Paranoia and American Politics

...The answer is that such a diagnosis in fact violates psychoanalytic principles...

...In fact, through his prison ministry, the organization known as Prison Fellowship, he has THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986 21...

...What I hear is that Rostenkowski won't help them [Kemp and Hart] but he won't block them either," says a Ways and Means Committee staffer...

...There can be no doubt about applying Hofstadter's thesis to Lyndon LaRouche...

...Perhaps right-wingers really are a less cautious lot than they used to be, or perhaps they are simply less cautious about questions put to them by a writer from the Wall Street Journal...

...I'm not sure you could get many Democrats to vote $10 billion for poverty right now," he cracks...

...These fears have been said to cause anxiety disturbances, as Lifton reports...

...Midge Decter in Contentions, the newsletter of the Committee for the Free World, and in excerpted form on the New York Times op-ed page...

...What was the source of these sentiments...

...Nor is there much doubt about whether the man who has quipped that "the Kingdom of God will not arrive on Air Force One" thinks Pat Robertson should run for President...

...Within a few years, of course, this particular form of crankery had migrated to the ecological left, which became convinced, and continues to believe, that fluoridation is a cause of cancer...

...As a result LaRouche "has been roundly denounced by organizations and media outlets as diverse as the AFL-CIO, the Heritage Foundation, The New York Times, and the National Review...

...For Lifton, "the most corrupt and dangerous of all fundamentalisms" is something he calls "nuclearism...

...Aides on Rostenkowski's Ways and Means staff say it will be up to Rangel to take the lead...

...Psychobiography tends to produce a diminished view of the individual life, as recent books and essays about Richard Nix-on and Ronald Reagan illustrate...

...See the vigorous essays by Sidney Hook in the newsletter of the University Centers for Rational Alternatives...

...By this standard, Colson is a giant, whose power as an evangelist is owed entirely to the sinfulness of his political past...

...The elaborate "resolution" is calculated to embarrass, not actually to indict, ABC...

...Whereas the conservative Federalists included those who believed that the party of Jefferson was plotting with the French to bring the horrors of their revolution to America, the liberal Jeffersonians included those who believed that the Federalists were plotting to import monarchy...

...The political consequence of the rising social status of journalism is that the press grows more and more influenced by attitudes genuinely hostile to American society and American government...

...He has mocked the ascent of TV evangelists—"Some preachers, especially a few I've seen on television, sound like they've just hung up from a private session with Him before going on the air' and questioned their pretensions to authority: "The quiet, often unnoticed actions of ordinary Christians .. . speak far more loudly than all the bombast of so-called religious leaders...

...munity because "worldly power—whether measured by buildings, budgets, baptisms, or access to the White House—is more often the enemy than the ally of Godliness...

...Moynihan declares that these putatively crackpot theories "matter to the extent that others believe them," and then charges that "they are not rejected...

...You don't mind jobs bills...

...In the end, Moynihan backs off...

...An assistant, who would only speak anonymously, said, "We've drawn up a set of options for him—including just learning more, visiting some areas, getting some publicity for the problems with hearings...

...But there can't be an Administration position, I explained, it's not a bill, just a hypothetical...

...In the second place, the concept of a group pathology, which can sometimes be applied to sects and fringe groups in society, is simply inapplicable within the normal range of political opinion...

...By the way, does Ted Kennedy support Gary Hart's bill...

...Falwell was still grounded in Lynchburg, excoriating the ghost of Martin Luther King for mixing religion and politics, when Colson was wooing religious leaders from the White House...

...It .was in the same book that Hofstadter first explored conspiracy theory—in the left egalitarian American populism of the 1880s and 1890s...

...But though LaRouche started out as an embarrassment to the left, he was converted to far right ideas in the mid-1970s, according to Dennis King and Ronald Radosh...

...And yet, the paranoia of the 1790s—a period that has been called "an age of passion"—was quite as apparent on the left as on the right...

...Similarly, the psychologizing political writer lays himself open to professional criticism for his use of clinical terms...

...As Moynihan observes, Hofstadter's purpose in writing was to expose "the conspiracy theories of the 1950s," which of course had sprung up on the right...

