Writing for the Philadelphia Enquirer, Tirdad Derakhshani deconstructs the paranoid flavor of the seventies so well, some editor has imposed false balance:
Beck’s penchant for finding enemies around every corner makes him one of today’s leading mouthpieces for what the late American historian Richard Hofstadter in 1964 termed the “paranoid style” in politics. (It’s on both right and left wings: See virtually anything spouted by Michael Moore.)
I’ll take Moore at his Dodd-bashing worst over the best teabaggery any day of the week. But no matter: Derakhshani interviews Francis Wheen, author of Strange Days Indeed: The 1970s: The Golden Days of Paranoia.
What made it all happen? There was no single cause, Wheen says, no conspiracy to cultivate paranoia.
“There was a perfect storm . . . of things coming together around the world at the same time,” Wheen, 53, said on the phone from his home in eastern England.
He rattled off an impressive list of events and nutty leaders who contributed to the atmosphere, including Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, China’s Mao Tse-tung and Ugandan leader Idi Amin. Add to that the oil crisis, the quagmire in Vietnam, and the rise of international terrorism, and you have a heady stew of misery and distrust, he says.
He also adds paranoid leaders. Let’s take those backwards, shall we? International terrorism: check. Quagmire in foreign wars: check. Energy shocks: check. The difference this time is that there are not quite so many wackos in charge of so many places, and we have replaced the paranoid Bush administration with a very disciplined Obama administration.
During the seventies, there was a sense that world powers were losing control; that the end was nigh. To be sure, we have the never-ending worries of Iran and North Korea, though they never seem to fully flash into open conflict. Indeed, Obama has consistently lessened strategic tensions and appears to have the War On Terror “the Effort Against Groups and Terrifying Nations” (EAGTN™, for short; code-named “EAGLE TURN” at the WH) well in hand.
Obama set out to restore faith in American government. At every turn, the right has consistently invoked the fear response in an attempt to undermine him: Lynn Cheney keeps terror fears alive and unreasoning. Neocons press for war with Iran. Beck finds scary Negroes on YouTube.
The merchants of fear hope to create another Carter out of Obama, but it isn’t going to do them the favor of happening. In the “teens,” there is still no conspiracy — but there certainly is a coalition that exists to propel Teh Stupid™ into our minds.
British journalist David Aaronovitch, author of Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History, says conspiracy theories have an almost religious function.
“I think the desire for a causal narrative in which we get to understand history is powerful. Especially the belief that there is a clear voluntary intention behind every thing that happens,” he says.
“It’s very much akin to the desire to know why we are on the planet and who put us there. And fundamentally, that is what religion is about.”
Yes. I’ve argued this until I’m blue in the face. Paranoia is a religion; but as seen with Beck, it is not a Christian one, howeversomuch it pretends to be. At its core, paranoia is narcissistic because it posits a universe in which individualism itself is under constant assault.
I know of two religions preaching a gospel of selfishness. One is the Ayn Rand cult; the other is Satanism.
You may think I have reached too far, but I haven’t. In his original theory of paranoid politics, Hofstadter posited:
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.
Hofstadter wrote his essay before we became aware that history could “end,” therefore I find his wording too contemporary. His seminal essay boils down to three key points:
1) THEY are after you.
2) THEY are all-powerful.
3) THEY are all in it together.
“THEY” being a conspiracy so vast and powerful as to be utterly invisible while entirely too real. “THEY” sound very much like God. True enough that conspiracies exist; but attempting to follow the logic of Beckerheads is very much like attempting to read Tolkien’s Silmarillion; it’s impossible to keep up. Sooner or later, an all-powerful conspiracy of evil persons cannot be proven not to exist; therefore it does exist, and is responsible for every evil thing anyone does.
A few years ago, I made a serious study of Satanism out of sincere-but-brief academic interest. After only a few hours, I learned that it is a religion as sect-ridden, politicized, and full of pretenders as any, only more so. There was also that terrific Randian absence of charity involved, It was, in a phrase, religion with few of the advantages and all of the disadvantages.
But I will say this for Satanism: one cannot claim to be a member until they have paid cash on the barrelhead; it is at least up-front and honest about taking your money and giving you nothing in return except your own ego.
And that brings us the the awful truth about a cult of selfishness which too often wears Americanism and Christianity: it is a selfish act, and it is always for-profit.
The John Birch Society stays alive by peddling Teh Stupid™. Beck pays his bills by hawking apocalypse supplies. Sarah Palin supports her train wreck of a career by shilling Teh Wacky™. Breitbart gets paid by the page load and the Sarahpalooza! appearance; he doesn’t buy into Teh Crazy™ so much as take the check and speak the cant.
The complete failure and collapse of modern conservatism has left the Grand Old Party with nothing — absolutely nothing– but shills, hacks, and mixed nuts making money by warping politics to evil ends.
That is not a movement. It is an intellectual cancer that does severe harm to the smooth, efficient running, and seasonal reforming, of our republic by feeding on the minds of idiots with disinformation and nontroversy; it is always eager to find and recruit new minds, indoctrinate them with ridiculous revised histories, and rationalize the consequences.
They sell a universe in which dots always connect out of private causation, never out of random action. And yet, the dots connect randomly, too:
Mark my words: one day these people will say the Devil made them do it.
