Thoughts & Commentary on the Obama Administration

[Louis VI the Fat]

There's Glenn Beck and the Teaparties.

And the homeschooling.
And the 'liberal bias' of the press.
And anti-intellectualism.
And racism.
And fear of being 'undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers'.
And 'the foreign agent' trying to bring down America. (whether they be, in rough historical order, Jews, communists, UN, terrorists).
And their helpers, 'not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power'.
And the aggresive posturising against all of this.
And the paranoia.

Hofstadter doesn't trace it back to 1964. He traces it back to the 19th century, to the beginning of America. That's the beauty of it.
To paraphrase Hofstadter - it has been thought since the beginning. So if it were true, then America has been undermined since the beginning. So why did it come to be such a large, succesful, autonomous, capitalist country?

The language of the rightwing resistance to Obama has deep roots. And these roots cross over between the paranoid hardright and the mainstream right.
The fruitcakes are a fringe. A rather large fringe, but fringe nonetheless. The crossover with the mainstream right is what is troublesome.

Then again, I suppose here too Hofstadter applies - if it has been crossing over all this time, then apparantly the mainstream right is resilient to being taken over completely by complete paranoia.

~~-~~-~~<<oOo>>~~-~~-~~

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/08/hbc-90000908
Here's an essay about Hofstadter's essay. Not by a leftwinger, by an author who detests big government himself. And who rightfully points out that Hofstadter describes not merely a rightwing peculiarity:

Hofstadter is very clear that the “paranoid style” is something with deep roots in American culture. Something almost universal, in fact. In Hofstadter’s view this “paranoid style” was not necessarily right-wing, or the province of the G.O.P. Moreover the G.O.P. had arisen and been nurtured as a counter-movement to one of the earliest manifestations of the paranoid style, a political movement derided by Abraham Lincoln

Here's the chilling part:

And finally we come to what was certainly the most stunning, indeed, shocking aspect of Hofstadter’s study, namely, the process of psychological projection. The paranoid political advocate crafts a villainous enemy and imbues the enemy with horrendous traits. And to counter this, he crafts an organization which mimics the enemy and copies its traits.


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.

If only everybody involved in the War on Terror had read Hofstadter...

And what is Fox - 'fair and balanced' - but a perverse mirror image of the rightist perception of the 'biased mainstream media'? To counter what was perceived as unremitting liberal bias, a mirror image to it was build, with an unremmiting rightwing bias.