Paranoid Style In American Politics Research Articles

Creating Conspiracy Beliefs: How Our Thoughts Are Shaped

Creating Conspiracy Beliefs: How Our Thoughts Are Shaped

Henrik Ibsen and Conspiracy Thinking: The Case of Peer Gynt

Henrik Ibsen and Conspiracy Thinking: The Case of <i>Peer Gynt</i>

Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Uncollected Essays 1956-1965, edited by Sean Wilentz

Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Uncollected Essays 1956-1965, edited by Sean Wilentz

Theoretical typology of deceptive content (Conspiracy Theories)

Theoretical typology of deceptive content (Conspiracy Theories)

Paranoid Politics: An Introduction

Paranoid Politics:An Introduction Frida Beckman (bio) and Jeffrey R. Di Leo (bio) Is there a paranoid style of the 21st century? Or should we talk about the "paranoid styles" of the 21st century? Or is the term "paranoia" a distraction in the context, one that obscures the formidable force and passionate proliferation of conspiracy theories in our contemporaneity? One thing is certain—much has changed since Richard Hofstadter held his lecture at Oxford in 1963 and subsequently published what would become a seminal essay: "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" in Harper's Magazine in 1964. Across the second half of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st, we have seen the supposed end of history and of grand narratives, the triumphs of neoliberalism, and the fragmentation, or, some would even say disintegration, of the public sphere. We have also seen the gradual dispersion and decline of a disciplinary society, with identifiable and more national sources of power, and the intensification of societies of control and security that have included not only more intricate modes of surveillance, but also the multiplication and dissemination of sources and features of power. This makes where we are now rather different from the time at which Hofstadter wrote his essay. Then it was easier, supposedly, not just to discern sources and organizations of power, but also to distinguish the perceived enemy, whether it bided its time in the big country in the east or the smaller island nation down south or infiltrated the cultural, academic, and entertainment industries or hid under your bed within the U.S. borders. The developments over the past half a century or so have confounded perceptions of identity and agency both of ourselves and of our supposed enemies. Who has power? Where is power? How can we resist it? Can we even claim to be able to position ourselves as separate from it? And who or what is threatening that autonomy, if we still have it? Who is the enemy? Because enemies Americans must have, at least if we accede to Hofstadter's historicization of the U.S. as haunted, from its very conception, by various conspiracies against the American way of life (2008, 19). Like control and security, enemies seem to proliferate, effectively invented and/or reinforced by conspiracy theories spinning ever expanding nets and constructing ostensibly concrete threats around attitudes to Muslims, [End Page 9] Mexicans, Jews, elites, leftists and so on and so forth. It is as if conspiracy theories have taken the place of grand narratives, salvaging disoriented subjects with die-hard conceptions of autonomous selves by giving them purpose and direction, an antagonistic form and shape consolidated via that which it pushes against. Although both phenomena have been around for a very long time, both "paranoia" and "conspiracy theory" are concepts that have been used abundantly in our ongoing diagnosis of the present. The two are clearly interlinked, a paranoid approach to how "everything is connected" frequently, and quite logically, leading to a more or less intricate weaving of conspiracy theories. But they are not the same. Paranoia as a term has a long history emerging initially in Greek literature and beginning to receive its more medical connotations in the 17th century. It thus gradually becomes a clinical term and although the definitions, and more remarkably, the perceived causes, for paranoia have varied over time (there are probably not many today who believe, as did Freud, that the trigger is a repressed homosexuality, perhaps because there are not that many who, like the famous Judge Schreber, believe that their dreams of being penetrated "as a woman" is caused by experiments on them by doctors and that they have been especially chosen by God), it has continued to center around an understanding of the paranoid subject as having delusions of personal persecution and grandeur. Where paranoia as a term stems etymologically from Greek "para" and "nous"—being "beside" the "mind,"—"conspiracy" harks back to the Latin "conspīrāre"—"to breathe together." In its extended conception, this breathing together is "to accord, harmonize, agree, combine or unite in purpose, plot mischief together secretly" (OED 1989), and...

