Tag Archives: paranoia

Those “Indoctrination” Charges

In a recent New York Times essay, Jamelle Bouie considered the accusation–increasingly leveled by the Right–that educators (especially but not exclusively at the university level) “indoctrinate” students.

When I first stumbled across that accusation, I found it ludicrous. As any professor will confirm, teachers are lucky to “indoctrinate” students sufficiently to get them to read the course syllabus. Like so many of the loony-tunes beliefs that have currency on the MAGA Right, this one is prompted by the conviction that no one could really disagree with their perspectives, so if many younger Americans reject their world-view, that rejection must be due to pernicious activity by those hated “libruls.”

As Bouie notes, they’re paranoid. He began his essay with examples:

According to Tim Sheehy, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Montana, young people have been “indoctrinated” on the issue of abortion.

“Young people, listen up, they’ve been indoctrinated for too long. We don’t even try to talk to them anymore,” Sheehy said at an event last year.

This idea that young voters have been indoctrinated — or even brainwashed — to reject Republicans and conservative ideas has significant purchase on the political right. Last month, responding to suggestions that institutions were controlled by left-wing ideologues, Dan Crenshaw, the pugilistic Republican congressman from Texas, declared that “the Left” had “turned higher education into a tool for indoctrination, rather than education,” and that “the Right needs to fight back” and “challenge the ideological chokehold on education” lest “woke elites” keep “pushing irrational leftist ideas.”

And last year, Elon Musk told his more than 100 million followers on X that “parents don’t realize the Soviet level of indoctrination that their children are receiving in elite high schools & colleges!”

As Bouie concedes, ordinary Americans often worry that, as their children find friends and have experiences outside the home, they will adopt ideas that differ from those with which they’ve been raised. But as he says, that is not what we have here. “What we have here, coming from these conservative and Republican voices, is the paranoid assertion that the nation’s institutions of higher education are engaged in a long-running effort to indoctrinate students and extinguish conservatism.”

After all, the ideological defection of one’s children couldn’t possibly be attributable to their encounters with reality. It must be a result of nefarious “grooming” and “indoctrination.” As Bouie points out,

To start, a vast majority of young people attending institutions of higher education in the United States are not enrolled in elite colleges and universities. They are not even enrolled in competitive or selective institutions. Instead, most college kids attend less selective schools where the most popular degree programs are ones like business or nursing or communications — not the ever-shrinking number of humanities majors blamed for the supposed indoctrination of young people….

If, as the latest youth poll from the Harvard Institute of Politics suggests, most young people in the United States reject the Republican Party’s views on abortion or climate change or health care or gun regulation, it’s less because they’ve been indoctrinated to oppose ideological conservatism and more because, like all voters, they have come to certain conclusions about the world based on their experience of it. A young woman looking ahead to her future doesn’t have to be brainwashed to decide that she wants the right to decide when and whether to have a child. A young man with memories of school shootings on the news and shooter drills at school doesn’t need to be indoctrinated to decide that he wants more gun control.

These students haven’t been indoctrinated; they’ve encountered reality–facts, evidence and experiences at odds with the beliefs of the cult. As Bouie says, “It’s the same with any group of voters. That’s just the way democracy works.”

But Republicans have made “democracy” a dirty word. And they seem to have given up on persuasion in favor of trying to win power through the brute-force exploitation of the political system. Why win over voters when you can gerrymander your party into a permanent legislative majority? Why try to persuade voters to reject a referendum you disagree with when you can try instead to change the rules and kill the referendum before it can get on the ballot? Why aim to win a broad national majority when you can win — or try to snatch — a narrow victory in the swing states?

Why consider the possibility that you might be wrong about climate change denial, or the government’s right to force a woman to give birth?

In the real world, professors lack the ability to indoctrinate, Jews don’t have space lasers, and liberals don’t control the weather.

The kids are just sane.

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Politics And Perception

Every so often, there will be a vigorous debate on social media that hinges on perception–is this dress blue or gold? What color are these shoes?  The arguments can get pretty heated, with viewers insisting that those who see a different color must be defective in some way.

There are scientific efforts to explain these opposing views.(Apparently, when context/background varies, so will people’s visual perception.)

