One of the most striking things about contemporary America is the popularity of conspiracy theories.<\/p>\n
The list of absurd things that \u201ceverybody knows\u201d gets ever longer. If you\u2019re on the right, you \u201cknow\u201d that the Deep State is subverting the administration of President Donald Trump; that the global elite is set on undermining American sovereignty; and that lockdown during COVID-19 was a dry run for totalitarian rule. If you\u2019re on the left, you \u201cknow\u201d that Putin has \u201ckompromat\u201d on Trump, probably involving urination; that the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt was a put-up job; and that the administration will find a way to cancel the midterm elections. I could go on \u2014 as America\u2019s distressingly articulate conspiracy theorists most certainly do.<\/p>\n
These effusions are the latest examples of what the historian Richard Hofstadter dubbed \u201cthe paranoid style of American politics.\u201d Hofstadter\u2019s eponymous essay, which germinated in the Red Scare years of the 1950s before gaining public attention as a Harper\u2019s article in 1964, has just been republished by Penguin\/Random House, along with other writings on the same theme. If anything, it seems even more relevant now than it did then. Indeed, anybody who wants to understand Trump\u2019s America could do no better than to read this book. \u201cAmerican political life … has served again and again as an arena for uncommonly angry minds,\u201d Hofstadter wrote more than a half-century ago. Today, the angriest mind of them all sits in the Oval Office.<\/p>\n
Having got our attention with his colorful phrase, Hofstadter is careful to define his terms. He is not engaged in clinical diagnosis. People who engage in paranoid political thinking may be perfectly sane in regular life. He is not suggesting that all conspiracy theories are devoid of content. He is rather talking about a style of thinking, about the way in which ideas are believed and advocated, rather than the truth or falsity of their content.<\/p>\n
The paranoid style begins with a simple proposition: The world is divided between good and evil. The baddies are usually elites who plot in secret. The goodies are regular people who suffer in public. This simple proposition then produces ever more convoluted thinking \u2014 the baroque whirligigs of the paranoid style \u2014 as inconvenient facts are explained away and unexpected developments fitted into the theory.<\/p>\n
Hence one of the great paradoxes of the paranoid style: A way of thinking that begins by appealing to the common sense of ordinary people produces an intellectual elite that specializes in deciphering conspiracies. The champions of the people end up resembling the very people they demonize. The anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments and developing elaborate rituals…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One of the most striking things about contemporary America is the popularity of conspiracy theories. The list of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":42421,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[30293,30292,30289,7793,30285,3469,13,30291,8,30290,30288,30287,29967,30294,30286,2858,84,17578],"class_list":["post-42420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-japan","tag-alex-jones","tag-barack-obama","tag-barry-goldwater","tag-covid-19","tag-deep-state","tag-democratic-party","tag-donald-trump","tag-dwight-eisenhower","tag-japan","tag-john-birch-society","tag-joseph-mccarthy","tag-ku-klux-klan","tag-republicans","tag-robert-f-kennedy-jr","tag-soviet-union","tag-state-department","tag-u-s","tag-vladimir-putin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42420\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}