Stamped Salon Guest Post: The Paranoid Style of the White Working Class.

“Although American political life has rarely been touched by the most acute varieties of class conflict, it has served again and again as an arena for uncommonly angry minds.”

Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” 1964

Written amidst the immediate tumult of the Kennedy Assassination, Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” did not have a chance to fully digest the plethora of conspiracies that proliferated in its wake. His article, however, did outline the then-ongoing debate over water fluoridation, the lingering effects of McCarthyism, and a supposed government plot to take citizens’ guns. For Hofstadter, these modern-day conspiracies provided evidence of an enduring thread in American history, an “old and recurrent mode of expression in our public life which has frequently been linked with movements of suspicious discontent.” These conspiracy theories animated political discourse and mobilized sections of the population on hearsay of persecution, foreign plots, and generalized chicanery. Key to Hofstadter was the marriage of the idea of “recurrence” with the notion that American political society proved unique in its ability to repeatedly provide fertile ground for the rapid proliferation of such wayward thinking. These “successive episodic waves” tied to ideas of political and cultural persecution and subversion, Hofstatder believed, suggested that the paranoid style was “mobilized into action chiefly by social conflicts that involve unique schemes of values that bring fundamental fears and hatreds, rather than negotiable interests, into political action.” And recent social and political observers, without necessarily naming Hofstadter specifically, adopted this view to explain the white working class’  2016 turn towards a political novice intent upon challenging existing social and governmental norms and appealing to the conspiratorial notions that animated their political beliefs. Only recently has a concerted challenge to this recent extension of Hofstadter’s theoretical construct been made.

Numerous intellectuals commented upon the state of the white-working class in the months preceding and following the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. In Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance recounted how economic stagnation had decimated a previously resilient “hillbilly” culture that had immigrated from the Appalachians looking for factory jobs and economic stability in the post-World War II Midwest. The deindustrialization of the Rust Belt destroyed the social cohesion of hillbilly culture. Although this fracture presented itself most noticeably in drugs, alcoholism, and broken homes, Vance closed his work by commenting upon the proliferation of conspiratorial political themes amongst his kin. Seeking to explain generational disintegration within a community, Vance’s friends and families pointed to an impostor (and Kenyan) president and “handouts” to the “undeserving.”  Taking an anthropological view of this new paranoid style, Arlie Russell Hochschild embedded herself amidst the conservative culture of south-central Louisiana to explain “the great paradox”: how could a culture and region decimated by industrial pollution turn away so strongly from government and its regulations and point to these as the problems that destroyed their community. Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land outlined a central organizing metaphor that mobilized the social and political lives of the community. People stand in line to gain the “American Dream,” all waiting patiently for their turn. But now, the U.S. government allows and even encourages certain people, here again identified as “undeserving,” to cut the line in front of these sturdy, working class whites. Although written prior to the other two books, Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson’s The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism echoed a similar conclusion. Older working- and middle-class whites gravitated towards the Tea Party’s more extreme version of conservatism — and several of the conspiracies that, while not underpinning the movement, did animate it — as a response to economic strain engendered by the 2008 economic crash and the sluggish recovery that followed. The identified “Other” for the groups that Skocpol and Williamson studied were again the “undeserving,” those purportedly reaping the benefits of governmental largesse (minorities, college students, the poor, etc.) and not those that dutifully worked for their money and economic security.

This vision of the white-working class as a dedicated voting bloc and the “economic anxiety” that led them to the polls inaugurated a political movement that sought the group’s “reintegration” into the wider political narrative. In the New York Times’ “The End of Identity Liberalism,” Mark Lilla claimed that the 2016 election showed how modern American liberals had foresworn the white-working class and focussed, at their peril, solely upon issues of racial, gender, and sexual identity, creating a fractured (white) American society and electorate. The conservative Charles Murray argued a similar theme several years prior to the 2016 election. In Coming Apart, Murray claimed that the embrace of modern-day liberalism by the urban elite and the identity politics that went along with it had left this group cut off from the cultural and intellectual foundation of white-working class America. The values of the founders — industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religion — had been lost by this “new elite”… but still mattered to the majority of white working class Americans. The nation should take a page from these people and work to reestablish these inherently American values into the core of our social discourse.

