[Posted by Paul Gleason]

This is the third in a series of posts on Richard Hofstadter’s classic essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”

In his 1963 lecture “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Richard Hofstadter claimed that McCarthyism, the John Birch Society, and the Goldwater movement are modern manifestations of an old fear. Throughout American history, said Hofstadter, many groups have stood accused of plotting to destroy the American way of life. If you are now, or have ever been, a member of one of the following groups, you may be a conspirator.

* Socialists
* Communists
* Freemasons
* Catholics (especially Jesuits)
* International capitalists
* International bankers
* International Jews
* Mormons
* Munitions makers
* Jacobins
* Phi Beta Kappa
* The Fabian Society
* The Executive Branch of the United States
* The Supreme Court
* The United Nations
* The international gold ring
* The Bavarian Illuminati
* The House of Hapsburg

[Posted by Paul Gleason]

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

In “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Richard Hofstadter puts Joseph McCarthy and the 50’s red scare into the context of American history. Far from being an aberration, Hofstadter argued, McCarthy was part of a long line of American paranoids, from Puritan preachers to 19th-century nativists. These paranoids also appear in popular culture. Below, General Jack D. Ripper unmasks an insidious Communist plot in Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove:

Part I: Communist Fluid Sappers

Part II: Precious Bodily Fluids

The following is excerpted from The Best of I.F. Stone.

What Few Know About the Tonkin Bay Incidents

On August 4, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson spoke on national television, asking Congress for authorization to use force in Vietnam in response to a claimed “unprovoked attack” against a U.S. destroyer on “routine patrol: in the Tonkin Gulf on August 2, followed by a “deliberate attack” by North Vietnamese PT boats on a pair of U.S. ships two days later. Three days later, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed by Congress, unanimously by the House (416–0), and by the Senate 88–2, with Senators Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska casting the only dissenting votes. That resolution was the slender reed on which the subsequent vast escalation of the war was built. Here I. F. Stone offers one of the first investigative reports into the omissions and deceptions in mainstream reporting of the Tonkin Gulf incidents.

August 24, 1964

The American government and the American press have kept the full truth about the Tonkin Bay incidents from the American public. Let us begin with the retaliatory bombing raids on North Vietnam. When I went to New York to cover the UN Security Council debate on the affair, UN correspondents at lunch recalled cynically that four months earlier Adlai Stevenson told the Security Council the U.S. had “repeatedly expressed” its emphatic disapproval “of retaliatory raids, wherever they occur and by whomever they are committed.” But none mentioned this in their dispatches. Read More

[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.

[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.”

[Posted by Paul Gleason]

This is the first in a series of posts about Richard Hofstadters classic essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”

In 1963, at Oxford University, the historian Richard Hofstadter gave a lecture entitled “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” He argued that the hysterias of certain right-wing movements—such as McCarthyism, the John Birch Society, and the Goldwater campaign—were no aberrations. Rather, their belief in foreign infiltration and the impending collapse of the Republic followed a particular, and peculiar, American tradition. Hofstadter traced this “paranoid style” back through American history, all the way to the Puritan preachers who thundered from their pulpits against a conspiracy to convert their Protestant nation to “Popery.”

Hofstadter’s lecture quickly became famous and remains a classic of American political thought. What follows is Hofstadter’s definition of the paranoid style and what he calls its “ancillary themes.”

Definition

“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.”

Ancillary themes

The plot is epochal
“The distinguishing thing about the paranoid style is not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they regard a ‘vast’ or ‘gigantic’ conspiracy as the motive force in historical events. History is a conspiracy.”

The end is near
“The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of this conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. … Time is forever just running out.” Read More

In the introduction to his Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America,  Jay Parini writes:

“By books that ‘changed America,’ I mean works that helped to create the intellectual and emotional contours of this country. Each played a pivotal role in developing a complex value system that flourishes to this day. I expanded my list of works under discussion in Promised Land from twelve to thirteen, preferring the odd number, a baker’s dozen, as it reflects the irregular nature of my project and distantly echoes the number of original colonies. I might easily have discussed fifteen or twenty books, but one has to stop somewhere, and I wanted to reflect certain major strains in American thought or culture without seeming encyclopedic.”