...But Hofstadter did not dwell on this congeniality, and as for the former period, that of the 1790s, he treated it as a pure example of ultraconservative hysteria...

...After being provided with some similar detail—how much money again for the jobs program...

...It has always been true, of course, that some of the bitterest critics of the newly politicized evangelists have been other evangelists...

...Colson speaks from personal experience...

...Forgotten in all this is the conspiratorial element made crucial by Hofstadter...

...The culture of disparagement that has been so much in evidence of late, that has attained such an astonishing grip on the children of the rich and the mighty, and that has exerted an increasing influence on the tone of the national press in its dealings 'It should be noted that a new AIM venture called attention to by Moynihan—Accuracy in Academia—has been promptly repudiated by other critics of the academy who disapprove of Reed Irvine's methods...

...The latter movement, Hofstadter very fairly pointed out, though "linked to an ultra-conservative argument . . . was altogether congenial to popular democracy and rural egalitarianism...

...His auto-biography, Born Again, sold in the millions, but he would seek none of the trappings of evangelical stardom—the television show, the crystal cathedral...

...Turning to the right, Moynihan finds a similar danger of association with two groups touched by paranoia: the obscure National Conservative Foundation and the fairly prominent Ac-curacy in Media...

...The latter group, Accuracy in Media (AIM), accuses the television networks of being duped by Soviet disinformation...

...The sixties provided other confirmations of Hofstadter's thesis as well...

...Moynihan's essay also makes a gesture toward examining the left, which is supposed to have been recently threatened by association with a paranoia-tinged organization, that of Lyndon LaRouche...

...I don't think they're the best way to create jobs, but I recognize it may take something like that to get the proposals moving...

...We don't want to get out the first program, we want to get out the best one," the aide says...

...Yet it is not immediately clear on exactly what grounds one can dismiss a professional association of psychologists when, for example, it declares that supporters of nuclear defenses suffer from a pathological condition...

...Practically speaking, the causes of nuclearism come down to disagreeing politically with Robert Jay Lifton...

...That's interesting...

...It is a considerable distance from the crude appropriations of psychology by antinuclearists to the subtle thesis of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's recent essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics Revisited...

...Finally, the underlying assumptions about human behavior applied by activist professional associa18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986 tions are not truly psychoanalytic...

...The third period would be the late nineteenth-century, progressive Age of Reform best described by Hofstadter himself...

...Both political sides would appear to have passed Moynihan's test in this instance...

...There are of course biases in journalism," he writes, but he is confident that these do not affect the ac-curate and fair reporting of the news...

...I began to understand why God views society not through the princes of power, but through the eyes of the sick and the needy, the oppressed and the down-trodden...

...I wonder why he hasn't put that in...

...T he Paranoid Style" could have just as well been written with its three detailed examples taken from the left...

...The first of these would have been the 1760s, the one time in American history when conspiracy theories—this time held by the radical patriots—led to a revolution...

...If the paranoid style's equal affinity with the left was not entirely apparent THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986 I9 to Hofstadter in 1965, what can one say of Moynihan twenty years later...

...This politicization of a psychological construct deserves a closer look...

...Group psychology tends to find in groups, which necessarily express themselves on a lower intellectual level than the individual, more intensity of emotionally wrought behavior than is necessarily the case...

...In the foundation's attack on the liberal media, Moynihan finds "the paranoid style in American politics fully on display, with the new locus on conspiracy: television news...

...In other words, no...

...Among the ingredients of the paranoid style that he listed, for example, was a sense of impending doom, something amply supplied in the sixties by a growing conviction of either ecological or atomic disaster...

...But it is worth recalling that in 1971 Moynihan did offer some thoughts, rather different from his present ones, on the infection of paranoid thinking...

...It has been pointed out that psychological professionals have no greater claim to political sagacity than sports figures, academics, medical doctors, or anyone else...

...He hasn't taken a position...

...The second could have been the pre-Civil War abolitionist crusade, during which, as Hofstadter wrote in The Age of Reform, "the early Republican leaders, including Lincoln, charged that there was a conspiracy on the part of Stephen A. Douglas to make slavery a nationwide institution...

