![Conspiracy](/web/20170414114713im_/http://nationalism.org/patranoia/images/conspiracy.jpg)
It had been around a long time before the Radical Right
discovered it—and its targets have ranged from “the international
bankers” to Masons, Jesuits, and munitions makers.
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.
But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far
from new and that is not necessarily right-wind. I call it the
paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes
the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial
fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid
style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing
a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence
nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present
as certifiable lunatics., In fact, the idea of the paranoid
style as a force in politics would have little contemporary
relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men
with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes
of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon
significant.
Of course this term is pejorative, and it is
meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad
causes than good. But nothing really prevents a sound program
or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style
has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than
with the truth or falsity of their content. I am interested
here in getting at our political psychology through our political
rhetoric. The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon
in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements
of suspicious discontent.
Here is Senator McCarthy, speaking in June
1951 about the parlous situation of the United States:
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 on a scale so immense as to
dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy
of infamy so black that, which it is finally exposed, its
principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions
of all honest men.…What can be made of this unbroken series
of decisions and acts contributing to the strategy of defeat?
They cannot be attributed to incompetence.…The laws of probability
would dictate that part of…[the] decisions would serve the
country’s interest.
Now turn back fifty years to a manifesto signed
in 1895 by a number of leaders of the Populist party:
As early as 1865-66
a conspiracy was entered into between the gold gamblers of
Europe and America.…For nearly thirty years these conspirators
have kept the people quarreling over less important matters
while they have pursued with unrelenting zeal their one central
purpose.…Every device of treachery, every resource of statecraft,
and every artifice known to the secret cabals of the international
gold ring are being used to deal a blow to the prosperity
of the people and the financial and commercial independence
of the country.
Next, a Texas newspaper article of 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. We have the best reasons
for believing that corruption has found its way into our Executive
Chamber, and that our Executive head is tainted with the infectious
venom of Catholicism.…The Pope has recently sent his ambassador
of state to this country on a secret commission, the effect
of which is an extraordinary boldness of the Catholic church
throughout the United States.…These minions of the Pope are
boldly insulting our Senators; reprimanding our Statesmen;
propagating the adulterous union of Church and State; abusing
with foul calumny all governments but Catholic, and spewing
out the bitterest execrations on all Protestantism. The Catholics
in the United States receive from abroad more than $200,000
annually for the propagation of their creed. Add to this the
vast revenues collected here.…
These quotations give the keynote of the style.
In the history of the United States one find it, for example,
in the anti-Masonic movement, the nativist and anti-Catholic
movement, in certain spokesmen of abolitionism who regarded
the United States as being in the grip of a slaveholders’ conspiracy,
in many alarmists about the Mormons, in some Greenback and Populist
writers who constructed a great conspiracy of international
bankers, in the exposure of a munitions makers’ conspiracy of
World War I, in the popular left-wing press, in the contemporary
American right wing, and on both sides of the race controversy
today, among White Citizens’ Councils and Black Muslims. I do
not propose to try to trace the variations of the paranoid style
that can be found in all these movements, but will confine myself
to a few leading episodes in our past history in which the style
emerged in full and archetypal splendor.
Illuminism and Masonry
I begin with a particularly revealing episode—the
panic that broke out in some quarters at the end of the eighteenth
century over the allegedly subversive activities of the Bavarian
Illuminati. This panic was a part of the general reaction to
the French Revolution. In the United States it was heightened
by the response of certain men, mostly in New England and among
the established clergy, to the rise of Jeffersonian democracy.
Illuminism had been started in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, a professor
of law at the University of Ingolstadt. Its teachings today
seem to be no more than another version of Enlightenment rationalism,
spiced with the anticlerical atmosphere of eighteenth-century
Bavaria. It was a somewhat naïve and utopian movement which
aspired ultimately to bring the human race under the rules of
reason. Its humanitarian rationalism appears to have acquired
a fairly wide influence in Masonic lodges.
