American paranoia: right-wing conservatism from McCarthyism to wokeism and the death of democracy

America has a history of paranoia. From the isolationism and America First policy brought on by the depression and the trauma of World War I casualties in the 1930s to the fear campaign of McCarthyism in the 1950s, there exists a deep-rooted phobia of the foreign and unfamiliar.

The most recent iteration is Trump’s America First policy, MAGA – Make America Great Again – which feeds on this paranoia and is a factor in the resurgence of US isolationism in the late 2010s. Spurred on by the nostalgic aspiration of bringing a flagging America back to a bygone era of greatness, MAGA and the Project 2025 manifesto fit neatly with Trump’sparanoid proselytism about imaginary threats.

More pertinent to Trump’s plethora of past improprieties, rather than Reagan’s “Make America Great Again”, is Bill Clinton’s mantra: “I did not have sex with that woman.” Consensually, at least. Suffice it to say that there is a certain paranoia peculiar to infidelity, whether partners in crime, passion, or politics.

Historian Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics, published in 1965 after the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy, is a well-cited critique of American paranoia. Hofstadter refers to “uncommonly angry minds” as most evident on the extreme right of politics.

He calls this mind “paranoid style” because no other word more aptly elicits “the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy”.

Hofstadter writes: “In the paranoid style, as I conceive it, the feeling of persecution is central, and it is indeed systematised in grandiose theories of conspiracy.”

He says the paranoid style occurs frequently in history and is the preferred mode of minority movements in the United States. “Uncommonly angry minds” and “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” is an apt description of the MAGA movement and its battle for voters’ hearts and minds. 

Fear is a byproduct of paranoia

Like all battles, the battle for voters’ hearts and minds is fought with fear. Fear is a byproduct of paranoia and is the go-to emotion for manipulating public opinion. Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Discourse Studies at Lancaster University Ruth Wodak, in her 2015 book The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean, references Professor of Sociology Jens Rydgren to list the fears that right-wing parties continually evoke then legitimise:

…fear of losing one’s job; fear of “strangers” (that is, migrants); fear of losing national autonomy; fear of losing old traditions and values; fear of climate change; disappointment and even disgust with mainstream politics and corruption; anger about the growing gap between rich and poor; disaffection due to the lack of transparency of political decision making and so forth.

This list could be considered required reading for any campaign manager wishing to make a name for themselves. We might add to this Trump’s oft-cited foci of vilification, including illegal aliens, communists, Marxists, fascists, the deep state, and ‘radical leftist thugs that live like vermin in our country’.

Once emotions are enflamed to the extent that the fear is deeply embedded in the public’s psyche, especially in times of economic, financial, and environmental crises, the promise of hope (for something better) is introduced as the saviour, followed by a raft of detail-deficient populist pledges designed to quash those fears. All the while, the flames of paranoia are fanned.

Remember the cautionary tale of McCarthyism

Every political system has an element of paranoia resulting from a fundamental distrust of government and its omnipotent power. Authoritarianism lurks just below the surface of a fragile democracy, and the US is currently in the throes of testing that fragility.

Remember the cautionary tale of McCarthyism. From the late 1940s to the early 1950s, American paranoia was at its height with the Cold War and the nuclear peril threatening to undermine the American ideal.

Led by President Harry S Truman and Senator Joseph McCarthy, authorities responded with a political purge against alleged communist sympathisers and left-wing activists. Anyone suspected of being “unAmerican” — those who did not conform to state-enforced politics — was pursued and persecuted.

It reached a crescendo on June 19, 1953, with the execution by electrocution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg at Sing Sing Prison. After several appeals for clemency and a trial marred by claims of collusion between the judge, FBI, and prosecution, they were declared guilty of espionage — conspiring to pass atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.

However misguided, McCarthy was a patriot, and his fear of communism creeping into American homes and politics was not just paranoia. And he was not alone in his allegations. But history is a harsh judge, allowing time to reflect on where it all went awry.

Did it start with a whisper, a piece of incriminating gossipmongering that “commies” had infiltrated the US State Department, like the infamous list of 205 communists supposedly employed at the US State Department that McCarthy never produced?

