the paranoid style: Glenn Beck

Recently, Glenn Beck cast his watery gaze upon George Soros. Beck is simply appealing to the anti-semitic segment of his viewing audience. His conspiratorial thinking regarding Soros, reflecting unconsciously the model of the distant past that evoked fear and condemnation of the "Golden International", comports well with the level at which his usual pseudo-intellectual punditry resides: character assassination. I heard Soros talk at an APSA meeting, during which he spoke at length of the deep impact Karl Popper made on his general vision of the social world. I look forward to Beck's future blackboard diagram of the hidden totalitarian kernel lodged in The Open Society and Its Enemies.

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Beck once devoted a program to his view that G.W. F. Hegel's thought lies at the root of what plagues America. I return to Hofstadter frequently for insight into his brand of conspiratorial theory.

"The final aspect of the paranoid style is related to the quality of pedantry to which I have already referred. One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is precisely the elaborate concern with demonstration it almost invariably shows. One should not be misled by the fantastic conclusions that are so characteristic of this political style into imagining that it is not, so to speak, argued out along factual lines. The very fantastic character of its conclusions leads to heroic striving for 'evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Of course, there are highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow paranoids, as there are likely to be in any political tendency, and paranoid movements from the Middle Ages onward have had a magnetic attraction for demi-intellectuals . . . The typical procedure of the higher paranoid scholarship is to start with such defensible assumptions and with a careful accumulation of facts, or at least of what appear to be facts, and to marshal these facts toward an overwhelming 'proof' of the particular conspiracy that is to be established. It is nothing if not coherent -- in fact, the paranoid mentality is far more coherent than the real world, since it leaves no room for mistakes, failures, or ambiguities. It is, if not wholly rational, at least intensely rationalistic; it believes it is up against an enemy who is infallibly rational as he is totally evil, and it seeks to match his imputed total competence with its own, leaving nothing unexplained and comprehending all of reality in one overreachiing, consistent theory. It is nothing if not 'scholarly' in technique. . . What distinguishes the paranoid style is not, then the absence of verifiable facts (though it is occasionally true that in his extravagant passion for facts the paranoid occasionally manufactures them), but rather in the curious leap in imagination that is always made at some critical point in the recital of events. . . The plausibility the paranoid style has for those who find it plausible lies, in good measure, in this appearance of the most careful, conscientious, and seemingly coherent application to detail, the laborious accumulation of what can be taken as convincing evidence for the most fantastic conclusions, the careful preparation for the big leap from the undeniable to the unbelievable. The singular thing about all this laborious work is that the passion for factual evidence does not, as in most intellectual exchanges, have the effect of putting the paranoid spokesman into effective two-way communication with the world outside his group -- least of all with those who doubt his views. He has little real hope that his evidence will convince a hostile world. His effort to amass it has rather the quality of a defensive act which shuts off his receptive apparatus and protects him from having to attend to disturbing considerations that do not fortify his ideas. He has all the evidence he needs; he is not a receiver, he is a transmitter." The Paranoid Style in American Politics, pp. 35-38

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It's worth noting that the program during which Beck uttered the statement that became the target of controversy is entitled "The Puppet Master: How much does George Soros control?" Also interesting, in light of Hofstadter's diagnosis, is the fact that Beck (or his producers) invites his followers to participate in his paranoid style: "For months, Glenn has been pulling back the structure progressives have worked decades to put in place. Beneath every layer lies one common thread: George Soros. Tonight on TV, Glenn presents an in-depth look at the Puppet Master, billionaire financier George Soros, one of the most powerful forces in the Progressive Movement. But don’t just take Glenn’s word for it. Read. Analyze. Do your own homework and come to your own conclusions - read below to fact check all the sources used on tonight's show." (emphasis added)

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One notices in Beck’s paranoid style a monotheistic vision of evil in it. In the particular case of Soros, he is the singular puppet master behind all that is wrong, the First Mover of the "Progressive movement" that is destroying America. The "Jewish" angle Beck explicitly evokes (N.B. it is certainly the case that one could criticize Soros' politics without referencing his religious/ethnic background) works in both the secular and religious registers of the manipulative "Jewish Bankers" and the biblical "Christ Killers" (which no doubts adds to the cathexis between Beck's audience and the subject matter).