Americans first learned of Illumism in 1797,
from a volume published in Edinburgh (later reprinted in New
York) under the title, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions
and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings
of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies. Its author
was a well-known Scottish scientist, John Robison, who had himself
been a somewhat casual adherent of Masonry in Britain, but whose
imagination had been inflamed by what he considered to be the
far less innocent Masonic movement on the Continent. Robison
seems to have made his work as factual as he could, but when
he came to estimating the moral character and the political
influence of Illuminism, he made the characteristic paranoid
leap into fantasy. The association, he thought, was formed “for
the express purpose of rooting out all religious establishments, and
overturning all the existing governments of europe.”
It had become “one great and wicked project fermenting and working
all over Europe.” And to it he attributed a central role in
bringing about the French Revolution. He saw it as a libertine,
anti-Christian movement, given to the corruption of women, the
cultivation of sensual pleasures, and the violation of property
rights. Its members had plans for making a tea that caused abortion—a
secret substance that “blinds or kills when spurted in the face,”
and a device that sounds like a stench bomb—a “method for filling
a bedchamber with pestilential vapours.”
These notions were quick to make themselves
felt in America. In May 1798, a minister of the Massachusetts
Congregational establishment in Boston, Jedidiah Morse, delivered
a timely sermon to the young country, which was then sharply
divided between Jeffersonians and Federalists, Francophiles
and Anglomen. Having read Robison, Morse was convinced of a
Jacobinical plot touched off by Illuminism, and that the country
should be rallied to defend itself. His warnings were heeded
throughout New England wherever Federalists brooded about the
rising tide of religious infidelity or Jeffersonian democracy.
Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale, followed Morse’s sermon
with a Fourth-of-July discourse on The
Duty of Americans in the Present Crisis, in which he held
forth against the Antichrist in his own glowing rhetoric. Soon
the pulpits of New England were ringing with denunciations of
the Illuminati, as though the country were swarming with them.
The anti-Masonic movement of the late 1820s
and the 1830s took up and extended the obsession with conspiracy.
At first, this movement may seem to be no more than an extension
or repetition of the anti-Masonic theme sounded in the outcry
against the Bavarian Illuminati. But whereas the panic of the
1790s was confined mainly to New England and linked to an ultraconservative
point of view, the later anti-Masonic movement affected many
parts of the northern United States, and was intimately linked
with popular democracy and rural egalitarianism. Although anti-Masonry
happened to be anti-Jacksonian (Jackson was a Mason), it manifested
the same animus against the closure of opportunity for the common
man and against aristocratic institutions that one finds in
the Jacksonian crusade against the Bank of the United States.
The anti-Masonic movement was a product not
merely of natural enthusiasm but also of the vicissitudes of
party politics. It was joined and used by a great many men who
did not fully share its original anti-Masonic feelings. It attracted
the support of several reputable statement who had only mild
sympathy with its fundamental bias, but who as politicians could
not afford to ignore it. Still, it was a folk movement of considerable
power, and the rural enthusiasts who provided its real impetus
believed in it wholeheartedly.
As a secret society, Masonry was considered
to be a standing conspiracy against republican government. It
was held to be particularly liable to treason—for example, Aaron
Burr’s famous conspiracy was alleged to have been conducted
by Masons. Masonry was accused of constituting a separate system
of loyalty, a separate imperium within the framework of federal
and state governments, which was inconsistent with loyalty to
them. Quite plausibly it was argued that the Masons had set
up a jurisdiction of their own, with their own obligations and
punishments, liable to enforcement even by the penalty of death.
So basic was the conflict felt to be between secrecy and democracy
that other, more innocent societies such as Phi Beta Kappa came
under attack.
Since Masons were pledged to come to each other’s
aid under circumstances of distress, and to extend fraternal
indulgence at all times, is was held that the order nullified
the enforcement of regular law. Masonic constables, sheriffs,
juries, and judges must all be in league with Masonic criminals
and fugitives. The press was believed to have been so “muzzled”
by Masonic editors and proprietors that news of Masonic malfeasance
could be suppressed. At a moment when almost every alleged citadel
of privilege in America was under democratic assault, Masonry
was attacked as a fraternity of the privileged, closing business
opportunities and nearly monopolizing political offices.