...He does quote an AIM "resolution," couched in legal terms, stating that "whereas" the ABC network has broadcast views identical to those of the Soviet propaganda apparatus, the directors of the network should "take note of the danger that ABC's facilities may be used to disseminate Soviet propaganda...

...Just why not remains unclear, for as he goes on to describe these sectors they appear to come closer to paranoia than either the National Conservative Foundation or AIM...

...The CIA was said to lurk behind large events including that war and the assassination of President Kennedy, and to be assiduous and ubiquitous, along with the FBI, in tapping the telephones and auditing the income tax returns of innocent civilians...

...Chuck Colson, the Nixon hatchet-man turned evangelist, and Jerry Falwell, the Lynchburg preacher playing statesman, are brothers in Christ...

...Only when prompted by questioners whose own antinuclear views are evident do children evince concern about nuclear weapons...

...Once again, the notion that a particular experience—here vaguely defined as being "closely involved with the bombs"is said to cause psycho-logical changes in the individual...

...No less removed from psychological theory is Robert Jay Lifton, the first speaker at the meeting reported on by the Kramers...

...Writing as a guest contributor to the twentieth anniversary issue of the Public Interest, with which he was formerly associated,he is attempting to discredit what he now regards as the conservative tendencies of that journal by associating it with the paranoid style...

...Our problem is we can't do it because as Vice President what he says would become Administration position...

...The key players, according to Beltway wisdom, will be Ronald Reagan for the Republicans and, for the Democrats, Charles Rangel and Dan Rostenkowski, who chair, respectively, the sub-committee and committee that would have to steer a new poverty initiative through the House...

...AIM may be crude and drearily single-minded, but these regrettable characteristics do not make it paranoid in Hofstadter's or any other sense.' For the most part, AIM's crusade amounts to being an unnuanced application of the by now thoroughly studied and widely accepted observation that the media exhibit a leftward leaning bias...

...If at this point the logic has become even further strained—Mr...

...Presumably this is not the case...

...The presidency would not be something a Christian leader could run for, but something he'd be drafted for, and there is only one Person who could do the drafting...

...I like it," Kemp said...

...The charge of paranoia, he writes, does not apply "to the merely more excitable sectors of the conservative right or the liberal left...

...The word is that Kennedy plans his own big initiative when the time is right—fair enough...

...In the fundamentalist panorama men have repented from crime or alcoholism or even—as in the case of Pat Robertson—a bad case of secular humanism...

...Although the stumbling blocks are many and obvious, there's an encouraging level of interest in such a package...

...This is a psychological "embrace of the bomb" as a compensation for the fear of death in an irreligious world...

...George Bush was similarly mum, with press aide Marlin Fitzwater citing the lack of any "Administration position" on the bill...

...Chuck Colson is not simply the most powerful internal critic of the religious right...

...Well, suppose a voucher is added for the poor, I asked...

...I like the last part," a Kennedy aide said, referring to the jobs program...

...Besides the conservatives of the 1950s, he discussed the reactionaries of the 1790s who were gripped by fear of the French Revolution, and the anti-Masons of the 1820s and 1830s...

...The present critique of the press, itself now labeled paranoid by Moynihan, ad-dresses itself—or should address itself—to a similar reportorial credulousness whenever the press deals with the left or extreme left in politics...

...What follows is an attempt, prompted largely by a recent essay by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, to makesome distinctions about the uses of psychology in political debate...

...Thanks to "those in the Democratic Party and the labor movement willing to resist," he writes, such an association was promptly disavowed...

...On the other hand, Moynihan would have to admit that AIM's fears to the contrary are expressed less fervently than another set of warnings issued a few years ago...

...In "On Terrorizing Children," Joseph Adelson and Chester E. Finn, Jr., writing in Corn-mentary, have shown that for the most part the studies have neither been con-ducted by professional researchers nor been published in professional journals...

...This is a "crackpot" charge in Moynihan's view, as is AIM's belief that American political protests contributed to the North Vietnamese victory over South Vietnam...

...This alternative scheme makes it evident that not only is there no monopoly of paranoid conspiracy theory on the right, as Hofstadter and Moynihan are careful to note, but that there is no greater affinity with such theories on the right either, as they imply...

