Think back a year, and it seemed no one had a way with words like Barack Obama. He could fill a stadium - and did, at the 2008 Democratic national convention - with prose that blew through your doublespeak detectors as you surrendered to its splendour.
It went downhill from Inauguration Day. As they settled into the West Wing, Mr. Obama's vaunted speechwriters somehow lost their touch and their boss lost his. The U.S. President now often seems as stiff as the teleprompter on which he has developed such an acute dependence.
No, Americans looking for evocative language from their public figures in 2009 had to turn to the anti-Obamas. It wasn't hard to find them - they have dominated the national soapbox since mid-year, outdoing each other in their preposterousness.
Picking the choicest quotes of 2009 is, hence, not quite the uplifting affair it might have been in 2008, when Mr. Obama was still compelling and Republicans still aspired to more than the political equivalent of demolition derby. The past 12 months have served up more sinister stuff.
Take Glenn Beck, the Fox News host who emerged last year as the U.S. right's conspiracy-theorist-in-chief. Government ownership of General Motors, he warned, enables the Obama administration to spy on Americans by way of the OnStar GPS devices installed in GM products: "I just don't believe in giving that kind of technology to this government."
Sarah Palin launched her crusade against Obamacare with this: "The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's death panel so his bureaucrats can decide … whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."
And Michele Bachmann, another syntactically challenged Republican politician on the rise, greeted a Dec. 15 rally against the Democrats' proposed health-care reform by crying: "That is our wish for fellow citizens here in the United States - for freedom, not for government enslavement."
It would be easy to dismiss this trio as harmless hewers of ill-considered hyperbole, were it not for their supporting roles in the most pervasive and potentially consequential phenomenon to emerge in U.S. politics in 2009. Paranoia, it seems, has become the U.S. right's stock in trade. It is not the first time this has happened, of course. Conspiracy theories have been such a recurring theme in U.S. political discourse that there is something almost archetypal about it. Yet there is also something just a little more unsettling about it all, this time around.
In a seminal essay published 45 years ago, Richard Hofstadter chronicled the long history of the "paranoid style" in U.S. politics. It is typically, though not exclusively, the preserve of the right. It stretches from early Americans' obsession with rooting out Freemasons (is it any wonder Dan Brown's books are so popular?) to the Ku Klux Klan's hatred of Catholics. It ranges from Senator Joseph McCarthy's witch hunt against Communists in the 1950s to Barry Goldwater's improbable 1964 presidential bid to "stop a government establishment that is preparing to nationalize our society."
American politics, Mr. Hofstadter observed, has long been "an arena for uncommonly angry minds" in which substantial leverage "can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority." Mr. Hofstadter was a historian, not a psychiatrist. He was not diagnosing Mr. McCarthy or Mr. Goldwater when he labelled them as purveyors of the "paranoid style." Rather, he explained, he used the term as an art historian "might speak of baroque."
GOLDWATER BEGAT REAGAN ...
Mr. Goldwater, of course, was a spectacular flame-out, a conservative Cassandra whose claim that "the moral fibre of the American people is beset by rot and decay" must have seemed laughable to young Americans liberated at last by the pill. Yet Mr. Goldwater begat Ronald Reagan, "who would bring to pseudo-conservatism the warmth and optimism it had lacked," noted Sean Wilentz, a Princeton University political historian, in the foreword to a 2008 re-edition of Mr. Hofstadter's essays.
Mr. Hofstadter called Mr. Goldwater a pseudo-conservative because he thought his ideas were actually quite radical. That same radicalism is at the core of the politics practised by the current crop of paranoid stylists. They too call themselves conservatives. But unlike Messrs. Goldwater and Reagan, Mr. Beck, Ms. Palin and Ms. Bachmann actually seem to believe their own paranoid rhetoric.
"Goldwater, not unlike Reagan, was a regular politician … They would exploit the paranoid style," Prof. Wilentz explained in an interview. "Now we're down to the real thing."
In other words, for Ms. Palin et al., it's not an act.
