[Posted by Paul Gleason]

This is the latest in a series of posts on Richard Hofstadter’s classic essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” See previous entries here.

In last week’s New York Times, Dan Barry reported on the current state of the John Birch Society, a right-wing organization dedicated to protecting America from various ill-defined but imminent plots. In the 1960’s the Birchers railed against Communist agents. These included President Eisenhower who, according to Birch Society founder Robert Welch, was “a dedicated conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.” Communism being a bit passé these days, the Birchers now fear the coming of the North American Union, which will merge present-day America, Canada, and Mexico into one, fascist super-state.

This is a classic instance of what Richard Hofstadter called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Hofstadter wrote that “the central preconception of the paranoid style [is] the existence of a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character.” The North American Union meets these criteria. Is it vast? Its membership includes “the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and the Rockefellers.” Is it insidious? The Illuminati hatched the plot more than 200 years ago. Is it preternaturally effective? Well, how do you explain the fact that former President Bush, former Mexican President Vincente Fox, and former Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin all signed a “security and prosperity partnership of North America”? The John Birch Society’s enemy has changed; their way of thinking hasn’t.

Hofstadter also pointed out that paranoids tend to adopt the tactics of their shadowy opponents. “A fundamental paradox of the paranoid style is imitation of the enemy,” he wrote:

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 Christian anti-Communist “crusades” openly express their admiration for the dedication, discipline, and strategic ingenuity the Communist cause calls forth.

Hofstadter’s observation, made in the early 60’s, holds true today. Arthur Thompson, the Society’s chief executive, refuses to reveal how wide-spread his organization is. “We don’t want to let our enemies know our strengths or our weaknesses,” he told Barry.

Reading Barry’s article, I couldn’t help but hum Paul Simon.

The numbers that follow are collected from So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government by Robert G. Kaiser. They pretty much speak for themselves.

Learn more about the book here.

$358 million: Amount in contributions collected by the RNC and the party’s House and Senate committees in the two years prior to the 1994 elections.
$782 million: Amount in contributions collected by the RNC and the party’s House and Senate committees in the two years prior to the 2004 elections.

$77 million: Combined campaign spending for every candidate for the House and Senate (34 Senate and 435 House races) in 1974
$343 million: Combined campaign spending for every candidate for the House and Senate (34 Senate and 435 House races) in 1982

$100,000: Cost of most winning House campaigns in the 1960s and 1970s
$349,000: Cost of most winning congressional campaigns by 1982

608: Number of Political Action Committees registered with the Federal Election Commission in 1974
3371: Number of Political Action Committees registered with the Federal Election Commission by 1982

$12.5 million: Total of PAC contributions to all House and Senate races in 1974
$83.1 million: Total of PAC contributions to all House and Senate races by 1982

700: Number of trade associations with headquarters in Washington in 1968
1,600: Number of trade associations with headquarters in Washington by 1978

$250: Standard “requested contribution” for a political fundraiser in Washington (i.e. the charge of admission charged to lobbyists) before the 1994 congressional elections
$1000: Standard “requested contribution” immediately after Republicans took over the House following those elections

$51,200: Amount in contributions from the banking and credit card industries collected over five years by the 18 Senate Democrats who voted for 2005 legislation making it more difficult for consumers to evade their debts by declaring personal bankruptcy.
$20,200: Amount collected from the same sources in the same period by Senate Democrats who voted against the law.

Here’s today’s sampling of articles of note by way of my RSS reader.

The Economist: Books on the credit crunch
The search is on for the ideal book about the financial crisis

Related:
The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers and the Great Credit Crash by Charles R. Morris
The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means by George Soros

NPR: New Biography Examines Rumsfeld’s ‘Rules’
Journalist Bradley Graham discusses the successes and failures of former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Related:
The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals by Jane Mayer

Fora TV: Gwen Ifill’s 2009 Georgetown Commencement Address
The noted author and journalist highlights the importance of discovery, diversity, and drive, as well as the importance of continuing to study and learn long after leaving school.

Related:
The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama by Gwen Ifill

Big Think: Robert Thurman: “It’s the moral high ground which is our only hope.”
“A petty little tyrant like Ahmadinejad” could be toppled depending on U.S. actions in the region.

