The violent storming of the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021 by Trump supporters, seeking to thwart what they considered was a stolen election, was a powerful demonstration of the strength of their delusions. However irrational and Manichean such beliefs might seem, they can have real and profound consequences, argues Benjamin Rhode.
Yesterday’s violent assault on the US Capitol, launched by supporters of President Donald Trump in the hope of overturning the recent election that they insisted was the product of a gigantic conspiracy, represented a shocking attack on American democracy itself. Yet to those familiar with the paranoid and conspiratorial discourse animating a significant portion of Trump’s ‘base’, or the history of other paranoid movements, these events were shocking but not surprising.
In his classic 1964 essay ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, Richard Hofstadter identified the ‘central preoccupation’ of the ‘paranoid style’, which had manifested itself throughout American (and international) history: ‘the existence of a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character.’ Paranoid movements, which are not exclusive to any one political tradition, feature a Manichean, total war against ‘absolute evil’, an enemy who ‘is a perfect model of malice’ and whose personal schemes, rather than any impersonal forces, dictate history’s course. There is often a special emphasis placed on defectors from ‘the enemy cause’ since, ‘in the spiritual wrestling match between good and evil which is the paranoid’s archetypal model of the world struggle’, this figure ‘brings with him the promise of redemption and victory’. Lurid condemnations of the supposed sexual and sadistic perversions of the enemy allow ‘exponents of the paranoid style an opportunity to project and freely express unacceptable aspects of their own minds.’
Hofstadter’s examination of the similarities between the worldview of the paranoid style in its political context and that of the religious millenarian and apocalyptic traditions drew on the work of the historian Norman Cohn, whose study of ‘revolutionary millenarianism’ in the Middle Ages and early modern era identified certain recurrent patterns in the narratives these groups promulgated. Cohn argued that these narratives and tropes – of a great battle that will see the total triumph of good over evil, the punishment of evil’s oppressive human agents, and ‘the elect … thereafter [living] as a collectivity, unanimous and without conflict, on a transformed and purified earth’ – originally derived from developments in Zoroastrianism that were reflected in Jewish apocalyptic traditions and thence strands of Christian millenarianism, most famously represented in the Book of Revelation. Cohn argued that the ‘tradition of apocalyptic fanaticism’ had endured and, in a secularised form, been ‘inherited by Lenin and Hitler’.
Trump as cosmic warrior
At present, the exact composition of the mob that stormed the Capitol remains unconfirmed. It is clear, however, that a significant proportion of Trump’s supporters share an especially paranoid and Manichean worldview. For example, the QAnon movement emerged online in late 2017 following a series of posts by the anonymous ‘Q’, purportedly a renegade from the heart of the ‘deep state’ that supposedly controls America. People wearing the movement’s branded garb or bearing its banners soon began to appear at Trump rallies. Like many cults or conspiratorial movements before it, its adherents revelled in the details of their enemies’ all-encompassing evil. Its revealed truth is of a vast global network of sinister elites engaging in Satanic worship, cannibalism (echoing the historical ‘blood libel’ that accused Jews of drinking the blood of Christian children) and trafficking of children for sex. This international ‘globalist’ elite includes members of the ‘deep state’, prominent Democrats and Jewish financiers such as George Soros or the Rothschilds. President Trump, representing the forces of light, has been engaged in a covert, cosmic war against the evildoers. Apparent setbacks to Trump’s agenda have been explained as only feints or diversions before his ultimate triumph in ‘the great awakening’, a resplendent victory over the forces of darkness, in which figures such as Hillary Clinton would be put to death, and in whose final outcome the elect must put their trust. By late 2020, 41% of Republicans who had heard of QAnon believed it was a ‘somewhat’ or ‘very’ good thing for the United States.
In the 1960s, Hofstadter observed that the paranoid style had enjoyed varying degrees of success worldwide, capturing the heights of power in Germany but thus far relegated to ‘minority movements’ in the US. Yet today, as others have noted, the outgoing US president – whose political career was born in the ‘birther’ conspiracy movement that claimed president Obama was a secret foreigner – is himself an exponent of theories once restricted to the fringe. The most powerful man in the world has frequently trafficked in fact-free fantasies typically associated with powerless outsiders. When questioned about the QAnon phenomenon, President Trump described its adherents as people who ‘love our country’, later saying that ‘what I do hear about [QAnon] is they are very strongly against paedophilia. And I agree with that’. On 6 January, Trump directly incited his supporters to march on the Capitol, presumably in the hope that they would intimidate lawmakers into overturning the election results. Reality would be forced to conform with the delusion that he had triumphed.
The power of belief
On one level, Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election represents a rejection by the majority of Americans of Trump’s conspiratorial discourse. Trump’s defeat seems to have unsettled many QAnon adherents, who were already impeded by widespread (if belated) bans of their content across several social media channels. Yet the new US Congress will also seat two QAnon-supporting Republicans, and it seems likely that the movement will adapt, with many QAnon followers moving sideways into other conspiratorial causes.
Such causes are by no means a minority phenomenon. Two weeks after the election, 88% of Trump voters believed Biden’s supposed victory was illegitimate. It is unclear what consequences the decision by almost half the US electorate to inhabit a parallel reality may have on the future of the Republican party, Biden’s ability to serve as president or the longer-term viability of the US system of government. The violent storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters, determined to thwart what they considered was a stolen election, was suggestive of the powerful hold their delusions had over them and the lengths to which they might be willing to go in order to impose those delusions on others.
False beliefs and Manichean worldviews can have real and profound consequences. It is tempting to laugh away those who spin lurid tales of conspiracy, perversion and plot; the inhabitants of that ‘subterranean world’, in Cohn’s words, ‘where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and the superstitious.’ This would be unwise. For, as Cohn warns us, when economic, political or cultural conditions are propitious, ‘there are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsibility. And it occasionally happens that this underworld becomes a political power and changes the course of history.’ We must acknowledge that people can be captivated by beliefs that are irrational and terrifying; and that they tend to act on their beliefs.
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