Being interested in the topic, and so having bought and perused the book, last night I went to see Andrew Burt, author of American Hysteria: The Untold Story of Mass Political Extremism in the United States, speak at our local book store. I must say Burt seems to be presenting a very strange, Panglossian thesis. He take a few examples from American history and current events – paranoia about the Illuminati, the Masons, the Red Scare circa 1919, McCarthyism, and the Anti-Sharia Laws being enacted by bigots around the nation today – traces their rise and supposed fall, and concludes essentially, ‘Hey Americans are sometimes big sillies, but the truth outs, sunlight disinfects, the hysteria gets discredited, and America goes on in its exceptional way.” Ideally, in Burt’s marchenhäft telling, this happens when some Quixotic white man comes up to Capitol Hill and gives the lie, .e.g. ‘Senator McCarthy, have you no sense of decency, at long last?’ The problem is that this is historically and currently bullshit.
Burt says he deliberately narrowed his scope in the service of narrative and readability (Just like Bill O’Reilly does in his books.), but it seems to me a great deal of truth got left on the cutting room floor. For one thing, none of his hysterias is so neatly self-contained or so extinct as he likes to make out. There are still plenty of Anti-Illuminati and Mason-hating cranks out there (check the internet, check the radio ravings of your more rural Bible thumpers), and their delusions are almost invariably bundled up with other more directly exploitable right-wing, racist, and xenophobic delusions. More importantly, he sometimes completely misses the case by pretending, for instance, that McCarthyism died with its namesake. McCarthyism’s latent pathology drove us into the Vietnam war – LBJ is on tape bemoaning his need to escalate lest he be crucified at the polls for being “soft on Communism” – killing millions of Asians and at least 58,000 Americans.
Burt seems proverbially ostrich-like in his readiness to ignore how such hysterias, far from being cured by the cathartic moments, go on to fester and deform American politics and policies. Cases that don’t fit his narrative he simply deems to be outside his definition of hysteria. One must wonder how, for instance, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan doesn’t qualify. Why doesn’t the war on drugs – spawned by racism, xenophobia and ‘Reefer Madness’? Why not the crusade to roll back reproductive freedom, with its various terror tactics including murders and bombings? Why doesn’t the war in Iraq – where on ludicrous and transparent pretexts we essentially lynched the wrong country because we needed a scapegoat? These things for some reason don’t blip his radar. Could these omissions be indicative of carefully closeted reactionary sympathies?
Burt said a truly astonishing thing last night, in answer to a question about prohibition of Sharia law. He, a Yale law graduate preparing to take the bar, assured the crowd that ‘American secular law is under no threat of religious encroachment.’ I literally called bullshit on that one – and suffered the glares of some folks who were just enjoying storytime. Later, somebody politely asked Burt to defend this assertion and he did, lamely, approving of the way ‘we elect people to represent our beliefs, and that’s a good thing.’ Fine with him then if the “Christian” majority gets to legislate old time religion for the rest of us. Maybe he skipped Establishment Clause class to research the Illuminati.
One so oblivious to the Roy Moores of today, to the dogmatic pseudo-originalist agendas of Scalia, Alito, Thomas (and countless other right-wing federal judges), to the Hobby Lobby decision and the innumerable ways religious organizations now pervert policy and tap into the treasury while militating for rightwing mouthpieces, must be a partisan with them, either that or suffering from his own form of hysterical blindness. American Hysteria is a highly readable but ultimately smug and facile view of a very dangerous, increasingly recurrent phenomenon.