In contrast, a polytheistic vision might entail recognition of, and openness to, complexity. On this account, good and evil -- for those who traffic in such a worldview -- would be distributed across a range of gods (i.e. forces, entities, persons, institutions, long and short term historical processes, etc.). This vision may not be as emotionally satisfying for those possessed of the conspiratorial mind, but it would at least bring them in touch with ordinary reality and might take some of the symbolically violent edge off their rhetoric (e.g. the primordialist "Us" versus "Them" imagination).

palling around with Paladino

Mr Paladino is the face of the new Republican Party, which has been infused by Tea Partysan resentment (the losers of recent American history). There was a time when Republican candidates would have expresses their various antipathies towards racial and sexual minorities (not to mention women) in indirect ways, using code words or euphemisms. But now that strategy is associated with the despised RINOcrats, the "weaklings" whom Tea Partysans seek to eliminate. Today it's good to be mavericky and to be rude and offensive, which is the form that "political correctness" takes for the Baggers: in other words, it's politically correct to be uncivil. Then, when the so-called MSM responds, one can always claim victimhood. It's a winning strategy: perp at one moment, victim of a media crime the next.

the year of reading tea leaves V: political style

What I think distinguishes my analysis from that of Hofstadter and Lipset (but primarily Hofstadter) is that I think there is a reasonable element in economic and social status anxiety. One is not a kook, a paranoiac, or an extremist for worrying about one's present and future in economic and social terms. Where the Hofstadterian analysis is useful, I think, is in characterizing the modality through which these otherwise rational concerns are articulated. And, hence, the lack of interest in genuine debate is a telling sign of something like a paranoid style. The demonization of political opponents is also a sign of this style.

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So whereas randomly sampled Republicans may identify with some of the opinions expressed by the Tea Party, they are not necessarily likely to turn up at a rally with a poster that refers to the President by a racial slur. However, the activists in the Tea Party (and some segment of its rank and file), who may not be identical demographically with the individuals sampled by the NY Times poll, appear to be more extreme, open to expressing their concerns in extremist images and words. And more disturbing to me is the presence of Republican politicians who also seem willing to engage in (if not incite) the same mode of symbolic violence that pops up during Tea Partysan events.

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Why does the anxious, white, middle-class college-educated male not argue in favor of an expansion of Medicare, a peace dividend dedicated to funding library construction, and amnesty for the immigrant underclass that services his comfortable lifestyle? I think the key factor here is that not all individuals of this sort react in this manner or hold these views. However, those who do also have a party identification that is Republican. They have an ideological framework (a justice frame) within which to make sense of their predicament: government is to blame. This has been the conservative mantra since Reagan. Government is given faces: Pelosi, Reid, Obama. These three individuals by themselves have created all sorts of problems, some of which will arrive on a Day of Reckoning, the national domesday that will occur at some unspecific point in the distant future. Why is this happening? Because Pelosi, Reid, and Obama are socialists.

Continue a bit further down this rabbit hole and one winds up at a Tea Party event, cheering Palin, Bachmann and Beck, wearing a silly hat, and holding a poster with a misspelled, uncivil message.

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The Tea Party is clearly more than a tax rebellion, given the Partysans' obsession with birth certificates and other symbolic phenomena that reach far beyond the vagaries of deficit spending and the income tax. It is part poujadisme, and part classic American paranoid style, the latter of which is manifested in the Chicken Little Syndrome that infuses Tea Partysan and Teapublican rhetoric. If one were to turn over some of the Partysans, old-fashioned Dixiecrats would crawl out.

rhetoric of the sacred

Barack Obama's oratorical style is widely commented upon. Some view it as inspirational; others view it as empty rhetoric. A simmering mistrust of his oratory has bubbled to the surfaced of the campaign; criticisms of his followers, apparently seized by a new messiah, are likely to become more mainstream if Obama's success continues. One pundit thinks the magic has faded. The bloom is off the rose, the Obama bubble has burst.

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Without resorting to the crudities of crowd psychology and the innate American fear of anything resembling the collective, it is possible to analytically parse the Obama effect. One good place to start is the work of Emile Durkheim on religion. One paragraph from his book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) is particularly relevant.

...we can also explain the curious posture that is so characteristic of a man who is speaking to a crowd -- if he has achieved communion with it. His language becomes high-flown in a way that would be ridiculous in ordinary circumstances; his gestures take on an overbearing quality; his very thought becomes impatient with limits and slips easily into every kind of extreme. This is because he feels filled to overflowing, as though with a phenomenal oversupply of forces that spill over and tend to spread around him. Sometimes he even feels possessed by a moral force greater than he, of which he is only the interpreter. This is the hallmark of what has often been called the demon of oratorical inspiration. This extraordinary surplus of forces is quite real and comes to him from the very group he is addressing. The feelings he arouses as he speaks return to him enlarged and amplified, reinforcing his own to the same degree. The passionate energies that he arouses reach in turn within him, and they increase his dynamism. It is then no longer a mere individual who speaks but a group incarnated and personified.*

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Those who lack this capacity to incarnate a group (which is especially important for a modern politician) resent those who can. Presumably, this capacity is one crucial characteristic of leadership, which is what Durkheim describes in the preceding paragraph. To lead is to move people, both as an act of following but also on a mental level; to coalesce a social consciousness that carries the force of opinion. This could be why Hillary Clinton's impressive resume does not suffice to overwhelm her putatively inexperienced opponent.

