The Left’s Paranoid Style of Politics

By David Harsanyi

Monday, December 02, 2024

 

The Democratic Party’s closing argument for the 2024 campaign season had little to do with policy or good governance. Rather, it was a stark warning about semi-fascists led by a modern-day Hitler coming to strip minorities of rights, execute journalists, send people to camps, erect a real-life Handmaid’s Tale, and initiate a Christian theocracy. Scary stuff. Communicating through “dog whistles” and propped up by “dark money,” these Fifth Columnists had even cataloged their devious plans in a scary-sounding book called “Project 2025.”

 

Over the past decades, the American Left and its institutions have ratcheted up political paranoia to the extent that its policy prescriptions — even what it views as our most pressing societal problems — are often tethered to groundless or sensationalized anxieties, myths, revisionist histories, pseudoscientific alarmism, and outright lies. For modern Democrats, every political loss, no matter how inconsequential, is a chilling threat to “democracy.” H. L. Mencken famously quipped, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” From the Russia collusion conspiracy to Jim Crow 2.0 to climate change, on the left, it’s hysteria and apocalypticism all the way down.

 

As I detail in my new book, The Rise of BlueAnon: How the Democrats Became a Party of Conspiracy Theorists, the 2024 campaign was a culmination of 30 years of mainstreaming a paranoid style of politics. During the Trump era, for instance, George W. Bush would often be portrayed as the honorable head of a once-rational Republican Party, but during his presidency Democrats regularly accused him of furthering fascistic policies; of fighting wars in the Middle East for personal, monetary gain; and of running international schemes to bring the nation to ruin. Michael Moore became famous and wealthy spreading unhinged conspiracy theories during the Bush years in his highly successful documentaries, getting standing ovations at the Oscars.

 

When a 2006 Scripps Howard poll asked Democrats, “How likely is it that people in the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East?,” over 50 percent said it was “very likely” or “somewhat likely.” Other polls mirrored these findings.

 

Now, none of this is to argue that Republicans — or members of any political faction, for that matter — are immune to conspiratorial thinking. As we all know, there is plenty of paranoia to go around. Whether voters believe Beyoncé is running the Illuminati or Rothschild space lasers are wreaking havoc on the environment, all factions have their unhinged conspiracists. This has been the norm since Pericles of Athens. Politics has the disastrous capacity to transform millions of seemingly rational, decent people into hysterical, unthinking mobs of partisans.

 

And, yet, the entire legacy media, editorial boards of major newspapers, cable news “experts,” professors, left-wing pundits, late-night talk-show hosts, and ordinary Democrats will confidently and persistently assure their audiences that conservatives are the ones, perhaps the only ones, susceptible to disinformation and misinformation. Sociologists at prestigious universities cook up studies confirming that right-wingers are easily hoodwinked by conspiracy theories, while political “scientists” warn us that the trend isn’t merely an urgent problem but an “existential” menace to our very way of life. Elected officials use these warnings as a justification to propose illiberal regulations to tackle the alleged avalanche of right-wing lies. And those who run our federal agencies deputize themselves arbiters of Truth, and push censorship to cleanse the people of this scourge of falsehood.

 

What is forgotten or ignored, however, is that by most standards that matter, the Left’s conspiracizing has been far more successful and effective.

 

The biggest difference between the two is the aesthetic and tonal quality of conspiracies. The Right’s ham-fisted theories are often crude, palpably screwy, and largely inconsequential to policy. The Left’s conspiracies and hoaxes are laundered through mass media, polished with high production values, calibrated for maximum plausibility, and draped in a patina of legitimacy. The Left’s deceptions have been broadcasted by once-trusted television hosts, politicians, public health officials, journalists, former federal intelligence officials in suits who appear on MSNBC, CNN, and NBC News armed with impressive degrees and résumés.

 

This is why the Russia collusion hoax was the most successful in American history, enveloping and paralyzing the first Trump administration. In a December 2016 poll, taken only a month after the election, an Economist/YouGov poll found that 52 percent of Democrats believed Russia had “tampered with vote tallies.” This was the result when we had only begun to hear about how the Kremlin’s gremlins had subverted our democracy. By the fall of 2018, in the heyday of Russia-panic-mongering, another YouGov poll found that 67 percent of Democrats believed it was “definitely true” or “probably true” that “Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected” — even though there was not a shred of evidence pointing to a manipulation of votes.

 

Alex Jones is a piker compared to Rachel Maddow.

 

For years now, I’ve been accused of being a dupe for Russia, even though I’ve never once written or said a single favorable word about Vladimir Putin. When I’m not fronting for Slavic autocrats, I’m being paid off by the National Rifle Association, American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Federalist Society, Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Grocery, and a host of other groups that have, quite rudely, never given me a penny to spread their message. In contemporary politics, a conservative might be dumb or maybe evil, owned by insidious billionaires or foreign governments, but never a good-faith political adversary. The Left has convinced its constituents that they are without agency, lorded over by shadowy billionaires, aspiring fascists, and “minority rule.”

 

Democrats no longer argue about policy. They cynically denounce you as a seditionist.

 

The Left’s adoption of paranoia is cynical but also ideological. The Democratic Party’s “progressive” turn in the past few years has become a religious superiority complex that imbues them with an uncompromising certitude. For those who see themselves as the only legitimate champions of justice, tolerance, and decency, it is inconceivable that anyone could honestly prefer the selfish, violent intolerance of the conservative agenda. There must be some unseen force pulling the strings.

 

In other ways, the Left’s neurotic worldview is necessitated by the Democratic Party’s cultural victories over the past decades. Without paranoia, the Left would run out of victims to “help” and enemies to slay. Many of the modern Left’s central issues would be rendered useless. Consequently, they create new traumas, condemn imaginary crimes, and warn of nefarious cabals. One of their most pernicious paranoias, for instance, is racial identitarianism, the idea that there is a systematic and embedded attack on African Americans in our society. Tens of millions of black voters falsely believe they have been stripped of agency.

 

It’s the nature of progressivism to view the world in zero-sum terms, where all that really matters is who has the power. In this world, Americans are either victims or oppressors, the latter buttressed by the alleged rampant injustices of capitalism and racism and scheming forces lurking in the shadows.

 

Traditionally, it’s the dispossessed — or those who think of themselves as powerless — who are most prone to believing and promoting conspiracy theories. Somehow the modern Left, which controls or influences virtually all major American institutions — corporate media, the academic world, the federal government — has pulled off the trick of running the country while playing the victim at the same time.

 

Will the 2024 losses break the fever within the Democratic Party? Considering the influence of the far Left, it seems unlikely. It’s worth remembering, though, that people with real principles, ideas, and good arguments don’t need conspiratorial answers to problems.