...And yet, the Democratic response to Democratic bills like Hart's, or the Gephardt proposal for lump-sum unemployment benefits, has been decidedly muted...

...And (4) a modest infrastructure bill of, say, $10 billion, to provide jobs at $5 to $10 per hour for those who want work...

...The former charges the federal bureaucracy and the liberals in Congress with thwarting the will ofthe people as it was expressed in the election of Ronald Reagan...

...It has some components I wouldn't like, but as a package, pretty attractive," said Congressman James Courter of New Jersey, a rising conservative...

...Like when...

...To my surprise, conservatives tended to be more enthusiastic about the deal—and in general, less suspicious, demanding fewer details, commenting almost immediately...

...Its underlying causes, in addition to compensation for the fear of death, are not truly psychological either: compensation for loss of personal vitality, worship of mechanistic "technique," and "a whole constellation of man-weapon nuclearistic emotions with which those closely involved with the bombs" become bound...

...But first, it should be observed that the paranoid-style construct itself, with its emphasis on the political right, contained a built-in bias...

...Kemp seems to think he would have better luck at the next meeting...

...Not opposition, just a general silence spliced by an occasional pooh-pooh...

...This certainly sounds unbalanced...

...Anyone who brings psychological considerations into the realm of politics needs to exercise special care...

...In the first place, though, a moment's reflection tells us that the diagnosis logically applies to those members of the professional association who happen to disagree with their activist, anti-nuclear colleagues...

...As Hofstadter remarked, even if it should be discovered that fluoridation is harmful in some way imagined by the old right—or, one may add, is carcinogenic as claimed by the ecological left—this would not alter the fact that the group's belief was grounded in fantasy...

...Here was a period as rich in conspiracy theory as any in American history...

...But Moynihan has evidently missed a heavy-handed attempt at humor...

...To the contrary, they are encouraged...

...They might have been—after all, one of Col-son's tasks as a young secular humanist in the Nixon White House was to be the administration's liaison with the religious community—but somehow history got in the way...

...This last point was made in these pages last June by Yale and Rita Kramer, in their account of a professional conference on nuclear weapons called by the Union of Concerned Psychoanalysts and Psychotherapists...

...But no one's criticisms carry the weight of Colson's...

...That nuclear fundamentalism—nuclearism—is both more and less than a psychological formulation is evident from its being introduced as "corrupt"—a moral category...

...Ten years later, in "The Paranoid Style," he shifted his critique to the American right, mentioning populism but not choosing it as one of his examples...

...The distinguishing thing about the paranoid style," he wrote, 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...

...which programs are going to be combined into a cash transfer...

...He placed the paranoid style essay, furthermore, in a book of essays so that it led off the section called "Studies in the American Right...

...Moynihan is entitled to disagree...

...The psychologist will find that rather than being accorded the authority of one who has a special insight into human motivation, he has opened himself to criticism from the wide range of people who make politics their business...

...Both, furthermore, have undertaken to use two specialties—psychobiography and group psychology—that carry built-in intellectual risks...

...Yet though both sides may have a tone that is "frequently apocalyptic," they are "just as frequently serious and sober-minded and certifiably sane...

...I wondered," said the transformed Colson, "how I could have spent three and a half years in the White House and missed so many things that really matter...

...It's probably the kind ofpolitical mix you need to get something through...

...I think after all that he'll be putting together something comprehensive...

...It only needs to be added that the unpsychological assumption that external causes bring about mental disturbance is once again at play...

...The left has properly disavowed its embarrassing groups, but "so far," Moynihan writes, "there have been few voices heard from the political ranks" of conservatives regarding theirs...

...Though he noted that the style was "not always right wing in its affiliations," he added, evidently with the right wing in mind, that "while any system of beliefs can be espoused in the paranoid style, there are certain beliefs which seem to be espoused almost entirely in this way...

...That Hofstadter knew of delusions on both sides is evident from his The Age of Reform of 1955, where he wrote that Jefferson himself "appears really to have believed, at onetime, that the Federalists were conspiring to re-establish monarchy...

...Rangel recently cosponsored (with Moynihan) an initiative to reform AFDC, and in a 1984 House-Senate conference reportedly voted to support enterprise zones...

