As U.S. evolves, paranoia rises

Talk-radio hosts play their listeners as well as Yo-Yo Ma plays the cello, stroking a string and making their audience respond exactly the way they want.

Nowhere is that more evident than in the fabricated right-wing outrage about reimposition of the Fairness Doctrine. Under that long-abandoned rule, radio and TV stations that use the public airways were required to give equal time to various sides of an issue. The rule was well-intended, but in practical terms radio and TV stations found it safer to avoid political discussion altogether than risk running afoul of the law.

JAY BOOKMAN
MY OPINION

• E-mail Bookman

Recent columns:

• Familiar Georgia may melt away 
• Slowly, green shoots of optimism appear 
• Inciting fears in hard times dangerous 
• Georgia Senate endorses radical idea 
• 'Socialist' charge has lost its power to sting 
• Legislature, we've got your number 
• Baseball in spring a metaphor for life 

For that and other reasons, the Fairness Doctrine was abandoned more than 20 years ago, a change that in turn opened the door to creation of right-wing talk radio.

However, with Democrats in control of Congress and Barack Obama about to become president, the maestros of talk radio see an opportunity. They know that the more threatened their audience feels, the higher their ratings get. And what better way to rile up their listeners than to claim that the Democrats are out to silence talk radio itself, the medium that brings conservatives the truth as they want to know it.

So for months, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and others have been warning their audiences that once in power, the Democrats plan to bring back the Fairness Doctrine. Politicians such as Newt Gingrich have joined the chorus, and right-wing pundits insist the issue will be part of Obama’s agenda in his first 100 days in office.

But it’s all nonsense. Obama, for example, is on the record as very clearly opposing a new Fairness Doctrine. The most recent bill calling for reinstatement of the doctrine was introduced back in 2005 and it went nowhere. In the current Congress, controlled by Democrats in both chambers, no such bills have been introduced and no Democrats have announced or even suggested an effort to resurrect the policy.

With no justification for their paranoia, right-wing media outlets have gone seeking it out, asking individual Democrats whether they think that restoring the doctrine might be a good idea. When they get a yes, it sets off a whole new round of bemoaning. You get the sense that the Democrats are amusing themselves, much as you’d toss a hunk of meat into a tank of piranhas just to watch them go into a frenzy.

The bottom line is that there is no chance whatsoever of the Fairness Doctrine coming back, as those on the right will no doubt learn in the months to come. But it won’t matter, because just as quickly as one justification for paranoia disappears, another is certain to emerge. Among a certain crowd, paranoia is a steady state that continues independent of evidence or proof.

In a famous essay written in 1964, historian Richard Hofstadter traced the evolution of what he called “the paranoid style in American politics,” and his description remains as fresh and accurate as the day it was written:

“But the modern right wing … feels dispossessed,” Hofstadter wrote. “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.”

It all sounds so familiar, doesn’t it? The passage of more than 40 years has confirmed Hofstadter’s observation that the paranoid style is enduring. All that has changed is the degree of influence that the paranoid style has achieved through talk radio, and the grip it now holds on the Republican Party.

In fact, the Democrats have every reason to encourage rather than break that relationship. As the paranoid right talks amongst itself on radio, Fox News and conservative Web sites, as they egg each other into ever higher fits of hysteria, they construct an alternative America and alternative reality for themselves that is increasingly divorced from the reality perceived by mainstream America.

In his piece, Hofstadter made it clear that he wasn’t using the term “paranoid” in the clinical sense. Instead, “it is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.”

“The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values,” Hofstadter wrote. “He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point.”

Or, as Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus said in an Oct. 17 conference call in which he tried to rally business leaders to beat back the Democrats:

“This is the demise of a civilization. This is how a civilization disappears. I’m sitting here as an elder statesman, and I’m watching this happen, and I don’t believe it.”

Marcus was not referring specifically to Obama in those remarks, but there’s no question that the president-elect stokes such emotions by his mere existence. Everything about Obama — his race, his age, his intelligence, his name, his back story — feeds the paranoid’s sense that America is being stolen from its true owners.

In fact, if you had to design someone to perfectly epitomize their deepest fears, Obama would be it. Over the next four to eight years, he’s destined to make Limbaugh, Hannity and their ilk even richer than they are today, and in the process make their listeners seem even more crazy and alienated.