I remember, when I was in college, hearing other students discuss “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” a famous speech (1963) and essay (1964) by Richard Hofstadter.
I was not interested in politics then and paid little attention; but I can testify to the respect these smart students gave Hofstadter’s thoughts. I just assumed they had substance.
This essay, over the years, became a drumbeat in the culture wars. The message was steady and smug: only dumb hayseeds from the South and American primitives from whatever region could possibly be so stupid as to be fearful -- that is, paranoid -- about that harmless mirage known as the Red Menace. Enlightened people knew there was no threat. This drumbeat became still louder as the Tea Party took shape a few years ago. When liberals in Manhattan wanted to dismiss the whole spectacle, they knowingly alluded to “the paranoid style.” Alas, those poor benighted savages.
So I’ve been reminded a lot of Hofstadter’s analysis, and prompted to look at it with more care. Conclusion: there is no there there.
Few things better illustrate the left-wing twisting of American academic and intellectual life than this little piece of fluff. It appeared a few years after Khrushchev was in the UN bellowing at the USA, “We will bury you.” The Communists made abundantly clear their hope for world domination, even as the Kremlin was busy killing millions of its own citizens in the gulag. The sensible reaction for every awake American was to be frightened--precisely the reaction that Hofstadter claimed was “paranoid.” (Which part of “bury” didn’t he understand?)
Hofstadter shows us sophistry at its awful apex, where reality is rearranged so that normal seems abnormal, and vice-versa.
Recall that a version of this gimmick had been in play for decades. Workers, supposedly the beneficiaries of Communism, were often its bitterest enemies. What an embarrassment. Deep thinkers in the Kremlin came up with the theory of “false consciousness,” which basically says any time a person disagrees with what the Communists want, that person is suffering from “false consciousness.” In simple terms, that person is crazy. This was in fact a routine practice throughout Communist society: people who disagreed with Party dogma were locked in mental hospitals.
What Hofstadter brought to American intellectual life, to use that term loosely, was the same spin. If you respond in a normal or prudent way to Communist threats, you are paranoid. So we see that Hofstadter wasn’t even very original. He took an off-the-shelf idea used by Communists to discredit their opposition, and watered it down by the simple device of substituting the word “paranoid” for the word “insane.” The Communists in Russia call their enemies insane. The far-left in the United States called their enemies paranoid. Same trick.
The word “style” is the important novelty in Hofstadter’s sophistry. Style is something you personally select. It’s optional, it’s superficial, it’s like a new wool suit. If the suit doesn’t fit right, if it itches, if it makes you look foolish, that is entirely your fault. You chose the suit. If you had any brains, the sophistry suggests, you would not choose this particular style.
Hofstadter summed up his insight this way: “The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization.” Yes, Richard, and who started this verbal extremism?
Karl Marx announced that the first order of business was to abolish all private property. The second order of business was to abolish all religion (and force everyone to worship in the Temple of Communism). The third order of business was to abolish most of the things that most people valued about Western civilization. Stalin and his successors were salivating at the hope of overrunning Europe, and eventually crushing America. That was surely the end of civilization, unless people did man the barricades.
The Communists brought a new Dark Ages to Russia. They wanted to bring the same blessings to the entire planet. But the instant you showed the least bit of concern, fear, worry, or hostility, Hofstadter declared you paranoid. And paranoid was bad, very bad.
Now this sophistry seems to me silly, like the visual one when you pretend to snatch a child’s nose, and the child believes you did!
After all, what is the braino professor doing here but name-calling? So’s your old man! How deep is that?
Richard Hofstadter was a member of the Young Communist League and later progressed to Communist Party membership. He was in a tiny cult but wanted to pretend the other 99.99% of the population is sick. It’s natural Hofstadter would write propaganda for his side. What’s not natural is that thousands of professors would use his propaganda in the classroom to persuade millions of students that anyone too dumb to be a liberal was less than human. In sum, Hofstadter came up with a wee bit of logical linguini and it was treated with reverence from colleges in California to universities in Boston, and by all the high-level institutions and publications in between. That supercilious reverence is the problem.
I write a lot about education now; and the bottom line for me is that the decay in the public schools is possible only because so-called “progressives” adroitly manipulate our intellectual life. I’ve argued that American public education is a swamp of sophistry. Everything is sort of a trick that promises one thing and ends up delivering another. Embrace New Math and nobody can count. Adopt Whole Word and kids can’t read. Let Constructivism into the school and kids learn little. Similarly, accept Hofstadter’s thinking and you’ll feel no alarm as clever subversives undermine your culture. Well, praise where it’s due, our Education Establishment does one thing really well, sophistry. The simplest way to improve public schools is to identify the sophistries one by one and eliminate them. A good place to start is with Hofstadter’s claim that fearing your enemies is irrational. On the contrary. As far as I can tell, the biggest enemies of public education are the people in charge of it. Until they do a better job, we should fear them. Daily.
Here’s another bit of the professor's vacuous essay: “American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years, we have seen angry minds at work, mainly among extreme right-wingers.” Methinks Hofstadter doth protest too much. Doesn’t he sound angry to you? And really paranoid? Isn’t he projecting his own bitterness and rage onto the world? He says in effect: “Listen, you primitive people. All we want to do is destroy your society. You shouldn’t be upset. You should be grateful. After all, we’re so much smarter than you, and know all the answers. If you’re upset, that can only be because you’re psycho. Try to get over it.” Along with anger and paranoia, can’t we also detect high levels of arrogance in the professor’s “style”?
(Disclaimer: Richard Hofstadter wrote a lot of famous books and is probably much smarter than I am. My only point is that his essay is a cheap shot and is typically used in a slimy, propagandistic way. For a look at other sophistries popular in college classrooms, see “9: Philosophy Weeps” on Improve-Education.org.)
Bruce Price - is the founder of Improve-Education.org, a lively intellectual site with articles on Latin, birds, Pavlov, phonics, sophistry, 1984, the assault on math, design, teaching science, why our educators do a bad job, and much more.
Bruce Price's fifth book is "THE EDUCATION ENIGMA--What Happened To American Education." (Available on Amazon.)
