The United States of Paranoia (2 page)

To be sure, there is more to Hofstadter’s paranoid style than a mere belief in a conspiracy theory. And there’s a risk of reading too much into those answers: You can believe the government has covered up information related to UFOs without believing it’s hiding alien bodies in New Mexico. (You might, for example, think that some UFO witnesses encountered weapons tests that the government would prefer not to acknowledge.) There is also a revised version of Hofstadter’s argument that you sometimes hear, one that accepts that conspiracies are more popular than the historian suggested but that still draws a line between the paranoia of the disreputable fringes and the sobriety of the educated establishment. It’s just that the “fringe,” in this telling, turns out to be larger than the word implies.

But educated elites have conspiracy theories too. By that I do not mean that members of the establishment sometimes embrace a disreputable theory—though that does happen. When White House deputy counsel Vince Foster turned up dead during Bill Clinton’s term in office, sparking an assortment of conspiracy tales, former president Richard Nixon told his personal assistant that the “Foster suicide smells to high heaven.”
26
Clinton himself, on being elected, asked his old friend and future aide Webster Hubbell, “Hubb, if I put you over at Justice, I want you to find the answers to two questions for me. One, Who killed JFK? And two, Are there UFOs?”
27
But I mean something far broader than that. You wouldn’t guess it from reading “The Paranoid Style,” but the center sometimes embraces en masse ideas that are no less paranoid than the views of the fringe.

Consider the phenomenon of the
moral panic
, a time when fear and hysteria are magnified, distorted, and perhaps even created by influential social institutions. Though he didn’t coin the phrase, the sociologist Stanley Cohen was the first to use it systematically, sketching the standard progression of a moral panic in 1972: “A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes more visible.”
28
To illustrate the idea, Cohen examined the uproar over two teen subcultures of early 1960s Britain, the rockers and the mods, and their sometimes violent rivalry. In press accounts of the time, seaside towns were destroyed by warring gangs, with pitched battles fought in the streets. But the kids had actually stuck to insults and minor vandalism until the media trumpeted their distorted account, inspiring an intense public concern, an increased police presence, and, ironically, a new willingness among the mods and rockers to behave the way they’d been described.

An essential feature of a moral panic is a folk devil, a figure the sociologist Erich Goode has defined as “an evil agent responsible for the threatening condition”
29
—typically a scapegoat who is not, in fact, responsible for the threat. The folk devil often takes the form of a conspiracy: a Satanic cult, a powerful gang, a backwoods militia, a white-slavery ring. (In the case of the rockers and mods, Cohen writes, the press sometimes claimed that their battles “were masterminded, perhaps by a super gang.”)
30
Cohen’s case study is British, but there are plenty of American equivalents. One is the antiprostitution panic of the early twentieth century, which featured lurid tales of a vast international white-slavery syndicate conscripting thousands of innocent girls each year into sexual service. An influential book by a former Chicago prosecutor claimed, in the space of three paragraphs, that the syndicate amounted to an “invisible government,” a “hidden hand,” and a “secret power,” and that “behind our city and state governments there is an unseen power which controls them.”
31

Coerced prostitution really did exist, but it was neither as prevalent nor as organized as the era’s wild rhetoric suggested. Yet far from being consigned to a marginal minority movement, the scare led to a major piece of national legislation, the Mann Act of 1910, and gave the first major boost in power to the agency that would later be known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Within a decade, the Bureau would be extending its purview from alleged conspiracies of pimps to alleged conspiracies of Communists, getting another boost in power in the process.
32

Such stories are missing from Hofstadter’s account, which drew almost all of its examples from movements opposed to the “right-thinking people” Cohen described. The result was a distorted picture in which the country’s outsiders are possessed by fear and its establishment usually is not. The essay had room, for example, for “Greenback and Populist writers who constructed a great conspiracy of international bankers,”
33
but it said nothing about the elites of the era who perceived Populism as the product of a conspiracy.
Hofstadter
did not mention the assistant secretary of agriculture, Charles W. Dabney, who denounced William Jennings Bryan’s Populist-endorsed presidential campaign of 1896 as a “cunningly devised and powerfully organized cabal.”
34
Nor did he cite the respectable Republican paper that reacted to the rise of the Union Labor Party, a proto-Populist group, with a series of bizarre exposés claiming that an anarchist secret society controlled the party. “We have in our midst a secret band who are pledged on oath to ‘sacrifice their bodies to the just vengeance of their comrades’ should they fail to obey the commands or keep the secrets of the order,” warned one article in 1888.
35
“How shall we maintain our honored form of government, or protect life and property from assassination at the hands of these conspirators, if their dark and damning deeds are allowed to continue and be perfected?” asked another.
36
The paper kept up the drumbeat till election day.

Or consider this passage from Hofstadter:

This enemy seems to be on many counts a projection of the self: both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. A fundamental paradox of the paranoid style is the imitation of the enemy. The enemy, for example, may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. . . . Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through “front” groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy. Spokesmen of the various Christian anti-Communist “crusades” openly express their admiration for the dedication, discipline, and strategic ingenuity the Communist cause calls forth.
37

It is the most astute argument in the essay. But it never acknowledged that the same point applies to much of Hofstadter’s elite audience.

