Michael Wolraich's picture

    Persecution Politics: Paranoia Rules the Right

    In early August, I began working on a book to document a growing sense of paranoia among right-wing conservatives. At the time, the media was fairly quiet on the subject. With the exception of liberal blogs (ahem), no one paid much attention to the wild rhetoric of the tea parties and occasional paranoid outbursts from commentators like Rush Limbaugh and politicians like Michelle Bachman. Then Sarah Palin loosed her "death panels" broadside, and the floodgates opened. Health care paranoia spewed from the orifice every conservative media outlet, Lou Dobbs embraced the "birther" conspiracy, Limbaugh raged about Obama's Nazi agenda, Glenn Beck launched a week-long tour de paranoia in which he accused Obama of preparing for a fascho-socialist revolution, and D.C. roiled as rabid conservative activists congregated in the Mall. Suddenly, the mainstream media took notice, and articles about the new "paranoid style" of the American right rolled across major newspapers, magazines, news sites, and talk shows. TIME Magazine even put Glenn Beck's tongue on its cover.

    Now the Democracy Corps, the consulting firm of James Carville and Stan Greenberg, has validated the thesis of my Persecution Politics series: there is a very large, very determined block of conservative voters who have thoroughly embraced paranoid extremism. Based on the results of a series of focus groups, the organization concluded:

    The self-identifying conservative Republicans who make up the base of the Republican Party stand a world apart from the rest of America...First and foremost, these conservative Republican voters believe Obama is deliberately and ruthlessly advancing a ‘secret agenda’ to bankrupt our country and dramatically expand government control over all aspects of our daily lives. They view this effort in sweeping terms, and cast a successful Obama presidency as the destruction of the United States as it was conceived by our founders and developed over the past 200 years.

    These voters "identify themselves as a minority in this country – a minority whose values are mocked and attacked by a liberal media and class of elites." They believe that these elites "are actively working to advance the downfall of the things that matter most to them in their lives – their faith, their families, their country, and their freedom." In short, they believe themselves to "persecuted."

    The sense of persecution, along with egotistical confidence in the validity of their own world view, has fostered an attitude of quasi-religious evangelism. They feel "a responsibility to spread the word, to educate those who do not share their insights, and to take back the country that they love. Their faith in this country and its ideals leave them confident that their numbers will grow, and that they will ultimately defeat Barack Obama and the shadowy forces driving his hidden agenda."

    Their hero, of course, is Paranoiac-in-Chief, Glenn Beck "They believe he embodies the best of conservative media – determination to unearth the stories the liberal media tries to bury, love of country, and refusal to be intimidated, even as the liberal media unleashes waves of attacks on his past and his credibility." They even fear for his life, believing "that his willingness to stand up to powerful liberal interests was putting his life, as well as the lives of those working with him, in danger. Of course, his willingness to face this danger head on only adds to his legend."

    And their favorite candidate for the next presidential election is, no surprise, Sarah Palin, in whom they see their own reflection: "They see in her the uncompromising personal conviction and integrity that they admired in Bush, but with an authentic conservatism that reflects her personal background. The one point they all agree on is that Palin was a victim of an unprecedented smear campaign. Reflecting in many ways their feelings about themselves as a group, they say Palin was targeted by the liberal media like no other figure in modern history because they both feared her and hated her for her unwavering values and beliefs."

    This paranoid Republican base represents "one-in-five voters in the electorate, and nearly two out of every three selfidentified Republicans," which means that current Republican legislators must accommodate them, and the next batch of Republican political candidates will likely be the most extreme that the nation has seen since the 1950s. If you haven't been taking them seriously, you should. The tidal wave of paranoia shows no sign of slacking. With a weak economy and an active Democrat-controlled government, conservatives are rattled and vulnerable to paranoid narratives. The growth of cable news, talk radio, and blogs have produced a right-wing echo chamber in which conservative commentators shout ever louder to make themselves heard over the shrill cries of their colleagues, and listeners measure the plausibility of each new conspiracy theory against a swiftly falling standard. We are witnessing a race to the bottom of a bottomless pit.