Here are Parini’s thirteen books:

1. Of Plymouth Plantation by William Bradford

2. The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison

3. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

4. The Journals of Lewis and Clark

5. Walden by Henry David Thoreau

6. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

7. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

8. The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois

9. The Promised Land by Mary Antin

10. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

11. The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care by Dr. Benjamin Spock

12. On the Road by Jack Kerouac

13. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

Buy Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America for $1 when you join Progressive Book Club. 

Review of Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke

By Darrin McMahon

Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France has much to say to a self-proclaimed era of “change.” A classic meditation on that very subject, the book has long appealed to those who would deny it, serving to this day as a foundational text of the conservative tradition. Yet given that self-styled “conservatives” in the United States have apparently abandoned any semblance of conservation—preferring instead to squander the resources of posterity, trample on traditional rights, and pursue reckless foreign adventures—perhaps it is time for liberals to take a closer look at a book that offers sound advice on how to innovate, while keeping what we have.

A child of the eighteenth century, Burke was the product of an age that invented change as a social and political ideal. Whereas earlier generations had tended to regard the world as given—the fixed creation of an eternal order, replete with established hierarchies and immutable laws—men and women in the eighteenth century became increasingly conscious of their capacity to shape it. Using reason, they believed, together with experience and practical judgment, they could fashion for themselves a better world—happier, more just, more humane. Read More

The following is excerpted from Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (Houghton Mifflin, 2002)

Introduction
By Linda Lear

Headlines in the New York Times in July 1962 captured the national sentiment: “Silent Spring is now noisy summer.” In the few months between the New Yorker’s serialization of Silent Spring in June and its publication in book form that September, Rachel Carson’s alarm touched off a national debate on the use of chemical pesticides, the responsibility of science, and the limits of technological progress. When Carson died barely eighteen months later in the spring of 1964, at the age of fifty-six, she had set in motion a course of events that would result in a ban on the domestic production of DDT and the creation of a grass-roots movement demanding protection of the environment through state and federal regulation. Carson’s writing initiated a transformation in the relationship between humans and the natural world and stirred an awakening of public environmental consciousness.

It is hard to remember the cultural climate that greeted Silent Spring and to understand the fury that was launched against its quietly determined author. Carson’s thesis that we were subjecting ourselves to slow poisoning by the misuse of chemical pesticides that polluted the environment may seem like common currency now, but in 1962 Silent Spring contained the kernel of social revolution. Carson wrote at a time of new affluence and intense social conformity. The cold war, with its climate of suspicion and intolerance, was at its zenith. The chemical industry, one of the chief beneficiaries of postwar technology, was also one of the chief authors of the nation’s prosperity. DDT enabled the conquest of insect pests in agriculture and of ancient insect-borne disease just as surely as the atomic bomb destroyed America’s military enemies and dramatically altered the balance of power between humans and nature. The public endowed chemists, at work in their starched white coats in remote laboratories, with almost divine wisdom. The results of their labors were gilded with the presumption of beneficence. In postwar America, science was god, and science was male. Read More

The Greatest Radical of a Radical Age

Paine turned Americans into radicals, and we’ve remained radicals at heart ever since.

By Harvey J. Kaye

You want to understand American experience? You want to make sense of why you despise injustice, inequality, and oppression? You want to know why you yearn to turn the world upside down? Read Thomas Paine’s revolutionary pamphlet, Common Sense.

In fewer than fifty pages, Paine not only inspired Americans to declare their independence and create a republic, he also emboldened them to turn their colonial rebellion into a world-historic revolutionary war, defined the new nation-to-be in a democratically expansive and progressive fashion, and articulated an American identity charged with exceptional purpose and promise. Moreover, he afforded a vision of the United States that—despite the best efforts of conservatives to have it otherwise—has inspired and encouraged liberals, progressives, and radicals in every generation to mobilize their fellow citizens in favor of extending and deepening freedom, equality, and democracy in the United States. Indeed, Paine’s radical-democratic arguments continue to resonate in American life. Read More