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Inside the Mind of the Conspiracy Theorist
It is hard to write stuff that stays fresh, and that’s what makes Richard Hofstalder’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics, written in 1964, so impressive. We live, as everyone knows, in what feels like a high point of mainstream conspiracy theory in the United States. There’s nothing you can read today that better will describes the aesthetic or the distinct mindset of those who believe our country is about to be taken away from us, by them. The essay is, in its way, a tour of the mind of the conspiracy theorist.
Hofstadler, a professor of history at Columbia University, used the word “paranoid” because he felt “no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.” But the essay was ultimately about the lasting power of the belief that some sinister cabal is in the process of taking over America, and the political purposes to which idea has been put. “The central image” wrote Hofstandler “is that of a vast and sinister conspiracy, a gigantic and yet subtle machinery set in motion to undermine and destroy a way of life.” Its adherents are taught to feel dispossessed. Their country “has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try and repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.”
It is easy to think that the widespread nature of conspiracy theories in our times is a fairly recent development. But The Paranoid Style makes it clear that this is not the case, for American political life has long served “as an arena for uncommonly angry minds.” There were those, in the early 1800s, who thought the Bavarian illuminati were trying to gain control of the country. Others seriously believed in the dangers posed by the Free Masons, and by the 1850s it was the Catholics. Here’s a Texas newspaper in 1855:
“It is a notorious fact that the Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome are at this very moment plotting our destruction and threatening the extinction of our political, civil, and religious institutions. We have the best reasons for believing that corruption has found its way into our Executive Chamber, and that our Executive head is tainted with the infectious venom…