The Melodramatic Mode in American Politics and Other Varieties of Narrative Suspicion

The Melodramatic Mode in American Politics and Other Varieties of Narrative Suspicion Timothy Melley (bio) No consideration of paranoia or conspiracy theory can proceed these days without at least a nod to Richard Hofstadter. Hofstadter's 1964 "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" is among the most influential essays ever on the American political imagination, and it is significantly responsible for much contemporary thinking about conspiracy theory. There is, of course, nothing new about conspiracism, and it was in fact Karl Popper who introduced the contemporary notion of "conspiracy theory" in 1945.1 Yet Hofstadter's essay popularized the idea that conspiracy theory is a distinct, recognizable, and dismissible category of thinking with outsized effects on national political life. The paranoid style, he argued, has a "long and varied history," simmering on the margins of American society from the beginning and occasionally flaring into decisive political movements (1965a, 3). Its core epistemological error is the tendency to see "a 'vast' or 'gigantic' conspiracy as the motive force in historical events" (25, 29). It is also characterized by a sense of persecution, the attribution of malevolent intentions to large organizations, and the deployment of "overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic" rhetoric (4). While the paranoid style is an expression of "distorted judgment" and "political pathology," it is not a symptom of true mental illness. Whereas clinically paranoid individuals fear plots against themselves, practitioners of the paranoid political style descry threats against "a nation, a culture, or a way of life" affecting millions (4). The age of Donald Trump seems an important time to reexamine Hofstadter's concept. Trump has frequently been seen as the avatar of a [End Page 57] new "post-truth era" and a "golden age of conspiracy theory."2 He is a stunning example of the paranoid style. His singular ability to wed the nostalgic politics of national grievance to a narrative of personal suffering at the hands of vicious political enemies, "deep state" traitors, and malevolent journalists propelled his unlikely rise to conspiracy theorist-in-chief. Still, if Trumpism marks a high point in the annals of paranoid politics, it is important to recall that Hofstadter was writing amid his own "post-truth" crisis. After a decade of anti-communist demagoguery from Joseph McCarthy and others, Hofstadter was confronting the disturbing rise of Barry Goldwater. "The Paranoid Style" connected the rhetoric of such Cold War "pseudo-conservatives" to a much older tradition of paranoid politics in order to confront the frustrating persistence and appeal of populist demonology in the U.S. The most important legacy of Hofstadter's essay is the idea that conspiracy theory is an easily recognized and dismissed type of political speech, marked by symptomatic errors of interpretation and understood chiefly as a result of faulty cognition—a "crippled epistemology," to use the term of Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule (2008, 675). This view continues to inform most scholarly and popular thinking about conspiracy theory, but it has also troubled some critics.3 For one thing, "The Paranoid Style" focuses exclusively on conservative and American examples. For another, it paints the paranoid style as a marginal, rather than central, aspect of American politics. Third, and most important, Hofstadter pathologizes the suspicion of conspiracy without acknowledging that something akin to paranoid suspicion might actually help discern the nature of modern political and economic power. Over the past two decades, numerous scholars, including myself, have asked whether the imagination of concealed structures and intentions may be a reasonable, even salutary, response to the conditions of knowledge in contemporary democracy.4 These inquiries have been intensified by the weaponization of the phrase "conspiracy theory," which is often used to dismiss claims as patently absurd and unworthy of serious consideration. The debate over Hofstadter's concept has mostly emphasized its epistemological rather than narratological framework—acknowledging the power of his category while challenging the confident assumption that paranoid interpretation can easily be distinguished from its rational counterparts. But what if Hofstadter's essay is, in the end, not primarily about paranoia? What happens if we take Hofstadter's term "style" more literally and attend to the formal dimensions of his major examples? What happens, in short, if we...