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*Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: The Free Press, 1995), 212.

holding on to yesterday

Someone, whose opinion I trust, asked me, after seeing Bill Clinton speak in the wake of Obama's rout of Hillary Clinton in South Carolina, "Does Bill Clinton have Alzheimers?" This is a good question. Where is the guy who usually raised the level of intelligence in political discussions? Has the so-called Great Triangulator lost his political instincts? Has he lost his mind? Or is he stuck so entirely in the past that he can't see the present reality? The present reality is that Obama represents the future, whereas the Clinton name represents the past.

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What is the past anyway, the good times of the Clinton 90s? What is the nature of the Clinton "mystique" among Democrats and is there really a mystique? My memory is that Clinton might not have won the Presidency in 1992 if Ross Perot had not siphoned Republican votes from Bush I. For Democrats, however, he was that knight in shining armor, whose election ended the dark times of the Reagan/Bush I era. The immediate and persistent effort of Conservatives to undermine the results of the 1992 election (and the subsequent one in 1996), caused Democrats to rally around Clinton I, even if his actual policies were not fully supported. To be sure, Clinton was rational, lucid, in control of the facts and nuances of the interpretation of facts, which made a stark contrast with Reagan. The economy eventually boomed and Clinton (in comparison to Bush II) did not enter into ill-advised military adventures. And he was well-liked abroad. But on the whole, I think the mystique is not so much the product of actual policy outcomes as the result of negatives: Clinton was not Reagan, he was not one of the self-righteous Republicans who waved the stained dress in public, and, most importantly, he was not Bush II. Unlike the Kennedy mystique, which is also short on substance, the Clinton mystique lacks any inspirational qualities. It is true that the Kennedy mystique might have been a post-assassination production (the Camelot imagery), but the Kennedy name inspires hope, the Clinton name does not.

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Hence, for Bill Clinton it must have been a painful thing indeed, as BBC commentator Katty Kay pointed out on a Sunday morning talk show, that Obama called Reagan the Great Transformer rather than Clinton. This single statement, not uttered in anger or spite by Obama, must have been the bee sting that roused the hibernating bear. Whatever it was, Bill Clinton has engaged in the type of personality destruction that has mostly characterized the demagoguery of Republican political operatives. Obama, in a typically understated way, had called the Clinton mystique into question. Bill Clinton has responded, and the response to the mere "fairytale" has diminished the former President.

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To be sure, there are enough Establishment Democrats left who benefited from the Clinton mystique to keep the upstart Obama off-balance. The party apparatus doesn't really want change, and the Hill/Bill Team is a comfortable old shoe in which to slip the party's hopes. Obama, unlike Carol Moseley Braun, the first black woman senator (also from Illinois), did not work his way up the ranks of the Democratic party apparatus. Hence, the message of change that is compatible to the Establishment is a change to the past of Clinton I. Certainly, Bill Clinton has the sort of rock star effect on crowds that Obama has. But the difference is that whereas people want to be near Bill Clinton, they want to follow Obama. Hillary Clinton does not and never has had the effect that her husband and her competitor have on Democratic voters. Thus is remains important for her campaign to unleash Bill Clinton, for as much as he reminds people of Monica-Gate, he also reminds them of the good olds days, the twelve years between Reagan/Bush I and the eight years of Bush II. 

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Should Obama directly challenge the Clinton mystique? Probably not, since the Establishment Democrats would also be threatened. But he can sharpen his criticism of style. And he could simply name this style as a type that will not regain the White House for the Democrats. The Clintonistas are banking on the fact that no matter how "Republican" she runs her primary campaign, Democrats will still rally to her if she wins the nomination. This, rather than Obama's campaign, is the actual roll of the dice. Just remember John Kerry.

the days of whine and roses

Barack Obama announced today that he'll take on Bill Clinton.

"I have to say just broadly, you know, the former president -- who I think all of us have a lot of regard for -- has taken his advocacy on behalf of his wife to a level that I think is pretty troubling," he told Good Morning America.

You know, he continues to make statements that aren't supported by the facts, whether it's about my record of opposition to the war in Iraq, or our approach to organising in Las Vegas. You know, this has become a habit.

President Clinton went in front of a large group, said that I had claimed that only Republicans had any good ideas since 1980 ... He was making it up and completely mischaracterizing my statement.