Context and background probably explain other differences in perception–for example, the prevalence of criminal activity.

The linked article from the Washington Post was prompted by the recent spate of irrational shootings–a teenager sent to collect his younger brothers, who rang the doorbell at the wrong house; a woman driver who pulled into the “wrong” driveway; cheerleaders who approached the “wrong” car in a parking lot.

Across the country this month, at least four men have opened fire on someone who’d stumbled upon their space, resulting in one death, two injuries and a car pocked with bullet holes. The apparent acts of snap-aggression have reinvigorated the debate around the prevalence of “stand your ground” laws in the United States and a pressing question: Why are people so quick to pull the trigger on strangers?…

Experts blame a cocktail of factors: the easy availability of guns, misconceptions around stand-your-ground laws, the marketing of firearms for self-defense — and a growing sense among Americans, particularly Republicans, that safety in their backyard is deteriorating. (emphasis mine)

Survey research confirms that fear of the “other”–and a growing belief that pretty much anyone could be a dangerous “other”–is more widespread among Republicans, who are also more likely to own guns. The gap is significant.

Since 2020, the share of Republicans who said that crime is rising in their community has jumped from 38 percent to 73 percent, according to the latest Gallup numbers from last fall. Among Democrats, that same concern climbed only 5 percentage points to 42 percent, marking the widest partisan perception gap since the polling firm first asked the question a half-century ago.

There is a reason Republicans are convinced that crime is growing: GOP strategists have encouraged Republican candidates to dwell on fear of crime and to level accusations that “woke” Democrats are insufficiently supportive of police and too protective of “those people.” (Here in Indianapolis, that strategy was employed by a Republican candidate in the recent primary, who won that primary largely by running repeated, offensive ads describing a violent hell-hole of a city most of its residents didn’t recognize.)

Not surprisingly, Rightwing media is culpable for spreading misinformation about crime.

The perception that life is getting more dangerous has spread on the right as GOP leaders and pundits repeatedly argued, without evidence, that immigrants and protesters are jeopardizing American peace. Conservative news channels have devoted more airtime to violence than their center- and left-leaning competitors: Over the past three years, for instance, Fox News anchors and guests spotlighted crime 79 percent more often than those on MSNBC and twice as much as voices on CNN, according to a Washington Post analysis of closed captioning…

So–what does accurate data tell us? (What color is that dress, really…)

A Washington Post crime analysis of 80 major police departments’ records found that reported violence across the country in 2022 was lower than the five-year average.

And over the longer term, the National Criminal Victimization Survey showed the number of people reporting sexual assault, robbery and other physical attacks is overall much lower now than in the 1990s and has not increased in recent years.

Homicides and thefts did rise during the pandemic, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data —but even then, that rise did not reach the levels of the 1990s. (It is worth noting that when it came to homicides, states with stand-your-ground laws had a 55 percent higher homicide-by-firearm rate in the past two years than the states that didn’t have such laws.)

The 28-year-old grandson of the 84-year-old White man who shot Black teenager Ralph Yarl, told officers that his grandfather was perpetually “scared to death. It’s the paranoia and fear…. It was the 24-hour news cycle — Fox News, OAN, all that stuff — pushing the civil division. Everybody is just so scared all the time.”

Context and background.

It’s one thing when you see a gold dress and I see a blue one. It’s something else entirely when I see a neighbor looking for directions and you see one of “those people” looking to rob or otherwise harm you–someone posing a threat that requires you to get your (always handy) gun and “stand your ground.”

The politicians and media outlets inculcating paranoia in their drive for power and profit are every bit as guilty as the armed and terrified citizens they’ve encouraged to pull the triggers.

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Political Paranoia

Awhile back, in one of his newsletters, Paul Krugman reminded us that we’ve always had lunacy in America. He was right–before the equation of vaccinations with (ahem!) both communism and fascism, the fluoridation of water was a favorite target. And I remember when the John Birch Society assured us that Dwight Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy.” 

