The paranoid style in American politics (2024). Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropped out of the U.S. presidential race last Friday and endorsed Donald Trump. Kennedy had been polling around 5 percent—low by the standards of America’s established parties, but high by those of any third party.

Third-party presidential candidates tend to have recognizable political views. In 2000, Ralph Nader represented the Greens, and in 2016, Gary Johnson, the Libertarians. Kennedy, however, has shown little ideological coherence: He began his campaign as a Democrat, continued as an independent, flirted with the Libertarian Party, and ended by throwing his support to the Republican nominee.

A very strange campaign.

In the course of it, Kennedy has said the Covid vaccine is a bioweapon targeting “certain races”; he’s also said a worm once ate part of his brain; he believes the Central Intelligence Agency killed not only his father but also his uncle, the 35th president of the United States.

Plenty of sensible people might be attracted to a conspiracy theory or two, but for Kennedy conspiracy is a whole style of thought. Which might feel like a sign of the times. But in the U.S., it’s not unusual. It can feel almost familiar.

In 1964—60 years ago now—the American historian Richard Hofstadter described a “paranoid style in American politics,” characterized by “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.” Already then, he wrote, the style was “far from new.” New England preachers warned against the Illuminati in the eighteenth century; there was a strong anti-Masonic movement in the 1820s; and then, of course, there was McCarthyism in the middle of the last century—which extrapolated from the real threat of communism to an out-of-control pattern of persecution that’s still infamous by McCarthy’s name.

The politics of the United States has turned on some wild ideas, again and again. And here again.

—Gustav Jönsson

Magliabechi’s: The Sentinel State. Chinese society has undergone radical, at times tumultuous, change since Mao Zedong established the communist People’s Republic in 1949. But since Mao, social and economic revolutions haven’t meant political revolution in China—and today, the Communist Party’s hold on power is, apparently, firmer than ever. Why’s that?

Minxin Pei’s recent book, The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China, makes the case that the fundamental reason is China’s near-total ability to spy constantly on its citizens. Pei, a professor of governance at Claremont McKenna College, has mapped it out: While high-tech facial recognition cameras are important to the Chinese surveillance system, what's even more important is the relatively small group of secret-police officers who command millions of informants.

If it feels like we’ve seen this before, the East German Stasi also had informers in every room—and the East German Stasi is long gone, along with the East German regime. But dwelling on the connection may be too optimistic.

—Gustav Jönsson

111MHz: ‘First Idea Part One.’ The four musicians of 137 are veterans of the post-jazz groups Portishead and Sons of Kemet. Here, on the new album Strangeness Oscillation, it’s instrumental fusion. Improvisation is the rule—animal spirits. Listen for that psychedelic swirl.

—Brendan Hasenstab

Tremors in Tokyo. On August 14, not even three years into his term, Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced he would step down in September. For much of Japan’s post–World War II history, administrations have rarely served a full term, and prime ministers have regularly resigned after a year or two—even as the Liberal Democratic Party controlled the government every year but one since 1955.

The new century seemed to bring a new stability to Japan, with Junichiro Koizumi leading the country for five years and then Shinzo Abe for eight. So what happened with Kishida?

News reports have cited corruption scandals: LDP officials held fundraisers but kept some of the donations in secret slush funds—and Kishida largely brushed off responsibility, helping push his approval rating down to 25 percent.

But they also cite polls that show acute anger about the economy. Since the pandemic, the cost of living has climbed dramatically in Japan, where inflation carries a special weight: For decades, the country has struggled with a stagnant economy—including stagnant wages, minimal GDP growth, and prices either holding steady or, in some cases, declining.

You can see the connection to a global pattern that extends far beyond Japan, around the post-pandemic world: Globally, economic turbulence has driven the cost of food, energy, and a lot of consumer goods higher—and a political wave against incumbents wider.

—Michael Bluhm

Standoff in Little Venice. The winner of last month’s Venezuelan election was not the winner.