One of the things that I think we're going to have to do is to directly confront Bill Clinton when he's not making statements that are factually accurate," Obama continued.

Message to Mr. Obama: you're in a political campaign, your words will be "mischaracterized". What Bill Clinton has done is nothing compared to what the Republicans would do in the fall campaign. I find it almost laughable that you've chosen to tell the world that you'll now start taking on the former president. That is exactly what you should be doing. Telling us you're going to do it before you do it is just silly. You should already have been doing it. 

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It is this sort of thing that makes me wonder whether Obama actually has the will for the job of President, especially a Democratic President confronting a Republican Senatorial filibuster machine. The Clintonistas won't play nice. Bill Clinton has been through much tougher challenges than the one Obama might present. Hillary has been a punching bag for Republicans since 1992.  In the face of this, does Obama think the talk of changing the tone of American politics will matter? Democratic party hacks like Charlie Rangel will hack away at Obama. Is this a surprise? 

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As I have opined before, the Clintonistas are fully at home in the trenches and there is a risk for Obama if he enters the battle on their terms (namely, he becomes just another politician rather than being the Chosen One). However, I do wonder about Obama's political style. It is often reported that Obama was a community organizer. His background is in Alinsky style organizing, which basically involves going into a community, listening to the complaints of community members, defining a common enemy in populist terms (i.e., the city versus the people; the landlord versus the tenants), picking a winnable battle (i.e., one that is likely to succeed and therefore build confidence in the community), making 'hits' on offices of public officials or engaging in "rent strikes", etc. It is also especially important for the Alinsky style to avoid "divisions", especially racial and ethnic divisions that might exist within the community that is targeted for organizing. I can see aspects of this organizing style in Obama's political style, most notably the populist appeal to "the people" rather than specific groups and the emphasis on "we" rather than "I" in his rhetoric. What is missing, of course, is the direct, confrontational style of Alinskyist community organizing. Ironically, Hillary Clinton's suppressed B.A. thesis is supposed to be on Alinsky; she, on the other hand, does engage in confrontation, seems to relish it, has a knack for it, and a will to succeed in it. 

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Hillary Clinton is running on her "experience" in the White House; hence, much of her campaign is bound up with the good times of the Clinton 90s. Why wouldn't Obama have made this a central point of attack? Bill Clinton was a creature of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the group of centrist Democrats who mapped out a strategy that would bypass the traditional, progressive, activist roots of the Democratic party, the inheritance of the 1960s. Clinton ran in 1992 with a theme of "ending welfare as we know it." And he did. His tactical strategy, nurtured in the DLC, was to steal Republican issues and make them over into moderate Democratic positions. Reagan ran for the Presidency by attacking the Red Soviets and the Welfare Queens. Clinton also ran against these queens, but did so in a truly kinder and gentler way. So when Bill Clinton criticizes Obama for trumpeting Reagan, Obama could point out that Clinton accomplished what Reagan could not; Bill Clinton put Reagan's idea into action ("It takes a President" in the eloquent formulation of Hillary Clinton). Moreover, Clinton launched the research into the policy that became the No Child Left Behind legislation of the first Bush term, which prescribes a method of educational testing that produces statistically unreliable results. Perhaps Obama is unaware of this, but, again, an Alinsky political style would make this a point of confrontation.

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Why mention Reagan? Obama surely knew he was stepping into deep sh*t when he flatly stated that Reagan "changed the trajectory of America" in a way "Bill Clinton did not." There's no need to recite the litany of Reagan's sins here. But it is, in fact, true that Reagan transformed the field of American politics in a way that no Democratic President has since FDR. Reagan co-opted FDR's themes and gave them a supply-side, neo-conservative spin (e.g., FDR's "Four Freedoms for the Fourth" speech*). Bill Clinton's domestic policies grew out of the soil of the Reaganite vision (leaving aside the national health care debacle). Obama could elaborate on this situation and tie Hillary Clinton to her closet Reaganite President-Husband. He could point to the language of Clinton's welfare reform law and show that it is directly hostile to poor, single mothers; that it is morally paternalistic; that it binds these women to men in an unfeminist way. Or Obama could point out that Bill Clinton set a Federal level firewall against "gay marriage" by signing the "Defense of Marriage Act," which stipulates that "the word 'marriage' means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word 'spouse' refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or wife." Surely, Obama could point out these features of the Clinton Presidency, in which Hillary Clinton claims an important role. But then, he, like Hillary, would have to find his voice.

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* See the excellent analysis of Reagan and FDR in the dissertation of Jayson Harsin, "A Tale of Two Citizenships: The Economic Rights Discourse of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan" (2005).