the paranoid style in american politics explained

In Europe, the financial crisis has had a dramatic and negative effect.

There is plenty of evidence, however, to suggest that anger, frustration and distrust - the necessary conditions for paranoia - are spreading into the body politic of advanced industrialised democracies in new and profound ways.

Maybe modern commentators are just being paranoid about paranoia. It is easy to be flippant about such a claim. In every continent, people are growing more and more sour towards politics. Yet today, across the world, the conspiratorial bent he identified seems to be getting stronger. Hofstadter formulated his argument to describe the movement behind the Republican candidate Barry Goldwater. He is always manning the barricades of civilisation.’ The paranoid style obsesses about power, but is profoundly hostile to those who currently occupy the commanding heights of the power structure. Hofstadter clinically observed the key symptoms: ‘The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms - he trafficks in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. Historian Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, provides the most well-known evocation of this idea. Political paranoia is something of a tradition in the United States. There is a long and distinguished history of conspiracy-crazed politics in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. A century ago, Russian elites published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to suggest that Jews were trying to take over the world - making it easier to label them as the root of all evil in Europe. Athens fell victim to the politics of rumour and conspiracy during the Peloponnesian war. Such theories are hardly a new phenomenon in world politics. These are just a small slice of the conspiracy theories floating around the global ether of rumour and innuendo. The United States triggered the earthquake in Haiti to expand America’s imperial reach. Barack Obama was born in Kenya and is a secret Muslim who hates the United States and wants to institute ‘death panels’ to govern the healthcare system.

Foreign zombies are replacing indigenous labourers in South Africa. Polio vaccines in Nigeria are part of a Western plot to make African women infertile.

The paranoid style in american politics explained