The Paranoid Style Returns for the Left.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s bid to man the ship of the democratic party for the 2024 presidential election has brought some dizzying conversation. He’s been called the anti-vaccine candidate, having built his recent brand around his fierce opposition to the covid-19 vaccines. Yet his campaign manager, former congressman Dennis Kucinich, calls that a smear and that really Kennedy is about vaccine safety. He’s appeared on numerous far right outlets while also garnering support from those on the further left and more centrist right. His anti-war stance fits in with the nascent Trumpian right while also slotting neatly with a more established peacenik left. In fact, his positioning makes it easy to see him more like a Republican of the MAGA variety than the establishment Democrat that his family name belies.

In a recent profile by John Hendrickson of The Atlantic, Kennedy defends his positioning in the Democratic party and pushes back at the assertion that he’s little more than a Republican plant to weaken Joe Biden’s re-election campaign. But he also engages in the same form of political rhetoric which rocketed Donald Trump to political power seven years ago. He describes a world in which the elite, particularly the medical science elite, are lying to us and manipulating people for financial gain. He derides “expertise” and conveys a sense of loss while providing a revanchist view not unlike the call to “make america great again.”

Kennedy is polling consistently in the double digits sometimes reaching as much as 20% in a head-to-head against Joe Biden. While those numbers may reflect something other than genuine support like name identification with his famous family or just general dissatisfaction with Joe Biden, it may also be useful to think of Kennedy as tapping into a similar sentiment among left-leaning voters as Trump did among right-leaning voters in 2016. 

Americans have long held beliefs that erred on the side of conspiracy and belief in elite subterfuge. In 1964, the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote of “the paranoid style” of American politics. A deeply ingrained desire by many Americans to see nefarious and insidious plots happening just out of plain view. And in some ways, Americans have reasons to believe conspiracy. The government has in fact lied about their activities and engaged in unsavory behavior both at home and especially abroad. The CIA has lied to congress about its clandestine operations and actively participated in overthrowing democratically elected governments in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile. Over a span of 40 years the CDC gave around 400 African-American men syphilis without their knowledge or consent in order to study its effects. Public justifications for wars in Iraq and Vietnam lacked validity or even belief among those government actors who carried them out. Among many other examples of unethical and illegal behavior by state run or sponsored organizations. 

But the paranoid style is more than just skepticism. It can be mentally healthy to be skeptical. I’d go so far as to say that a healthy level of skepticism is one of the bedrock characteristics of the liberal mind. Skepticism helps us navigate the liberal world of constant advertisement and informational fluff, it helps us make decisions for ourselves and our societies, and perhaps most importantly, it helps us confront our own convictions and discover new evidence or adopt different viewpoints. The paranoid style is not skepticism for the mind’s sake, it's hostile skepticism for the heart. 

As Hofstadter wrote in his original essay on the subject, the paranoid style isn’t so much about the substance of the concern or interest but about how that subject is broached. Even well researched and objectively true subjects can be approached with the paranoid style. Because it is simply that, the style of the argument or approach. The paranoid style appeals to the emotional center of a person, it taps into the animalistic desire for manichean justification, for right and wrong, for good guys and bad guys. It strips complexity for the sake of strong emotional appeal. 

In Hendrickson's Atlantic piece, Kennedy mentions that “every individual, like every nation, has a darker side and a lighter side, and the easiest thing for a political leader to do is to appeal to all those darker angels.” He wrote his senior thesis at Harvard on how Alabama Governor George Wallace advanced that darker side for his own political gain. Kennedy goes on to talk about how populism always starts from a real justification or ideal but almost always gets co-opted by those darker demagogue angels of anger, fear, and hatred. Hendrickson asks the Kennedy campaign if he considers himself a populist to which simply say he’s a democrat. 

