Why are Americans so paranoid? Conspiracy is a psychic salve

You know about the Shadow Government, right? No? Well, you should. Ever since President Bush carried out his controlled detonation of the World Trade Center in 2001, an invisible protocol has been in place in all the major Western democracies to bring their populations into check: with ID cards, microchips, and — if you took the vaccine, at any rate — little switches under every citizen’s skin to power us down like electrical appliances when we have become surplus to requirements. It was orchestrated, we suspect, by some combination of the Bavarian Illuminati and the Jesuit lodges installed across the Midwest by Prime Minister Metternich of Austria in the 19th century; this we have deduced from the pyramidal structures on all American banknotes, which, if folded a certain way…

You will be familiar, of course, with this style of political discourse. It is hard to avoid these days — particularly in the United States, where for at least the past five years, whole news channels have given themselves over to an endless barrage of Epstein speculations, vaccine panics, Russian collusion allegations, and UFO babble. It is characterized by a kind of hyperactive manufacture of hidden plots to explain what is going on in the world, coupled with an almost hermetic fascination with the deeper meaning behind coincidences and symbols: the logo of a D.C. pizza shop, for instance, is evidence of the pederastic blood rituals that go on in the upstairs room; or Donald Trump’s bizarre grammar on Twitter and Truth Social, which actually contains hidden kabbalistic messages about his ongoing war with the Deep State. It is invariably met with noisy disapproval in other, more respectable media corners, where academics and experts rally like the counterrevolutionaries of the Vendée, “debunking” the feverish allegations, “calling out” the online rabble, and usually agitating for a return to good, old-fashioned virtues like “trust in government” and “standards in public life”.

Perhaps the greatest debunker of them all was Richard Hofstadter. As a young historian in the Thirties, Hofstadter had flirted with Marxism-Leninism, but by the time he gained tenure at Columbia during the most feverish years of the Cold War, he had traded in his class-based conception of history for a more institution-friendly liberalism. His magnum opus — The Paranoid Style in American Politics, recently reissued — was first published in 1964, when conspiracy theorizing in America was at a high point. The US government was still reeling from McCarthyism; rumors were swirling around concerning the death of JFK, and the Republican Party was in the process of being hijacked by arch-paranoiac “pseudo-conservative” Barry Goldwater. Hofstadter believed that liberal America needed new, diagnostic terms if it had any hope of weathering the storm.

In the end, it was a term from psychiatry, “paranoia”, that seemed the best fit. This was partly because it was non-partisan (paranoia, Hofstadter generously points out, is “not necessarily right wing”) but mainly because “no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind”. After all, Hofstadter explains, paranoia isn’t simply a kind of madness. In fact, the paranoid mind is in many ways “far more coherent than the real world”. The greatest paranoiacs are sticklers for careful scholarship (“McCarthy’s 96-page pamphlet, McCarthyism,” observes Hofstadter, “contains no less than 313 footnote references”). They display the kind of maniacal interpretative zeal that is also found among rationalist philosophers: everything must fit into their schema, and nothing — no verbal similarity, no coincidence, no pizzeria logo — is permitted to go unexplained.

As a history of conspiracy panics in US political life, The Paranoid Style in American Politics does an excellent job. Hofstadter manages to amass an extraordinary amount of detail in just a few pages: beginning with the immediate post-revolutionary period, when John Robison’s treatise on “the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies” captured the imaginations of New England puritans, who worried that secular secret societies might undermine the congregations and institutions they had worked so hard to set up. Even more winningly outlandish is Hofstadter’s account of the forgotten American tradition of anti-Jesuitism, with its profusion of salacious, tell-all memoirs from ex-nuns — one of which, Awful Disclosures, written by Maria Monk in 1836, was probably the bestselling book in American history until the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. By the time we reach the 20th century, it is hard not to agree with Hofstadter’s well-known contention that “American politics has often been an arena for angry minds”.

But what about explaining the American propensity for paranoia? Like all good academics, Hofstadter is very clear about the explanatory claims he is not making: “In using the expression ‘paranoid style’”, he assures his readers, “I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes.” But if this essay is not an attempt at psychological classification, what is it? Hofstadter’s final interpretation is curiously toothless: “a mentality disposed to see the world in this way may be a persistent psychic phenomenon, more or less constantly affecting a modest minority of the population,” he speculates; “certain religious traditions, certain social structures and national inheritances, certain historical catastrophes or frustrations may be conducive to the release of such psychic energies.” The essay ends soon after. In fact, it is hard not to finish The Paranoid Style in American Politics without beginning to wonder whether Hofstadter might actually have something to learn from the conspiracy theorist. The conspiracy theorist, at least, has the temerity to ask the big sociological questions: What is behind all this? What does it all mean?

