the paranoid style in american politics explained

As Hofstadter put it, paranoid literature has an ‘almost touching concern with factuality’. These exhaustive articles hint to one of the central facets of the paranoid style: dot-connecting pedantry. Even lengthy investigative pieces in Slate and Mother Jones, based on interviews with hackers and anonymous intelligence officers, could offer nothing more than a ‘suggestive body of evidence’, and suggestive nudges and winks, as proof that Trump was in league with Alfa or the Kremlin. The hacking into Democratic emails, the FBI concluded, ‘was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr Trump’. As the New York Times reports, the FBI investigated Trump’s links with Russia over the summer, as part of a broader investigation into Russia’s hacking of Democratic Party computer systems it found ‘no conclusive or direct link between Trump and the Russian government’. This comes after a stream of news investigations claiming Trump has a private server connected with a shady Russian bank called Alfa.

He alleged that the FBI is sitting on ‘explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisers, and the Russian government’. This week, in response to FBI director James Comey’s unprecedented decision to reopen the investigation into Clinton’s email server just 11 days before the election, Senate minority leader Harry Reid wrote to Comey to accuse him of a ‘disturbing double standard’. And this comes straight from the top of the Democratic establishment.

Where once the right had sleepless nights over Communist (mostly Russian) agents, so today liberals think Vlad lurks behind Trump’s every move. Today, the conspiracy theory du jour is that Trump is ‘Putin’s Puppet’, a useful idiot in hock to the Kremlin and being used as a weapon against Western civilisation. McCarthy acolyte Robert H Welch once accused President Eisenhower of being ‘a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy’. And the parallels with the Fifties are striking. Yes, Donald Trump’s more vociferous online fanboys are wont to push heavily footnoted theories about Hillary Clinton being terminally ill and/or plotting a ‘socialist dictatorship’ but even respectable critics of Donald Trump are tapping into the paranoid style. With the US election looming, Hofstadter’s essay is as pertinent today as it was then – but not in the way you might think.

The paranoid style in american politics explained