American Literature and the Long Downturn: Neoliberal Apocalypse by Dan Sinykin

Reviewed by: American Literature and the Long Downturn: Neoliberal Apocalypse by Dan Sinykin Mitchum Huehls SINYKIN, DAN. American Literature and the Long Downturn: Neoliberal Apocalypse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 185 pp. $65.00 hardcover. In 1964, Richard Hofstadter observed in his influential essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” that “the paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values.” For Hofstadter, the apocalyptic fever dreams of American politics stretch from the nation’s founding, when fears of Jesuit and Masonic plots ran rampant, to the McCarthyism and John Birch anti-communism of his mid-century present. Dan Sinykin’s American Literature and the Long Downturn picks up where Hofstadter left off, exploring the heightened apocalypticism of what historian Robert Brenner dubs “the long downturn”: an extended period of economic decline and precarity stretching from the late 1960s to the present that is marked by deindustrialization, wage stagnation, financialization, deregulation, an explosion of public and personal debt, and growing economic inequality. Sinykin views neoliberalism as the “dominant ideology” (9) of the long downturn and “neoliberal apocalypse” as its central “form” (19), a form that he locates in an array of late-twentieth-century writers—James Baldwin, William Luther Pierce, Cormac McCarthy, Leslie Marmon Silko, and David Foster Wallace—who use apocalypticism to offer “imaginary solutions to real world problems” (19). As neoliberalism creates dire material conditions from which there appears to be no escape, an apocalypticism promising “total annihilation” emerges as a “seductive way to respond to a lack of alternative” (10). These formulations reveal a core tension that runs through Sinykin’s analyses. If apocalypticism functions as a “seductive,” “imaginary” solution to lived material inequities and injustices, then it’s clearly not Sinykin’s preferred response. Its capitulation to the perceived inexorability of neoliberalism undermines the pursuit of real-world alternatives and solutions to the long downturn’s many conflicts and crises. On the other hand, Sinykin recognizes that material conditions are in fact quite [End Page 198] dire and even, in some cases, seems sympathetic to the apocalyptic turn his authors make. Given the poverty, racial violence, mass incarceration, widespread addiction, climate change, and resurgent white nationalism that define daily existence, Sinykin understands why we might conclude that the end is nigh, although he would also like us to remember that apocalypse is just a “story” and not “a description of reality” (1). But why would Sinykin write a book about a collection of texts that are doing something that he would rather they not do? Why not write a book about some texts that do better, that don’t succumb to apocalypticism, that get it right? Because, as Sinykin explains, he “remain[s] unconvinced that we should look for successful politics from our literature” (11). So even though the apocalypticism Sinykin identifies in the literature of the long downturn represents a failure of politics, he nevertheless sees it as a very telling failure of politics. Thus, his literary analyses treat apocalypticism symptomatically, using its presence to critique neoliberal America and highlight many of the long downturn’s socio-economic contradictions. Sinykin proceeds chronologically, with the first two chapters exploring the divergent responses that African American and white evangelical authors had to the racial and economic crises of the 1970s. Comparing James Baldwin’s critical but ultimately hopeful The Fire Next Time (1963) to his much more apocalyptic No Name in the Street (1972), Sinykin suggests that Baldwin and his contemporaries embrace apocalypticism once they realize that the racial gains of the Civil Rights Era were meaningless—that Black Americans would remain immiserated and powerless—without a corresponding dismantling of capitalism, a dismantling that for Baldwin was such an impossible dream that it only seemed achievable via apocalypse. Notably, white evangelical novelists such as William Luther Pierce, Pat Robertson, Hal Lindsey, and Tim LaHaye also view capitalism in the long downturn as a decadent and corrupting scourge destined to end in apocalyptic collapse. When that critique of capitalism is combined with a white racial animus that perceives Black racial uplift as an existential threat to white America, however...

