In 1964, American historian Richard Hofstadter wrote his infamous essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” In it, he noted that “American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority.”
Hofstadter’s argument, labeled as inherently flawed by most conservatives, went on to define and explain political paranoia in America by using “right-wing extremism” as his case in point. He called out the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, and the perpetrator of the Red Scare, Sen. Joseph McCarthy. All of those, according to the mainstream narrative, are examples of radical conservative ideas, or when the Republican Party goes too far.
But for all his slightly misguided assumptions, Hofstadter makes one very astute observation. “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.”
What Hofstadter meant by the “projection of the self,” was that when people go to extremes in fighting against some political enemy, they unwittingly take on the characteristics of the very enemy they are fighting. To make his case, Hofstadter points to the John Birch Society- saying that the style of its ideological crusade is similar to the way Communists seek to expand their message and influence.
Fast forward to the political climate of 2010 and not much has changed. Only now however, Hofstadter is being joined by people like Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman in warning against “right-wing extremism.” Whether it’s racism or fascism, the Left has been denouncing the radical right since Barack Obama announced his candidacy for president.
They questioned whether America would be able to handle a black president. They wondered whether Rep. Joe Wilson’s outburst of “You Lie!” was a symptom of repressed racism and bigotry. They characterized opponents of healthcare reform as obstructionists to President Obama’s agenda. And they marginalized an entire pro limited-government movement, the overwhelming majority of which is peaceful, law-abiding Americans.
Indeed, in his most recent and now widely-circulated New York Times column, Frank Rich wrote, “How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht.”
What is interesting is that while Rich accuses Tea Partiers of exemplifying Hofstadter’s “projection of the self,” he also compares last weekend’s protest of the healthcare bill to a Nazi anti-Jewish program organized by Hitler that destroyed 200 Jewish synagogues, thousands of other Jewish properties, and left 91 Jews dead. And the worst anyone has been able to connect to the Tea Party movement is a few racial slurs and some inappropriate signs. The recent wave of threats and vandalism against Democratic lawmakers have not been encouraged or carried out in the name of the movement itself.
But the connect-the-dots game that is being played by the left, and the attempt to marginalize a legitimate movement reflects a lot more about the left’s anxieties than it does any potential threat posed by the Tea Party. In other words, Hofstadter’s self-projecting idea applies just as much to people like Rich as it does any alleged paranoid political faction.
In his piece, “The Paranoid Center,” Reason Magazine managing editor Jesse Walker explains it best. “When pundits weave a small number of unrelated incidents into a “pattern” of crime, then link it to the rhetoric of Obama’s opponents, it becomes easier to marginalize nonviolent, noncriminal critics on the right…”
Today, the politics of paranoia rest just as much with Liberal commentators like Rich as it does with anti-government activists who resort to threats and menacing phone calls. But if Hofstadter’s reverse psychology of “self-projection” can be applied today, then what does it mean when Rich, et al, tries so hard to lump together peaceful anti-government conservatives with “right-wing extremism?”
When Hofstadter wrote “The Paranoid Style of American Politics,” he failed to turn the finger around and apply his own theory to himself and his audience. If he had, his analysis would be a lot more insightful. Today’s liberal pundits would be wise not to follow Hofstadter’s example and instead, stop trying to connect conservatives with violent fanatics. Because doing so is only participating in the extremism they claim to be against.
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Amanda Carey is the Editor of The Tiger Town Observer at Clemson University. She has previously worked for Robert Novak and has been published in Reason Magazine and The American Spectator.
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