Back in 1964, Historian Richard Hofstadter wrote the now-classic “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” for Harper’s Magazine. According to Hofstadter, this style of mind was characterized by “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” Hofstadter goes on:
“Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention.”
According to Hofstadter, the enemy in this paranoid narrative is a “perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, who “manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. …Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing)…”
Now the latest news, care of CNN :
“Sen. Elizabeth Warren announced Tuesday morning that she is rejecting an invitation from Fox News to participate in a town hall with the network, slamming the outlet as a "hate-for-profit racket that gives a megaphone to racists and conspiracists."
In a series of tweets, the Massachusetts Democrat said that what she sees as Fox News' "hate-for-profit" model means that the network "balances a mix of bigotry, racism, and outright lies with enough legit journalism to make the claim to advertisers that it's a reputable news outlet. It's all about dragging in ad money -- big ad money."
Denounce and shun: the paranoid style of politics today, especially on the left. One side virtuous, the other evil. Quick to label and condemn, today’s paranoids seem to have a quasi-religious concept of irredeemable souls - souls that must be cast out of society because nothing good comes from commerce with the devil. Hardly a mindset conducive to a robust exchange of ideas that is the foundation of a healthy democracy. As John Stuart Mill put it:
“He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that…Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form…” On Liberty
Come on, Elizabeth! Fox News is the most-watched cable news network* in the nation - by far. An interview on Fox would have been a golden opportunity to make your case to a skeptical audience and perhaps learn something in the process. Instead, you chose to score points with your base and run from the challenge.
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* Fox News had 2,395,000 viewers in April 2019, almost twice as many as the runner-up MSNBC, which had 1,660,000 viewers, an advantage that extended to younger viewers.