The Paranoid Style in American Politics

[Procrustes Stretched]

This ain't no game...

This is where the forces of freedom, liberty, prosperity and enlightenment compete against you and yours for the borders defining America's future political ideology.

quote from the author:

http://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/ I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content. I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric. The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent.

/\ arrow points to above quoted post


The Paranoid Style in American Politics - Richard J. Hofstadter

Anyone who has read this book (The Paranoid Style in American Politics - Richard J. Hofstadter) or excerpts of it cannot deny this fits the bill. My question is why is it in on such display on the internet? Is it because on the anonymity and/or the ability to spout off without challenge face to face?

It has awlays been there in print and even radio and television, but the world wide web offers an exponential leap in the size of the potential soap box for demagogues and propagandists, populists and radicals, and reactionaries...

 

[Mojo2]

This ain't no game...

This is where the forces of freedom, liberty, prosperity and enlightenment compete against you and yours for the borders defining America's future political ideology.

/\ arrow points to above quoted post


The Paranoid Style in American Politics - Richard J. Hofstadter

Anyone who has read this book (The Paranoid Style in American Politics - Richard J. Hofstadter) or excerpts of it cannot deny this fits the bill. My question is why is it in on such display on the internet? Is it because on the anonymity and/or the ability to spout off without challenge face to face?

It has awlays been there in print and even radio and television, but the world wide web offers an exponential leap in the size of the potential soap box for demagogues and propagandists, populists and radicals, and reactionaries...

Handwashing has not always been believed to reduce the transmission of disease. Up until the late 1800's surgeons didn't scrub or wash their hands before surgery. Often Doctors and medical students would move from disecting a corpse through to examining new mothers without washing their hands. This led to a high mortality rate in maternity wards from puerperal or 'childbed fever'.

History of hand washing, information on how hand washing has evolved

Who would think that tiny bacteria, too small to even see with the naked eye, could cause the deaths of hundreds of millions of people? (The Plague, the flu pandemics and etc.)

The same way that bacteria causes disease is the same way that individual voices and opinions on the internet CAN spread to others across America, and around the world, to impact real life events, conditions, thinking and people.

Your problem is that nothing you've ever said has made such an impact.

Or you are too stove piped to recognize it; too self absorbed to peer outside your bizarre little world to see IF anything you've said has reverberated elsewhere.

Well, I have. And others here have as well.

Bottom line: Whether you know it or not, we are fighting a battle that does and will define the borders of our political landscape.

And I know your next question will be to ask me for an example of something I said which reverberated outside of the forum I was in to be felt in the common experience.

I was talking about the 9mm handgun I'd just bought several years ago and mentioned I was "fondling" it.

There were several other posters who thought that was the best thing they'd ever heard to describe what every gun lover does when they get a new one.

Well, that was that. And then a few months (or more?) later I heard people on TV gun and hunting shows talking about fondling their guns.

And before I posted it I'd heard NO ONE ever say that.

There are others, but this is the one that convinced me that a single idea CAN make a difference.

But I'm glad if nothing you ever said has.

 

[PaintMyHouse]

This ain't no game...

This is where the forces of freedom, liberty, prosperity and enlightenment compete against you and yours for the borders defining America's future political ideology.

/\ arrow points to above quoted post


The Paranoid Style in American Politics - Richard J. Hofstadter

Anyone who has read this book (The Paranoid Style in American Politics - Richard J. Hofstadter) or excerpts of it cannot deny this fits the bill. My question is why is it in on such display on the internet? Is it because on the anonymity and/or the ability to spout off without challenge face to face?

It has awlays been there in print and even radio and television, but the world wide web offers an exponential leap in the size of the potential soap box for demagogues and propagandists, populists and radicals, and reactionaries...

The Internet is to debate and politics what peanut butter is to a dog's mouth.

 

[Procrustes Stretched]

This ain't no game...

This is where the forces of freedom, liberty, prosperity and enlightenment compete against you and yours for the borders defining America's future political ideology.

quote from the author:

The Paranoid Style in American Politics | Harper's Magazine I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content. I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric. The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent.

/\ arrow points to above quoted post


The Paranoid Style in American Politics - Richard J. Hofstadter

Anyone who has read this book (The Paranoid Style in American Politics - Richard J. Hofstadter) or excerpts of it cannot deny this fits the bill. My question is why is it in on such display on the internet? Is it because on the anonymity and/or the ability to spout off without challenge face to face?

It has awlays been there in print and even radio and television, but the world wide web offers an exponential leap in the size of the potential soap box for demagogues and propagandists, populists and radicals, and reactionaries...

/\ arrow points to above quoted post


The Paranoid Style in American Politics - Richard J. Hofstadter

Anyone who has read this book (The Paranoid Style in American Politics - Richard J. Hofstadter) or excerpts of it cannot deny this fits the bill. My question is why is it in on such display on the internet? Is it because on the anonymity and/or the ability to spout off without challenge face to face?

It has awlays been there in print and even radio and television, but the world wide web offers an exponential leap in the size of the potential soap box for demagogues and propagandists, populists and radicals, and reactionaries...

....................................... .......................

Handwashing has not always been believed to reduce the transmission of disease. Up until the late 1800's surgeons didn't scrub or wash their hands before surgery. Often Doctors and medical students would move from disecting a corpse through to examining new mothers without washing their hands. This led to a high mortality rate in maternity wards from puerperal or 'childbed fever'.

History of hand washing, information on how hand washing has evolved

Who would think that tiny bacteria, too small to even see with the naked eye, could cause the deaths of hundreds of millions of people? (The Plague, the flu pandemics and etc.)

The same way that bacteria causes disease is the same way that individual voices and opinions on the internet CAN spread to others across America, and around the world, to impact real life events, conditions, thinking and people.

Your problem is that nothing you've ever said has made such an impact.

Or you are too stove piped to recognize it; too self absorbed to peer outside your bizarre little world to see IF anything you've said has reverberated elsewhere.

Well, I have. And others here have as well.

Bottom line: Whether you know it or not, we are fighting a battle that does and will define the borders of our political landscape.

And I know your next question will be to ask me for an example of something I said which reverberated outside of the forum I was in to be felt in the common experience.

I was talking about the 9mm handgun I'd just bought several years ago and mentioned I was "fondling" it.

There were several other posters who thought that was the best thing they'd ever heard to describe what every gun lover does when they get a new one.

Well, that was that. And then a few months (or more?) later I heard people on TV gun and hunting shows talking about fondling their guns.

And before I posted it I'd heard NO ONE ever say that.

There are others, but this is the one that convinced me that a single idea CAN make a difference.

But I'm glad if nothing you ever said has.

you keep re-making the points that Hofstadter made

 

[Procrustes Stretched]

Anyone who has read this book (The Paranoid Style in American Politics - Richard J. Hofstadter) or excerpts of it cannot deny this fits the bill. My question is why is it in on such display on the internet? Is it because on the anonymity and/or the ability to spout off without challenge face to face?

It has awlays been there in print and even radio and television, but the world wide web offers an exponential leap in the size of the potential soap box for demagogues and propagandists, populists and radicals, and reactionaries...

Amazing...

The Paranoid Style in American Politics, by Richard Hofstadter

harpers.org