    Unfortunately for the nation, I expect to have plenty of material to write about for the foreseeable future.

    Stay tuned for more crazy talk in my Persecution Politics series at dagblog.com.

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    Comments

    Noam Chomsky recently spoke at the California Commonwealth Club.  He had some interesting remarks about right-wing rhetoric:

    I think it's worth examining the dictinction that Chomsky is making here.  He's not just likening the current rhetoric of the right with Nazi rhetoric, though the comparison is germane in this case.  The more important point is that there are genuine grievances at play: Stagnant wages, income inequality, lop-sided distribution of wealth not seen since the gilded age, the TBTF doctrine, steadily growing unemployment, vanishing pensions, the rotating carousel from Wall Street to Capitol Hill to K Street and back again.  An utterly broken healthcare system.  Worse still, laughably audacious influence peddling abounds on both sides of the aisle.  That's bipartisanship you can believe in and bank on.

    As Chomsky wisely notes, the real significance of this rhetoric is that it gives people with genuine grievance an answer.  It might be a terrible answer.  It might not be very well informed.  It is, however, coherent with their sense of disenfranchisement.  That fear and paranoia is given considerable purchase in this movement, which appears to account for as much as quarter of the population if the numbers are to be believed.

    I don't mean to be an alarmist.  None of us can predict the future.  However, I think it's fair to say that extreme polarization and deteriorating economic conditions are not conducive to peace and stability.  It's important that these problems be addressed.

    Great stuff.  I look forward to future installments.


    Thanks, DF. Various academic disciplines have offered a number of arguments for why paranoia flourishes. Chomsky's is a typical one--your basic high school textbook explanation of Nazi success--economic insecurity fosters a need for scapegoats, authority, etc. I think that this answer is a good one as far as it goes, but it doesn't offer much by way of verifiability, and it's important to consider that other folks have given alternative answers (also unverifiable). I've only begun to examine them, but I'll try to write a longer answer that summarizes the various approaches over the weekend.


    Curious as to whether you've read any Lakoff on this topic.  I'm reading him right now.  He has much to say on the matter, but it mostly has to do with neurolinguistic programming, specifically how we think in metaphors and how those metaphors end up framing the way that we see the world.  So, it's more of an attempt to explain the fundamental case for why someone might be prone to believe this sort of thing.

    Also, something interesting just occurred to me.  I recall seeing some footage of Beck where he was actually comparing America to Weimar Germany.  I'll see if I can find a clip.  Anyhow, I just thought that it was interesting that he's actually usuing that comparison in pushing fear and paranoia.  Of course, in his narrative it's Obama that's analagous to Hitler.


    Some. I'm definitely going to address Lakoff's notion of re-framing. But his approach strikes me as too narrowly linguistic. When right-wing paranoiacs reframe issues like health care, they don't just coin new phrases like "death panel" or "death book," they create an entire story around the issue that represents the health care plan as a deliberate step towards some abhorrent future, e.g. fascism and eugenics.

    Here's your video. Make sure to watch the crying:


    Those stories, however, always seem to return to the same basic narrative though, don't they?


    The issue of framing is really just an application of Lakoff's thesis.  The real issue is that, according to him, cognitive science has shown that our decision making process is decidedly emotional and that our thinking is grounded in metaphors.  The stories that you mention are described by Lakoff as narratives that are likewise grounded in these metaphors.  He identifies two prevailing metaphors based on parenting, one being a strict father/authoritarian metaphor and the other being a nurturing parent metaphor.  The framing comes into play in order to cast issues into one of these prevailing narratives.


    Thanks. I obviously need to immerse myself in Lakoff, one of my first priorities when and if I get a publisher. Anything that you recommend in addition to Don't Think of an Elephant and The Political Mind?

    Related to your previous comment, I think that the most difficult task will be present a defensible explanation for why the paranoia is happening--why paranoid narratives appeal and in general and why there is such a an outbreak right now. The explanations that I have read to date seem extremely speculative. Everyone from psychologists to sociologists to political scientists to evolutionary biologists have suggestions, but none of the theories I've seen have been verifiable, and there are few bases available for selecting one over the others.


