Quotes:
Richard Hoftsadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Harpers Magazine November 1964, pp. 77-86. Available online at
http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/conspiracy_theory/the_paranoid_mentality/The_paranoid_style.html.

Indeed, one of the lessons I’ve gleaned from carefully observing the behavior of the American right over
the years is that the best indicator of its agenda can be found in the very things of which it accuses the left.
This is known as “projection.” One of the first to observe this propensity on the right was Richard
Hofstadter, whose The Paranoid Style in American Politics remains an important contribution to the field
of analyzing right-wing politics:

The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral
superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of
us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim
of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism
of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises,
starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and
profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is
distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as
the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some
especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has
a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for
seduction (the Catholic confessional).

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the
self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The
enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the
apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations set up to combat secret
organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point
of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate
hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation
through “front” groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along
lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy. Spokesmen of the various
fundamentalist anti-Communist “crusades” openly express their admiration for the
dedication and discipline the Communist cause calls forth.

Self-proclaimed anti-authoritarians such as Limbaugh thus adopt the language and style of authoritarians themselves, and engage in Newspeak-laden propaganda whose sole purpose is to appeal to persons with totalist propensities. The anti-Gephardt essay is a classic example.

# posted by Hazem @ 2/06/2004 11:06:00 PM