Certain elements of truth and reality there
may have been in these views of Masonry. What must be emphasized
here, however, is the apocalyptic and absolutistic framework
in which this hostility was commonly expressed. Anti-Masons
were not content simply to say that secret societies were rather
a bad idea. The author of the standard exposition of anti-Masonry
declared that Freemasonry was “not only the most abominable
but also the most dangerous institution that ever was imposed
on man.…It may truly be said to be hell’s
master piece.”
The Jesuit Threat
Fear of a Masonic plot had hardly been quieted
when the rumors arose of a Catholic plot against American values.
One meets here again the same frame of mind, but a different
villain. The anti-Catholic movement converged with a growing
nativism, and while they were not identical, together they cut
such a wide swath in American life that they were bound to embrace
many moderates to whom the paranoid style, in its full glory,
did not appeal. Moreover, we need not dismiss out of hand as
totally parochial or mean-spirited the desire of Yankee Americans
to maintain an ethnically and religiously homogeneous society
nor the particular Protestant commitments to individualism and
freedom that were brought into play. But the movement had a
large paranoid infusion, and the most influential anti-Catholic
militants certainly had a strong affinity for the paranoid style.
Two books which appeared in 1835 described
the new danger to the ?American way of life and may be taken
as expressions of the anti-Catholic mentality. One, Foreign
Conspiracies against the Liberties of the United States,
was from the hand of the celebrated painter and inventor of
the telegraph, S.F.B. Morse. “A conspiracy exists,” Morse proclaimed
, and “its plans are already in operation…we are attacked in
a vulnerable quarter which cannot be defended by our ships,
our forts, or our armies.” The main source of the conspiracy
Morse found in Metternich’s government: “Austria
is now acting in this country. She has devised a grand scheme.
She has organized a great plan for doing something here.…She
has her Jesuit missionaries traveling through the land; she
has supplied them with money, and has furnished a fountain for
a regular supply.” Were the plot successful, Morse said, some
scion of the House of Hapsburg would soon be installed as Emperor
of the United States.
“It is an ascertained fact,” wrote another
Protestant militant,
that Jesuits are prowling about all parts of
the United States in every possible disguise, expressly to
ascertain the advantageous situations and modes to disseminate
Popery. A minister of the Gospel from Ohio has informed us
that he discovered one carrying on his devices in his congregation;
and he says that the western country swarms with them under
the name of puppet show men, dancing masters, music teachers,
peddlers of images and ornaments, barrel organ players, and
similar practitioners.
Lyman Beecher, the elder of a famous family
and the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote in the same year
his Plea for the West, in which he considered
the possibility that the Christian millennium might come in
the American states. Everything depended, in his judgment, upon
what influences dominated the great West, where the future of
the country lay. There Protestantism was engaged in a life-or-death
struggle with Catholicism. “Whatever we do, it must be done
quickly.…” A great tide of immigration, hostile to free institutions,
was sweeping in upon the country, subsidized and sent by “the
potentates of Europe,” multiplying tumult and violence, filling
jails, crowding poorhouses, quadrupling taxation, and sending
increasing thousands of voters to “lay their inexperienced hand
upon the helm of our power.”
The Paranoid Style in Action
The
John Birch Society is attempting to suppress a television series
about the United Nations by means of a mass letter-writing campaign
to the sponsor,…The Xerox Corporation. The corporation, however,
intends to go ahead with the programs.…
The
July issue of the John Birch Society Bulletin…said an “avalanche
of mail ought to convince them of the unwisdom of their proposed
action—just as United Air Lines was persuaded to back down and
take the U.N. insignia off their planes.” (A United Air Lines
spokesman confirmed that the U.N. emblem was removed from its
planes, following “considerable public reaction against it.”)
Birch official John Rousselot
said, ”We hate to see a corporation of this country promote
the U.N. when we know that it is an instrument of the Soviet
Communist conspiracy.”
