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The Paranoid Style in American Politics

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The Paranoid Style in American Politics The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hoistadter It had been around a long time before people that makes the phenomenon significant. the Radical Right discovered it-and Of course this term is pejorative, and it is its targets have ranged from "the in- meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing ternational bankers" to Masons, Jesu- really prevents a sound program or demand from its, and munitions makers. being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed and advocated than with the truth or A merican politics has often been an arena for falsity of their content. I am interested here "angry minds: In recent years we have seen angry in getting at our political psychology through minds at work mainly among extreme right- our political rhetoric. The paranoid style is an wingers, who have now demonstrated in the old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life Goldwater movement how much political leverage which has been frequently linked with movements can be got out of the animosities and passions of of suspicious discontent. a small minority. But behind this I believe there Here is Senator McCarthy, speaking in June is a style of mind that is far from new and 1951 about the parlous situation of the United that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the States: paranoid style simply because no other word How can we account for our present situ- adequately evokes the sense of heated exagger- ation unless we believe that men high in this ation, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy government are concerting to deliver us to that I have in mind. In using the expression disaster? This must be the product of a great "paranoid style" I am not speaking in a clinical conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, purposes. I have neither the competence nor the when it is finally exposed, its principals shall desire to classify any figures of the past or be forever deserving of the maledictions of present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea all honest men:' ... What can be made of this of the paranoid style as a force in politics would unbroken series of decisions and acts con- have little contemporary relevance or historical tributing to the strategy of defeat? They cannot be attributed to incompetence .... The value if it were applied only to men with pro- laws of probability would dictate that part foundly disturbed minds. It is the use of par- of ... [the] decisions would serve the coun- anoid modes of expression by more or less normal try's interest. 78 THE PARANOID STYLE IN POLITICS Now turn back fifty years to a manifesto American right wing, and on both sides of the signed in 1895 by a number of leaders of the race controversy today, among White Citizens' Populist party: Councils and Black Muslims. I do not propose to try to trace the variations of the paranoid style As early as 1865-66 a conspiracy was entered that can be found in all these movements, but into between the gold gamblers of Europe and America .... For nearly thirty years these will confine myself to a few leading episodes in conspirators have kept the people quarreling our past history in which the style emerged in over less important matters while they have full and archetypal splendor. pursued with unrelenting zeal their one central purpose .... Every device of treachery, every resource of statecraft, and every artifice known Illuminism and Masonry to the secret cabals of the international gold ring are being used to deal a blow to the pros- perity of the people and the financial and com- I begin with a particularly revealing episode- mercial independence of the country. the panic that broke out in some quarters at Next, a Texas newspaper article of 1855: the end of the eighteenth century over the allegedly subversive activities of the Bavarian ... It is a notorious fact that the Monarchs Illuminati. This panic was a part of the general of Europe and the Pope of Rome are at this reaction to the French Revolution. In the United very moment plotting our destruction and threatening the extinction of our political, civil, States it was heightened by the response of and religious institutions. We have the best certain men, mostly in New England and among reasons for believing that corruption has found the established clergy, to the rise of Jeffersonian its way into our Executive Chamber, and that democracy. Illuminism had been started in 1776 our Executive head is tainted with the infec- by Adam Weishaupt, a professor of law at the tious venom of Catholicism .... The Pope has recently sent his ambassador of state to this University of Ingolstadt .. Its teachings today country on a secret commission, the effect of seem to be no more than another version of En- which is an extraordinary boldness of the Cath- lightenment rationalism, spiced with the anticler- olic Church throughout the United States. ical atmosphere of eighteenth-century Bavaria. These minions of the Pope are boldly insulting our Senators; reprimanding our It was a somewhat naive and utopian movement Statesmen; propagating the adulterous union which aspired ultimately to bring the human race of Church and State; abusing with foul under the rules of reason. Its humanitarian ra- calumny all governments but Catholic; and tionalism appears to have acquired a fairly wide spewing out the bitterest execrations on all influence in Masonic lodges. Protestantism. The Catholics in the United States receive from abroad more than $200,000 Americans first learned of Illuminism in 1797, annually for the propagation of their creed. from a volume published in Edinburgh (later re- Add to this the vast revenue collected here. .. printed in New York) under the title, Proojs of These quotations give the keynote of the style. a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Gov- In the history of the United States one finds ernments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret it, for example, in the anti-Masonic movement, Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Read- the nativist and anti-Catholic movement, in cer- ing Societies. Its author was a well-known tain spokesmen of abolitionism who regarded Scottish scientist, John Robison, who had him- the United States as being in the grip of a self been a somewhat casual adherent of Masonry slaveholders' conspiracy, in many alarmists about in Britain, but whose imagination had been in- the Mormons, in some Greenback and Populist flamed by what he considered to be the far less writers who constructed a great conspiracy of innocent Masonic movement on the Continent. international bankers, in the exposure of a Robison seems to have made his work as factual munitions makers' conspiracy of 'World War I, in as he could, but when he came to estimating the the popular left-wing press, in the contemporary moral character and the political influence of Illuminism, he made the characteristic paranoid leap into fantasy. The association, he thought, was formed "for the express purpose of ROOTING Richard Hoistadter is DeWitt Clinton Professor OUT ALL RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS, AND OVER- of American History at Columbia University. His TURNING ALL THE EXISTING GOVERNMENTS OF latest book, "Anti-intellectualism in American EUROPE." It had become "one great and wicked Life," was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction earlier this yea,'. This essay is adapted project fermenting and working all over Europe," [rom. the Herbert Spencer Lecture delivered at and to it he attributed a central role in bringing Oxford University in November 1963. about the French Revolution. He saw it as a by Richard Hofstadter 79 libertine, anti-Christian movement, given to the afford to ignore it. Still, it was a folk movement corruption of women, the cultivation of sensual of considerable power, and the rural enthusiasts pleasures, and the violation of property rights. who provided its real impetus believed in it Its members had plans for making a tea that wholeheartedly. caused abortion-a secret substance that "blinds As a secret society, Masonry was considered to or kills when spurted in the face," and a device be a standing conspiracy against republican that sounds like a stench bomb-a "method for government. It was held to be particularly liable filling a bedchamber with pestilential vapours." to treason-for example, Aaron Burr's famous These notions were quick to make themselves conspiracy was alleged to have been conducted felt in America. In May 1798, a minister of the by Masons. Masonry was accused of constituting Massachusetts Congregational establishment in a separate system of loyalty, a separate imperium Boston, Jedidiah Morse, delivered a timely sermon within the framework of federal and state govern- to the young country, which was then sharply ments, which was inconsistent with loyalty to divided between Jeffersonians and Federalists, them. Quite plausibly it was argued that the Francophiles and Anglomen. Having read Robi- Masons had set up a jurisdiction of their own, son, Morse was convinced that the United States with their own obligations and punishments, too was the victim of a Jacobinical plot touched liable to enforcement even by the penalty of off by Illuminism, and that the country should be death. So basic was the conflict felt to be between rallied to defend itself. His warnings were secrecy and democracy that other, more innocent heeded throughout New England wherever Fed- societies such as Phi Beta Kappa came under eralists brooded about the rising tide of religious attack.
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