Related:
The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power by David E. Sanger

Bloggingheads TV: Steven Waldman & William Saletan: Two Men, No Uteruses.
Can pro-lifers embrace birth control?… Can pro-choicers embrace abortion’s moral complexity?… Americans in the middle… Paying pregnant women to not have an abortion… Why Obama must lead toward common ground…

Related:
Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America by Steven Waldman

NPR: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
For his book, philosopher Alain De Botton observed everyday occupations. On one trip, he observed the development of a new cookie.

Book TV: Katha Pollitt On Writing
The columnist, poet, and author discusses her writing methods.

[Posted by The Media Consortium Media Wire]

Weekly Immigration Wire

by Nezua, TMC Mediawire Blogger

Related PBC Book

President Obama has often stated that immigration reform cannot be approached in a piecemeal fashion, and that his administration would tackle the issue in 2009. This week, Obama will be meeting with members of Congress to kick off a bi-partisan approach to reform. These meetings don’t guarantee any legislative action will take place this year, but are at least an encouraging sign. In the meantime, the deportation industry shows no sign of slowing, hate crimes are rising and hate groups are being main streamed. As a result, the polarization between reform advocates and foes is getting worse. Read More

If so, you’re in good company: 76 percent of Americans, including Howard Dean and the producers of this video.

Photo: AP

I have to be honest, I don’t really get this “summer reading” thing (though of course I’m happy to pile on). As best I can tell, the idea is that a good summer book is an “easy” read? Easy reading has its place, don’t get me wrong. But I’ve always found that summer vacation is the only time I can really get into a book for long (more or less) uninterrupted stretches; in other words, the more concentration a book needs, the more likely I am to read it during the summer; whereas the breezy page-turner is about all I’m good for during the year, in the roughly 7 minutes between reaching over to the nightstand and crashing out.

But anyway: here, for your consideration, are some more summer recommendations from here and there.

• Amy Walter, editor in chief of National Journal’s Hotline (Book TV)
• Sen. Mitch McConnel, Senate Minority Leader (Book TV) (No, really.)
• Summer Nonfiction Recommendations (NPR)
• Librarian Nancy Pearl Picks Summer’s Best Books (NPR)
• Vote For The Best Beach Books Of All Time (NPR)
• Summer Reading: 25 Books You Can’t Put Down (Oprah’s Book Club)

[Posted by Paul Gleason]

This is the second in a series of posts on Richard Hofstadter’s classic essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” (Read the first here.)

In his famous essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Richard Hofstadter traced the idea that America was about to fall as a result of foreign infiltration from McCarthyism to Puritanism. “The central preconception of the paranoid style,” wrote Hofstadter, is “the existence of a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character.” Here are a few of the paranoids he identifies, and their dire warnings:

• Robert Welch, Jr., founder of the John Birch Society, on President Eisenhower (1963): The former general was “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy … based on an accumulation of detailed evidence so extensive and so palpable that it seems to put this conviction beyond any reasonable doubt.”
• Senator Joseph McCarthy on Communist infiltration (1951): “How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.”
• The leaders of the Populist party on the international gold ring (1895): “As early as 1865-66 a conspiracy was entered into between the gold gamblers of Europe and America … Every device of treachery, every resource of statecraft, and every artifice known to the secret cabals of the international gold ring are being made use of to deal a blow to the prosperity of the people and the financial and commercial independence of the country.”
• A Texas newspaper on the Catholic menace (1855): “It is a notorious fact that the Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome are at this very moment plotting our destruction and threatening the extinction of our political, civil, and religious institutions.”
• David Bernard on the Freemasons (1829): “They bespeak the most imminent danger, because they have proceeded from a conspiracy more numerous and better organized for mischief, than any other detailed in the records of man, and yet, though exposed, maintaining itself, in all its monstrous power.”
• Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College, on the atheist Illuminati (1789): “No personal or national interest of man has been uninvaded; … Shall we, my brethren, become partakers of these sins? Shall we introduce them into our government, our schools, our families? Shall our sons become the disciples of Voltaire, and the dragoons of Marat; or our daughters the concubines of the Illuminati?”

