Frum On Hofstadters The Paranoid Style In American Politics

6 Comments so far ↓

• senor // May 4, 2009 at 5:53 am

  David’s is not the first riff on Hostader in recent weeks. George Packer made essentially the same argument in The New Yorker, about all those right wing, paranoid conservatives. Guess liberals can’t be paranoid, huh: The Bushes WERE the tools of the Saudis; G. Bush did help the Bin Laden family escape the U.S. for sinister reasons; there WERE an abnormal number of Jews who escaped the World Trade Center. Nothing untoward about Jimmy Carter sitting next to the estimable Michael Moore at the 2004 Democratic Convention. David’s message is loud and clear, along with our pundocracy: paranoid people must be silenced.

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• senor // May 4, 2009 at 6:02 am

  I would like to apologize to David. I hurriedly read his review of Hostader and missed his points about liberal paranoics. Overall, it was actually a very balanced piece and I recommend it.

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• ChristianMiller // May 4, 2009 at 6:41 am

  Then there is the “move along, nothing to see here” style of politics. This style is promoted by elites who support the status quo. One hallmark of this style is when they smear perfectly rational people who ask legitimate questions as “paranoid”. Of course, there IS a paranoid style of politics. But many of the examples Frum uses are themselves tinged with paranoia. Beck is just asking questions. Valid questions. The question of the whereabouts of Obama’s birth certificate, along with his school records, is perfectly valid. Why do I have to bring my birth certificate to get a drivers license and Obama doesn’t have to prove American birth despite it being a stated requirement for the office of the Presidency? If Obama were to be proven not to have been born here, I grant that it would be a constitutional problem and a huge political problem. I don’t want to go there myself. It would be easier for all to ignore it, given the ramifications if it were found to be the case that Obama was not born here.But Frum is being intellectually dishonest in his lumping legitimate questions with conspiracy theories. Mark Levin is not practicing a “paranoid style ” at all.There is a difference between paranoia and the tipping point whereby the RESULT of both Republican statist policies along with Democrat socialist policies produces fascism.I dismiss almost all conspiracy theories out of hand based on my belief that people only act in their self-interest and therefore cannot act in large groups together secretly. But I do believe in large forces acting in concert because of incentives. This is not paranoid at all and there are many examples of forces that align for mutual benefit. Global warming has become a belief system where many stand to gain. Scientists get funding based on the assumptions. Scientists get published based on publications’ bias towards alarmism. Corporations like GE ,which owns NBC, stands to gain tremendously from sales of wind turbines and government subsidies. Al Gore himself has made millions not just on his propaganda film but his investments in ‘green’ corporate schemes. The UN stands to gain leverage over the strongest countries especially the USA, and smaller third-world countries stand to gain as well. It is not a conspiracy but a confluence of interests.Seeing larger patterns that produce negative end results does not constitute paranoia.

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• Ploughman // May 4, 2009 at 8:58 am

  So, “Those People” are not only bitter, but paranoid as well, and we are thus relieved of having to take them into account politically, or engage their ideas intellectually, is that how it works? How big is this New Majority tent?

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• ChanceRandel // May 4, 2009 at 12:00 pm

  If you don’t acknowledge the problem you can’t deal with it head on.

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• JJWFromME // May 4, 2009 at 1:18 pm

  Margaret Chase Smith on Joe McCarthy:”Today our country is being psychologically divided by the confusion and the suspicions that are bred in the United States Senate to spread like cancerous tentacles of “know nothing, suspect everything” attitudes.”http://www.mcslibrary.org/program/library/declaration.htm

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