I was browsing reactions on Breitbart.com to the Merrick Garland SCOTUS nomination when I came across the following comment:
the Democrats and Republicans are now controlled by the same people....The Bilderberg Group is a conglomerate of the World's most powerful and dangerous men....Rothschild, Soros, Rockefeller, Bloomberg, Getty, Carnegie, etc...These men own all of the world's banks and oil...and collectively have trillions of dollars of worth...it was this group that recently met off the coast of Georgia to devise a plan to derail Donald Trump's campaign...and they came up with a solution, as "leaked" by John Boehner today...They keep Kasich in the race to force a contested convention, and then "they" install Paul Ryan as their nominee, who WILL be the next President of the United States. As powerful as Trump is, he cannot compete with this evil...they are the one's that pull Obama's, Merkle's, etc. strings....and they never stop until they get what they want as evidenced by our GOPe's willingness to go along with anything that Obama says.
I don’t mean to suggest this perspective is so widely held, but it is fascinating nonetheless. This kind of overheated conspiracist thinking is an exact rehash of the sentiments discussed by Richard Hofstadter in his famous 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” published in Harper’s Magazine and available here.
The main point of Hofstadter’s piece, which was written at the time of the Goldwater insurgency, is that there is nothing new about the angry, conspiracist sentiment in American politics.
In the history of the United States one find it, for example, in the anti-Masonic movement, the nativist and anti-Catholic movement, in certain spokesmen of abolitionism who regarded the United States as being in the grip of a slaveholders’ conspiracy, in many alarmists about the Mormons, in some Greenback and Populist writers who constructed a great conspiracy of international bankers, in the exposure of a munitions makers’ conspiracy of World War I, in the popular left-wing press, in the contemporary American right wing, and on both sides of the race controversy today, among White Citizens’ Councils and Black Muslims.
Indeed the paranoid style seems to be virtually a permanent part of the American political landscape.
It’s worth taking a minute to enjoy Hofstadter’s eloquent prose in the context of our current political battle. If the following description doesn’t apply perfectly to either Ted Cruz or Donald Trump, it certainly applies to many of their followers. This is the wellspring of angry sentiment that they both tap:
As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.
Some of the dots with regard to Donald Trump and this paranoid style are fascinating to connect. We learned from an article in Tuesday’s NYT about the disaster that was the 1924 Democratic Convention. It lasted 16 days and required 103 ballots to select a candidate, mainly because one major candidate was backed by the Ku Klux Klan and was running on a platform based on religious and racial bigotry.
In 1924, there were fistfights in the aisles and roosters released in the galleys; the police were called to break up the rumbles. Tammany backed the candidacy of Gov. Alfred E. Smith of New York, a Roman Catholic, reviled by the Klan for his religion and his stature as a champion of the newest Americans, and by “dry” Democrats for his opposition to Prohibition. The candidate of the Klan, and many other Democrats, was a California lawyer, William G. McAdoo, the son-in-law of former President Woodrow Wilson.
Additionally, we learned back in September that Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump, was arrested in 1927, just three years after this convention, in connection with “a massive brawl between KKK members and police at a 1927 Memorial Day parade in NYC.” Of course, Donald Trump refuses to confirm or deny, but it seems likely that his father was a follower of the Klan in his youth.
So, when you see Donald Trump stoking up these nativist, paranoid sentiments among his followers, realize that he didn’t devise this all on his own. It is in fact a legacy from his family that he learned at his father’s knee. You can stretch a line directly between Donald Trump and the paranoid fantasies of the Ku Klux Klan that held such sway in the 1920s. No wonder Trump was slow to condemn an endorsement by the Klan. It’s a family tradition.