The modern right wing ... feels dispossessed

Glenn Beck and the paranoid style: 

"The modern right wing ... feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power."

The above passage could fittingly be used to describe the character of today's American right. One need only listen to Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) lash out at ACORN's corrupting influence on the census, or Rush Limbaugh claim that the "socialist" Obama is a "puppet" of the United Nations. It was, however, written in 1964 by historian Richard Hofstadter as part of his iconic essay for Harper's Magazine titled "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." Long before ACORN was founded, back when Bachmann and Limbaugh were still in grade school, the American right was practicing this "paranoid style" to great effect, discovering communist monsters hiding under every bed and linking American presidents and Cabinet officials to the great communist conspiracy.

And though the Soviet Union has long since disintegrated, the paranoid style has endured. It found a new voice in talk radio and right-wing activism. It also found a new champion who, better than anyone else, emulates and outright replicates the conspiracy-laden rhetoric from 45 years ago -- Fox News' Glenn Beck. In his rapid rise from morning zoo DJ to the frantic Paul-Revere-meets-Don-Quixote voice of modern conservatism, Beck has crafted a rhetorical style that is every bit as conspiratorial and irrational as the '60s-era right-wing firebrands who inspired the political movement he now leads.

(To be clear, no one is saying that Beck or anyone else suffers from a mental disorder. As Hofstadter wrote, it's not a state of mind that's under examination, but rather it "is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant." Beck, however, has compared himself to mathematician John Forbes Nash, who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia.)

Posted via email from Jim Nichols