As Krugman pointed out, however, the difference between then and now is that the entire GOP has embraced bizarre theories like Trump’s “Big Lie.” Conspiracies are so mainstream in the Republican Party that, as he wrote, “These days you’re excommunicated from the Republican Party if you don’t embrace the Big Lie that the election was stolen, don’t denounce modestly center-left Democrats as the second coming of Stalin and, increasingly, don’t declare that mask mandates are the equivalent of the Holocaust and vaccines are a globalist plot to achieve mind control.”

The question of our time is: What has given “political paranoia” critical mass? Krugman didn’t offer an answer, and I certainly don’t have one.

In 1964, Richard Hofstadter published his famous essay in Harper’s Magazine titled “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” This seems to be a good time to revisit it.

Hofstadter was commenting on the right-wing of his time, and its success in nominating Barry Goldwater. (In the wake of Donald Trump, Goldwater seems eminently normal, whether one agrees or not with his political positions.) Explaining his choice of language, Hofstadter wrote

I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

The essay included illuminating examples reaching back to 1855.

In the history of the United States one find it, for example, in the anti-Masonic movement, the nativist and anti-Catholic movement, in certain spokesmen of abolitionism who regarded the United States as being in the grip of a slaveholders’ conspiracy, in many alarmists about the Mormons, in some Greenback and Populist writers who constructed a great conspiracy of international bankers, in the exposure of a munitions makers’ conspiracy of World War I, in the popular left-wing press, in the contemporary American right wing, and on both sides of the race controversy today, among White Citizens’ Councils and Black Muslims. I do not propose to try to trace the variations of the paranoid style that can be found in all these movements, but will confine myself to a few leading episodes in our past history in which the style emerged in full and archetypal splendor.

The examples–which he elaborates–are telling, but it’s the following paragraph that struck me. It could easily have been written this year.

The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country—that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.

At their base, American grievances always come back to tribalism, and to threats posed by “the Other” to the world within which White Christian men are comfortable.

Ironically, it’s their refusal to accept a changing reality that is by far the biggest threat we face.

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European Media Saying What American Media Won’t

In April of this year, I stumbled upon a publication called Euronews, and read the following lede from one of its “viewpoint” articles:

There has only been one headline worth printing since Donald Trump was elected president. That headline is “Donald Trump suffers from a dangerous incurable narcissistic disorder which makes him incapable of empathy and reason. He is a grave danger to the US and the world.”

Instead of stating this disturbing fact, the evidence for which is voluminous, the mainstream media have over the last three years led America down the rabbit holes of normalising him and trying to understand him as you would a psychologically healthy human being. But Donald Trump is not a psychologically healthy human being and reporting on him as if he were, empowers him and disempowers people of reason. Acknowledging his pathology is fundamental to reversing this imbalance.

The article made the point that an understanding of Trump’s “dangerously disordered mind” requires “joining the dots” between what the article identified as his narcissism, his paranoia and his incapacity to accept reality. The author went on to detail the symptoms of  each of those disorders and the elements of Trump’s behavior that “fit” the diagnoses.

In all fairness, there has been significant media emphasis in the U.S. on Trump’s malignant narcissism–but I will admit there has been less attention paid to the diagnosis of paranoia. And when we do start to connect–or “join”–the dots, it’s a pretty convincing one, and especially relevant to his horrendous approach to international relations.

Acute paranoia is characterised by a worldview in which other people are not only inherently untrustworthy, but also “out to get” the paranoid individual. Connecting those dots explains some otherwise confounding foreign policy behaviors:

Trump’s major foreign policy stances are consistent with such extreme paranoia. Trump’s attacks on membership organisations, such as NATO and the European Union, reflect a paranoid conviction that such alliances cannot be trusted and will serve only to rip off the United States, a view he has expressed repeatedly. Trump’s affinity for violent authoritarian leaders is also consistent with the interpretation that they are more in tune with Trump’s own narcissistic and paranoid worldview, than the “weak” leaders of America’s major democratic allies.

According to this analysis, Trump’s psychopathology simply doesn’t allow intelligence information incompatible with his worldview to be processed. Lacking the ability to fact-check the intelligence provided to him–or for that matter, to recognize or fact-check the reality within which he resides– he fills that space with “fact-free conspiracies that fit with his emotional needs.”

