Paranoia is back in politics. But today's conspiracy theories have roots in a strange history

We’ve just been through the third US presidential election with Donald Trump as a candidate, and his campaign seemed more fuelled by conspiracy theories and moral panics than ever. From the now-stock assertions that the 2020 election was stolen and that migrants were being bussed in to vote Democrat, to claims that Haitians were eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio, the Republicans seemed entirely captured by the kind of thinking people associate with tin foil hats.

Still, they won.

Of course, conspiracism is nothing new in US politics. Sixty years ago, Harper’s Magazine published the American political scientist and historian Richard Hofstadter’s influential essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Hofstadter analyses a recurring mode of expression in American public life: one marked by “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” and often linked with movements of discontent.

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He traces this “paranoid style” through various episodes in US history, including the 19th century movements against Masonry and Catholicism. These movements expressed their hostility through an “apocalyptic and absolutistic framework”, finding covert, fiendish plots to destroy the American way of life.

Hofstadter then identifies mid-20th century right-wing movements and organisations that epitomise this style, including McCarthyism. Named after the demagogic Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, this was the intense political repression to combat supposed communist subversion in the 1940s-50s. Combining official proceedings like public hearings and FBI investigations with private sector reinforcement through dismissals and blacklists, McCarthyism framed communist influence as an existential threat to America.

Another major example Hofstadter discusses is the John Birch Society. Founded by the American businessman Robert Welch in 1958, this secretive group reached its height in the 1960s with an estimated national membership of between 80,000 and 100,000. Known as Birchers, these activists saw Communist plots behind everything from sex education in schools to fluoride in the water supply. Consciously mirroring left-wing cadre organisations, the society’s cells and front organisations built grassroots networks and facilitated mobilisations on the right. 

Many of the Birchers’ paranoid conspiracies around education are reflected in Moms for Liberty’s crusade against “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” in schools. We see even deeper regurgitations in Hofstadter’s analysis of the Presbyterian minister Lyman Beecher’s 1835 anti-Catholic tract A Plea to The West, which describes a plot by the old European powers to send migrant voters, hostile to the Protestant American way of life, to “lay their inexperienced hand upon the helm of our power”. The parallels with present-day, right-wing conspiracy theories of the Great Replacement and mass illegal immigration to bolster Democrat votes scarcely need elaboration. 

Still, Hofstadter’s analysis has serious problems. As writers like Kenan Malik, Kathryn Olmsted and Simon Willmetts note, even when discussing instances where it intensified into mass movements, Hofstadter tends to assume that the “paranoid style” is a temporary, aberrational deviation from US democratic institutions’ “usual” politics of compromise and consensus.

Certainly, the US conservative movement has often told itself the story of responsible conservatives cordoning off a “lunatic fringe” that saw treasonous plots everywhere. This story makes much of the prominent right-wing intellectual William F Buckley Jr’s supposed expulsion of the Birchers. 

Challenging this narrative, historians like John S Huntington and David Austin Walsh demonstrate how, at key points, ultraconservatives and mainstream conservatives in the US came together against perceived enemies within. Such alliances intensified right-wing thinking and set the trajectory for American politics.

And shades of conspiracist and apocalyptic thinking in mainstream politics aren’t limited to the right. In an ironic twist, some Harris supporters have entertained their own conspiracy theory that the 2024 election was stolen, claiming that 20 million “missing” Democrat voters compared to 2020 is a sign of electoral tampering, rather than of something more plausible like voters changing allegiances. Whilst it contained a grain of truth, the mainstream discourse around Russiagate and Project 2025 often took a cataclysmic and Manichean tone at the expense of frank and rigorous political analysis.

Despite his analytical shortcomings, Hofstadter captures something important about the contemporary right. He points to how, historically, conspiracy theorists saw themselves as“fending off threats to a still established way of life”. In contrast, the modern radical right “feels dispossessed” and “finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high”.

A mass media and global political-economic situation even more rife with uncertainty and spectacle than in 1964 have only intensified such millenarian fears, driving the contemporaryright to “mount the barricades” in one last push to save the very soul of the USA. In conspiracy theories like QAnon, treacherous elites have not only subverted the republic and its values through the Deep State: They have covertly reshaped American society over decades.

There are no easy solutions to the rampancy of conspiracy theories in politics. What we can say with confidence is that, unless we develop forms of politics that can present people with a better-grounded explanation of what’s causing their plight and foster a collective sense that they can do something about it, the conspiracist siren song will continue to draw them to the rocks.

Dan Davison and Sacha Marten are scholars researching the contemporary far right. Both have backgrounds in labour and migrants’ rights activism.

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