Nicolás Maduro, the incumbent president, is an autocratic populist who’s overseen the ruin of the country’s once-thriving economy through 11 years in office. On July 28, he was routed by Edmundo González. And yet Maduro declared himself the winner.

The National Electoral Council has backed Maduro—but Venezuelans know he controls the council, so that’s only provoked protests across the country. And now, the government has responded in turn with a nationwide campaign of repression of torture. No Western countries, meanwhile, have acknowledged Maduro as the election’s winner.

How long can he stay on? Today, Moisés Naím looks at how far Maduro’s allies, in his security forces at home and among authoritarian powers abroad—in Beijing, Moscow, and Havana—are willing to go to keep him in power.

—Michael Bluhm

111MHz: ‘Days.’ The French duo Kashaiof named their band as an interpretation of the Hebrew word Kishoof, meaning sorcery. And the vocal chants lean in that direction—but the overall tone brings back the industrial sounds of the EBM-1980s. Rhythms move slowly in a world dense with grit and noise. Recommended if you know and care for Nitzer Ebb or Front 242.

—Brendan Hasenstab

Politics and the English language: a ‘coup.’ After it became clear that U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris would replace President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee for the November presidential election—a role she’ll formally accept at her party’s national convention this week—her Republican opponent, Donald Trump, described it as a “coup.”

The claim quickly became a meme on the American right and—unusually for a Trump provocation—the subject of at least some earnest conversation beyond the right.

Of course, it’s not a coup—on any established meaning of the word: Biden stepped down, albeit under coordinated pressure; the party is uniformly behind Harris—an elite decision, in the first instance, but one that’s proved enormously popular across the party’s tens of millions of members; … and there was no evident threat of violence.

It’s not a coup, but it is—as some Democrats have taken to saying—weird.

It may once have been normal for party insiders to pick U.S. presidential nominees in what journalists have since imagined as smoked-filled rooms; but what’s happened here is unprecedented in contemporary American politics.

It may also be true that Harris has been formally first in line to replace Biden as president since January 20, 2021; but that’s a different thing—with a different process to it—and the last time Harris did run for the Democratic nomination herself, in 2020, she could hardly have done worse.

Now, it seems, her handlers are advising her to play it safe and avoid speaking to reporters, even about the core of her policy platform. That may well change after Harris accepts the nomination and it’s no longer possible for anything to go sideways at the Democratic National Convention. But the weirdness may linger—even if no one’s ultimately done anything wrong.

—Gustav Jönsson

Weather report: Washington, D.C. An unsettled afternoon in the District of Columbia. The high temperature of 30^◦ C (86^◦F) wasn’t unusually warm by D.C.’s August standards. Dark clouds loomed, but they ended up bringing little rain. Yet with Tropical Storm Ernesto churning offshore, more’s likely coming.

U.S. intelligence—what they don’t tell you. Recently, a U.S. court unsealed new FBI documents supporting longstanding allegations that Saudi Arabia was involved in the 9/11 attacks on the United States in 2001. According to these documents, Omar al-Bayoumi, who helped two al-Qaeda hijackers settle in America, was an agent of Saudi intelligence. Nothing’s been proved definitively, but the circumstantial case against the Saudis has only been getting stronger.

The final report of the 9/11 Commission, published in 2004, concluded that there was no compelling evidence of official Saudi complicity in the attacks—but the commission never had the newly released material, and according to the commission’s chair, the Bureau never even told it about the material it was withholding in the first place. Why is all this only coming out now?

As Matthew Connelly explains, the FBI hiding key evidence from the 9/11 Commission may be notable, but it’s not unusual; it’s a window into how U.S. intelligence normally operates—keeping the American people, and even the American government itself, in the dark. The U.S. system of secrecy is so sprawling, Connelly says, that no one, not even the president, knows its full extent. Digital technology isn’t improving the situation, either: Electronic communications have created a constant torrent of classified material, making the system more inscrutable—and public accountability for it more elusive—than ever.

—Gustav Jönsson