Conspiracy, Complicity, Critique

Conspiracy, Complicity, Critique Peter Knight (bio) The coronavirus pandemic and the storming of the Capitol have created a perfect storm of conspiracism, especially visible on social media. Many commentators have returned to Richard Hofstadter's analysis of the "paranoid style in American politics" to make sense of the surge of conspiracy-minded populism and the spread of disinformation. Conspiracism is usually framed as beyond the pale of rational discourse, a symptom and a cause of the delegitimization not only of the media, scientific expertise, and democratic institutions, but also of the very idea of objective truth (see Rosenblum and Muirhead 2019 on the nihilistic tendencies of the "new conspiracism" of post-truth politics). But does Hofstadter's diagnosis of the paranoid style still make sense today, when, for example, President Trump himself was one of the most significant "superspreaders" of misinformation about the coronavirus and the 2020 election (Evanega et al. 2020)? Although Hofstadter acknowledges that the paranoid style is a persistent trait in American politics, he nevertheless insists that it is "the preferred style only of minority movements" (1996, 7). Hofstadter, like other consensus historians and sociologists in the 1950s and 1960s, wanted to explain but also to stigmatize what they regarded as mass political delusions (see Butter 2014; Thalmann 2019). In effect, they wanted to diagnose but also quarantine conspiracism as a dangerous tendency, to put clear water between conspiracy thinking and more respectable ways of making sense of historical causality. Either you believe that nothing happens by accident, that nothing is as it seems, and that everything is connected (Barkun 2013), or you think that way of understanding historical causation and collective agency is a delusional fantasy. In contrast, this essay will explore the territory between conspiracy and not-conspiracy, focusing on notions such as collusion, complicity, and critique, which are neither the same as conspiracy, nor simply its opposites. The question is whether it is possible, under conditions of neoliberalism that make it harder than ever to trace lines of corporate and governmental accountability, to talk about problems of collective action and occluded power without lapsing into a conspiracy theory. Only by recognizing the affinities and disavowals between the rational mainstream and its marginalized, irrational counterparts can we begin to understand the seductive appeal and expressive functions of conspiracy theory as an act of communal political [End Page 197] identification, rather than merely a "crippled epistemology" (Sunstein and Vermeule 2009, 211) whose mistaken propositions can be combatted through fact-checking corrections. To do so, I'll first sketch out cock-up, complexity, and contingency theories, before going on to consider how conspiracy theories constitute both a distorted critique of neoliberalism, while at the same time also distracting and diverting their believers from more concerted forms of political opposition. The Conspiracy Theory of Society What is the opposite of a conspiracy theory? One common answer is what might be termed contingency theory, the assumption that there is no underlying plan or meaning to history. Another—closely aligned—possibility is the cock-up theory (as it is termed in the British colloquialism; see McKenzie-McHarg and Fredheim 2017), the notion that things rarely go to plan, often as a result of incompetence rather than intention. A third, related option is complexity theory, the idea that order emerges spontaneously out of a complex system without there being anyone behind the scenes secretly in command. All three answers assume that there is a clear divide between conspiracy theory and its opposites, with conspiracy theory viewed as an unsophisticated, inaccurate, and harmful mode of thought. Although the expression "conspiracy theory" had been used from time to time in the late nineteenth century, Karl Popper provided the first explicit definition of the phenomenon and its opposites (Thalmann 2019; McKenzie-McHarg 2020). He began to formulate what he called "the conspiracy theory of society" (2002, 94; his italics) in two lectures delivered in the late 1940s, before working this argument into the American edition of the second volume of The Open Society and Its Enemies in 1950. It is "the view that an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of the men or groups who are interested in the occurrence...

The Paranoid Style in American Politics Revisited: An Ideological Asymmetry in Conspiratorial Thinking

It is often claimed that conspiracy theories are endorsed with the same level of intensity across the left‐right ideological spectrum. But do liberals and conservatives in the United States embrace conspiratorial thinking to an equivalent degree? There are important historical, philosophical, and scientific reasons dating back to Richard Hofstadter's book The Paranoid Style in American Politics to doubt this claim. In four large studies of U.S. adults (total N = 5049)—including national samples—we investigated the relationship between political ideology, measured in both symbolic and operational terms, and conspiratorial thinking in general. Results reveal that conservatives in the United States were not only more likely than liberals to endorse specific conspiracy theories, but they were also more likely to espouse conspiratorial worldviews in general (r = .27, 95% CI: .24, .30). Importantly, extreme conservatives were significantly more likely to engage in conspiratorial thinking than extreme liberals (Hedges' g = .77, SE = .07, p &lt; .001). The relationship between ideology and conspiratorial thinking was mediated by a strong distrust of officialdom and paranoid ideation, both of which were higher among conservatives, consistent with Hofstadter's account of the paranoid style in American politics.

Paradoxes of white moral experience

Paradoxes of white moral experience

Donald Trump and the Return of the Paranoid Style

AbstractHere, I examine Donald Trump';s use of what historian Richard Hofstadter has called the paranoid style in American politics, a style that galvanizes audiences by describing how malign forces are working behind the scenes to subvert their will. Although many observers see that style as Trump's own, scholars have not yet tracked its manifestations empirically and systematically. Using DICTION software, I examined a large number of political documents to track Trump's uses of this style. I find that (1) Trump used the paranoid style considerably more often than prior presidential candidates between 1948 and the present; (2) in doing so, he tapped into a discourse already present among citizen‐activists; and (3) encounters with the press were especially likely to draw forth such remarks from the nation's forty‐fifth president. That Trump has depended heavily on the paranoid style and that he has been successful doing so raises painful questions for the American people, especially as nationalist tendencies surface with greater regularity in the United States and in other Western democracies as well.

