It is a notorious fact that the Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome are at this very moment plotting our destruction and threatening the extinction of our political, civil, and religious institutions.
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Every device of treachery, every resource of statecraft, and every artifice known to the secret cabals of the international gold ring are being used to deal a blow to the prosperity of the people and the financial and commercial independence of the country. For nearly thirty years these conspirators have kept the people quarreling over less important matters while they have pursued with unrelenting zeal their one central purpose. . . . Now turn back fifty years to a manifesto signed in 1895 by a number of leaders of the Populist party:Īs early as 1865–66 a conspiracy was entered into between the gold gamblers of Europe and America. . . . decisions would serve the country’s interest. The laws of probability would dictate that part of . . .
#PARANOID MEANING SERIES#
What can be made of this unbroken series of decisions and acts contributing to the strategy of defeat? They cannot be attributed to incompetence. . . . A conspiracy of infamy so black that, which it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men. . . . How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. Here is Senator McCarthy, speaking in June 1951 about the parlous situation of the United States: The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent. I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content. But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.
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In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes.
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I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. It had been around a long time before the Radical Right discovered it-and its targets have ranged from “the international bankers” to Masons, Jesuits, and munitions makers.Īmerican politics has often been an arena for angry minds.