[IP] Los Angeles Times: Paranoid Past the Fringe
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-
chait12nov12,0,4474048.column
JONATHAN CHAIT
Paranoid Past the Fringe
Jonathan Chait
November 12, 2004
Are conservatives crazier than liberals? I think so. Just consider the
behavior of both on one topic: election fraud.
You may have seen e-mails circulating among liberals charging that
President Bush won the election through skulduggery. Like most
conspiracy theories, these begin with indisputable facts — a voting
machine in Ohio that erroneously awarded Bush 4,000 votes; the
manufacturer of touch-screens pledging to help Bush; counties in
Florida whose tallies for Bush vastly exceeded GOP registration — and
then careen off into implausible conclusions.
This sort of paranoia, of course, can be found on both edges of the
ideological spectrum. But here's the difference: Mainstream liberals
have thoroughly rejected it. Even magazines like the Nation and
websites like dailykos.com, which represent the party's left, have
unequivocally declared that these pieces of evidence do not add up to a
fraudulent election.
Mainstream conservatives, by contrast, wallowed in just this sort of
paranoid speculation four years ago when the election was still up in
the air. Consider this disjointed passage from a Wall Street Journal
editorial published Nov. 21, 2000: "With further desperation, we would
not be surprised to see 1,000 Gore votes appear somewhere in the dead
of night. Palm Beach County Commissioner Carol Roberts said the other
day she would go to jail to drive the count forward, and someone
offered a vote-punching machine on EBay."
A lead editorial in the conservative Weekly Standard, published around
the same time, lingered suspiciously on an automatic recount in Florida
that narrowed Bush's lead, and concluded: "In our bones, we're pretty
sure what happened here. In the middle of the night on Nov. 8,
Democratic ultraloyalists … watched a fevered [Gore campaign chairman]
Bill Daley announce that things were still close in Florida — and that
his party's campaign would 'continue' until the rectification of
unspecified 'irregularities' in that state made Al Gore president. The
ultraloyalists read this hint for what it was. And next, they set
about, fast as lightning, before anyone was watching, doing 'anything
to win.' "
The phrase "in our bones" reveals a lot about the mental habits of the
author. When you say you know something in your bones, you're saying
that you don't need actual evidence to impute a vast criminal
conspiracy to the other side. All you need to know is that the other
side represents pure evil.
And even this year, when Bush won a clear victory, conservatives still
posited dark conspiracies. Michael Barone, the U.S. News columnist and
Fox News talking head, wrote that he suspected that Democrats
deliberately distorted exit polls in order to depress Republican
turnout. Never mind that such a scheme would take thousands of
activists in thousands of sites across the country, all keeping their
dastardly plot a secret.
You can imagine what would have happened if the Republicans had lost.
In fact, I don't even have to imagine. I once sat dumbfounded as a
high-ranking Republican member of Congress said at an off-the-record
luncheon that he thought President Clinton stole the 1996 election.
(Keep in mind, Clinton won by more than 8 million votes.)
Historian Richard Hofstadter described this kind of thinking in his
essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." Hofstadter, writing
in the 1960s, traced the paranoid style from 18th century
anti-Masonites through the McCarthy and Goldwater movements. The
latter, of course, laid the foundation for today's Republican Party.
Today, right-wing paranoia has achieved a power and respectability that
left-wing paranoia has not. Michael Moore — who hints at conspiracies
between the Bush family and the Saudi royal family in "Fahrenheit 9/11"
— does not seriously influence the Democratic Party the way the Wall
Street Journal influences the GOP. In fact, Moore didn't even support
the Democrats before this election; in 2000 he backed fellow left-wing
loon Ralph Nader.
We're accustomed to thinking of paranoids as residing only on the
fringe. But what happens when the fringe takes over a party, and then
the country?
If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at
latimes.com/archives.
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Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times
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chait12nov12,0,160231,print.column>
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