Paranoid Politics and the Plague of Inequality in the Age of Pandemics

Introduction

As Hannah Arendt noted in her work on totalitarianism: "If lawfulness is the essence of non-tyrannical government and lawlessness is the essence of tyranny, then terror is the essence of totalitarian domination."¹ In an age of mass fear, a politics of paranoia becomes central to the development of a fascist state. Shared fears replace shared responsibilities, and a war-of-all-against-all moves from the economic sphere to the center of daily life. Police violence, the rise of the surveillance state, and an eco-system of conspiracy theories, have and continue to be legitimated largely by former president Trump who thrives on paranoia and appears haunted by his own paranoid fears. Even with the defeat of Trump in the presidential election, fear and a conspiratorial notion of reality, if not the truth itself, appear to be a defining ideology for the 74 million followers who voted for Trump. In the midst of a pandemic crisis that both isolates people and reinforces their sense of anxiety, a meaningful politics for social changes has been replaced by a withering of civic literacy if not reason itself. In addition, there exist a willingness among large members of the public to align themselves with a Republican Party that trades in lies, misinformation, and the tenets of white supremacy. At the same time, in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd and a number of other innocent Blacks, this culture and state of ethical nihilism feeds the flames of fascism, racism, and political conformity, while being further mobilized by official apparatuses of paranoia to new and more desperate extremes.

Acquiescence to Trumpism is the aftermath of the Biden election has become a defining feature of the Republican Party in spite of his former celebration of demagogues such as Kim Jong Un, whom he called a "real leader" and overtly fascists leaders such as Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines.² Paul Krugman's comments made in the waning days of the Trump presidency rightly claimed that modern conservatives live inside a cult and are "turning into government by the worst and dumbest."³ At the same time, he made it clear that there is more than massive degree of stupidity at work in the former Trump administration, there were also the dark clouds of authoritarianism which extended far beyond the political career of Donald Trump. Krugman presciently wrote: "For whatever may happen to Donald Trump, his party has turned its back on democracy. And that should terrify you. The fact is that the G.O.P., as currently constituted, is willing to do whatever it takes to seize and hold power."⁴ In light of the Republican Party's refusal to allow a commission to go forward in Congress to examine the insurrection against the Capitol along with their relentless attempts at voter suppression, Krugman's comments are more relevant today than when they were first made.

Paranoid politics has reinforced an image of a party wedded to what Robert Jay Lifton calls an act of "absolute purification" and a cult-like totalizing vision that reproduces a politics of "malignant normality."⁵ Trump's paranoid politics, now being advanced by the Republican Party under the aegis of Trumpism, are increasingly being challenged by millions of people, especially by young people across the globe who are protesting police violence and other authoritarian practices. What is memorable in this global resistance movement is the comprehensive politics that drives it; at the heart of such a politics is a challenge to the inequities in wealth and income that concentrates power in few hands and enables the latter to produce a society largely gripped by paranoia, anxiety, and in some cases hopelessness. In the midst of the historic rebellions now going on in the U.S. and across the globe, the politics of paranoia, racism, class divisions, and the war on democracy itself, inequality has and must become a central feature of any politics that lays claim to the promise of a democratic socialist society.

Inequality under neoliberal capitalism is...