Kennedy’s unlikely rise in the polls and his bid for presidency seem to almost assuredly be for not. He’s running against an incumbent president for a party which controls the process much more tightly than the Republican party which produced Trump, against all their efforts, in 2016. But the return of the Kennedy dynasty in this conspiratorial manner almost seems appropriate for an American moment where people are flailing with a sense of loss or misplacement. The American century seems to be closing, at least from the average American’s perspective. Globalization took the jobs out of the heartland and AI seems to be threatening the livelihood of the urban elite as well. Social benefit programs built over half a century ago seem to be likely to fade away and few alternatives have been crafted to replace them. Foreign wars and failures have weakened the perspective of the Imperial American power and a rising China threatens America’s hegemonic status. Young people see faults in American history and question why anyone would be proud of their country.

In this cultural milieu comes a familiar face preaching a comforting message. A Kennedy, a member of the dynasty that was last in the White House when things were well and good in America. A Kennedy, telling people that they are right! Things are not as they appear, the state is lying to you, you are worse off than your parents and it’s not your fault, it’s the fault of the bureaucrats and capitalists who have pulled the wool over your eyes and transformed YOUR America into something you don’t understand. A Kennedy who “tells it like it is” in much the same way that Donald Trump was a member of the wealthy elite letting us all in on the charade that the elite were pulling in order to make us all worse off. 

In many ways, it’s entirely understandable that this subcurrent has taken some element of the mainstream in America. Our internets have become effectively algorithmically driven silos which efficiently feed us more radical information and push us into communities of like minded others. When Hofstadter wrote about the paranoid style he was channeling an undercurrent in American history which was always beaten back by the reserved masses. At the height of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s paranoid inquiry into communism in America, the army lawyer Joseph N. Welch famously chastised McCarthy in a congressional hearing asking: “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” In an era without the internet and without social media, this even-keeled exasperation at the paranoid style turned the tide against McCarthy and the fever dream of communist infiltration broke. 

I don’t see how we will ever have a Welchian moment again. The amount of information produced and shared today dwarfs anything even remotely possible in the 1950s. Any attempt to shame or ground the paranoid style is met with complete indifference. An army of writers, youtubers, podcasters, and content creators can exist by reassuring their audiences that what they saw was what they wanted to see. In today’s information landscape, Welch's reproach would have won him a spot on Rachel Maddow’s evening show and some self assured youtube clips but would have done little else to change the broader conversations. 

The internet has supercharged the paranoid style and created a defense against sanctimonious attempts to bring it back down to earth. There is simply too much content created every minute of every day to refute. If you want to believe something today, it takes little effort to fall down the rabbit hole which will support and enhance your beliefs. Kennedy does not seem to believe himself to be a conspiracist. His anti-vaccine views seem to come from his long time support of environmentalism and his encounters with vaccine skeptics in that community. Hendrickson traces Kennedy’s concern with mercury in our water supplies and fish to his concern for elements of mercury found in certain vaccines. Which is an entirely justifiable initial concern, but when the paranoid style takes over, it’s far easier to double down on that initial skepticism than to accept information that refutes your initial concern.

Figures like Trump and Kennedy will continue to show up in American politics, if anything I could see politics shifting from a right-left spectrum to something more along the lines of establishment/expertise vs paranoid style. Kennedy represents the paranoid style on the left while Trump and his many political offspring represent the paranoid style of the right. The fact that the paranoid style of the left and the right seem to get along so well is indicative of a potential political shift.

The paranoid style has always been present in American politics, it always will be. But unlike in previous eras where the minority behind that style have been shamed or shown to be fraudulent, the information era social media companies have crafted will project those paranoid styles to ever more accepting audiences. I don’t think the answer is to shut down companies or censure information, but we must think of different ways to ordering the internet to not shunt healthy skeptics into the paranoid style. Profit driven companies’ over-reliance on algorithms to feed us what they think we want should be regulated. Not to prevent people from learning about bad things that the state has done, but to force people of all persuasions to confront their own convictions and question why they believe what they believe. The ability to access more information means we should confront more information that challenges our assertions, not be given ever more information that coddles and solidifies our beliefs.

Kennedy’s bid in 2024 won’t bear fruit for him as president but it will no doubt put him at the forefront of the paranoid style ticket, earning him more media time, coverage and potentially a place in the paranoid style cabinet of a second Trump presidency. Like many politician before him, he has captured some element of the American imagination which will benefit him more than it benefits America.