    I'd recommend Moral Politics before either of them, especially for your purposes.  I started reading The Political Mind first because I thought it would be more up to date.  It is in some respects and there are some new scientific findings incorporated.  However, Moral Politics provides a much more thorough treatment of the same subject matter.


    Great, thanks.


    If you're looking for "why" Genghis, I'd spend some time on the rise of the Religious Right, evangelicals and the Apocalyptic worldview they have. There've been other waves of this in American life, not necessarily with this exact mix of feeling, but I can tell you - the feeling that runs through the religious world today is almost precisely that which runs through the political one. Political paranoia - for people who believe in an Anti-Christ - is easy. My family has this river running through it, and I once lived inside it, and I have to say, it's almost impossible to understand if you haven't lived in it. Not meaning to be rude, but most liberals write the crappiest stuff about religion. They're angry at the religious freaks, but they really don;t have a clue how it works, and they try to tackle it with a narrow rationality, and end up sounding to me like little boys in short pants. Thin. Reedy. Out of their league. Because there's a big deep craziness that's happening here, and it's powerful enough to kill people, so the idea that this Right insanity is based on ideas that can be proven false with a 1-2-3 rational debate, or exploded with a little satire, well... that's ridiculous. And offensive, dangerous and misleading in its own way. Understand the religious stuff, and you've got the feeling and the flow of the political phenomenon.

    Thanks quinn. I agree with your pithy critique of "reedy"liberal attacks on conservative craziness and the notion that rational argument and witty satire can snuff the fire. Limbaugh and Beck have thrived in the age of the Keith Olbert, the Daily Show, and Al Franken. I'm not attempting to take on the paranoid right, so much as reveal its depth and analyize its origins. Ultimately, I don't believe that what is said matters nearly as much as who says it. Past eruptions have subsided only when widely respected voices of moderation have unanimously expressed revulsion. Insofar as I have a political objective, it is to provoke those voices.

    As for the religious component, I agree that there is certainly a heavy religions element to the paranoia, but I think that most analysts err by conflating religious fervor with political passion. Beck and company exploit fundamentalist Christian ideology, and they have inherited the ideas of the Robertson and Falwell, but by and large, today's right wing leaders are not dogmatic fundamentalists themselves. Moreover, past bouts of American paranoia, such as the Red Scare, have only been partly religious, and other global examples, such as fascism, even less so. Rather, my sense is that the political right wing and Christian evangelists have found common ground in a mythology of persecution that is both political and religious. The persecution fantasy is the core of the mythology; the "anti-Christ" theme is just one element of it. For that reason, analyses of the rise of the Christian right--of which there have been many--tend to miss the big picture.


    Could be. What I do know is that the fundamentalist/evangelical churches have had - in recent decades - their CONTENT shifted in the most remarkable way over toward "political" issues. As a kid in the 60's in these churches, the wave of change that hit them in the 70's and 80's was phenomenal, and came right out of the Southern US. These things are now SOAKED in current events, in Iran and Iraq and Russia and China, in abortion and taxes and government control, in separate schools and evolution, in free enterprise and guns. Wrapped around the whole thing was resentment, at being shoved under culturally and pushed to the margins, and a sense of needing to fight back. And SOMEHOW wrapped in with this was the gospel of prosperity. In short, the content of their religious life has increasingly BECOME a political message. Republicanism IS part of their gospel now. So it isn't just outsiders conflating it - it has been, very deliberately, MIXED TOGETHER within the churches. It's also important to realize that the degree to which some pols and spokespeople can be accepted within these churches, IF they spout the right POLITICAL line. Some of these Republicans can't even fake the real religious message of the right wing churches. I know, cause I'll listen to them and snicker - it's like Pat Boone "rocking out." But they get the stamp of approval BECAUSE they say certain POLITICAL things that have become touchstones. Abortion. Muslims. etc. These political stances often act as religious touchstones now. Other pols, like Palin, feel in their element enough to go deep behind the scenes, to participate in the truly weird religious shit. What I'm saying is that liberals are often completely unable to read the religious stance and status of Republican figures. Palin was not Bush, for instance. But if they hit the right buttons, they are gonna be accepted, whatever their particular views or depth of fervour. There's cross-breeding been going on here. Not just at the top, by Robertson and other figures who worked both worlds, but down in the trenches, sermon by sermon, prayer group by prayer group, election by election, layers and levels and code words and touchstones. Just keep an eye out for it, because I think if you want to find the deep black heart of the hateful, psychotic Right, the ones who will day or do anything, you're gonna end up inside church doors.