The Conspiracist Strategy: Lessons from American Alternative Health Promotions

Hofstadter's classic essay Paranoid Style in American Politics opened a floodgate of analyses of fear and conspiracy theories in American culture. The present paper adds to those studies by providing a cultural interpretation of commercials for alternative cures. It shows that publishers of such commercials often use a strategy in two interrelated steps. They first raise fears of government collusion with 'Big Pharma.' They then call citizens-cum-patients to protect their liberties from hidden machinations by buying 'hidden' or 'censured' cures. While doing so they employ a series of means to seem professional yet persecuted; scientific though in clandestine. Their graphics and apocalyptic narratives necessitate patients to take swift actions. By manipulating fears and conspiratorial suspicions, entrepreneurs promise suffering 'patriots' that by choosing their alternative cures they would win back their liberty and health. The paper discusses the general theoretical implications for studying conspiracy theories while calling for a comparative approach for observing local habitual predispositions on the one hand, and the culturally adapted conspiracist strategies for manipulating them, on the other hand. In contemporary America, for example, politicians and media outlets employ conspiracist strategies to raise fears from the 'deep state.' They succeed doing so because those conspiracist strategies and the suspicious habitus they manipulate spring from the same democratic source.

PERVERTS TO ROME: PROTESTANT GENDER ROLES AND THE ABJECTION OF CATHOLICISM

“Anti-Catholicism has always beenthe pornography of the Puritan,” noticed Richard Hofstadter in his famous essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (21). This observation, made in the 1960s, draws upon centuries-old tradition of casting Catholics in the role of sexual perverts, not only in American politics but also in British politics and culture. Through the study of anti-Catholic Victorian writing we can analyse the particular crux embodied in Hofstadter's pithy remark: a mixture of moral superiority combined with prurient enjoyment of the described practices it purports to condemn. This part of my study is dedicated to the Victorian novel and its depictions of Catholic sexuality, which, as the novelists often suggested, was either stifled and warped or rampant, but either way it transgressed the boundaries delineated by the Protestant family ideal. It also discusses Victorian gender roles and the ways in which Catholicism was allegedly undermining them.

Encoding the paranoid style in American politics: “anti-establishment” discourse and power in contemporary spin

ABSTRACTThe term “anti-establishment” has witnessed a revealing rise in recent American political discourse. Combining textual analysis of news coverage and speeches with in-depth interviews with dozens of consultants involved in the encoding of mediated political communication, this research analyzes and critiques its deployment and significance in Republican campaign messaging. Mapping the contours of this rhetorical strategy, a typology of four dimensions of tension emerges: insurrection versus order; populism versus insider power; real America versus elitism; and purity versus compromise. As an exercise in critical political communication, the argument concludes that “anti-establishment” rhetoric seeks to stoke and co-opt resentment while effacing powerful, privileged economic interests.

The Revival of Reinhold Niebuhr: A Foreign Policy Fable

A curious feature of the present political moment in the United States is the revival of two Cold War intellectual figures, Reinhold Niebuhr and Richard Hofstadter. The Hofstadter revival is understandable, pegged in large part to the rise of the Tea Party movement and the effort to comprehend its enraged politics of restoration, the fevered demand to “take our country back.” The Tea Party’s grassroots conservative populist concerns and style hark back to the earlier right-wing movements coupled to Joseph McCarthy and Barry Goldwater, about which Hofstadter (1965) composed his celebrated theory of “the paranoid style in American politics.” How the paranoid style helps explain the Tea Party lay at the roots of the Hofstadter revival. I have written about this in a recently published book and will not dwell on it in this essay (Horwitz 2013). The Niebuhr revival is more complicated—and perhaps more consequential. It reflects the use—or misuse—of the presumed lessons of the Cold War in the justification of America’s current war on terror. Niebuhr’s tough-minded foreign policy realism, lauded in the day as “hardheaded” or “hard-boiled” and extolled for helping win the Cold War, has been resurrected uncritically by many policy makers and commentators since September 11 in an effort to legitimize the war on terror. This article examines Niebuhr, his restoration, and the foreign policy fable of unproblematic Cold War triumph that underlies the revival

The paranoid style in politics

In American politics, the National Rifle Association (NRA) has asserted itself as a leading voice in the gun rights movement. The strident rhetoric emanating from the NRA leadership impacts the development of a broader discourse in American public life over gun rights — a discourse of Second Amendment absolutism — that articulates a set of assumptions and explanations in defense of an absolutist stance against gun regulation in any form. This paper examines the ideologies that underlie this absolutist discourse and the identities those ideologies help to construct. In particular, the absolutist discourse is analyzed through the lens of what historian Richard Hofstadter termed “the paranoid style in American politics.” The aim is to isolate and expose the extremist elements of this discourse, which polarize political debate and hinder the democratic process.

