Be Really Afraid: What Parody Does with Political Paranoia

There is one concept missing in Richard Hofstadter's iconic "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" (1964). Remarking that "American politics has often been an arena for angry minds," Hofstadter describes the way that conspiratorial thinking depends on a paranoid style, yet he misses the fact that the paranoid style is always, also, deeply ironic. Hofstadter seems to deliberately sidestep the irony of the paranoid style he analyzes, choosing, instead, to take it all very seriously. While many have critiqued Hofstadter's association of paranoia with conspiratorial thinking (e.g. Michael Butter's piece in this collection), few have keyed into the notion that the flaw in Hofstadter's piece is not his overemphasis on paranoia, but rather his oversight of irony.

Yet, as we can see in the three quotes he uses to frame his essay, which hail from Senator McCarthy addressing the Senate in 1951, an 1895 populist manifesto, and an 1855 Texas newspaper article, the paranoid style that Hofstadter describes is intensely ironic. Each of the three quotes offers excellent examples of paranoid rhetoric, a rhetoric that tends to follow a similar pattern regardless of historical context and one which the less conspiratorial mind will immediately recognize as inherently ironic. The core irony here is situational: If the thing we are being told to be afraid of were really that powerful and scary, then the speaker would not be able to describe it publicly. If there ever truly were the sort of conspiracy signaled in these quotes, then the speaker would be disappeared, abducted or silenced in some conclusive way. Dark forces don't just let people run around exposing them, after all. The point is that the public fearmongering itself is an ironic signal of that which we are supposed to fear. The capacity to decry the conspiracy is proof of its nonexistence, or at least of its far weaker power than that imagined. No conspiracy that scary can also be that easy to denounce.

Hofstadter notes that the paranoid right-wing 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" (1964). Yet another situational irony, since this group may be many things, but dispossessed it is not. Nor, frankly, is there any subversive plan to destroy the nation. Instead, ironically, the paranoid style's desire to manufacture threats is what threatens the nation most, though Hofstadter doesn't quite emphasize it that way.

There are other outright situational ironies in the paranoid style of most conspiracy theorists. Senator Joseph McCarthy, who wielded considerable political power, frets in the speech from which Hofstadter quotes over "a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man" while speaking on the Senate floor of the United States, in a speech transcribed and available to anyone (McCarthy 1951). In this case, the irony is that someone with political power suggests he is a weak victim facing a formidable force. While not all conspiracy theories emerge from social sectors who have privilege and power, when they do, it is all the more ironic. The point is that McCarthy's hyperbolic victimhood is not just a core feature of his paranoid style; it is an ironic one.

In a related way, less attention has been paid to the fact that Hofstadter focuses on paranoia as a style, a rhetoric, and mode of communication. Sure, it is clear that Hofstadter is not attempting some sort of clinical assessment of a collective psyche, but what Hofstadter signals is more than the use of "paranoid" as a generalized adjective; rather, he is clearly thinking of it as a political idiom and an ideological mindset, not a psychological condition. "I call it the paranoid style," Hofstadter writes, "simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind." These three qualities-- exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy—help highlight what I am describing because they each demand that...