The paranoid spokesman's "sense that his political passions are unselfish and patriotic," Mr. Hofstadter wrote, "goes far to intensify his feeling of righteousness and moral indignation." When Ms. Bachmann accuses Mr. Obama of holding "anti-American views," or when Ms. Palin decries "the agenda-driven policies being pursued in Copenhagen," they feed into the same anger that drives thousands of Americans to show up for "tea parties," where they give voice to many who feel dispossessed. "They refuse to listen" is the slogan of the Tea Party Patriots. It expresses the frustration of those who feel their country and their government have been usurped by Mr. Obama and his "socialist" cohorts.
The tea party movement has sent the Republican establishment (what's left of it) into a state of panic. You know what they say about imitation? A recent Republican National Committee Internet ad against Mr. Obama's health-care reform features a series of speakers uttering, in succession, the same plea: "Listen to me!"
That such a volatile and vitriolic faction as the tea party movement is now influencing the conduct of the party of Lincoln is indicative of the desperate state of Republicanism, which has embraced the paranoid style in a manner that would make even Mr. Goldwater cringe. At the party's meeting this month in Hawaii - which, at least if you believe what's written on his birth certificate, is where Mr. Obama came into the world - Republicans will decide whether to impose a "purity test" on prospective candidates seeking the GOP nomination in the 2010 congressional elections. If adopted, those who fail to profess their faith in at least eight of 10 core beliefs would be deprived of RNC backing and money.
When Mr. Hofstadter wrote, it was the assertion that Communist elements had systematically infiltrated the U.S. government that was most emblematic of the paranoid style. But although the labels have changed, the diatribes directed at Mr. Obama are merely variations on the same theme. In the words of Rush Limbaugh, who was the uncontested king of the right-wing media until Mr. Beck invented himself: "We want [Mr. Obama]to fail because we want to preserve our country as we found it. We do not want to see a successful attack on capitalism."
Mr. Limbaugh made that comment at last year's Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual event where the U.S. right's leading lights either commiserate or celebrate, depending on whether their side is in power. This year as last, commiseration will be on the agenda next month when 2012 Republican presidential hopefuls Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty and Mike Huckabee take to the stage to show off their paranoid style alongside the pros: Mr. Limbaugh, Anne Coulter and Ron Paul.
Among the event's sponsors is the John Birch Society, which students of the McCarthy and Goldwater eras of Republicanism might be shocked to learn still exists. The group, named for a Christian missionary who was allegedly killed by Communists in China, once labelled Republican president Dwight Eisenhower "a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy." (Suddenly, the RNC's consideration of a purity test starts to make sense, doesn't it?) It called for the impeachment of the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, "one of the most important agencies of Communism." It considered the fluoridation of drinking water to be a plot worthy of Soviet socialism.
IMAGINE THE RIGHT WING IS A RUG
The JBS is still alive, and apparently kicking a little stronger since Mr. Obama's election. It still fights to "halt legislation and federal policies that threaten the independence of our country and our people." But instead of U.S. Communists, its targets of predilection these days include the United Nations, NATO and the U.S. central bank, which it would like to see dismantled. It strives, according to its website, "to warn against and expose the forces that seek to abolish U.S. independence, build a world government or otherwise undermine our personal liberties and national independence."
Rachel Maddow, the anti-Glenn Beck who plies her progressive politics on the rival MSNBC network, recently took a swipe at the Birchers in a way that, fair or not, helps to situate the group on the U.S. political spectrum. "Imagine the right wing is a rug, right?" she began. "And on the far edge of that rug is a fringe. Now imagine that that fringe also has a fringe. The fringe on the fringe of the right wing of the American conservative movement - that's the John Birch Society."
That "fringe on the fringe" is also a proud sponsor of one of the most important gatherings of conservative thinkers in the United States, an event that will undoubtedly set the tone for Republican discourse in 2010 as the party aims to reclaim control of Congress in the November elections.
If that seems hard to fathom, Mr. Hofstadter would not be at all surprised.
The paranoid style "represents and old and recurring mode of expression in our public life," he wrote six years after the John Birch Society's 1958 founding. "Our experience suggests too that, while it comes in waves of different intensity, it appears to be all but ineradicable."
Konrad Yakabuski