One is reminded of the misinformation and disinformation that pervades mainstream media and our ideologically demented politicos. There is always the risk of legitimised political violence.

Purged under the pretext of paranoia

There were US-based Russian spies then, and there are now, although degraded from the KGB days, and the Rosenbergs were later confirmed as much by Soviet documents released after communism’s fall. Still, capital punishment for any crime is inhumane, let alone for alleged espionage.

Many patriotic Americans, branded as subversives, were caught up in the McCarthy-era hysteria. Accusatory gossip roared through the ranks of suspected leftists, from government employees to academics, left-wing politicians, prominent individuals in the entertainment industry, and labour union activists. No rumour was left unprosecuted.

Purged under the pretext of paranoia, thousands lost their jobs, were imprisoned, and publicly shamed. Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins described McCarthy’s term in office (from transcripts released in 2003) as:

… a shameful chapter in American history, a time when hundreds of innocent people were paraded before a Senate subcommittee, with little regard for due process or their constitutional rights, a time when character assassination, mudslinging, and guilt by association trumped the truth and fairness.

American civil rights have progressed significantly since those heady unconstitutional days. But is America caught in a perpetual time warp? Is anti-wokeism, for example, merely the latest orchestration of “the paranoid style”? It starts with a whisper and ends in political violence.

The woke Inquisition

Admittedly, the Woke Inquisition is much less intense than McCarthyism but parallels its parochial paranoia and persecution. Perhaps more relevant to the parochial paranoia we find ourselves in today is that McCarthyism was more than just a political ideology encompassing patriotic right-wing activists and liberal anti-communists.

Professor Emeritus of American History Ellen Schrecker argues in her 1998 book Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America that McCarthyism fulfilled some long-standing right-wing objectives, many of them bearing little relationship to protecting the United States from Russian spies.

Likewise, it may well be that the political agendas that fuelled McCarthyism periodically rise up in concert with sanctimonious cries for reform and the paranoid style.

Schrecker elaborates: McCarthyism ensured that an entire generation of radicals and their institutions that offered a left-wing alternative to mainstream politics and culture were hounded out of existence, turning dissent into disloyalty and, in the process, “drastically narrowing the spectrum of acceptable political debate”.

Anti-wokeism is a continuation of the same. Persecuting the woke fits nicely with those long standing right-wing objectives. The insidious end game is the belittling of broadmindedness, the censuring of impartial, unprejudiced, and tolerant debate, and the silencing of the voices of social and environmental justice.

What exactly does woke mean?

Simply put, woke is a colloquialism meaning to be actively aware of social and racial issues that have been illegitimately redefined as an all-encompassing trope that, etymologically, does not mean anything or denotes anything right-wing conservatives perceive as negative.

For right-wing conservatives, its connotation goes something like this: if you cry “victim”, you encourage others to do the same, and suddenly, you have a profusion of victims all seeking sympathy. It is then a case of misplaced sympathy because none, or only a few, are actual victims. They just identify as one. Hence the cynicism and acrimonious undertones.

Woke is thus recast as an acerbic indictment of anyone actively aware of social, environmental, racial, and discriminative issues, especially against those willing to call out any kind of injustice. And given the scope of its new meaning and obfuscation, woke is used liberally and indiscriminately by Republicans and their global sycophants to denigrate everything and everyone they oppose.

Moreover, not to be outdone by the leftist intelligentsia, woke ropes in a bunch of intellectual egoists eager to show the world how eruditely they can flog a dead horse. Dutiful right-wing mediaists, highly irrational Republicans, and serial provocateurs offering nothing but the same old clash of ideals — provocative propaganda, headlines, and ledes without substance but enough venom to get extremists all riled up.

As a measure of how riled up, Professor of Psychology at the Kellogg School of Management Eli J Finkel and colleagues write in a 2020 article that American liberals and conservatives report “more animosity toward the opposing political group than warmth toward their own group”. And rather than a hallmark of a healthy democracy, the rift between conservatives and liberals focuses “less on triumphs of ideas than on dominating the abhorrent supporters of the opposing party”.

