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Sat Jan 7 11:10:33 PST 2006

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THE PARANOID STYLE IN AMERICAN POLITICS
Jan 5th 2006  

It's back, updated for a new generation

RICHARD HOFSTADTER'S classic essay, "The Paranoid Style in American
Politics", was aimed at the American right (it was published in
November 1964 in the wake of the Goldwater insurgency). But it is hard
to read it these days without first thinking of the other side of the
political divide. 

Hofstadter argued that the "paranoid style" expresses itself in three
habits: "heated exaggeration", "suspiciousness" and "conspiratorial
fantasy". Victims of the paranoid style have attacked shifting groups
throughout American history--from international bankers to freemasons,
from the Illuminati to effete liberals--but today they are targeting
the White House. 

Begin with the fuss over wiretapping. According to Robert Byrd, a
Democratic senator from West Virginia, George Bush has assumed
"unchecked power" that is "reserved only for kings and potentates".
Barbara Boxer of California says there is "no excuse" for Mr Bush's
actions. A growing chorus of outrage, including Congressman John Lewis
and John Dean (of Watergate fame), has suggested impeachment. Over at
the NATION, Jonathan Schell argues that "Bush's abuses of presidential
power are the most extensive in American history". The administration
"is not a dictatorship", he concedes, before adding that "it does
manifest the characteristics of one in embryonic form."

And the proof of dictatorship? On more than 30 different occasions, Mr
Bush authorised the tapping of telephone calls made by American
citizens. Tapping domestic telephone calls without getting a warrant is
illegal. But Mr Bush claims that his constitutional powers as
commander-in-chief allowed him to do so because all these calls were
international ones. He maintains that going to the courts would have
been cumbersome and that his first priority was to prevent another
terrorist attack. 

You can pick at this reasoning--for instance, there are retrospective
warrants that might have done the trick. But it is hard to claim that
Mr Bush is being outlandish on any of these scores. John Schmidt, an
associate attorney-general under Bill Clinton, thinks Mr Bush has the
constitutional power to approve such taps; General Michael Hayden, the
deputy director of national intelligence, has argued that the programme
"has been successful in detecting and preventing attacks inside the
United States".

 That assertion is for Congress to probe, but the real argument here is
surely one of nuance: it has to do with how much freedom you should
reasonably curtail in the name of security. Mr Bush may have crossed a
line, but he has hardly smashed through it. Most European countries
have more intrusive surveillance regimes than America's. As for
impeachment, the prospect of having to defend Mr Bush against the
charge that he went a tad too far trying to avert a terrorist attack is
the sort of thing Karl Rove salivates about.

Moreover, the paranoid style is finding an ever larger home in popular
culture. In 2004, American cinema-goers trooped off to see Michael
Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11", a fearless expose of the hidden forces
behind the war on terrorism, and an update of "The Manchurian
Candidate", the quintessential paranoid film. Now they are crowding to
"Syriana", an analysis of American policy in the Middle East, featuring
George Clooney. The villains vary: "Fahrenheit 9/11" went for the
Carlyle Group, the Saudi royal family and virtually anybody who had met
Mr Bush; "The Manchurian Candidate" attacked big business; "Syriana"
dislikes oil firms and the CIA. But they all agree that America is run
by a sinister cabal that will stop at nothing.

PARANOID OPTIMISM
In one way, paranoia is one of America's great strengths--part of its
long-standing suspicion of government. America was born in a revolution
against George III's tyranny. Hostility towards central government has
been a constant of American history. Most periods of heightened
executive power during wartime have been followed by sharp reactions.
Abraham Lincoln, who suspended HABEAS CORPUS, was accused of
dictatorship and his Republican Party lost seats in 1862; Richard
Nixon's abuses of power spawned a host of reforms, including the
wiretapping-oversight system that Mr Bush has tangled with. 

But there is something less healthy at work on both the left and the
right. Hofstadter argued that the politics of paranoia is fuelled by a
sense of dispossession--by fury at your loss of relative power to
rising groups. In the 1960s, the right was driven by a sense that it
was being eclipsed by cosmopolitans and intellectuals. Now the left
thinks it is losing power to businessmen and suburbanites. It cannot
believe that the north-east--the vortex of civilised America--is losing
influence to the South and the West, to people who believe in God and
guns, to Mr Bush.

That does not let the president off the hook. Put simply, a man who
claimed he would unite the country has given his enemies far too much
to be paranoid about. There may well be a case for wire-tapping people
in contact with al-Qaeda; but what about refusing to reveal who is on
the energy task-force, let alone the (possibly legal but ghastly)
treatment of inmates at Guantanamo? There may be a case for asking
people to rally around the flag at a time of war; but how does that
square with Mr Bush using terrorism to divide his opponents and advance
his party's political interests, as he did in 2002 and 2004?

 Hofstadter argued that the paranoid style "has more to do with the way
in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their
content". The problem for America's left is not the lack of justified
complaints about Mr Bush. It is that their paranoid style--with its
propensity to exaggeration and conspiracy-mongering and its inability
to distinguish between justified complaints and hysteria--means that
their cries are seldom listened to except by people who suffer from the
same affliction. Which is sometimes a pity.

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