The Paranoid Style Revisited: Pseudo‐Conservatism in the 21st Century

AbstractFifty years ago, the Pulitzer Prize‐winning historian Richard Hofstadter published the seminal essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” In this and related works he examined the rhetoric animating the extreme right‐wing of the country's electorate. In this article I revisit Hofstadter's claims regarding the marginalization of the paranoid style and its connection to status‐based politics. A review of the most popular “pseudo‐conservative” commentators, survey data, the rise of the Tea Party, and the intransigence of the present day Republican Party suggests that a worldview that was once extreme has now become “mainstreme” within the political culture.

Epistemologies of State, Epistemologies of Text. A review of Timothy Melley, The Covert Sphere : Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State

Epistemologies of State, Epistemologies of Text. A review of Timothy Melley, The Covert Sphere:Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State Aaron Colton (bio) Melley, Timothy. The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2012. Richard J. Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (1952) provides the classic framework for any scholarly discussion of conspiracy and paranoia in the United States. In his essay, Hofstadter reminds us of the self-assured heroism implicit in the conspiratorial mindset—how the paranoiac understands conspiracy solely in “apocalyptic terms,” and how he “traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds … manning the barricades of civilization” (29-30). Scholarship on conspiracy is thus an exceptionally tone-sensitive genre. Write too modestly and the argument will fail to catch; write too strongly and you risk enacting the same paranoia you seek to gauge. Restraint can make for unconvincing prose, but even worse, discernibly paranoid criticism can end up, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has remarked, “blotting out any sense of the possibility of alternative ways of understanding or things to understand” (131). In The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State (2012), Timothy Melley manages these demands deftly. The conspiracy theorist, as Hofstadter notes, aims toward the reduction of global systems into sinister, coherent plots managed by a handful of individuals “not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history” (32). Melley, however, is more interested in explicating discursive processes than in pinning major cultural and political developments on a few persons or sources; he defines “the covert sphere” as “a cultural imaginary shaped by both institutional secrecy and public fascination with the secret work of the state” (5). Melley contends that the US government’s efforts to silence or censor journalism after WWII implicitly authorized only select, speculative media—postmodern fiction, in large part—to probe the covert action of the state. This, however, would begin a vicious feedback loop. While writers such as Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood, Robert Coover, Tim O’Brien, Joan Didion, and E.L Doctorow would deploy “postmodern epistemological skepticism” to critique state secrecy (10), so too would the Cold War US state erect comparable “epistemological barriers to knowing the work of the state” (105). By investing his prose in this intricate, two-way relationship between state and text—rather than proposing a model of cultural and social development engineered only from highest government offices—Melley effectively evades the self-aggrandizing, me-against-the-world stereotype of thinkers involved in conspiracy theories. Claims that could easily come off as conspiratorial—for instance, that “geopolitical melodramas” such as Fox’s 24 underlie the twenty-first century discourse on national security (219)—are rendered reasonable and compelling. Readers hardly suspect the author as paranoid himself. Melley’s text seamlessly weaves together decades of American studies scholarship on the Cold War and its sociological and aesthetic repercussions. In the context of current scholarship, one might think of The Covert Sphere as a companion to and even an expansion of Daniel Grausam’s On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War (2011), which investigates what exactly the fictional narrative can and cannot articulate in the context of mutually assured destruction. Comparatively, one can think of The Covert Sphere as an institutional parallel to Tobin Siebers’s Cold War Criticism and the Politics of Skepticism (1993), an analysis of the ways that theorists (as opposed to novelists) offer a cult of personality and power over knowledge in response to a world that could, at any given moment, erupt into nuclear warfare. Melley’s work follows another acclaimed historicization of fiction in the Cold War era, Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2009), which chronicles the advent of American MFA programs in the mid- to late-twentieth century. While McGurl speaks mainly to the ways in which the Cold War allowed universities to both philosophically and financially seize on “the linked values of fictionality and creativity” and thus mark their investment in “vivacious American individualism” (McGurl 265), Melley sketches the overarching, epistemological structures that govern such transactions. Indeed, one of the most admirable features of Melley’s...

