History, McCarthy, Politics

The Paranoid Mind

“American politics has often been an arena for angry minds,” Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter wrote in a famous Harper’s essay in 1964. 

Hofstadter, who won two Pulitzer Prizes for his work, entitled his essay “The Paranoid Style of American Politics,” and in that essay he traced the long arc of “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” that he contended is a reoccurring theme in the country’s history. 

The essay, easily found online, is worth reading in the context of, oh, the state legislature in Idaho coming within one vote of defunding the most popular public television system in the country because one legislator had been listening and recorded “a full page of concerning language.”

Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter

Or in light of a legislative decision to forgo a $6 million federal grant to facilitate early childhood education because the money – this grant was authorized during the Trump Administration – would facilitate “indoctrinating our children at a younger level.” One lawmaker said it was really bad news that the whole sordid mess was full of the obviously questionable concept of “social justice.” 

Many people are saying that certain notable figures – think Jesus, Gandhi, Dr. King, Pope Francis – would be shocked to learn that discussing “social justice” is now controversial. 

Or consider the bright lights of the Iowa legislature – what is it with the “I” states – who are considering placing new restrictions on public schools and universities “related to staff or student training dealing with racism, sexism and discrimination.” Similar moves have traction in Idaho and other conservative states.

Elsewhere under the golden dome of the Iowa statehouse, conservative legislators grilled a local school superintendent recently over her district’s Black Lives Matter curriculum, developed in part, the school official said, to “address incidents of bullying, lower graduation rates and higher disciplinary rates of students of color.” Imagine a local educator being concerned about her students in such a way? 

Another Iowa legislator admitted his bright idea, he wants to have the Iowa attorney general review presidential executive orders before they became effective in his state, was clearly unconstitutional, but he still felt compelled to make his point. He did, but the point made was just a little different than he intended. 

At the same time back in Idaho a gang of some of the most fevered right-wingers want to strip the Republican attorney general of much of his authority to legally represent state agencies. They don’t like the way the AG reads the law. Idaho’s chief lawyer was one of the few Republicans chief legal officers unwilling to countenance the frivolous post-election lawsuit out of Texas seeking to overturn the presidential election. You will remember that lawsuit died faster than a mayfly, but apparently embracing crazy legal theories and spending tax dollars to advance them is a new conservative value. And calling BS on such things is apparently a defunding offense.  

All of this conservative paranoia from Boise to Des Moines and points in between has one unifying theme: grievance. The angry minds on the right of American politics are perpetually pissed off. A constant state of aggravated outrage is the essence of modern conservative thought. 

Young kids are encouraged to burn face masks on the steps of a state capitol to protest an effective public health measure. Fox News and its followers fume over a decision by the Dr. Seuss Foundation – a private entity, by the way – to cease publication of a half dozen children’s books with clear racist portrayals of people of color. All a piece of the outrageous affront directed at conservatives by a liberal society. 

Idaho children burn face masks on the Statehouse steps in Boise

Richard Hofstadter wrote his essay when Joseph McCarthy’s grievance against liberals, Hollywood elites and homosexuals was still fresh in the American mind and in the wake of Barry Goldwater’s angry claim that “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice,” but he could well have been writing last week. 

The modern rightwing, Hofstadter wrote 57 years ago, always feels dispossessed. “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.”

Hofstadter’s old essay reads like last night’s Tucker Carlson script or a last year Tweet from the Prince of Mar a Lago. Conservative politics has been reduced to curated performances of assorted grievances. The agenda on the right from banning transsexual students from sports, politicizing the response to a pandemic or censuring the rare conservative who bucks the party line is not about policy or even principle, but rather anger and grievance and making someone else pay. 

Something is happening. Something is changing. Somebody not like me is causing this outrage, damn it. And I’m not happy about it. In fact, I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. 

Hofstadter didn’t know about the Tea Party or Trump or Hannity, but he would not have found any of the anger they possess surprising. “The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms,” he wrote, “he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point.”

Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1950

As you consider the paranoid nature of so many conservatives today – the outlandish conspiracy theories, the big lies about election fraud, the absurd notion that a nuanced examination of American history is a socialist plot – you see the paranoid line stretching back to McCarthy, the John Birch Society, on and on. 

As Hofstadter noted, some of us look at history and see a confusing, contradictory mishmash of good, bad and indifferent, somethings to condemn, others to celebrate. The paranoid on the right suffers that history, as well, but also deals with constant fresh fantasies, and there is always grievance. And that must be frightening, so frightening that thousands acted on their fantasies and grievance and violently attacked Congress two months ago. 

Paranoia on the far right is an enduring reality of American politics. At key moments in the past when the phenomenon went from merely crazy to seriously dangerous the conservative party rejected the worst of it. We’re waiting to see what the conservative party will do this time. 