Testimony to how dumb the woke retribution is, in 2022, Florida’s hard right governor, Ron DeSantis, even called for a Stop Woke Act (as in W.O.K.E., the acronym for wrongs to our kids and employees) to be legislated, and rumours were rife in the US House of Representatives about forming an anti-woke caucus.

According to DeSantis, the Stop Woke Act would prohibit educators and their institutions and businesses from teaching anything that would cause their students and employees to “feel guilt, anguish or any form of psychological distress because of their race, colour, gender, or national origin”. 

A point to note here: wokeism does not kill anyone, but gun violence does at an average of 117 fatalities a day (US deaths from gun violence in 2023), so where is the Republican’s Stop Guns Act or Stop Hypocrisy Act?

Clearly, anti-woke fundamentalists are waging a culture war to stoke division and distrust against those who think and look differently from their perceived cultural identity, and MAGA Republicans have embraced this as central to their politics. It might be described as a reformation against pretentious social sympathisers, but it is disingenuous because its purpose is to control and cancel.

What the anti-woke movement wants, apart from fostering division and distrust, as far as one can tell — prima facie — is a re-normalisation of views on race, gender, and sexuality and a refocus of institutions on their fundamental purpose.

For example, schools and universities should focus on teaching, and companies should focus on employing and training people and making a profit. And not get involved in social issues such as critical race theory, queer theory, gender theory, truth-telling about past atrocities or even climate change, whether fashionable or unfashionable.

Under a WOKE Regime, we should be suspicious of transgressors proffering the same, and their criticisms should be suppressed. There is a devious endeavour to change one’s thinking and beliefs about what is right and what is wrong.

MAGA fundamentalists might label woke transgressors guilty of “thoughtcrimes”, as the English social critic and novelist George Orwell described in his inspired satire Nineteen Eighty-Four. Thoughtcrimes are thoughts and beliefs that challenge political orthodoxy. Those who indulge in such anti establishment thinking are branded thoughtcriminals.

Republicans and their conservative comrades might refer to transgressors as wokethinkers and wokecriminals.

Learning to think critically and discuss rationally, however, is a much better option than taking a word like woke, loading it with all kinds of derogatives and using it as a cultural counteroffensive for MAGA diehards and radicalised conservatives to control nonconformists, as this will only widen the political and cultural divide that is undermining democracy.

Only in America!

The paranoia is palpable. It has become central to the Republican party’s political identity. Donald J Trump, on the verge of another White House cameo, has embraced and exploited American paranoia as a pathway to the presidency. In effect, he has made his fellow Republicans and MAGA devotees prisoners of his sociopathic paranoia.

That said, Trump is not a conservative or a Republican, highlighting the irony of his 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Trump has no genuine political affiliation; he is a political opportunist who is happy to adopt the GOP’s ideology as a marriage of convenience and a ticket to the White House. This makes him more dangerous than any MAGA extremist or alt-right conservative — a pretender without true affiliations or loyalties but with immense power.

Indeed, the November 2024 US presidential election may be a frontrunner to democracy’s demise. We find ourselves on a knife edge where the constitutional constraints on presidential power and the tenets of government accountability are at risk. And we are bound to worship false prophets, proving that some degree of paranoia is prudent.

I have always been of the opinion that you get what you vote for. But it is a sad day in American history when, once again, a tyrant with grandiose ambitions declares himself king, and the triumph of democracy over tyranny won through the American Revolutionary War is lost, which is the real American tragedy.

Biden’s exit stage left from the presidential race might seem a blessing, but a win for the Democrats still looks challenging. However, a Harris/Buttigieg late-to-the-presidential party campaign would boost their coherency and charisma, not to mention donations. Mindful also that MAGA Republicans would be far from gracious in defeat.

As an outsider looking in, if it wasn’t so serious a situation, if Trump were to give his RNC “narcissist’s guide to global unity speech” anywhere else in the world, he would be ridiculed and laughed off the stage. Love-bombing his Republican reprobates is one thing, but claiming that he is The One is the stuff of fools and fantasies. Only in America!

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