The Bulwark's Charlie Sykes takes note of a tweet that underscores the madness of the right's conspiracy theories about Jan. 6:
"Antifa did it. And it was totally peaceful. And we were expressing our righteous and justified indignation at the Democratic vote steal. And Portland was worse. And the FBI entrapped us."
— David Frum (@davidfrum) June 16, 2021
Sykes remarks that "the point is that many folks in the MAGAverse believe it all… simultaneously." And he assigns Hannah Arendt to explain: "In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true."
She wrote those words in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), and they accord perfectly with Richard Hofstadter's illuminations on "the paranoid style" (1964) then raging in the United States, which I touched on yesterday in addressing the right's massive resurgence of political paranoia, couched in Jan. 6 conspiracy theories.
Hofstadter concludes his essay with these words: "We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well." Yet I wonder about the degree to which political paranoids actually suffer. For that matter, to what degree did Hofstadter actually believe in their suffering? I ask because of how I interpreted his thesis yesterday: "[Paranoid conspiracy theorists'] anxiety arises from the feeling of being out of control over whatever alternative situation they preferred — and that feeling is one of inferiority, which must be extinguished by feeling in control."
Put another way, feeling powerful. As Sykes' colleague, Tim Miller, writes: "For [the purveyors of Jan. 6 theories], their narrative doesn’t have to make sense. None of the different stories and arguments need to tie together. Because the lies" — the conspiracy theories themselves — "are a demonstration of power. The lies are a signal that as long as you are on the right side, there are no red lines. That anything goes."
Indeed it would seem that even Hofstadter questioned his assertion of the paranoid-as-double-sufferer, since just prior to his essay's conclusion he writes that the "afflicted" paranoid is nevertheless "assured of ultimate triumph." Could it be that the paranoid is, at root, free of suffering?