The paranoid style in world politics

8 May 2010

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Anger, frustration and distrust now pervade modern politics, writes Daniel W. Drezner. How can governments defy the conspiracy theorists and win back faith in democracy?

Polio vaccines in Nigeria are part of a Western plot to make African women infertile. Foreign zombies are replacing indigenous labourers in South Africa. Barack Obama was born in Kenya and is a secret Muslim who hates the United States and wants to institute ‘death panels’ to govern the healthcare system. The United States triggered the earthquake in Haiti to expand America’s imperial reach.

These are just a small slice of the conspiracy theories floating around the global ether of rumour and innuendo. Such theories are hardly a new phenomenon in world politics. Athens fell victim to the politics of rumour and conspiracy during the Peloponnesian war. A century ago, Russian elites published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to suggest that Jews were trying to take over the world — making it easier to label them as the root of all evil in Europe. There is a long and distinguished history of conspiracy-crazed politics in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.

Political paranoia is something of a tradition in the United States. Historian Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, provides the most well-known evocation of this idea. Hofstadter clinically observed the key symptoms: ‘The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he trafficks in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilisation.’ The paranoid style obsesses about power, but is profoundly hostile to those who currently occupy the commanding heights of the power structure.

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