Additional Reading:

My carefully curated – right – list of things you might want to read now or later…

6 Questions Officials Still Haven’t Answered After Weeks of Hearings on the Capitol Attack

I wonder – constantly – how many Americans are just ready to move on from the horrific events of January 6, 2021 when a violent mob stormed the U.S. Congress. And, yes, we really do need to get to the bottom of these events. While the legal and law enforcement work continues questions still go unanswered. Pro Publica has a good take on what we still don’t know.

The January 6, 2021 insurrection in Washington, D.C.

“During more than 15 hours of testimony, lawmakers listened to a cacophony of competing explanations as officials stumbled over themselves to explain how America’s national security, defense, intelligence and law enforcement agencies allowed a homegrown enemy to put an entire branch of government in danger during the attack on the U.S. Capitol.”

A good backgrounder.


Conservative Donors Have Their Own Cancel Culture

A fascinating piece in The Atlantic about the battle over the University of Texas school song. Some Longhorn football players want the song, with its Confederate nostalgia, discarded. Big donors aren’t having it.

Link here.


How The Anti-Vaxxers Got Red-Pilled

What happens when a global pandemic, a vaccine resistance movement, and the age of conspiracy collide? A black hole of misinformation that poses a grave threat to public health

A good read in Rolling Stone:


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2020 Election, McCarthy, Trump

GOP Fails Its McCarthy Moment…

Sixty-six years ago this week – December 2, 1954 – the United States Senate voted to censure Wisconsin Republican Joseph McCarthy. The vote was 67 in favor, 22 opposed. The very public rebuke effectively marked the end of McCarthy’s lie-infused assault on American democracy. 

During his four-year run, the burly bully from Appleton dominated headlines and ruined careers with his reckless and unproven allegations that Communists had infiltrated the federal government. As his reign of political terror advanced toward censure by his own colleagues, McCarthy became ever more brazen, even attacking the patriotism of members of the United States Army

Joseph McCarthy with Roy Cohn, his counsel, who later became Donald Trump’s lawyer

McCarthy’s followers condemned Dwight Eisenhower, the celebrated supreme allied commander of European victory in World War II, as “a communist.” McCarthy used a Senate speech to attack General George Marshall, one of the great heroes of 20th Century America, for being soft on communism. Marshall’s biographer says McCarthy’s speech was so hysterically over the top, so obviously full of innuendo and bad faith, that few senators remained in their seats to listen to the tirade, but few also condemned it. 

When the roll was called in the Senate on McCarthy’s censure in 1954, Idaho’s two Republican senators – Henry Dworshak and Herman Welker – refused to condemn McCarthy, indeed they defended him, made excuses, embraced his delusions. According to contemporary accounts, Welker prowled the Senate floor during the censure vote muttering threats to those attempting to hold McCarthy to account. Dworshak, handpicked by McCarthy, served on the committee that investigated McCarthy’s wild accusations against the Army but made little contribution. One McCarthy biographer said the Wisconsin senator effectively silenced the “timid” Dworshak and publicly insulted him by wishing he had selected someone else. 

The events surrounding McCarthy during that long-ago December seem both a distance echo of American history and as fresh as today’s front page. As the conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg wrote recently, “McCarthy liked to insist he had evidence of communists in the government, but he couldn’t show you the names right now. The number of communist infiltrators on his secret list changed from speech to speech.” 

In this December we are experiencing a new kind of McCarthyism updated for the Trump Era. 

“Listening to President Donald Trump’s legal team claim over and over again that they have voluminous evidence that the election was stolen,” Goldberg says, “it occurred to me that we’re in a kind of repeat McCarthy era. Only this time, to borrow from that old-school communist Karl Marx, history is repeating itself not as tragedy but as farce.” 

McCarthy was condemned by the Senate 66 years ago this week

It took four long years for the Senate – and many Republicans – to admit that McCarthy’s protean tactics and political treachery were a genuine threat to the stability of American citizens and institutions, everything from the legal system to the Senate itself. McCarthy intimidated and bullied anyone who questioned him. His weapon was not fact, but intimidation; intimidation meaning if you had the backbone to challenge him McCarthy would summon down the wrath of his supporters on those who stepped out of line. 

A handful – Maine’s Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith most notably – had the courage to confront McCarthy, but most held their tongues while his power grew, and his outrages expanded. “The fifties were like that,” historian Ellen Schrecker wrote in her study of the era, “less a world of fear than of silence.” 

Nearly a month on from the presidential election that will turn Donald Trump out of the White House, a firehose of lies about voter fraud and rigged elections tumble from the presidential Twitter feed to be amplified by his minions on cable television and across the Internet. The lies have been refuted repeatedly by a bipartisan collection of state election officials, Trump’s own attorney general and the cyber security expert the president fired for truthfully saying the recent election was the most secure in American history. 