The author’s conclusion is depressing–and undoubtedly quite accurate:

For those looking to November’s election as the safety stop that will secure all our futures, Irish journalist and author Fintan O’Tooles has issued a prescient warning: “As the cost of [Trump’s] terrible failures of public duty and common decency becomes ever more starkly evident, he will revert in his re-election campaign to an explanation of the [COVID-19] disaster, not as a consequence of his own incompetence and contempt but as a punishment inflicted on the United States for its failure to build his wall, keep out foreigners, and crush the enemy within. Like a medieval quack making a profit in times of plague, he will offer a stricken people an ever-higher dose of a toxic cure.”

It is long past time to acknowledge the truth that has been staring us in the face all along – Donald Trump is clearly mentally disordered and poses a grave danger to us all.

The interval between now and January 21st will be incredibly dangerous. And in the absence of any discernible Republican integrity, I have no idea what we can do about it.

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I Hope This Is Hyperbole…

Generally, when partisans of one sort or another pursue policies that are likely to have negative side-effects, those side effects are unintended. (Hence the term “unintended consequences.”) A recent report generated by The Institute for New Economic Thinking–a source with which I am unfamiliar, and for which I cannot vouch–asserts that the attack on teachers (about which I recently blogged) is part of a deliberate effort to “Groom U.S. Kids for Servitude.”

At least three people forwarded the paper to me. It references research by Gordon Lafer, Associate Professor at the Labor Education and Research Center at the University of Oregon, and Peter Temin, Professor Emeritus of Economics at MIT.  It describes a movement that is said to have begun in the wake of Citizens United, a “highly coordinated campaign” to destroy unions, cut taxes for the wealthy, and cut public services for everyone else.

Lafer pored over the activities of business lobbying groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) – funded by giant corporations including Walmart, Amazon.com, and Bank of America—that produces “model legislation” in areas its conservative members use to promote privatization. He studied the Koch network, a constellation of groups affiliated with billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. (Koch Industries is the country’s second-largest private company with business including crude oil supply and refining and chemical production). Again and again, he found that corporate-backed lobbyists were able to subvert the clear preferences of the public and their elected representatives in both parties. Of all the areas these lobbyists were able to influence, the policy campaign that netted the most laws passed, featured the most big players, and boasted the most effective organizations was public education. For these U.S. corporations, undermining the public school system was the Holy Grail.

The obvious question is: why? These organizations and businesses need an educated workforce; why would they intentionally subvert education? I understand–and mostly agree with– the argument that their preferred policies would have that effect, but why would that be the motivation?

While Lafer acknowledges that there are legitimate debates among people with different ideological positions or pedagogical views, he thinks big corporations are actually more worried about something far more pragmatic: how to protect themselves from the masses as they engineer rising economic inequality.

As Lafer sees it, we are headed for a new system in which the children of the wealthy will be “taught a broad, rich curriculum in small classes led by experienced teachers. The kind of thing everybody wants for kids.” The rest of America’s children will be trapped in large classes with a narrow curriculum taught by inexperienced staff —or through digital platforms with no teachers at all.

Most kids will be trained for a life that is more circumscribed, less vibrant, and, quite literally, shorter, than what past generations have known. (Research shows that the lifespan gap between haves and have-nots is large and rapidly growing). They will be groomed for insecure service jobs that dull their minds and depress their spirits…

In other words, dismantling the public schools is all about control.

The linked article develops these themes, and readers who want to explore them more fully are welcome to click through and do so.

I know that even paranoids have enemies, but this argument strains credulity. I don’t quarrel with the assertion that many of these “reforms” are wrongheaded and detrimental to the national interest. (Vouchers, for example, are supported mainly by people who think they can make a profit and religious zealots who want public money to support their parochial schools.) The unwillingness of so many “haves” to pay the taxes that support the social and physical infrastructure that enabled their good fortune is selfish and despicable, but the policies they are pursing can be debated–and their dangers exposed–on their own (dubious) merits.

The problem is, if the gap between the rich and the rest isn’t reduced soon, we are likely to see more overheated accusations along these lines–along with more class-and-race-based animosity.

We’re entering the social danger zone.

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