Bonfire of the Sanities

Like Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” is often cited but less often read, which is a shame because the landmark 1964 essay helps explain our times. Consider Sen. Ron Johnson.

Last week, Sen. Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, described a text message between FBI lawyer Lisa Page and counter-espionage agent Peter Strzok as “further evidence of corruption, more than bias, but corruption of the highest levels of the FBI.” He also made reference to a “secret society” and an “an informant talking about a group that were holding secret meetings off-site.”

“There’s so much smoke here, there’s so much suspicion,” Johnson warned on Fox News.

Uh-huh. A few days later, Johnson was forced to back-pedal when it turned out that the text message he had found suspicious was an office in-joke between two colleagues having an affair revolving around a Vladimir Putin-themed calendar. As for the off-site, Johnson also admitted he had no idea what it was for or about, not that it prevented him from painting it in the most sinister colors. Maybe there was a scavenger hunt for Hillary Clinton’s missing emails.

Alas, Johnson’s suspicions are only of a piece with other paranoid Republican effusions. That includes the supposed loss of five months’ worth of texts between Page and Strzok, which President Donald Trump called “one of the biggest stories in a long time” — until the bureau said they were recovering the texts.

Or the contrived furor over former National Security Adviser Susan Rice’s “unmasking” of Trump team officials, who, it turned out, were trying to set up a dubious back channel to Russia without notifying the outgoing Obama administration.

Or, for that matter, the very idea that the FBI is dedicated to destroying the Trump presidency. Recall this is the same bureau that, wittingly or not, probably did more than any other arm of government to create the Trump presidency in the first place, in part because disgruntled FBI field agents were intent on forcing Director James Comey to reopen the Clinton email investigation 11 days before the election.

None of this would have surprised Hofstadter, whose essay traces the history of American paranoia from the Bavarian Illuminati and the Masons to New Dealers and Communists in the State Department.

“I call it the paranoid style,” Hofstadter wrote, “simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.” What better way to describe a Republican Party that thinks America has more to fear from a third-tier FBI agent in Washington who doesn’t like the president than it does from a first-tier KGB agent in Moscow who, for a time at least, liked the president all too well?

Then again, Hofstadter might have been surprised to find that the party of conspiracy is also the party of government. The paranoid style, he noted, was typically a function of powerlessness: “Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed.”

Today, Republicans control every branch of government and nearly every aspect of the Russia investigation. Robert Mueller, a Republican, was appointed special counsel by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, another Republican, and a Trump appointee. Devin Nunes, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, supposedly accuses the FBI of anti-Trump perfidies in a secret four-page memo, but he won’t share the memo with the director of the FBI — who’s also a Trump appointee.

Liberals observing the awful spectacle might be forgiven for taking quiet satisfaction in this Republican bonfire of the sanities. They should take care it doesn’t infect them as well.

The principal lesson of paranoia is the ease with which politically aroused people can mistake errors for deceptions, coincidences for patterns, bumbling for dereliction, and secrecy for treachery. True conspiracies are rare, but stupidity is nearly universal. The failure to know the difference, combined with the desire for a particular result, is what accounts for the paranoid style.

Should the president’s critics really be quite so sure of their suspicions when it comes to Trump’s dealings with Russia? Should they invest so much of their credibility on being proved right? And are they prepared for the political fallout if they turn out to be wrong?

The smart course is to let Mueller do his work, defend his probity and the integrity of his investigation, and only draw conclusions from the facts as he finds them.

America already has one party that’s lost its mind. We don’t need another.