While Hofstadter might not fully embrace the thinking of Murray (the professor’s legacy currently dodges accusations of “liberal elitism”), the pre- and postmortems of the 2016 election seemed to align with his views. The “economic anxiety” and conspiratorial bent that these authors described matched Hofstadter’s view of a “successive episodic wave” generated by a shifting socio-economic reality. And just as he described in the 1964 book length treatment of his article, this new paranoid style carried its own political ramifications. A white working class pressured by a generation of declining wages and lost economic opportunity searched for an explanation to their current state, gravitating towards a series of conspiratorial beliefs. A foreign-born president, a wave of undocumented workers stealing jobs and spreading crime, an atheistic government willfully trampling on religion and intent in taking away citizens’ guns — all of these conspiracies gained significant traction in the first decade and a half of the Twenty-first Century, and now-President Trump mobilized these fears for political gain.

All of these works discount any central role for race in the election; as Lilla argues, the over-emphasis of race as a political calculus had lost Democrats the election. Vance, Hochshcild, and Skocpol and Williamson all underline the fact the people and communities they wrote about were note “racists” or “bigots,” but instead defined the undeserving Other in economic terms, not racial or cultural. And yet, in the process of defining the “white working class,” scholars and commentators use a racial and class metric to define the group of people that many have argued cast their ballots in a color-blind manner. Stating such a reality should not be seen as a condemnation of the liberal elite intelligentsia, though. As Ta-Nehisi Coates points out in his book We Were Eight Years in Power, defining the “white working class” as divergent from the “working class” is critical. The “non-white working class” did not vote for Trump in 2016, making it hard to claim that a paranoid style exists along class lines. Coates took initial  polling data further, showing that the voting block that Trump depended upon the most was the easiest to define: white. And this reality went beyond 2016; in the recent race in Alabama for the U.S. Senate, 68% of white voters rallied around Roy Moore, a candidate with several credible accusations of pedophilia leveled against who also claimed that homosexuality was a sign of degeneracy and that Sharia law was being practiced in the United States. If we gauge acceptance of these beliefs as being closely associated with how one voted, then only one true correlation existed: a preponderance of white voters, be they male or female, educated or uneducated, employed or not, voted for Roy Moore. As Coates stated in his assessment of the white working class and the 2016 election, “…any empirical evaluation of the relationship between Trump and the white working class would reveal that one adjective in that phrase is doing more work than the others”

The inability of polling data to draw out the reality of a class-based paranoid style explains the criticality of Ibram Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning. In his work, Kendi turns Hofstadter’s notion of “episodic waves” of paranoid style on its head. Racism, for Kendi, is the grand conspiracy that has animated American history. It has been prevalent and persistent in its ability to define the nation’s society and culture; as Kendi states, “for generations of Americans, racist ideas hav been their common sense.” The paranoid style that Hofstadter described could better be defined as the most overt attempts to prop up an ideology of  white supremacy. In the book length The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Hofstadter showed how other events in American history presented the evidence of his theory in action. Yet Kendi’s paradigm shows that these “episodic waves” are shot through with racist ideology, even if not explicitly stated. Hofstadter’s “Pseudo-Conservative Revolt” in 1954, instead of simply the vestiges of McCarthyism, must also include an assessment of it as a response to the early stages of the Civil Rights Movement and the increased political activism of the African-American middle class, just as the Goldwater movement of the mid-1960s must be understood as a significant rejection of the federal government’s and Democratic Party’s support of civil rights. Even the seizure of Cuba and the Philippines during the War of 1898, which Hofstadter clearly links to the Depression of 1893, should be understood as part of the global colonization movement that had as one of its core beliefs an inherent white supremacy based on a faulty assessment of science, morality, and democracy. Whereas Hofstadter saw the paranoid style as indicative of periodic upsurges of national-level social tensions, Kendi outlines a dominant intellectual ideology — racist ideas — that regenerates itself through periods of social reconfiguration oftentimes built on the assumption of new conspiracies, a rejuvenative paranoid style for white supremacy.

Stamped from the Beginning inaugurates a paradigm shift in how we view the paranoid style and its inherent conspiracy theories in American political life. Periods of socio-political strife in U.S. history, for Kendi, represent a contest over the acceptance of white supremacy as the underpinning of American society and culture. The paranoid style provides the means to explain the perceived fissure in this ideology and articulates the intellectual foundation needed to frame political action intended to return the racial and cultural status quo. Hofstadter wrote in 1963 that, “We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.” Stamped from the Beginning would state that we all suffer from history…but the dominance of white supremacy in American history means that we have to adopt fantasies to explain why white society and culture must suffer, as well. Those that suffer double are those not protected by the ideology, for the paranoid style of false persecutions and overarching conspiracies has definite winners and losers.