In a true McCarthyesque through the looking glass turn, William Barr, the Trump appointed attorney general who has defended the president at every turn, is now dismissed as a traitor and agent of “the deep state” for saying there is no evidence of fraud that would change the election outcome. 

A Republican election official in Georgia, one of many needing police protection now for doing his job in a state where Trump continues to lie about a rigged election, demanded this week that Trump end the deceit, saying “Someone’s gonna get shot. Someone’s gonna get killed…and it’s not right. It’s not right.” The official, Gabriel Sterling, put a fine point on what is happening with his fellow Republicans. “This is elections,” Sterling said, his voice quivering with indignation. “This is the backbone of democracy, and all of you who have not said a damn word are complicit in this. It’s too much.”

Gabriel Sterling, the Republican election official in Georgia, who has condemned Donald Trump’s attacks on election integrity

Yet, all of this – the lying, conspiracy theories, attacks on an election that wasn’t really all that close, the full-on assault on democracy – has engendered a world of silence from most elected Republicans. They are ending the Trump presidency as they began – with eclairs for backbones. And no Republican senators better exemplify this chicken-hearted response than the two from Idaho who now fill the seats once held by McCarthy’s enablers. 

Jim Risch is proving to be a worthy heir to Henry Dworshak. While Dworshak is remembered in Idaho, to the extent that he is remembered, for a big dam on the Clearwater River, the history books (briefly) note him only as a dead ender for Joe McCarthy. Risch has gone all the way up and now all the way down with Trump.

Mike Crapo, twenty years in the Senate, has little more to show for that tenure than Herman Welker, the angry senator and credulous McCarthy defender whose seat he now occupies. 

A month on from the November election, neither man has uttered a word of condemnation, concern or care about Trump’s blatant attack on democracy even as the conservative National Review points out, “Almost nothing that the Trump team has alleged has withstood the slightest scrutiny.”

Crapo and Risch seem to care less, again to quote National Review, that “Flawed and dishonest assertions like this pollute the public discourse and mislead good people who make the mistake of believing things said by the president of the United States.”

Like Idaho’s Welker and Dworshak from an earlier day, Crapo and Risch will be remembered to history, not as they might hope, but rather because they are complicit in the worst attack on American democracy in the history of the presidency.

It’s just not right. 

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Additional Reading:

Iowa is What Happens When the Government Does Nothing

From The Atlantic

“To visit Iowa right now is to travel back in time to the early days of the coronavirus pandemic in places such as New York City and Lombardy and Seattle, when the horror was fresh and the sirens never stopped. Sick people are filling up ICUs across the state. Health-care workers like Klein are being pushed to their physical and emotional limits. On the TV in my parents’ house in Burlington, hospital CEOs are begging Iowans to hunker down and please, for the love of God, wear a mask. This sense of new urgency is strange, though, because the pandemic isn’t in its early days. The virus has been raging for eight months in this country; Iowa just hasn’t been acting like it.”

Read the full piece.


Obituary of Marvin J. Farr

This death notice in a Kansas funeral home went viral with the Kansas City Star newspaper wrote about it. Read it and you’ll see why.

“Dr. Marvin James Farr, 81, of Scott City, Kan., passed away Dec. 1, 2020, in isolation at Park Lane Nursing Home. He was preceded in death by more than 260,000 Americans infected with covid-19. He died in a room not his own, being cared for by people dressed in confusing and frightening ways. He died with covid-19, and his final days were harder, scarier and lonelier than necessary. He was not surrounded by friends and family.”

Here is the obit


And Speaking of Obits

Ding Kuen Tam, also known as Danny Wong, a legendary restaurant owner in Butte

The Montana Standard in Butte, Montana had a wonderful tribute this week to one of the city’s iconic figures, Ding Kuen Tam, owner of reportedly the oldest continuously operated and family-owned Chinese restaurant in the country, the Pekin Noddle Parlor.

One of Mr. Tam’s best customers was a guy named Evil Knievel.

“Knievel was ‘Bobby’ to Wong.   

“Whenever Knievel pulled his Maserati into the Pekin alleyway, Wong would give him a box full of food and a bottle of Jack Daniels, whether he drank it or not.

“Danny, I’m gonna jump Caesars Palace,” Knievel would say.

“Bobby, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Wong would answer.

“I’m gonna jump the Snake River,” Knievel would say.

“Bobby, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Wong would answer again.

“Such was their bond. Knievel even gave Wong his last car, a Lincoln Mark VIII.”

What a story.


Thanks for reading…take care.

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