There is a reason, after all, that Hofstadter’s article begins with a reference to “the extreme right wing.” In the early 1960s, the United States experienced a wave of alarm about the radical Right. This dread had been building throughout the Kennedy years and exploded after the president’s assassination, which many people either blamed directly on the far Right or attributed to an atmosphere of fear and division fed by right-wing rhetoric. By the time Hofstadter’s essay appeared, the “projection of the self” that he described was in full effect. Just as anti-Communists had mimicked the Communists, anti-anti-Communists were emulating the Red-hunters.

In 1961, for example, Walter and Victor Reuther of the United Auto Workers wrote a twenty-four-page memo urging Attorney General Robert Kennedy to join “the struggle against the radical right.”
38
The letter, coauthored by the liberal attorney Joseph Rauh, called for Kennedy to deploy the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Federal Communications Commission against the enemy. By “the radical right,” the Reuthers and Rauh meant not just the Birchers and the fundamentalist Christian Crusade but Senator Barry Goldwater and the libertarian William Volker Fund. In
Before the Storm
, his study of Goldwater’s presidential campaign, the historian Rick Perlstein described Group Research Incorporated, an operation funded by the Reuthers’ union, as “the mirror image of the political intelligence businesses that monitored left-wingers in the 1950s, identifying fellow-traveling organizations by counting the number of members and officers shared with purported Communist Party fronts. Group Research did the same thing, substituting the John Birch Society for the reds.”
39

Interestingly, the phrases that sounded so dangerous on the lips of the Right weren’t always so different from the rhetoric of the Cold War liberals. Robert DePugh—the founder of the Minutemen, a paramilitary anti-Communist group of the 1960s—claimed to have been inspired by JFK’s own words: “We need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take up arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as a basic purpose of their daily life.” In
Before the Storm
, Perlstein noted that Kennedy “spoke often in these absolutist, apocalyptic terms.”
40
When Hofstadter sketched out the paranoid style, he listed an “apocalyptic and absolutistic framework” as one of its characteristics. But he didn’t have the thirty-fifth president of the United States in mind.

When scholars and pundits aren’t claiming that paranoia is limited to the political extremes, they sometimes claim that it’s a product of particularly harsh times—that a conspiracy panic might leave the fringe and seize a large portion of the population, but only when the country is in turmoil. In 2009, the conservative writer David Frum offered that explanation for the popularity of Glenn Beck, a right-wing broadcaster with a fondness for conspiracy stories. “Conspiracy theories,” Frum wrote, “always flourish during economic downturns.”
41

He’s right: They
do
flourish during economic downturns. But they also flourish during economic upturns. Frum was specifically attacking Beck for his interest in the idea that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was building secret concentration camps, so it’s worth noting that the very same fear was previously popular on the left during the booming eighties and on the right during the booming nineties. For the last few decades, elements of whatever party is out of power have worried that the party in power would turn fascist; the FEMA story was easily adapted to fit the new conditions. (Beck, I should note, wound up rejecting the FEMA theory.)

Even if you set aside purely partisan fears, the 1990s, a time of relative peace and prosperity, were also a golden age of both frankly fictional and allegedly true tales of conspiracy. There are many reasons for this, including the not unsubstantial fact that even at its most peaceful, the United States is riven by conflicts. But there is also the possibility that peace breeds nightmares just as surely as strife does. The anthropologist David Graeber has argued that “it’s the most peaceful societies which are also the most haunted, in their imaginative constructions of the cosmos, by constant specters of perennial war.”
42
The Piaroa Indians of Venezuela, he wrote, “are famous for their peaceableness,” but “they inhabit a cosmos of endless invisible war, in which wizards are engaged in fending off the attacks of insane, predatory gods and all deaths are caused by spiritual murder and have to be avenged by the magical massacre of whole (distant, unknown) communities.”
43
Many middle-class bloggers leading comfortable lives spend their spare time in a similar subterranean universe.

This is a book about America’s demons. Many of those demons are imaginary, but all of them have truths to tell us. A conspiracy story that catches on becomes a form of folklore. It says something true about the anxieties and experiences of the people who believe and repeat it, even if it says nothing true about the objects of the theory itself.

Just as an animist treats natural forces as conscious spirits, many conspiracists treat social forces as conscious cabals. Real restraints on national sovereignty become a pending UN occupation. Lousy conditions in the ghetto become a genocidal plot against blacks. An ongoing increase in executive power becomes an imminent dictatorial coup. Even a less elaborate theory can play this allegorical role. Take the idea that the football star O. J. Simpson was framed for the murder of his wife. Simpson was probably guilty, but sometimes the police do frame suspects, and few would claim that innocent black men never run into trouble with racist cops. For many African Americans, the Simpson case became more than one man’s encounter with the law. As the journalist Sam Smith wrote during the trial, Simpson’s defense served “as the mythic translation of stories never allowed to be told. The stories that should have been on CNN but weren’t. Everything is true except the names, times and places.”
44

In the next few chapters I will lay out five primal myths that underlie America’s conspiracy folklore. By using the word
myths
, I don’t mean to suggest that these stories are never true. I mean that they’re culturally resonant ideas that appear again and again when Americans communicate with one another: archetypes that can absorb all kinds of allegations, true or not, and arrange them into a familiar form. One is the Enemy Outside, who plots outside the community’s gates, and one is the Enemy Within, comprising villainous neighbors who can’t easily be distinguished from friends. There is the Enemy Above, hiding at the top of the social pyramid, and there is the Enemy Below, lurking at the bottom. And then there is the Benevolent Conspiracy, which isn’t an enemy at all: a secret force working behind the scenes to improve people’s lives.
45