—
San Francisco Chronicle,
July 31, 1964
Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography
of the Puritan. Whereas the anti-Masons had envisaged drinking
bouts and had entertained themselves with sado-masochistic fantasies
about the actual enforcement of grisly Masonic oaths, the anti-Catholics invented an immense
lore about libertine priests, the confessional as an opportunity
for seduction, licentious convents and monasteries. Probably
the most widely read contemporary book in the United States
before Uncle Tom’s Cabin
was a work supposedly written by one Maria Monk, entitled Awful Disclosures, which appeared in 1836.
The author, who purported to have escaped from the Hotel Dieu
nunnery in Montreal after five years there as novice and nun,
reported her convent life in elaborate and circumstantial detail.
She reported having been told by the Mother Superior that she
must “obey the priests in all things”; to her “utter astonishment
and horror,” she soon found what the nature of such obedience
was. Infants born of convent liaisons were baptized and then
killed, she said, so that they might ascend at once to heaven.
Her book, hotly attacked and defended , continued to be read
and believed even after her mother gave testimony that Maria
had been somewhat addled ever since childhood after she had
rammed a pencil into her head. Maria died in prison in 1849,
after having been arrested in a brothel as a pickpocket.
Anti-Catholicism, like anti-Masonry, mixed
its fortunes with American party politics, and it became an
enduring factor in American politics. The American Protective
Association of the 1890s revived it with ideological variations
more suitable to the times—the depression of 1893, for example,
was alleged to be an international creation of the Catholics
who began it by starting a run on the banks. Some spokesmen
of the movement circulated a bogus encyclical attributed to
Leo XIII instructing American Catholics on a certain date in
1893 to exterminate all heretics, and a great many anti-Catholics
daily expected a nationwide uprising. The myth of an impending
Catholic war of mutilation and extermination of heretics persisted
into the twentieth century.
Why They Feel Dispossessed
If, after our historically discontinuous examples
of the paranoid style, we now take the long jump to the contemporary
right wing, we find some rather important differences from the
nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier
movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types
that were still in possession of their country—that they were
fending off threats to a still established way of life. But
the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed:
America has been largely taken away from them and their kind,
though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent
the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues
have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals;
the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined
by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security
and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having
as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners
as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of
American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies;
the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from
on high.
Important changes may also be traced to the
effects of the mass media. The villains of the modern right
are much more vivid than those of their paranoid predecessors,
much better known to the public; the literature of the paranoid
style is by the same token richer and more circumstantial in
personal description and personal invective. For the vaguely
delineated villains of the anti-Masons, for the obscure and
disguised Jesuit agents, the little-known papal delegates of
the anti-Catholics, for the shadowy international bankers of
the monetary conspiracies, we may now substitute eminent public
figures like Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower.,
secretaries of State like Marshall, Acheson, and Dulles, Justices
of the Supreme Court like Frankfurter and Warren, and the whole
battery of lesser but still famous and vivid alleged conspirators
headed by Alger Hiss.
Events since 1939 have given the contemporary
right-wing paranoid a vast theatre for his imagination, full
of rich and proliferating detail, replete with realistic cues
and undeniable proofs of the validity of his suspicions. The
theatre of action is now the entire world, and he can draw not
only on the events of World War II, but also on those of the
Korean War and the Cold War. Any historian of warfare knows
it is in good part a comedy of errors and a museum of incompetence;
but if for every error and every act of incompetence one can
substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation
are open to the paranoid imagination. In the end, the real mystery,
for one who reads the primary works of paranoid scholarship,
is not how the United States has been brought to its present
dangerous position but how it has managed to survive at all.
The basic elements of contemporary right-wing
thought can be reduced to three: First, there has been the now-familiar
sustained conspiracy, running over more than a generation, and
reaching its climax in Roosevelt’s New Deal, to undermine free
capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the
federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism.
A great many right-wingers would agree with Frank Chodorov,
the author of The Income Tax: The Root of All Evil,
that this campaign began with the passage of the income-tax
amendment to the Constitution in 1913.
The second contention is that top government
officialdom has been so infiltrated by Communists that American
policy, at least since the days leading up to Pearl Harbor,
has been dominated by men who were shrewdly and consistently
selling out American national interests.
