The United States of Paranoia, Cont'd

Paranoia can be a useful frame of mind.

I have a few more thoughts on this subject. My previous blast was written after getting halfway through the book. Now I’m done. I appreciate Jesse Walker’s efforts at providing a balanced view of left- and right-based paranoia, but I’m afraid there is a limit to the value of balance when reality is fundamentally unbalanced. Walker’s discounting of the threats of fascism and right-wing terrorism is not aging well.

I’ll note that Walker is a libertarian, but unlike others who brandish the label, is consistently anti-authoritarian. In particular, back in the day, he rejected the absurd case for the invasion of Iraq, which in my book was a requirement for any bona fide libertarian. He is one who rejects authoritarianism no matter where it originates. Such a frame of reference is useful. Other pretend libertarians are just closet Republicans who listen to rock music and smoke weed. In contrast, the website Antiwar.com is always good for a brisk critique of whatever the USGOV is up to in its foreign policy rampages. Reason Magazine can be useful.

Back to the book, one angle is the purported disconnect between anti-Semitism and other right-wing currents. I would object that, where white folks are concerned, shit all flows downhill to the same place. Bigotries of other sorts usually merge with anti-Semitism sooner or later. Racists, anti-Semites, homophobes, Islamophobes, xenophobes, etc. commune with each other. Black anti-Semites do not become racists, and Jewish fascists do not turn anti-Semite, but outside of marginalized groups, the toxic personalities tend to gather together eventually.

Walker’s own account documents how easily paranoids slide from one sort of bigoted fantasy into another, even from left- to right-wing points of view (the reverse appears to be less frequent). Wikileaks transitioned from an all-purpose anti-government stance to shameless support for Donald Trump in 2016. True to form, he repaid them by overseeing the indictment of Julian Assange. This confuses people who don’t understand Trump.

Jews may be paranoid, but we have real enemies. Just today, jailbird Steve Bannon is quoted in an interview warning American Jews to cleave tightly to Christian nationalism, or else.

Another analytical weakness in the book, excusable for lack of experience with the past decade and its plague of mass shootings, is the link between demagogy and apparently isolated terrorist acts. Trump’s role in this respect has become obvious. This was less clear when Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh were dumping their garbage into the street. Now tweets from Trump generate immediate, kinetic threats to individuals.

Walker criticizes the famous 2008 Department of Justice report on right-wing terrorism, which I have not read. I do remember clearly that its distribution was quashed by the Obama Administration in the face of furious denunciations from mainline Republicans. They understood the connection, if Walker did not. Yet another establishment Democratic failure, when audacity was in short supply.

Walker also criticizes the Southern Poverty Law Center, which reports on right-wing extremism, for its exaggerations. This has been a long-standing issue on the left. Such reporting is the SPLC’s business, and business has been booming for some time. They have become an atypically rich non-profit. At the same time, Walker provides some indulgent words for militias who pretend to be non-partisan, or who think of themselves that way. This cuts no ice with me. The only benign militia — the “Wicked Good Militia” — was founded (in Maine, you might realize, from the name) mostly I surmise as a joke by the eccentric novelist Carolyn Schute.

I’ve always thought the Left was more alert to fascism, though since the rise of Trump we see voices on the left discounting the threat he presents, perhaps to avoid excessive indulgence of admittedly dubious Democratic alternatives such as Joe Biden. My view is that balance in this context embodies a mortal threat to U.S. democracy.

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A couple of postscripts I hope do not detract from the main point of this post—that Walker’s book underestimates threats to Democracy from the Right.

One note is a phenomenon very relevant to conspiracy, which has a name: apophenia, the tendency to project patterns onto data. This is well-known in finance, thanks I would guess to the work of Benoit Mandelbrot. I would add it is the soul of so-called technical analysis of price movements of stocks, a practice I do not find compelling.

Two, on a less serious note, is his view of the X-Files, the television series and movies that I followed devotedly. To Walker, the X-Files deteriorated as it focused increasingly on a long-running background conspiracy, based on extraterrestrial alien designs on enslaving the human race. I enjoyed the “creature of the week” episodes but I especially doted on the Big Conspiracy (Cancer Man! The Lone Gunmen!!). I was duly offended when in later X-Files presentations, the conspiracy story was effectively recanted, probably at the direction of the aliens. At that point the show had lost its soul.