The BBC Magazine on paranoiac fantasies: “Trump promises to make America
Great Again - as if the US somehow was no longer the most powerful country in
the world”
The title of this post is taken from a BBC magazine web article which
can be read here. The
article is of great interest to VNP because it adds further weight to the VNP theme
which links fundamentalism, collective paranoia and right wing politics into an
integrated socio-psychological complex. Although I’m not talking here about
clinical paranoia, the term is singularly appropriate in this context because there is a close social analogy to clinical paranoia – in particular, the way the
fearful imagination invents baroque conspiratorial narratives about malign wills
working behind the scenes to persecute, corrupt, subvert and control.
Below is a quote from the
article:
The phrase "paranoid style
in American politics" was coined by the late historian Richard Hofstadter.
He defined the Paranoid Style, "an old and recurrent phenomenon in our
public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious
discontent."
In a country that at its best
radiates an infectious optimism, it is interesting how often fear has stalked
the American landscape.
Richard Parker, who lectures on
religion in the early days of America at Harvard's John F Kennedy School of
Government, traces paranoia in American public life back to the Salem Witch
Trials in the late 17th Century and even before that, to the religious politics
of the Mother Country.
It's easy to forget how closely
tied the first colonies were to England, particularly in Massachusetts. The
Pilgrims were dissenting Protestants who sided closely with Cromwell in the
English Civil War. When the Commonwealth was overthrown and the Stuarts
restored to the British throne, there was renewed struggle with Catholicism -
and the religious suspicions surrounding the court of James II were magnified
out of all proportion on the other side of the Atlantic.
Add in the daily struggles with
nature, fighting with native Americans, and millennial religious practice that
thought the end times were approaching and you have, Parker points out, "a
community primed to be fearful".
And so in the town of Salem,
people turned on their more free-thinking neighbours, and accused them of being
witches. At this time, the idea of witchcraft was not something from fiction.
People really did believe, in Parker's words, "dark spirits could inhabit
souls and bodies. It was the basis for primitive psychology and physiology."
This is not just a US phenomenon, although it might be more prevalent
there; I’ve seen similar fears among extremist Protestants in the UK. As the quote above suggests the US may have inherited its complex of easily aroused fear from the mother
country: The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries set a paranoiac backdrop; the religious apocalyptic mind-set of those times is
implicated as the origin of a recurring socio-psychological malaise. English
government went through a time of trepidation about Roman Catholic conspiracies.
In the seventeenth century this was compounded by national infighting as
dissenting Protestants found themselves at odds with the English government, the
state church and one another. It was a
time of mutual suspicion and fear. Many nonconforming Protestants decided to
start a new life on the American continent free from the interference of government
and all those other heretics. The American Revolution was founded on
anti-taxation grievances as the English war-machine demanded taxes to finance its battles against
a competing French empire. The parliamentary opposition to Royal taxation and absolute monarchy precipitated the English civil war and this opposition migrated, along
with the colonists, to the middle classes of America.
The article lists examples of the historical recrudescence of paranoia
in the US about the machinations of hidden malign parties. I’ll high light just
one recent and well known case:
Following World War Two the fear
shifted to the Soviet Union. Leaders of the far-right vied with each other to
see who could turn up the most Communists. This led Robert Welch, the founder
of the ultra-right John Birch Society, to claim that President Dwight D
Eisenhower was "a tool of the communists".
That latter claim reminds me of some of the things which have been said about
President Obama. Given VNP’s critique of religious extremism, VNP’s interest
was particularly piqued when the BBC article quoted Harvard history professor
Lisa McGirr as saying the following about the US tendency toward collective paranoia:
"I think it is linked to
religiosity: evangelicalism and
fundamentalism which have deep strands in American life,"
And needless to say Trump knows how to tug those strands:
Writing off Donald Trump was the
default setting of most pundits and political professionals in the first months
of the campaign. It isn't any more. Trump understood more than they did that a
significant chunk of American society is fearful. He plays to those fears - whether
they are rational or not. He doesn't speak in what he calls "politically
correct" terms.
And finally:
In South Carolina, recently, I
met a gentleman named Robert Sandifer. In his 70s, well-educated and well-off,
he had retired to a lovely island just south of Charleston, one of the nicest
cities in America.
"Trump has instilled hope in
people," Sandifer told me.
"Hope? Sounds to me like
desperation," I told him.
Sandifer politely disagreed.
"If he does what he says he's gonna do, we would be less fearful." He
added, for emphasis: "We fear the
federal government very much."
From the intelligent design web site Uncommon
Descent, through the Fundamentalist
ministry of Answers in Genesis, to religious crackpots like William
Tapley, the American right wing is suffused with fear, a sense of impending
doom and a deep hatred of the liberal views of government funded academics.
Relevant Links.
More on Trump
