The New Yorker Talks About the Paranoid Kooky Right

The New Yorker had a interesting article up today that caught my eye because of it's reference to the the history of FDR, Huey Long and the dangers of the mob masking itself as legitimate populism. See Populism and Paranoia

Sadly the piece is a tad runied by just a full assault on conservatives and the right . It is true the right has plenty of kooks but the New Yorker failing to realize that the left has just as many is mind boggling. Did the author of this piece fail to observe what the kooks on the left were saying about Bush. I mean right now we got Damon Linker over a respected magazine like the New Republic talking about Catholic conspiracies headed by the late Father Neuhaus to take over the United States!!

Jonah Golderg had this to say over at NRO.

Paranoid Style for Thee But Not For Me [Jonah Goldberg]

Over at The New Yorker, George Packer, echoing many, rehashes the usual talking points about how conservatives are particularly prone to paranoia and populist hysteria. He trots out Richard Hofstadter and Hofstadter's cribbing of the incredibly flawed work by Adorno. I respect Packer, but I find this all so deeply tiresome.

Look, I think there are examples of conservative or right-wing rhetoric getting out of hand vis a vis Obama. I listened to a video clip of Alan Keyes talking about Obama the other day and he might as well have been talking about Pol Pot. But I think most of the rhetoric has been perfectly legitimate given the times we're in and what Obama is trying to do. In particular, as I noted the other day, I love how liberals — who have been pushing to Europeanize American social policy for generations — are suddenly aghast and contemptuous when conservatives complain that liberals want to Europeanize American social policy, just as the liberal effort starts to succeed.

But I just have a hard time listening to liberals grow suddenly high-brow and Ivy League serious about the paranoid style of the American Right. Where were these people for the last eight years when abject paranoid hysteria consumed the left flank of liberalism and threatened to capsize the entire enterprise? There are certainly elements on the Right that are prone to such things, but there are also elements on the Left that are just as prone to it.

I will stack Naomi Wolfe up against any John Bircher. Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, the folks at ANSWER, Ward Churchill, are no less conspiratorial than your typical right-wing conspiracy theorist and some of them are not only worse, but far more accepted by the liberal establishment than their opposite numbers are by the conservative establishment. Why do the Tim McVeigh types count against the Right, but the Black Panthers never against the Left? Why aren't liberals troubled by

Rosie "Steel Never Melted Before Before Bush" O'Donnell but wigged out by Michael Savage? When Spike Lee floated the idea that the Bush administration blew up the levees to flood New Orleans, where was Packer & Co's hand-wringing then?

When Randall Robinson proclaimed at the Huffington Post that blacks — and only blacks — were being forced to eat the flesh of the dead in the wake of Katrina, why did no one dust off their Hofstadter?

Where was The New Yorker when a Greek Chorus of dunderheads claimed that a cabal of perfidious bagel-snarfing neocons were, like the Elders of Zion of yore, scheming to undo all that is good in the world? Where were they when Hollywood buffoons were producing Broadway plays depicting the very same neocons shouting "Hail Leo Strauss!"

The real problem is that the liberal establishment, starting with Hofstadter and Adorno, have perfected the art of proclaiming paranoia or populism they don't like as "right-wing" when — often, but not always — there's nothing right-wing about it. Adorno was particularly reprehensible on this score. And when, for whatever reason, they can't excommunicate left-wing populists and conspiracy nuts, they usually — though, again, not always — defend it as valuable speech in the hurlyburly of American democracy or make apologies for the "legitimate anger" that drives folks like Wolfe and Spike Lee to say demonstrably idiotic and crazy things.

So again, by all means, dust off your dog-eared copies of the Paranoid Style. But spare me the lectures if you can only find things to worry about to your right.

03/25 10:11 AMShare