Finally, the country is infused with a network
of Communist agents, just as in the old days it was infiltrated
by Jesuit agents, so that the whole apparatus of education,
religion, the press, and the mass media is engaged in a common
effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans.
Perhaps the most representative document of
the McCarthyist phase was a long indictment of Secretary of
State George C. Marshall, delivered in 1951 in the Senate by
senator McCarthy, and later published in a somewhat different
form. McCarthy pictured Marshall was the focal figure in a betrayal
of American interests stretching in time from the strategic
plans for World War II to the formulation of the Marshall Plan.
Marshal was associated with practically every American failure
or defeat, McCarthy insisted, and none of this was either accident
or incompetence. There was a “baffling pattern” of Marshall’s
interventions in the war, which always conduced to the well-being
of the Kremlin. The sharp decline in America’s relative strength
from 1945 to 1951 did not “just happen”; it was “brought about,
step by step, by will and intention,” the consequence not of
mistakes but of a treasonous conspiracy, “a conspiracy on a
scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the
history of man.”
Today, the mantle of McCarthy has fallen on
a retired candy manufacturer, Robert H. Welch, Jr., who is less
strategically placed and has a much smaller but better organized
following than the Senator. A few years ago Welch proclaimed
that “Communist influences are now in almost complete control
of our government”—note the care and scrupulousness of that
“almost.” He has offered a full scale interpretation of our
recent history n which Communists figure at every turn: They
started a run on American banks in 1933 that forced their closure;
they contrived the recognition of the Soviet Union by the United
States in the same year, just in time to save the Soviets from
economic collapse; they have stirred up the fuss over segregation
in the South; they have taken over the Supreme Court and made
it “one of the most important agencies of Communism.”
Close attention to history wins for Mr. Welch
an insight into affairs that is given to few of us. “For many
reasons and after a lot of study,” he wrote some years ago,
“I personally believe [John Foster] Dulles to be a Communist
agent.” The job of Professor Arthur F. Burns as head of Eisenhower’s
Council of Economic Advisors was “merely a cover-up for Burns’s
liaison work between Eisenhower and some of his Communist bosses.”
Eisenhower’s brother Milton was “actually [his] superior and
boss within the Communist party.” As for Eisenhower himself,
Welch characterized him, in words that have made the candy manufacturer
famous, as “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy”—a
conclusion, he added, “based on an accumulation of detailed
evidence so extensive and so palpable that it seems to put this
conviction beyond any reasonable doubt.”
Emulating the Enemy
The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy
in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole
worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values.
He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly
lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses
the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and
he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse.
(“Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling
up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is
the fatal month when Stalin will attack.”)
As a member of the avant-garde who is capable
of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an
as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader.
He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated
and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since
what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good
and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the
will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought
of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be
totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the
theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention.
This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly
unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely
attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense
of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same
feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn
only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality
of the enemy he opposes.
The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect
model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous,
powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of
us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism
of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations.
He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history,
or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil
way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions,
manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the
misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history
is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part
of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s
will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially
effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited
funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing);
he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).
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. Secret organizations set up to combat secret
organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated
Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing
an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. 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 fundamentalist
anti-Communist “crusades” openly express their admiration for
the dedication and discipline the Communist cause calls forth.
On the other hand, the sexual freedom often
attributed to the enemy, his lack of moral inhibition, his possession
of especially effective techniques for fulfilling his desires,
give exponents of the paranoid style an opportunity to project
and express unacknowledgeable aspects of their own psychological
concerns. Catholics and Mormons—later, Negroes and Jews—have
lent themselves to a preoccupation with illicit sex. Very often
the fantasies of true believers reveal strong sadomasochistic
outlets, vividly expressed, for example, in the delight of anti-Masons
with the cruelty of Masonic punishments.
