Paranoid politics

The politics professor Matthew Goodwin made an interesting observation on Twitter this week. He pointed out that many of the characteristics of the ‘paranoid style’ in American politics — a phrase coined by Richard Hofstadter to describe right-wing populists such as Barry Goldwater — apply to left-wing anti-Brexit campaigners. They are convinced that the 2016 referendum result was due to the machinations of sinister data-mining companies, Kremlin bot factories and Vladimir Putin.

I reread Hofstadter’s 1964 essay and the parallels are striking. The paranoid style is characterised by ‘-heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy’, all of which were on view this week, with Gordon Brown accusing the Brexit party of being funded by sinister foreign forces. The ‘evidence’ for this is almost laughably threadbare. Donations of under £500 to the party are supposed to be in sterling, but it’s technically possible for foreign donors to convert their currency into sterling via PayPal (true of every political party, including Change UK). Nevertheless, the Electoral Commission visited Brexit party headquarters to investigate.

Hofstadter contrasts the paranoia of 19th-century populist movements, which saw in Jews, Catholics and Free-masons an external threat that had to be repelled to preserve the American way of life, with the fabulist claims of Joseph McCarthy, who believed malign foreign forces had embedded themselves in powerful institutions and had to be expelled. This more recent manifestation of the paranoid style is fuelled by a sense of ‘dispossession’, of ‘powerlessness’ in a section of American society. ‘America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and prevent the final destructive act of subversion,’ he writes.

That perfectly captures the style of bug-eyed Remainiacs such as A.C.