The Paranoid Style in American Politics, 60 Years On
How Richard Hofstadter diagnosed the American Right
In 1964, the same year that Richard Hofstadter’s essay ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’ was published by Harper’s Magazine, Senator Barry Goldwater (R - AZ) won the Republican nomination for President. Although Goldwater would be a foundational figure in the American conservative movement, his campaign was a disaster. Carrying only six states and 38% of the popular vote, Goldwater suffered a landslide defeat against Lyndon Johnson. Hofstadter, who was not a conservative, called Goldwater supporters “angry minds at work” and “extreme right-wingers” who demonstrated “how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority.”
A historian by trade, Hofstadter saw an unbroken strain of paranoia throughout American political history, which can be found not only in the Right but also in diverse groups such as “the anti-Masonic movement, the nativist and anti-Catholic movement, in certain spokesmen of abolitionism who regarded the United States as being in the grip of a slaveholders’ conspiracy, in many alarmists about the Mormons, in some Greenback and Populist writers who constructed a great conspiracy of international bankers, in the exposure of ammunitions makers’ conspiracy of World War I, in the popular left-wing press” as well as other contemporary movements like the “White Citizens’ Councils and Black Muslims.”
The targets of right-wing paranoia, Hofstadter suggested, are “cosmopolitans and intellectuals”, “socialistic and communistic schemers”, “outsiders and foreigners” as well as “major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power.” These figures are routinely accused of subversion as well as betrayal of “American virtues”, “competitive capitalism” and “national security and independence.” At the time of Hofstadter’s essay, Senator Joseph McCarthy (R - WI) stood out as an example of a right-wing paranoiac. In 1951, McCarthy infamously accused Secretary of Defense George Marshall, as well as President Dwight Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dean Acheson, of being part of a grand Communist conspiracy “to diminish the United States in world affairs, to weaken us militarily, to confuse our spirit with talk of surrender in the Far East and to impair our will to resist evil.” A public official of scant legislative record, McCarthy’s name becomes the shorthand for one of the darkest periods of American history - the Second Red Scare.
After the Wisconsin Senator’s death from hepatitis in 1957, the baton of anti-communist paranoia was passed down to Robert W. Welch Jr., a retired candy salesman. He co-founded the John Birch Society, named after the Baptist missionary who was killed by Communists in China. Like McCarthy, Welch was vocal in his denunciation of prominent American political figures. He accused Secretary of State John Foster Dulles of being ‘a communist agent’, President Eisenhower of being “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy”, Eisenhower’s brother Milton of being “[his] superior and boss within the Communist party”, and Arthur F. Burns’s position in the Eisenhower Council of Economic Advisers of being “merely a cover-up for [his] liaison work between Eisenhower and some of his Communist bosses.”
Members of the John Birch Society (or Birchers) adored Barry Goldwater, and the Senator did not make much of an attempt to distance himself from them: “I see no reason to take a stand against any organization just because they’re using their constitutional prerogatives even though I disagree with most of them.”
What made Goldwater less hesitant to outright denounce the Birchers was the effort of William F. Buckley Jr. and his new journal National Review. In a 1962 editorial titled “The Question of Robert Welch”, Buckley called the Society leader “so far removed from common sense” and accused Welch of “[anathematizing] all who disagree with him.” “The underlying problem,” Buckley wrote.
is whether conservatives can continue to acquiesce quietly in a rendition of the causes of the decline of the Republican Party and the entire Western world which is false, and, besides that, crucially different in practical emphasis from their own.
His denunciations of Welch, later extended to include the Birch Society as a whole, marked an important chapter in the early history of American conservatism. In order to become a politically and intellectually respectable movement, conservatism had to disassociate itself from the paranoid style that dominated the Right from the 1950s. This was far easier said than done, as Buckley recounted in 1961: “I have had more discussions about the John Birch Society in the past year than I have about the existence of God or the financial difficulties of National Review.” But it finally made Goldwater put the foot down: “I believe the best thing Mr. Welch could do to serve the cause of anti-Communism in the United States would be to resign. . . . We cannot allow the emblem of irresponsibility to attach to the conservative banner.”
Richard Hofstadter was, in hindsight, mistaken in his blanket denunciation of Senator Goldwater and the American Right as filled with paranoid lunatics. However, at the time his essay was published, some of the Right’s most prominent figures, like Joseph McCarthy and Robert Welch, were such lunatics. Still today, the paranoid ghosts of McCarthyism and Bircherism still haunt the Right, and the emblem of irresponsibility threatens to gain control of American conservatism once again. As Hofstadter said at the end of his diagnosis: “We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.”