Renegades and Pedants
A special significance attaches to the figure
of the renegade from the enemy cause. The anti-Masonic movement
seemed at times to be the creation of ex-Masons; certainly the
highest significance was attributed to their revelations, and
every word they said was believed. Anti-Catholicism used the
runaway nun and the apostate priest; the place of ex-Communists
in the avant-garde anti-Communist movements of our time is well
known. In some part, the special authority accorded the renegade
derives from the obsession with secrecy so characteristics of
such movements: the renegade is the man or woman who has been
in the Arcanum, and brings forth with him or her the final verification
of suspicions which might otherwise have been doubted by a skeptical
world. But I think there is a deeper eschatological significance
that attaches to the person of the renegade: in the spiritual
wrestling match between good and evil which is the paranoid’s
archetypal model of the world, the renegade is living proof
that all the conversions are not made by the wrong side. He
brings with him the promise of redemption and victory.
A final characteristic of the paranoid style
is related to the quality of its pedantry. One of the impressive
things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its
fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality
it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence
to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be
believed. Of course, there are highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow
paranoids, as there are likely to be in any political tendency.
But respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain
moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully
and all but obsessively accumulates :evidence.” The difference
between this “evidence” and that commonly employed by others
is that it seems less a means of entering into normal political
controversy than a means of warding off the profane intrusion
of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have little
expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can
accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions
from it.
Paranoid writing begins with certain broad
defensible judgments. There was
something to be said for the anti-Masons. After all, a secret
society composed of influential men bound by special obligations
could conceivable pose some kind of threat to the civil order
in which they were suspended. There was also something to be
said for the Protestant principles of individuality and freedom,
as well as for the nativist desire to develop in North America
a homogeneous civilization. Again, in our time an actual laxity
in security allowed some Communists to find a place in governmental
circles, and innumerable decisions of World War II and the Cold
War could be faulted.
The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing
if not coherent—in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent
than the real world. It is nothing if not scholarly in technique.
McCarthy’s 96-page pamphlet, McCarthyism, contains no less than 313
footnote references, and Mr. Welch’s incredible assault on Eisenhower,
The Politician, has one hundred pages
of bibliography and notes. The entire right-wing movement of
our time is a parade of experts, study groups, monographs, footnotes,
and bibliographies. Sometimes the right-wing striving for scholarly
depth and an inclusive world view has startling consequences:
Mr. Welch, for example, has charged that the popularity of Arnold
Toynbee’s historical work is the consequence of a plot on the
part of Fabians, “Labour party bosses in England,” and various
members of the Anglo-American “liberal establishment” to overshadow
the much more truthful and illuminating work of Oswald Spengler.
The Double Sufferer
The paranoid style is not confined to our own
country and time; it is an international phenomenon. Studying
the millennial sects of Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth
century, Norman Cohn believed he found a persistent psychic
complex that corresponds broadly with what I have been considering—a
style made up of certain preoccupations and fantasies: “the
megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably
persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution
of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary; the refusal
to accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human
existence, such as transience, dissention, conflict, fallibility
whether intellectual or moral; the obsession with inerrable
prophecies…systematized misinterpretations, always gross and
often grotesque.”
This glimpse across a long span of time emboldens
me to make the conjecture—it is no more than that—that a mentality
disposed to see the world in this way may be a persistent psychic
phenomenon, more or less constantly affecting a modest minority
of the population. But certain religious traditions, certain
social structures and national inheritances, certain historical
catastrophes or frustrations may be conducive to the release
of such psychic energies, and to situations in which they can
more readily be built into mass movements or political parties.
In American experience ethnic and religious conflict have plainly
been a major focus for militant and suspicious minds of this
sort, but class conflicts also can mobilize such energies. Perhaps
the central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid
tendency is a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or
are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not
susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and
compromise. The situation becomes worse when the representatives
of a particular social interest—perhaps because of the very
unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands—are shut
out of the political process. Having no access to political
bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original
conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious
fully confirmed. They see only the consequences of power—and
this through distorting lenses—and have no chance to observe
its actual machinery. A distinguished historian has said that
one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches
us how things do not happen. It is precisely this kind
of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special
resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness,
but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that
might enlighten him—and in any case he resists enlightenment.
We are all sufferers from history, but the
paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only
by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies
as well.
«Harper’s
Magazine»,
November 1964, pp. 77-86