To the Editors:
The stupor many Americans are feeling provides the crucial, clarifying starting point: we’ve all been fumbling around in the dark, not seeing our country for what it really is. Something profound has been revealed, it’s not new, and it’s right before our eyes if only we will see it. And, shockingly, it’s as American as apple pie.
Sixty years ago, the great American historian Richard Hofstadter published The Paranoid Style in American Politics, in which he writes:
“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, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power, and what is felt to be needed to defeat it is not the usual methods of political give-and-take, but an all-out crusade.”
It has been present in American politics from the beginning — the anti-Masonic movement of the 1820s, recurrent anti-Catholicism starting with the Puritans, the World War II internment of the Japanese-American “fifth column,” the drumbeat of anti-Semitism against the secret machinations of Jews, McCarthyism, the long-standing panic over vaccines and fluoridation, and many more over the centuries. The “paranoid style” has simmered on the back burner of our politics throughout our history, but when conditions have proven salutary, it has burst onto the center stage over and over. For the first time in 2024, taking advantage of a leader who is truly charismatic in the religious sense of that term (a miracle-maker), modern communications technology, billionaire money to deploy it, and hateful tropes through which to express it, the paranoid style has now moved from the margins to the heart of American political power and capillaries of (un?)civil society.
Our failure to recognize all this is evident in the blame game of the last two weeks. Most of it has been directed against the Democratic Party — not left enough, not savvy enough, or both. This reminds me a bit of the Trotskyist tendency to blame the Party leadership or rival communist parties for the failure of a revolution to materialize. If only they had had the right line, things would have come out fine. The proletariat is always ready for revolution, after all, so it can’t be them.
But can it after all? Some progressives have taken an equally benighted view that they’re never supposed to think: that more than half of the people in the country are indeed “deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton famously called them. Blame the people, not the party. Still worse, they deserve what they’re now gonna get.
Few have pinned the blame where it actually belongs: the Republican Party. They won largely because of their campaign of no-holds-barred deceit and hatred, powered by limitless, carefully crafted messaging targeted at the reptilian part of voters’ brains. As one of my sons put it, Musk turned the X, formerly Twitter, algorithm “up to 11.” They cheated big time and in plain view, but also “legally.” They’ve been doing this for a while now, but the breathtaking level and sophistication of their 2024 operation turned quantitative change into qualitative. It brought the “paranoid style” from the margins and shadows of American politics to its very core, hence all the talk about the imminent death of democracy.
But unless Trump and Co. are able to cancel the 2028 election, that’s probably like Mark Twain’s quip that “the report of my death was an exaggeration.” Indeed, it’s more likely that over the next four years MAGA extremism and hubris are going to produce a profound crisis that will destroy the movement itself — along with so many vulnerable Americans. A few months ago, the British Tories paid the price of 15 years of reactionary extremism by suffering their greatest defeat in 130 years. Like the Labour Party, the Democrats are almost surely going to win the next national election — big. But what will they win?
The next four years provide a priceless opportunity. Progressives’ task is not to work for that victory, since it is almost certain anyway. It’s to make that a triumph worth having. We must create irresistible pressure on the Democratic Party to shift leftward. We began doing so during the first Trump administration, and the results were detectable in Biden’s surprising — though still insufficient — resuscitation of the New Deal. When MAGA drives huge numbers of us over the edge (as Trump intones, “we’re not going to have a country anymore”), Americans will become primed at last for the profound changes we have needed for so long. I’m turning off all my insider political blogs and subscriptions, stopping my Party contributions, and getting back to the trenchwork of Democratic Socialist movement-building, this time looking not toward some vague future but one with a starting date of Jan. 20, 2029.
Marc Belcher, professor of Politics and East Asian Studies
