Paranoia

Wednesday

January 25, 2023

The United States of paranoia

Half a decade ago, with America’s elites trying to make sense of the rise of Donald Trump, an essay from the Sixties made a surprising comeback. Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” became part of the conversation over fifty years after it was first published in Harper’s. It was less something concerned citizens actually read, more something they mentioned at dinner parties to sound smart. Writing with Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential bid in the background, Hofstadter described in pseudo-psychological terms what he saw as the right’s tendency towards the paranoid style, a phrasing he chose “simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.

Bridget Phetasy

In defense of paranoia

Maybe it’s because I grew up during the “stranger danger” milk carton kid era (for those too young to know what I’m talking about, milk cartons were the original Amber Alert) or because of the burgeoning twenty-four-hour news cycle — or maybe I was just born neurotic — but I became convinced as a child that I was going to end up getting murdered by my bus driver in a schoolbus lot on the outskirts of town. Every morning, I’d ask my mom no fewer than a hundred times if she was going to be there when I got off the bus. My fear seemed irrational for a seven-year-old, but I was obsessed.

Thursday

September 6, 2018

James Bradley

All things lead to 9/11

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 many writers spoke of feeling immobilised. The scale of the attacks and the world’s shared experience of the media event seemed to demand a response; but simultaneously writers such as Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Jay McInerney described a sense that the tools at their disposal were inadequate — that the reality of what had taken place exceeded fictional representation. These three all recovered from their shock reasonably quickly, contributing to the flood of 9/11 fiction that poured into bookshops during the 2000s. In recent years this torrent of novels and stories has slowed, but as Christopher Priest’s eerily powerful An American Story demonstrates, it most certainly has not stopped.