The Epstein Files and the Paranoid Style of American Politics

"As historian Richard Hofstadter documented, this political anger and paranoia represents a long and deeply rooted aspect of American culture."

The modern right wing feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it... [U]ndermined by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. [T]he modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.

—Richard Hofstadter, "The Paranoid Style of American Politics"

Don't knock schadenfreude—it is one of life's joys. Watching right-wing conspiracy nuts internally hemorrhage as their dear leader tries to bury the Epstein issue is a joy to witness. But as gratifying as it may be to see these right-wingers suffer, the media fascination with the Epstein controversy points to a more profound problem at the heart of U.S. politics: the hunger for conspiratorial explanations for social problems.

As historian Richard Hofstadter documented, this political anger and paranoia represents a long and deeply rooted aspect of American culture. His famous essay "The Paranoid Style of American Politics" argues that this form of political paranoia is as old as the country itself. Writing in the 1950s in the shadow of McCarthyism, Hofstadter traced the origins of political paranoia far beyond concerns about Communism. Conspiracies targeting Masons, Catholics, slaveholders, and bankers have accompanied virtually every period of social change in U.S. history.

The Epstein controversy and the broader right-wing belief in a Democratic-led pedophile ring echo the patterns of paranoid American ideologies that Hofstadter described. For example, anti-Catholic paranoia in the early 19th century contained strong sexual undertones evocative of today's QAnon rantings and Marjorie Taylor Greene's proclamations: "the anti-Catholics invented an immense lore about libertine priests, the confessional as an opportunity for seduction, licentious convents and monasteries."

Hofstadter as Psychologist

Hofstadter's explanation for this paranoid style was fundamentally psychological. Influenced by the popularity of Freudian psychology among 1950s intellectuals, he located the hunger for paranoid conspiracy theories in the mental deficiencies of a small group of individuals. As he put it, "the paranoid style is an opportunity to project and express unacknowledgeable aspects of their own psychological concerns." These psychologically damaged individuals projected their hunger for domination onto minorities, enabling the hunt for supposed "traitors" among their ranks.

What transforms this relatively small number of psychologically damaged individuals into movement leaders, according to Hofstadter, are major social conflicts. "[C]ertain historical catastrophes or frustrations may be conducive to the release of such psychic energies, and to... building them into mass movements." When large numbers of people become dissatisfied with social change, the mental paranoia of the few can become the anger and resentment of the many.

For Hofstadter, preventing these paranoid individuals from gaining power required mediating popular anger and resentment through the intervention of rational elites who could guide compromise and extinguish irrational angers. His model was the reaction of "responsible" leaders of the 1950s to McCarthy's anti-Communism extremism—the Eisenhower administration's distaste for the right-wing’s hysteria of the period and the U.S. Senate's ultimate censure of McCarthy represented how political paranoia could be prevented from taking deeper root in society.

Hofstadter's Limits

While this formulation may seem insightful given our current situation, it has two major weaknesses. First and most obviously, what happens when there is no rational elite to mediate these conflicts? Rather than a rational Eisenhower, our current president is another type of damaged personality—a rabid narcissist. Trump shows no interest in calming paranoid speculation but wants to instead redirect it to serve his personal interests. Unfortunately, capitulation rather than containment of these ideologues, including the ideologue in the White House, seems to be the approach of all too many major institutions—including the U.S. Congress, the Supreme Court, and even the major media outlets.

Second and more importantly, Hofstadter's framework devalues the legitimate anger in the streets that provides the mass appeal of conspiracy ideologues. We need to acknowledge that the sense of helplessness in the face of forces destroying jobs, communities, and culture is real and understandable. The lives of working-class Americans have been hollowed out by trade agreements that shipped factory jobs to Asia, by robots and AI that continue destroying the remaining service jobs, and by an economic system that funnels the profits of all of this to a small elite of bankers, hedge-fund owners, and tech “bros.” Anger at these conditions is not a problem for a rational elite to dampen, but a force for progressives to acknowledge and lead.

Beyond Cold War Liberalism

Hofstadter was too much the Cold War liberal, disgusted by McCarthy's conspiracies and irrationalism while remaining deeply distrustful of leftist anger at capitalism. We have witnessed what contemporary liberals have done to address working-class anger: little or nothing. Some have actually helped create the conditions generating this anger. Leaders like Clinton and Obama were too enthralled by neoliberal economics to address the suffering it inflicted on working-class communities.

Anger at economic inequality is not a psychological pathology to be cured or extinguished by a paternalistic liberal elite, but a force to be mobilized. As many progressive writers have argued, we need engagement with this anger and its redirection toward economic populism that could actually solve problems. There ARE forces attacking healthcare access, gutting our retirement systems, and automating jobs, but they are not found in shadowy pizza parlors where pedophiles supposedly gather. They operate in corporate boardrooms where an elite has enriched itself at our expense.

Once we recognize this, anger becomes not the problem but the solution to the problem, if progressively led. The challenge is not to dismiss or pathologize legitimate grievances, but to channel them toward meaningful economic and political change that addresses their root causes. If progressives fail to do this, we leave this anger to be manipulated by the paranoid conspiracy ideologues that Hofstadter so feared. This is a political failure we cannot afford under present circumstances.

Gregg Robinson is a long-time activist, retired Grossmont College Sociology professor, San Diego County Board of Education member, and a member of the AFT Guild, Local 1931 Retiree Chapter.