The Deluded
Newman, Edwin
The Deluded The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, by Richard Hofstadter. Alfred A. Knopf. 315 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by Edwin Newman Richard Hofstadter has come up with the most...
...That being the case, the outlook is for paranoia to continue...
...That security began to disappear in World War I, and by the end of World War II, it was gone...
...We had, moreover, oceans to the east and the west, and so we had "free security, easy expansion, inexpensive victories, decisive triumphs...
...This belief was nurtured by easy victories over the Indians, Mexicans, and Spaniards, and by the circumstance that when we fought the British, they were primarily concerned with Napoleon...
...There remains the question of why contemporary American politics gives rise to paranoia...
...For one thing, the second half of the book is given over to "Other Essays" not germane to the title...
...This followed the assassination of President Kennedy, but the Arizonan saw in the bill "a further attempt by a subversive power to make us part of one world socialist government...
...He does not use the term to describe a person who believes conspiracies are directed only against him...
...At the moment, we may be certain that the Vietnam war will provide much material for the paranoiacs of the future...
...Being cut off serves to reinforce his belief in the existence of a conspiracy...
...American power is limited, but there are those who cannot believe that the limits derive from anything but treason...
...That again cuts him off, because complete victory is hard to find in democratic politics...
...The paranoid style, Hofstadter concludes, is all but ineradicable in our politics...
...It will be fed by our inability to find total victory abroad...
...Goldwater's overwhelming defeat further convinced the paranoiacs that a conspiracy existed, especially with moderate Republicans occupying much the same ground as the Democrats...
...The paranoiac Hofstadter is writing about believes conspiracies are directed against millions of people, a nation, or a culture, or a way of life...
...Hofstadter finds much of the answer in "a long history that encouraged our belief that we have an almost magical capacity to have our way in the world, that the national will can be made entirely effective, as against other peoples, at a relatively small price...
...it will be fed by the restive-ness of Negro Americans, and by all the other social troubles at home...
...Hofstadter uses the term "paranoid" to describe a state of mind that produces "heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy...
...The paranoic has cut himself off from normal political intercourse by the bizarre nature of his beliefs, and by his attributing black villainy to all who disagree with him...
...Hofstadter does not classify Barry Goldwater as an out-and-out paranoiac, since he does live at least part of the time in the world of routine politics, but he finds Goldwater to be a partisan evangelist thriving on the paranoia of others...
...and it strengthens his insistence on complete victory...
...It is only when he somewhat belatedly gets to them that the book comes alive...
...Thus, he tells us about a Populist Party manifesto in 1895 that contained paranoid notions about an "international gold ring" and about a Texas newspaper in 1855 that complained that the "monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome" were plotting the destruction of the United States...
...He offers as an example a man who drove 2,500 miles from Bagdad, Arizona, to Washington to testify against a bill strengthening Federal control over the sale of guns through the mail...
...This is not without interest, but it doesn't touch us deeply...
...Happily, it has been confined to minority movements, but it has sometimes been a close thing...
...Reviewed by Edwin Newman Richard Hofstadter has come up with the most provocative title of the season, and one's first impression is that he has come up with little else...
...For another, even the first half is at first glance merely a typically professorial compilation of events and movements that may be said to be related, in the sense that they have similarities, but which do not connect in any significant way...
...The events that followed the election—the enactment of even more welfare legislation because Goldwater's candidacy brought more Democrats into Congress—convinced them still further...
...it leads him to believe that crisis is upon us (for the paranoiac, Hofstadter says, time is forever just running out...
...Hofstadter has some pity for the paranoiac, since the latter is troubled not merely by the realities of the world, as the rest of us are, but by his own fantasies...
...What we want to know from Hofstadter is what he makes of the current paranoiacs...
Vol. 30 • March 1966 • No. 3