Though Hofstadter’s essay is nearly fifty years old, it remains indispensable to anyone who wants to understand American politics. The “paranoid style” hasn’t gone away:

• Michele Bachmann (R-MN) on the coming one-world currency: “As you know, Russia, China, Brazil, India, South Africa, many nations have lined up now and have called for an international global currency, a One World currency and they want to get off of the dollar as the reserve currency. …What that means is all of the countries in the world would have a single currency. We would give up the dollar as our currency and we would just go with a One World currency. … If we give up the dollar as our standard, and co-mingle the value of the dollar with the value of coinage in Zimbabwe, that dilutes our money supply. We lose control over our economy. And economic liberty is inextricably entwined with political liberty. Once you lose your economic freedom, you lose your political freedom. And then we are no more, as an exceptional nation, as we always have been. So this is imperative.”

Among this month’s Progressive Book Club selections is Mirrors by Eduardo Galeano, a scintillating unofficial history of the world seen from the vantage of history’s dispossessed. Galeano recounts his story in 600 vignettes, some of just a few hundred words, and ranging across great sweeps of time and geography — from the Garden of Eden to twenty-first-century New York — bringing both past and present into startling relief. (Read an excerpt here. And buy the book for FREE when you join Progressive Book Club!).

For more, check out video below, from Fora TV, where Galeano reads from Mirrors at the Los Angeles Public Library.

We asked Maureen Corrigan, book critic for Fresh Air with Terry Gross, PBC editorial board member, and serious genre fiction buff, to recommend some favorite mysteries, thrillers, and police procedurals for summer reading. Here’s what she came back with.

The Way Home by George Pelecanos

If you don’t know of him, Pelecanos has been writing crime novels for years about the “other” Washington (i.e., not Capitol Hill or Northwest DC) He’s socially and racially conscious and a terrific writer.  Also wrote for The Wire.  The working class “hero” of this novel works for his family’s remodeling company.

Small Crimes by Dave Zeltzerman

I really really loved this noir that came out last year.  A police officer newly released from prison tries to put his life back together in a small town in upstate NY and only proves himself to be one of fortune’s fools.  Pure, updated James M.Cain.

The Moe Prager mysteries of Reed Farrell Coleman

My find of the year.  Coleman is superb but relatively unknown.  Hailed by Michael Connelly and most of the Big Guys in Hard Boiled Detective fiction. His Moe Prager series is terrific (Jewish ex cop detective) and one of them, Redemption Street, is my favorite because it’s set in the crumbling Catskill resort area.  A perfect summer setting! [Listen to Maureen Corrigan’s

The Adamsberg series of Fred Vargas

Terrific, psychologically dense police procedurals set in Paris.  Reminiscent of the classic  Per Wahloo/Maj Sojwall police procedural series. This series stars Inspector Adamsburg and a recurring cast of police detectives and considers all the big questions about the nature of evil.  Vargas is one of the biggest names in crime fiction in Europe but, again, not widely known here except to real crime fiction fans.  (And, yes, she’s a she.)

Death of a Nationalist by Rebecca Pawel

Came out in 2003 and is set in the Spanish Civil War but its political story loops around in unexpected ways.  Pawel spun a series out of it but this was her debut book (she was a young Spanish teacher at the time) and it’s really smart and politically inflected.

The Hours Before Dawn by Celia Fremlin

This one is probably not in print (1958 is the date on my first edition) but I’d love to make a pitch for it.  It’s the first mystery that I know of in which a woman who’s recently given birth and is sleep deprived as a result sees things she shouldn’t see in the small hours of the evening.  Proto-feminist in its politics.

[Posted by Media Consortium Media Wire]

Weekly Audit: Obama’s Regulation Overhaul Comes Up Short
by Zach Carter, TMC MediaWire Blogger

Related PBC Book

President Barack Obama rolled out his plan to overhaul financial regulation last week. While much of the Obama plan relies on the same regulators and structures that led to the current meltdown, there is one key exception. The establishment of an independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency would give ordinary citizens a seat at the financial policy table for the first time and prevent the abuses in credit card and mortgage lending that have wreaked havoc on households all over the country.

The new agency is the brainchild of Harvard University Law School Professor Elizabeth Warren. As chair of a key oversight panel for the Treasury Department’s bank bailout program, Warren has uncovered major deficiencies in the government’s handling of the plan, including nearly $80 billion in overpayments to bailed-out banks. American News Project features footage of an interview with Warren, who explains why we need a separate agency to regulate on behalf of consumers.

Read More