...Let us imagine a "second declaration of war," as Merrick Carey calls it, to include something like the following: (1) Gary Hart's training account, probably with an added William Bennett-style voucher that the poor could use to ac-quire new job skills...

...Just how nuclearism is supposed to relate to other mass delusions, even if one consents to describe them as fundamentalisms, is never explained...

...2) Kemp's enter-prise zone and homesteading initiatives...

...The press proved to be culpably credulous of the false conspiracy charges typical of this politics, and as a result became "a too-willing outlet for mindless paranoia...

...The essay has succeeded in attaching a stigma to the writer's opponents, then technically withdrawn its strongest charges without dissipating their effect...

...A 1971 article in Commentary by . . . Daniel Patrick Moynihan...

...But they're hardly close friends...

...These concerned the press, but made charges that "by extension" held true for the broadcast media as well...

...Moynihan is at present only a part-time intellectual—the effect of "The Paranoid Style in American Politics Revisited" is clear enough...

...Hofstadter called their fervent belief, and the political behavior that goes with it, the paranoid style...

...Such lukewarm reaction from the party leadership has staffers from Kemp and Hart mumbling about putting together a big-name initiative to force poverty back onto the agenda...

...But never has a man been redeemed from something of the symbolic enormity of Watergate...

...He calls these movements "fundamentalist," thereby emphasizing the religiously and politically backward among them, though he does include the "revolutionary fundamentalism" of Mao Tse-tung in the category...

...In his portion of the book, Indefensible Weapons: The Political and Psychological Case Against Nuclearism, written with Richard Falk, Lifton begins by refer-ring to collective delusions and the enthusiasms of sects...

...This judgment is delivered with an apparent evenhandedness, but like Hofstadter, Moynihan has a political object...

...Here are two of them...

...Be careful though about the price tag...

...However crudely or even mistakenly this critique may prove to be applied in some instances, calling it paranoid, like treating support of a nuclear deter-rent as a sign of mental disturbance, amounts to a distorted, self-serving abuse of psychology...

...The Kramers showed that the association's critique of nuclear weapons rests largely on the assumption that "the primary causes of serious mental illness are social," whereas psychoanalysis of course finds the primary causes of serious mental disturbance within...

...Peter Shaw PARANOIA AND AMERICAN POLITICS Is Senator Moynihan out to get the right...

...But a few preliminary words are in order about the use of politics by psycho-logical professionals...

...Bob Jones (of Bob Jones University) has said that Falwell'sinvolvement with politics makes him the greatest instrument of Satan in America today...

...THE FUNDAMENTALISTS How political can you get...

...The Vietnam war, he wrote, had brought out a mirror-image, Mc-Carthy-style, "conspiracy-oriented politics" on the left (though this was a left that he preferred to designate as neofascist...

...The only evidence cited by Lifton concerns studies of children's fears about nuclear war...

...And I think it's the kind of policy mix that would have a real impact on the inner cities...

...Peter Shaw is the author of The Character of John Adams and American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution...

...It is tempting to speculate that Moynihan's resort to the paranoid style as a means of accounting for present criticism of the press by others is of-fered as a covert confession that he himself previously suffered from delusions...

...The historian of the fluoridation movement, Donald R. McNeil, has shown that, starting in 1974, the 1950s antifluoridationist belief in a "Red conspiracy" to infect the water supply was transformed by "radical environmentalists" into their own terms, which of course posited a capitalist conspiracy...

...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986 with the national government, is bad news for democracy...

...The military-industrial complex was believed to be engaged in secret manipulations to keep America at war in Vietnam...

...But here his thesis begins to run aground on the rocks of inconsistency...

...He became a prison preacher, a minister to the hopeless and forgotten, working as closely with those who wield no power as he once did with those who do...

...Malcolm Gladwell CHUCK COLSON VS...

...I learned that power did not equal justice...

...3) Consolidation of Aid to Families with Dependent Children, food stamps, and health-care programs such as Medicaid into a more coherent income transfer program, but with aid channeled through local governments, private charities, and the church—a Novakian solution...

...The excitables circularize senators from the right with the charge that "the liberals have seized Radio City (NBC)," and from the left with the charge "that it is Jesse Helms or the Reverend Falwell who is about to seize power...

