Magical Thinking and the Paranoid Style

Mark Jamison writes about Magical Thinking and the Paranoid Style.

The conservative movement is built on two interlocking premises, Americans can be made to fear almost anything and that fear can be used to sell most anything; paranoia and magical thinking combined for profit and political power. Rick Perlstein wrote a piece for Baffler a few years ago,“The Long Con: Mail Order Conservatism” that captures the con-artist element perfectly while Richard Hofstadter’s classic, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” captures our long historical dalliance with crazy.

Over the years, the Right in the United States has been comprised of a sort of mainstream Babbitt Republicanism which, with the 1971 Powell Memo coalesced into a celebration of Friedmanism, a sort of religious celebration of self-interest that dovetails nicely with elements of conservative huckster-paranoia. The result is a Republican Party that cannot really control the forces it has manipulated to gain and retain power. In the end though the Republican Party is a fusion of high-toned grifters selling bad economics designed to further the interests of the military/financial/corporatist industrial complex and small time con artists who use direct mail and now the internet to fan the flames of fear, resentment, and division, primarily as a selling strategy.

Emphasis Mine

Divide and conquer has long been a maxim of ruling classes throughout history. As long as the subordinate classes are kept fightened and fearful of each other, they will continue to look to the rulers for safety.

yet. magical thinking and fearfulness are attributes of children. The rulers want to see themselves as adults (or parents) who protect and nuture their children.

But parents who keep their children as children without giving the room to grow into adults themselves, are abusive parents who are only interested in maintaining control.

Even Anarchists are prone to magical thinking. They believe a single general strike, or other spectactular event, will bring the whole system tumbling down.

They do not realise the road to adulthood is fraught with danger, opportunities, learning and un-learning, mistakes. That is the nature of maturation. There is no easy path. It is the very difficulty that turns children into adults.

So it is with the evolution of societies. People must learn to take on more and more responsiblity for their own lives and to grow society into a more harmonious whole. This will take the wisdom of experience and struggle.

Societies do not grow wholly through individual growth, but also through individuals learning to respect and listen to each other. The social and personal must be bound together through politics.