemasons.
• Some one called Freemasonry the most dangerous institution that ever was imposed and "an engine of Satan".
• One anti-Masonic pulpit orators called the order "a work of darkness because rr bears decided marks of being one of the confederate powers of iniquity predicted by the apostle John...".

Catholic Plots

• After the Masonic plot was rumors of a Catholic plot against American values.
• Two books appeared in 1835 describing the new danger,Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States, by Samuel F.B Morse, claimed "A conspiracy exists".
• Lyamn Beecher wrote Plea for the West, warned of Catholic and European plots and immigrants.
• Maria Monk wrote Awful Disclosures book about her life in nunnery.
• Anti-Catholicism, like anti-Masonry, mixed its fortunes with American party politics.
• Spokesmen of the movement circulated an encyclical attributed to Leo XIII instructing them to exterminate all heretics, the impending Catholic war of mutilation myth persisted to 20th century.
• Contemporary right shows different differences from nineteenth-century movements.
• The spokesmen felt represented their personal type still possessed the country, now radical right feels dispossessed.
• The modern radical right finds conspiracy also embraces betrayal at home.
• The villains of the modern right are much vivid, known to the public from the mass media.
• In the modern day President Roosevelt, Truman, Hoover are conspirators instead of vague anti-mason figures.
• The modern day Secretary of State like Marshall and Acheson -The modern day Justices of the Supreme Court like Frankfurter and Warren
• Alger Hiss are modern figures.
• Events since 1939 have given the contemporary right-wing paranoid a vast full theater for his imagination like World War 2, Korean War.
• John A. Stormer: None Dare Call It Treason traces ramifications, a conspiratorial plan to destroy uS from foreign aid.
• the elements of contemporary right-wing consist, sustained conspiracy Roosevelt's New Deal .
• Government top officials infiltrated with communists, selling out the country.
• a network of communist agents, to paralyze the resistance.

The Modern examples

• The document of McCarthyist : George C. Marshall, Senator McCarthy McCarthyism, Marshall.
• Modern Era consists of : Communist agents.
• The retired candy Robert H. Welch, Jr., his well-organized the John Birch Society Influence.
• Contemporary paranoia included
• 35,000 Communist Chinese troops in powder-blue uniforms poise on Mexican - invade San Diego.
• Us turned over to Soviet Russian Colonel.
• Mideast leader agent of the Soviet. .Georgia Warfare =Un Taking Over.

Basic elements of the paranoid

• The paranoid style is the central image of a vast and sinister influence set in motion.
• The paranoid style is not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots, but that they regard its "vast"or "gigantic" conspiracy forces.
• The paranoid spokesman sees the fates of the conspiracy in apocalyptic terms, whole political orders, human value. always.
• The religious Millienarians such as Welch says October 1960, a fatal month when Stalin attack.
• The avant-garde who are capable of perceiving public unaroused leaders.
• The paranoid is militant not a politician mediated work
• Absolute evil out of a finish to compromise.
• The enemy is totally evil and totally must be eliminate
• Paranoid is always a leader but see a confrontation over compromise.
• The paranoid interest is unrealistic cannot be felt in process.
• The world of power as ominipotent, sinister confirmed.

Enemy Archetypes

• The enemy is cruel, sexual, and evil.
• The enemy manufactures, history itself, or deflects the normal, an actor.
• The enemy makes crises, causes depressions, manufactures, diasters makes money from it
• The paranoids interpretation of history is will, especially the elite of power
• Paranoid Style is the imitation of his opposite/ Enemy , like the Cosmopolitan, Catholic.
• This imitation has been going since anti-matriots
• The John Birch society Imulates Society of Cells/ Frontal Operations.
• The Anti-Masonic movement with its ex-Masons revelations.
• The fanaticis has been an integral part of paranoid style, even when they stop being "reformed".

The Evidence

• Paranoid literature is shown that is not reasoned out factual lines, and is instead has "evidence". Low row, Highbrow, middle eyebrow paranoids has had magnetic attention, that can be justified. Paranoid writing the something be said, But not if wholly rational, has fallible competence and with competency

The overreaching

The paranoid theory nothing, if not, Scholarly. 96 page McCarthy is, Anti-is weighed down by a hundred notes and bibliography. The Right-wing movements is of study experts and monographs notes and bibliography. Welchs charged that Arnord's Is, the consequence of Fabian/ Members.

• paranoid is the absence verificables made Critical The Leap to Imagination John Robinson Tract The. Patienity he knows the History, then has knowledge, sensibility cause the revolution.

Explore the characteristics of the paranoid style, its persuasiveness, and its distinction from factual reporting. Covers the use of scholarly materials, the role of evidence in paranoid literature, and the potential threats perceived by those holding such views.