    You know, I (and I suspect many others here at Dagblog) have had a good laugh at Conservapedia's desire to make Jesus more Republican, but the more I dwell on it, the more it actually scares me. I know it seems so silly to us that we just can't take it seriously, but LDS and Scientology were arguably founded with even more ludicrous beginnings. I think we ridicule them at our own peril.


    Ridicule does not necessarily entail dismissiveness. Satire of a subject that you don't take seriously is merely comic entertainment. That's not to say that ridicule will make it go away.


    Yes. Perhaps I should say "we dismiss them at our own peril". It would be superhuman of us to avoid ridiculing them. I, for one, am no ubermensch.


    Thanks, quinn. Well put, and point taken. My book takes O'Reilly's war on Christmas--the first mainstream application of the persecution/conspiracy formula--as its focal point, and I plan to devote a couple of chapters to the alleged "war on Christianity," starting with the Moral Majority, so I'm deeply conscious of the religious connection. But your comments do a nice job of connecting the dots and help me see the need to explore what has been going on at the grassroots level. Next stop: church.


    Hi Mike, Adi here, glad to see that you are working on this stuff and keeping the book project moving along. I think that you are definitely on to a bunch of big and interesting themes.

    A couple of quick thoughts.

    First I agree with those who urge you to focus on the link between persecution and religion. Many new religious movements have persecution at their very core.  The most interesting example of this in recent times is the LDS.  The LDS was born and became wildly popular in spite of and in large part due to both real and perceived persecution.

    Jon Krakuer's Under the Banner of Heaven does an amazing job of telling this story. It also shows in intimate detail the paranoid style of some current crazy modern day FLDS leaders.  You can see how a healthy dose of paranoia is great for creating in-group status among a sect.  My guess is that you will find good stuff written on this in the context of cults.

    On a side note, it is interesting that Beck converted to Mormonism. It's also interesting to note that this his Mormonism has not kept Evangilicals from following him, despite a historic and continuing distrust between mainstream Christian sects and Mormonism.

    I think this is part of an interesting trend in which religious groups used to fighting most bitterly with those closest to them are beginning to focus on more distant religious groups and secularism in general.

    I don't know if you remember the comic Emo Philips. He had an old routine that highlighted the classic state of religious paranoia. It went like this:

    I was walking across a bridge one day and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said,

    "Stop! Don't do it!"
    "Why shouldn't I?" he said.
    "Well, there is so much to live for."
    "Like what?"
    "Well, are you religious?"
    He said yes.
    I said, "Me too! Are you Christian or Buddhist?"
    "Christian."
    "Me too! Are you Catholic or Protestant?"
    "Protestant."
    "Me too! Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?"
    "Baptist."
    "Wow, me too! Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?"
    "Baptist Church of God."
    "Me too! Are you Original Baptist Church of God or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God?"
    "Reformed Baptist Church of God."
    "Me too! Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1879, or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1915?"
    He said, "Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1915."
    I said, "Die, heretic," and pushed him off.

    We have spent most of human history fighting between religions, with a special love of fighting with those closest to us, both geographically and ideologically. There is still plenty of this going on, but with the advent of global media, it's now much easier to choose ominous, all powerful out-groups to focus on.

    On another front I think that John Haidt has a bunch of good insights into the nature of moral reasoning and why Liberals and Conservatives react so differently to certain moral arguments.For a very short but helpful introduction to the topic, check out his TED talk http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html.

