Notes

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