Part of the problem, I suspect, lies in the “debunking” mentality which Hofstadter and his fellow Cold-War liberals forged, and still characterizes much of the American establishment today. For the debunker, the salient fact about the conspiracy theorist is his departure from the truth: conspiracy theorists are disordered, delusional, and need to be corrected by a stern, patrician voice telling them how things actually are. But when you talk to conspiracy theorists, you tend to find that their operative notion of the truth is rather different. There is often a humorousness to people’s adoption of conspiracy theories — or, at least, a kind of perverse pleasure or comfort. In conspiracy theory, in fact, the relationship between “truth” and “belief” seems to land rather closer to what one might find in Pascal, or Nietzsche: a sense that the conspiracy theory is true in an artistic sense, the way a metaphor, or allegory, might be true. They are ways for people to parse or understand complex situations without the conceptual vocabulary to do so in a more literal way. Even if you don’t quite have the time or resources to articulate a full account of all the different ways in which the DNC is corrupt or austerity is misguided, you can still say “Hillary Clinton eats babies” or “David Cameron had sex with a pig”, and everyone, on some level, will understand what you mean.

What dark truths might Hofstadter’s American paranoiacs be articulating? I suspect it might have something to do with the United States’ political system: after all, even Hofstadter notes the fetishistic preoccupation the purveyors of the Paranoid Style have with subverting political institutions — freemasons walking among the Founding Fathers, Jesuits infiltrating the government, Communists taking control of the Senate. And curiously, conspiratorial fantasies of subversion do seem to crop up in post-revolutionary liberal societies like the United States with remarkable frequency. The German historian Reinhart Koselleck has argued that something like Hofstadter’s Paranoid Style can be observed in France, Germany, and Italy in the late-18th and early-19th centuries — often using a lot of the same “secret society” imagery. No sooner does a country declare a liberal constitution that guarantees power to the people, than those same people declare it to be the product of freemasons, or Illuminists, or Jews, or Jesuits — any group, really, so long as it isn’t them.

For Koselleck, in fact, conspiracy panics are simply what you get when you combine liberal societies’ endless rhetoric about “openness” and “transparency” and “mass participation” with the rather more exclusionary and secretive reality of the modern liberal state, with its faceless bureaucracies and standing armies and legions of spies. They are a way of explaining away dissonance, wriggling out of the double bind that comes with being a modern citizen. The applicability to 18th and 19th-century American history is obvious: “I know that America ought to mean liberty and prosperity and a bright future for myself and my family,” thinks the American paranoiac, “and yet all around me I see a decaying oligarchy that seems to hold my abstract freedoms in pretty low esteem. Ergo: America must have fallen victim to a plot, an infiltration.”

Nor is it particularly hard to see why conspiracy theories might be so popular in America today. Liberal institutions are creaking more loudly than ever before: since the Patriot Act of 2001, the very bodies that are supposed to safeguard abstract freedoms have voted to support mass state surveillance; and all across Congress, the custodians of the “transparent” lawmaking process seem to be writing policy with the sole intention of making money from some mixture of insider trading and Polymarket gambling. Under such conditions, paranoia works as a way out, a psychic salve for the citizen who all his life has believed the state to consist of a bright and noble set of ideas, only to discover that it is in fact run by flawed, greedy people. Its true function, therefore, might well be a good deal less radical than its sufferers would like to admit: the more time you spend looking for government subverters in the local Jesuit mission or masonic lodge, the less time you spend looking in the lobbying industry, or big business, or the institutions of government themselves.

Anthropologists have been making this kind of argument for decades. When an ethnographer glosses, say, vampire panics in Malawi as an example of a culture reckoning with its colonial past, or South African zombie scares as a response to globalization, scarcely anyone raises an eyebrow. But for some reason, the lavishly funded debunking institutions in contemporary media — BBC Verify, the Stanford Internet Observatory, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab — seem incapable of applying the same logic to Western societies. They just keep on checking isolated fact after isolated fact, maintaining the steady burble about “fostering transparency” and “countering disinformation” that is expected of them. They are, in short, just like Hofstadter, spending so much time crowing about the conspiracy theorist’s total lack of epistemic reasons for his beliefs that they fail to mention his abundance of causal ones.

Perhaps the real lesson in all this is that the best political and sociological thinking always has a whiff of conspiracy theory to it. After all, to understand the world, you have to subject it to an immense simplification; you have, like the paranoiac, to come up with totalizing metaphors that you believe capture vast, sprawling processes — whether “capitalism” or “patriarchy” or “modernity” or “globalization”. Indeed, you don’t have to be a sociologist to suspect that part of the reason why a lot of stolid, dependable media institutions are suffering a collapse in trust — despite the millions they have poured into their in-house debunking commissions — is that they have failed to make such leaps of interpretative simplification. There really are deep structural explanations for the latest inner-city stabbing, the latest riot, the latest bomb detonated in a distant, sun-baked part of the world, but you would be hard pressed to find them grappled with satisfactorily on the BBC. And if there is one thing The Paranoid Style in American Politics really does prove beyond all reasonable doubt, it is that the public’s conspiratorial imagination cannot be switched off by complacent talk of “fact-checking” and “debunking”. When an entire media class neglects the biggest issues of its day, some people cannot help but posit something vast and shadowy behind it, nudging the tiller, pulling the strings.

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