Linda Kerber: David Brooks's Misapplication of Hofstadter
[The writer is a professor of history at the University of Iowa.]
Predicting that Patrick J. Fitzgerald's investigation will go no further than the alleged perjury of I. Lewis Libby Jr., David Brooks invokes the great historian Richard Hofstadter's characterization of a "paranoid style in American politics" to describe Democrats who conclude that Mr. Libby's lies obfuscated the administration's intention to go to war in Iraq.
But Mr. Hofstadter's focus in that essay was the contemporary right wing, exemplified by Joseph McCarthy and Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society. For Mr. Hofstadter, a central characteristic of the paranoid style is the conviction that the nation faces a hostile and conspiratorial world and the absence of sensible judgments about how to respond to that threat.
"Respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can be justified to many non-paranoids but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates 'evidence,' " Mr. Hofstadter wrote. The goal is "to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed." Senator McCarthy waved fictional lists of Communist agents.
Is not "paranoid" more appropriate as a description of those who misled the nation into war on the "evidence" of weapons of mass destruction?
Read entire article at NYT
Predicting that Patrick J. Fitzgerald's investigation will go no further than the alleged perjury of I. Lewis Libby Jr., David Brooks invokes the great historian Richard Hofstadter's characterization of a "paranoid style in American politics" to describe Democrats who conclude that Mr. Libby's lies obfuscated the administration's intention to go to war in Iraq.
But Mr. Hofstadter's focus in that essay was the contemporary right wing, exemplified by Joseph McCarthy and Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society. For Mr. Hofstadter, a central characteristic of the paranoid style is the conviction that the nation faces a hostile and conspiratorial world and the absence of sensible judgments about how to respond to that threat.
"Respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can be justified to many non-paranoids but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates 'evidence,' " Mr. Hofstadter wrote. The goal is "to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed." Senator McCarthy waved fictional lists of Communist agents.
Is not "paranoid" more appropriate as a description of those who misled the nation into war on the "evidence" of weapons of mass destruction?