A Political Biography of John Toland by Michael Brown

Reviewed by: A Political Biography of John Toland by Michael Brown Al Coppola Michael Brown. A Political Biography of John Toland. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011. Pp. viii + 196. £60; $99. Say what you will about John Toland, you have to love a sonofabitch who, racked with pain and retching on his deathbed at 52, could find the strength to write Physic without Physicians “by fits and starts in [his] intervals of up-sitting.” A scalding indictment of the medical establishment’s unwarranted authority, it attacks the obfuscations, pretensions and malfeasance that prop up a profession whose art, he says, is “founded in darkness and improved by murder.” This is just the kind of anecdote we love to get in a biography: a little local color, a glimpse into the mind of a literary figure who might otherwise be all too easily collapsed into the sum of a few influential ideas in a few influential works. The petty resentments that sustain a deathbed curmudgeon, the preoccupations of a great writer’s obscure ephemera—these are the details that put flesh on the bone of biography. But to Mr. Brown’s credit, this anecdote (which leads off his fine, provocative biography) serves as so much more. The dying Toland’s grousing about doctors is in fact a key to the corpus of this famous, and famously mercurial and ambiguous, freethinker. Physic without Physicians (1722), as much as his notorious Christianity not Mysterious (1696), betrays a fundamental and thoroughgoing distrust of clerisy, whether religious, political, or professional, and the means by which insiders consolidate their power by obscuring and perverting plain truths. Indeed, Mr. Brown is at pains in this political biography to integrate the variety and profusion of Toland’s oeuvre and life under the shelter of a few simple and largely persuasive ideas. As he writes in the polemical introduction (that is itself worth the book’s price), “Toland conceptualized the world in terms of parties and networks, not social groups and economic transformation. These parties often hid their agendas and operations from public view; knowledge elites emerged consisting of those in the know, whose interests lay in the perpetuating of an infrastructure of power and keeping the public in the dark about the actual causes of the events that shaped their lives. Extending this interpretation across society from the church to the state, Toland became a conspiracy theorist.” This is something like a Tin-Foil-Hat Enlightenment: after all, “conspiracy theorist” is an anachronistic label that one associates with angry bloggers in basement bunkers. As a matter of fact, Brown embraces the anachronism of his approach, drawing his chief theoretical framework from Richard Hofstadter’s study of Mc-Carthyism, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (1964). This anachronism proves strikingly useful for making sense of the whole of Toland’s oeuvre, and not [End Page 74] just the chief philosophical and theological works, the caustic wit and slippery rhetoric of which have saved them from obscurity. Toland’s life was “shaped by a commitment to overthrow the conspiracy he identified at play within the church, and thus to complete the political revolution he associated with the Williamite War by extending it to spiritual affairs. . . . Toland did much to promulgate the idea that politics is structured by power, self-interest and deceit. His body of work constitutes a conspiracy theory concerning the corruption of liberty by the malevolent forces of arbitrary government and spiritual orthodoxy.” Mr. Brown persuasively argues that To-land has been wrongly embraced as a “post-modern figure” by recent critics like Justin Champion and Stephen Daniel, whom he tasks for recasting Toland as a proto-post-structuralist, a “1960’s French intellectual, playful, ironic, erudite, and elusive.” Mr. Brown’s biography pays just as much attention to Toland’s extensive pamphleteering and his remarkably energetic application to the life of the courtier, the diplomat, and perhaps even the spy, a career that, at every turn, Mr. Brown shows to be animated by a signature suspicion of cabals and behind-the-scenes manipulation. This is, after all, a political biography. No one who committed himself so fully to eighteenth-century politics, and no one who took...

“Catnip for Cranks”: Depictions of Canadian Threat in US Conservative News Commentary

This article examines how conservative television news commentary in the United States portrayed Canada in the years following 9/11. It draws on Richard Hofstadter’s formulation of the paranoid style in American politics for insight into the rhetoric used by these commentators. Adopting a critical geopolitics perspective to shed new light on Canadian–American relations, the article explores how conservative pundits framed Canada in the context of the global war on terror and portrayed the country as a threat to US security. It examines how this threatening version of Canada was enabled by a complementary set of depictions that scripted the country as having embraced an extreme and dangerous form of liberalism. It concludes by showing how the intertwining of these notions of threat and liberalism in Canada provided pundits with an accessible script for discrediting liberal perspectives in the US and championing a “return” to a conservative American identity as essential for winning the war on terror.