...There would be reason for hope on both fronts...

...He has regarded Walter Mondale as a "conscious agent of Soviet influence," and as such part of a vast conspiracy dating back to Alexander the Great...

...The next day, Kennedy said through a spokesman that he and his staff had "kicked it around and preferred not to comment—it's a complicated proposal and there isn't much detail...

...For while Hofstadter theoretically allowed for its appearance on the left, two of the three periods that he analyzed in detail came from the right, while the third was politically anomalous, though mostly of the right...

...Moynihan argues that the conspiratorial tendencies of the fringe constituency that was the 1950s right have sprung up again in the 1980s...

...Once again, Hofstadter's theory allowed for the later development, though he did not really anticipate it...

...You know the Gary Hart plan wouldn't really help the poor—it's not going to help people with little income to deduct from," the Kennedy aide told me...

...Unlike so many of Falwell's detractors, he does not issue a blanket condemnation of all forms of political activity...

...There is little doubt who Colson is referring to when he calls for "sober soul-searching" in the evangelical cornMalcolm Gladwell is a writer living in Washington, D.C...

...Hofstadter had offered a particularly striking example of this tendency from the fifties, observing: It is common knowledge that the movement against the fluoridation of municipal water supplies has been catnip for cranks of all kinds, especially for those who have obsessive fear of poisoning...

...Time will tell...

...His purpose in reviving Hofstadter's analysis of them, though, is to pose a challenge to mainstream conservatism and neoconservatism...

...Fitzwater's voice pierced my fog to note that Bush "strongly supports enterprise zones and education vouchers...

...Today the two men are at odds...

...Bob Jones's quarrel with Falwell is theological...

...Late next year or early '87...

...A religion based on conversion," Garry Wills has said of fundamentalism, "tends to measure the height of a man's rise by the depth of his fall...

...By the time Falwell had his celebrated epiphany on the road to Washington, Colson too had changed, finding God and in the process turning his back on everything he had stood for in the past...

...That would put the ball in the Oval Office court, bouncing around in search of a presidential commitment—right about where it was in 1981...

...So serious are these charges that they deserve quotation in any discussion of the press and paranoia...

...These groups devote themselves to a frantic, perpetually eleventh-hour crusade to rescue civilization...

...Writing in the introduction, he observed that he had been critical of populism, which was part of the tradition of his own liberal and reformist politics, but not hostile to it—presumably out of loyalty and identification...

...Even Hart and Kemp, however, would be dependent upon some support from the top...

...With the exception of the politically anomalous LaRouche movement, Moynihan nowhere points to anything of this description...

...In 1965 the historian Richard Hofstadter had described certain recurrent periods of American history during which disgruntled groups succumb to the delusion that a dangerous conspiracy threatens the nation...

...For his political sins he was sent to prison where, he remembers, "surrounded by despair and suffering, I began to see through the eyes of the powerless...

...He is also, in a sense, the most sophisticated...

...But though the claim has been presented at professional association meetings like the one reported on by the Kramers, as well as before the United States Congress (once again by Lifton), the studies on which it is based have been thoroughly discredited...

...Colson left power and politics for God...

...Or maybe my pro-posed package was skewed in their favor...

...Whatdoes George Bush think...

...what about COLAs?—the aide went off to put the question to Teddy and his press secretary...

...Sometime in 1986, after tax reform and Gramm-Rudman have had their day," says Carey...

...For if one chooses to "revisit" the paranoid style, then surely what first leaps to the attention is the outburst of hysteria from the left that erupted in the years and even months after the appearance of Hofstadter's book...

...Moynihan argues that rightist fringe groups are intellectually the responsibility of conservatives and neoconservatives, just as leftist fringe groups are the responsibility of the left...

...and Lawrence W. Hyman in the newsletter of the Campus Coalition for Democracy, edited by the present writer...

...Moynihan argues that rightist fringe groups are intellectually the responsibility of conservatives and neoconservatives...

...For these specifications amount to an escalation of the original contention that conservatives have failed to repudiate certain groups on their right, to the implication that respectable conservatives and neoconservatives are thoroughly infected with the poison of political paranoia...