It’s the paranoid style of American populism

The war of in-groups against out-groups

There’s a tendency on the center-left to dismiss populism on the grounds that it’s divisive, irrational, and anti-democratic. Probably the most famous of these arguments is Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay for Harper’s, “The Paranoid Style of American Politics.”

Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash

But as Hofstadter himself emphasizes, populists, at least in the American context, are united more by style than by substance. Anti-Masons, anti-Catholics, and anti-communists, in Hofstadter’s telling, are all paranoid pedants reaching for the simplicity of grand conspiracy to avoid the hard work of interpreting complex facts. Leave history to the historians, Hofstadter is saying, to the trained experts who can make sense of it. Not exactly a winning message during populist times!

Speaking of winning messages, consider the best performing ads of the electoral cycle. “Kamala Harris is for they/them. Donald Trump is for you” is a textbook example of the paranoid style of populism. It literalizes the “us versus them” framing that is critical to forming an identity of grievance. The ad is odious. It’s also brutally effective in preying on the fears of a large portion of the country struggling under inflation and experiencing post-pandemic upheaval, including navigating elite mores.

But populism is indeed a style. Take a different ad, from Kamala Harris. According to Future Forward, the Democratic SuperPAC that tested the effectiveness of the Harris campaign’s messages, it was the best ad in the arsenal. It’s also textbook populism — but instead of punching down on trans immigrants, it calls out landlords and price gougers who profit off our pain of high prices.

The problem? The ad got virtually no air time. This accords with research from the Center for Working-Class Politics that concludes “the Harris campaign pivoted away from the economy starting around mid-September, de-emphasizing policies that she had previously advocated and moving away from an adversarial stance toward elites.” Instead, the Harris campaign made overtures to cast her opponent as a fascist, a dangerous threat to the institutions of democracy.

Here’s the thing: those institutions are clearly not working for the majority of Americans. Once again, let me cite the fact that 50% of Americans own a paltry 2.5% of national wealth, a smaller percentage than 35 years ago.

Reading the Hofstadter essay, I’m struck how populism rears its head in periods driven by social, economic, and technological change, when the old ways no longer work and new formations of conflict appear. Because these periods of change necessarily result in winners and losers, they tend to be low trust environments, in which paranoia and conspiratorial thinking reign.

It’s in these moments where ranks tighten among tribes, formed along the lines of self-interest and collective identity. This isn’t the Hobbesian war of all against all so much as the war of in-groups against out-groups.

This all describes 2024 pretty well.¹ We live in a vastly different world than we did in 2019. Things cost a lot more. Covid broke people in ways that are still underexplored, in part because of a collective decision to memoryhole the horrors of the pandemics. Though still emergent, AI promises to shake up the economy, leaving many of my peers — from poorly paid journalists to well off coders, but all of them urban, college-educated “elite” — anxious. Men continue to lose status, income, and education, with few people beyond the online “manosphere” helping them find meaning throughout this decline.

Which brings me to a key insight that Hofstadter made. The right-wing paranoid movements of the 19th century were guarding a way of life from incursion by European Illuminati. But the right-wing of the early 1960s had already lost its way of life, so Hofstadter argued. They were “dispossessed:”

America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.

Hofstadter had Barry Goldwater’s doomed 1964 presidential campaign in mind here. Of course, Goldwater pioneered the politics of dispossession that become the southern strategy that Nixon rode to the White House just four years later. This is the reactionary strain of populism: take real “betrayal from on high” and cast the blame on Black people, immigrants, the poor, trans teens in sports.

What the Democrats need to do is reclaim the paranoid style of populism to cast blame where it belongs — the wealthy elite who got us here in the first place. The problem is that liberals broadly have an allergy to this paranoid style. So instead they run as stewards of a broken system.

Sometimes it works. But if you misjudge the moment and campaign as an institutionalist during populist times, you’re going to lose. And that’s what happened.

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Burn After Reading

Ross Douthat’s 2022 essay about “How the Right Became Left and the Left Became Right” is something of an updated version of Hofstadter. He argues that the total victory of the libs in America’s elite institutions has had a reverse counterculture effect, where now the right owns transgression while the left defends norms. I think the 2024 election, where Trump was able to run as an outsider, vindicates much of Douthat’s analysis:

The evolving attitudes of right and left reflect their evolving positions in American society, with cultural liberalism much more dominant in elite institutions than it was a generation ago and conservatism increasingly disreputable, representing downscale constituencies and outsider ideas.

1. Where I get stuck is that this described 2022 pretty well too, which is when Democrats had the best midterm performance I can remember, despite an even higher rate of inflation.