Liberty For All

by Peter Orvetti

“There is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing,” historian Richard Hofstadter wrote in November 1964.  “I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.”  Hofstadter said the representative of this movement “traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values.  He is always manning the barricades of civilization. …  Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish.  Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated.”

Forty-five autumns later, the paranoid style is back in style.

In the first chapter of his book “The Revolution: A Manifesto,” Rep. Ron Paul writes, “A substantial portion of the conservative movement has become a parody of its former self.  Once home to distinguished intellectuals and men of letters, it now tolerates and even encourages anti-intellectualism and jingoism that would have embarrassed earlier generations of conservative thinkers.”

These individuals work mainly within the Republican Party, but they are a faction of their own.  Theirs is a grand old paranoia.  They are the “Hofstadter Party.”

Oklahoma legislator Steve Russell, who called President Obama’s September address to schoolchildren “something you’d expect to see in North Korea or in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq,” is a member of the Hofstadter Party.  So is Sarah Palin, who wrote in August that “the America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel.’”  Ditto the “birthers”, who insist against all evidence that a president with a different skin color cannot possibly be a real American.  Also columnist John Perry, who wrote last week that “there is a remote, although gaining, possibility America’s military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the ‘Obama problem’” — a problem he does not define.  The Hofstadter Party’s rank-and-file are all of those who gleefully scrawl a Hitler mustache under Obama’s nose, visually equating his policies of profligate spending and dangerous deficit expansion to the roasting of six million human beings.

The emerging leader of the Hofstadter Party is Glenn Lee Beck, a former goofy drive-time radio host who has reinvented himself as a cheerful modern-day Father Coughlin.  On a recent episode of his Fox News program, Beck delivered a 19-minute monologue detailing what he called a “tree of revolution” linking Van Jones, “a radical communist revolutionary in the White House”; the “extreme left-wing” Apollo Alliance; and Bill Ayers, the Students for a Democratic Society, and other 1960’s radicals; and the Obama White House.  Another show started with Beck drawing a line between the President, White House aide Valerie Jarrett, ACORN, and a hammer-and-sickle.

Beck is less in the conservative tradition of Barry Goldwater than he is a spiritual descendant of another 1960’s politician, George Wallace.  In his book “Glenn Beck’s Common Sense,” he writes that Americans “know that SOMETHING JUST DOESN’T FEEL RIGHT, but they don’t know how to describe it or, more importantly, how to stop it.”  Like Wallace, Beck trashes big business and wealthy elites, telling viewers, “Wall Street owns our government.  Our government and these gigantic corporations have merged.”  He once went so far as to replace the stars on an American flag with corporate logos, in the style of the anti-corporate Adbusters Media Foundation.  Sometimes Beck comes off like a skinner Michael Moore.

MSNBC personality Joe Scarborough, himself a former bomb-throwing back-bench Republican congressman, has expressed his queasiness about the state of the conservative movement.  On his September 22 show, Scarborough cited Beck by name, and suggested those who “preach hatred” can inspire events like the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.  Scarborough then vowed to create “a conservatives’ honor roll on this show.  I’m talking to you, Mitt Romney, and I’m talking about anyone who wants to be president in 2012.  You need to call out this type of hatred.”

In Sunday’s Washington Post, Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute lamented, “During the glory days of the conservative movement, from its ascent in the 1960s and ’70s to its success in Ronald Reagan’s era, there was a balance between the intellectuals, such as Buckley and Milton Friedman, and the activists, such as Phyllis Schlafly and Paul Weyrich. …  Today, however, the conservative movement has been thrown off balance, with the populists dominating and the intellectuals retreating and struggling to come up with new ideas.  The leading conservative figures of our time are now drawn from mass media, from talk radio and cable news.  We’ve traded in Buckley for Beck, Kristol for Coulter, and conservatism has been reduced to sound bites.”

This is a sad state of affairs.  With great issues like health policy, government ownership of business, and multiple foreign wars on the agenda, this country needs a dynamic and thoughtful conservative voice.

Peter Orvetti was an early political blogger in the United States, running his Orvetti.com political news report from 1997 through 2002. He is a past editorial writer for the Cato Institute, served as Deputy Director of Communications for the Libertarian Party in the lead-up to the 2000 party convention, and has published commentaries in several major newspapers. Contact Mr. Orvetti at peterjorvetti@gmail.com.