    One of the key points that Haidt makes is that there are generally 5 fundamental moral values that are found cross-culturally. They are:

    1. Care for others, protecting them from harm. (He also referred to this dimension as Harm.)
    2. Fairness, Justice, treating others equally.
    3. Loyalty to your group, family, nation. (He also referred to this dimension as Ingroup.)
    4. Respect for tradition and legitimate authority. (He also referred to this dimension as Authority.)
    5. Purity, avoiding disgusting things, foods, actions
    Liberals tend to value the first two much more strongly then the second two, while conservatives (and many traditional cultures) tend to value the 5 equally.

    Watch the TED talk it's interesting.

    Anyway, that was a bit rambling and disconnected, but I think there is juice in both of those boxes.

    Keep trucking and I would love to hear how it's going.


     


    Thanks, Adi. Great points. I've been thinking more and more about the role of persecution in creating a shared sense of identity, and the Mormon example is a great one with an interesting tie in to Beck's Mormonism. I think that you've recommended Krakauer's book to me before, or at least someone did, so I'll be sure to read it.

    Excellent point also about the evangelicals following Beck, though it somewhat detracts from the religious element that you emphasized. In building a shared identity based on persecution, conservatives have effectively minimized doctrinal differences between Christians and have even brought some Jews into the fold.

    As to the moral differences between liberals and conservatives, I'll check out the talk, but I've read about the theory before, and it rings of hokey pop-psychology to me. Moreover, a lot of the conservative paranoia rhetoric has been lifted from left-wing populist ideas from the early 20th century, which suggests that when it comes to the appeal of persecution narratives, conservatives and liberals are not inherently different, even though the hysteria is running high on the right these days.


    Hey - took me a while to get this, for some reason, I thought it would let me know if you had responded.

    I am sure I did recommend Under the Banner of Heaven. It's one of my favorite reads!

    Regarding the religious element that is an interesting question. On the one hand,  there is a strong religious role in the right's sense of persecution. On the other hand it seems to be galvanizing around a much broader divide than in the past.

    Protestants and Catholics and Christians of all stripes have laid aside their differences to fight secularists. I think there are limits to how far this will go. For example the Christian right was not ready for Mitt Romney as president, but I think that may is due more to his utter lack of populist chops, his having spent too much time hanging out with liberals in Boston and the fact that in the words of Mike Huckabee "you don't want to vote for the guy who looks like the guy who fired you." But I also don't think they loved the fact that he was a Mormon.

    Regrading the Haidt stuff, read it (or watch it) and let me know what you think. I think his take on Moral Dumbfounding is very interesting and that he gives a much better description of moral reasoning than Kohlberg and that crowd do.

    As for it's applications in understanding politics, I think the main insight is that people have moral reasoning but they also have moral intuition - that's much cruder and faster and generally wins out.  The classic illustration of this given by Haidt and his collaborator Josh Greene is the trolley dilemma.

    We know that people are generally utilatarian in their moral reasoning but when push comes to shove (if you'll pardon the pun) they act and feel quite differently.

    In other words we may all care about starving kids in Africa or failing shcools. We may see these problems as being of profound moral consequence, but they generally don't elicit the same type of visceral and powerful emotional and moral reaction we have if we see someone kick a kitten.

    In terms of Beck, I think he is an absolutely brilliant populist. He knows how to evoke strong feelings in his audience.  Unlike Limbaugh, he almost never bothers with the logic, or even the pseudo logic. Beck goes for the gut. If it feels right it must be true!  What I think we know from history and psychology and are getting affirmation from in neuroscience is that these types of powerful emotional arguments can be incredibly effective.

    My sense is that Beck's popularity will continue to grow, at least for a while- until or unless something simple and shocking (an affair? a picture of him kicking kittens?) happens to deflate it


    Sorry, no notifications, although you can subscribe to comments by RSS. I can't access the paper, but I watched the talk, which was excellent. The concern main that I have with the concept is overgeneralization, particularly with respect to politcal categories as opposed to personality types. Right-wingers can be revolutionaries too.

    I think that Beck's greatest strength is storytelling. He presents an epic drama to his audience--good vs. evil, the strong vs. the weak, an ordinary man called to duty to save the world. He very deliberately fold every piece of news into this powerful story.

    FYI, interesting piece about Beck and Mormon history: http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/jason_echols/2009/10/mor...


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