The paranoid style in American punditry

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http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/story/index.html?story=/books/laura_miller/2010/09/15/hofstadter

The paranoid style in American punditry
Richard Hofstadter's seminal take on right-wing crackpots sheds light on the current anti-Muslim panic
By Laura Miller

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Whatever their boogeymen (and in the case of anti-Communist fanatics during the Cold War -- paranoia's golden age -- the fear was grounded in fact), these groups shared the same baroque and fantastical imagination. This is what Hofstadter meant when he referred to a persistent "style." Its elements are: "the central image" of "a vast and sinister conspiracy, a gigantic and yet subtle machinery of influence set in motion to undermine and destroy a way of life"; an "apocalyptic" mentality, that "traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human value"; and an insistence on seeing all political differences as "a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil."

With the passing of the Soviet Union, the paranoid style lost a bad guy made in heaven, and the years since have seen a restless casting about for a suitable replacement. Hofstadter essentially argued that, while political paranoids claim to be driven to their crusades by the nefarious misdeeds of their designated fiends, really it's the other way around; the craziness comes first and then seeks an appropriate object. It looks even crazier when it can't quite settle on a sufficiently dastardly evildoer. For example, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" reads like a playbook for the career of Glenn Beck, right down to the paranoid's "quality of pedantry" and "heroic strivings for 'evidence,'" embodied in Beck's chalkboard and piles of books. But Beck lacks an archenemy commensurate with his stratospheric ambitions, which makes him appear even more absurd to outsiders.

Will the next villain be immigrants, or the gays (with their diabolical "agenda"), or the "liberal elite"? (Hofstadter pointed out that the left is certainly not free of this mind-set, and so Dick Cheney and Halliburton have often served as the designated superhumanly competent malefactors for the other side, as in the 9/11 "Truth" movement.) The trouble is, immigrants, gays and liberals have an irritating tendency to turn up, undisguised and manifestly harmless, in everyday life.

Muslims, on the other hand, are still exotic to many Americans, and a handful of Islamic extremists have proven adept at disguising themselves as regular people while secretly pursuing baleful and murderous schemes ostensibly aimed at world domination. Terrorist cells in our neighborhoods aren't bad enough, however. Hofstadter saw the idea of infiltration at the highest levels of power as central to the paranoid style. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, for example, wrote an entire book arguing that Secretary of State George C. Marshall (architect of the Marshall Plan) was a Soviet mole who had systematically and traitorously sabotaged U.S. interests.

Is it any wonder, then, that a growing number of Americans insist on believing that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim? This fantasy is the last piece needed to make an imaginary international Islamic conspiracy fit the formula for political paranoia laid out by Hofstadter 36 years ago.