Richard Hofstadter published a famous essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, in the Harpers Monthlyof November, 1964. A year before, John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas. The Republican Party, in 1964, nominated Barry Goldwater for President. For the establishment liberal, the court intellectuals of Kennedy’s Camelot, Goldwater was a Southwestern, ruddy-cheeked repeat of Joe McCarthy (Camelot ignored Bobby Kennedy’s own admiration of Joe McCarthy). Although Goldwater brandished no list of Communists in the State Department at the convention, he did bite out a line that became famous: Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
Karl Hess, Goldwater’s speechwriter, came up with that magnificent sentence. Johnson, of course, won overwhelmingly; his campaigned aired tv ads linking Goldwater to nuclear war, implying Goldwater was for it.
Karl Hess had an interesting career post-Goldwater. In an interview once, he summed it up: “I moved in a direction which the FBI chooses to call leftward. What I actually did was go to work as a commercial welder, get arrested for demonstrating against the Indochina war, work with the Black Panthers and teach a course on anarchism.”
Hess’s career choices mark a good shadow line against which to measure Hofstadter’s essay. That essay, to my mind, codified a certain establishmentarian view of postwar American history that continues even to this day, when the Cold War ostensibly lies in ruins behind us. Substitute “Trump” for “Goldwater” in the first paragraph of Hofstadter’s essay and one could easily imagine it being published yesterday in some newspaper opinion page, or in the New Yorker’s Talk of the Town, or in the Atlantic, et al.
‘Although American political life has rarely been touched by the most acute vagaries of class conflict, it has served again and again as an arena for uncommonly angry minds. Today this fact is most evident in the extreme rightwing, which has shown, particularly in the Goldwater movement, how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.”
This is an almost perfect establishmentarian credo. You could easily draw a line between this and Cass Sunstein, between the politics of Cold war realpolitik and the politics of nudgery. It shifts the notion of class conflict almost completely to the side of one class – the workers – while endowing Capital with a pleasing political colorlessness. It posits a small group as troublemakers, wrapping an old FBI trope in columnar marble, suitable for thinktankery. It makes the small minority of policy-makers into de fact “representatives” of the majority. And it attributes suspiciousness and conspiracy-thinking to an outsider group – while the insider group, implicitly, is dedicated to sweet reason. Of course, by November 1964 Congress had passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution which wedged the US into Vietnam. And of course that incident was a lie, one motivated by suspiciousness of the “enemy” and one that threw America, once again, into conflict with the “communist conspiracy” – which was combatted, then, for eight years via massive bombing, shifting and building barbed wire around villages, death squads, and casualty count incentivizing the drafted troops. If we are to see the sixties clearly, Hoftstadter is a pisspoor guide, whereas Karl Hess seems much more levelheaded about assessing America’s cold war history.
Hofstadter goes on to justify his use of paranoid by reference to Webster instead of Freud. It consists of “systematized delusion of persecution and one’s own greatness.” I take this shorthand as more descriptive of the D.C. mindset, and the interlocking culture of media, politics and capital, than I do of the Goldwater rightwing. The U.S. had, by the time Hoftstadter wrote his article, spent at least ten trillion dollars to build up the most dangerous military system in the world. During this buildup the U.S. had sustained and supported numerous coups throughout the world, from Guatemala to Iran, bringing about widespread and continuous violence, all in the name of anti-communism. It had instituted a system of atom bomb tests which meant sending military people into the fallout of atom blasts merely hours, or even minutes, after they happened, and letting radioactive fallout drift over large parts of the Pacific and over the continental U.S. I’m not even going to speak of the Jim Crow regime, or its justification through the pseudo-science of race.
What other country has so instituted paranoia that a considerable and influential think tank-academic sector spends mucho time developing suitable images of America’s “enemies” and celebrates the invigorating power of this orientation? In a recent NYT article about Russia and Ukraine, the bright side of the conflict is seen in these terms:
It may be just what a lagging alliance has needed. Repeat that five times. See if it is any less insane the fifth time than the first time. If you find it becoming more and more rational, you might have a job waiting for you at Brookings!
The establishmentarian viewpoint pervades “acceptable” politics from conservative to liberal in the U.S. It is what comes out of the mouths of talk show hosts and serious “experts”. It is the kind of attitude that accepts a figure like John Bolton as a rational ‘dissident’ to that crazy Trump. I call this the Denial style in American Politics. It is an exhausted style, so often thrown to the mat by reality that it should long ago have given up – but it is always coming out of its corner for the next round. It is, still, nearing its end and dragging us with it. And I say:
Fuck it.
No comments:
Post a Comment