Degrees of Suspicion and Paranoia: The Need for More In-Depth Psychohistorical Analysis

Ken Fuchsman has done a fine job of surveying uses of paranoia from colonial times up to the present in “The Paranoid Style in American History and Politics: A Psychohistorical Examination,” although I wish he would have included the Know-Nothing (anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, and anti-Irish) Party of the 1840s and 50s. My goal here is to probe the uses and degrees of paranoia among leaders and followers in modern history, as well as to suggest some more psychohistorical avenues of inquiry that Professor Fuchsman could develop.

Paranoia Among Leaders

In terms of conscious motivations, paranoia abounds in politics and among political leaders. Suspicion and mild paranoia in politics may even be requirements for long-term political success. Political leadership is a highly competitive, cutthroat business; those who are successful need to be constantly aware of the dangers, especially from potential rivals. This caution applies to democratic as well as dictatorial leadership. Intense suspicion is so prevalent in the business of politics that it becomes a habit of mind and may not even be a conscious process.

Of course, an excess of paranoia can ruin a politician’s career. Thus, Richard Milhous Nixon’s viewing his cabinet as enemies was one of the components in his downfall. At the moment, many Republican legislators are so driven by a realistic (or is it paranoid?) fear of being primaried by followers of former President Trump that they continue to go along with his “big lie” of having the 2020 election stolen from him despite Trump losing by over seven million votes. Even after Saddam Hussein lost the Gulf War of 1990-1991, his generals, party leaders, and populace dared not go against a paranoid leader who was so murderous that he had first killed someone when he was about 12 years old. Although he had destroyed his most feared weapons of mass destruction before the 2003 Gulf War, Hussein feared being seen as weak without them so

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much that he sought to keep their destruction a secret, even though this admission, along with thorough U.N. inspections could have averted the war and his ultimate death.

In teaching about the Third Reich, I’ve often wondered why Adolf Hitler was so much more successful than his numerous competitors for domination of the Right-wing opposition to the Weimar Republic. The answer I usually end up with is three-fold. One, he was simply more sincerely paranoid in his belief in the stab-in-the-back myth of why Germany lost World War I, causing most of his competitors to fall in line behind him. Two, the National Socialist Workers’ Party that he built up from its very small beginnings gave him a greater base of support than his competitors. Three, he was a highly decorated veteran of the trenches, unlike his competition.

In terms of unconscious motivations, there is also the issue of reasons behind the reluctance of what could be lifesaving paranoia leading to protective actions. Abraham Lincoln’s dismissal of a dream depicting his own assassination about a week before his actual assassination may be a reflection of a death wish. Even those who find this possibility to be far-fetched need to contend with the reality of Lincoln, known to have bouts of suicidal depression, sometimes being dismissive of the real threats to his life, and not taking adequate precautions. Leon Trotsky’s ambivalence about fighting for the leadership of the Russian Revolution upon the death of Lenin would cost him both the leadership and ultimately his life.

Paranoia as an Electoral and Leadership Strategy

Fuchsman does a good job of providing examples of the uses of paranoia by successful leaders in America. He even provides sound evidence of the fears that the leaders are trying to stoke with their rhetoric and scapegoating. This is especially true in terms of White fears of Blacks and other non-Whites. Both Nixon and Joe McCarthy rose to power based on the paranoid fears of Russian communism and the fantasy that it was the U.S. that had “lost” China to communism.

Ultimately, Soviet communism would collapse because Gorbachev’s attempts at reform seriously reduced Russian paranoid fears of the United States (which was becoming a model of a more efficient, prosperous society), prompting a collapse from within the USSR as captive national groups pushed for their independence. Conservative claims that Reagan brought down the Soviet Union

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are off the mark or at least greatly exaggerated. Paranoid fantasies can help leaders come to power and help others hold on to power. However, in the long run, leaders must deal with the realities of the countries they lead.

Psychohistorical Interpretations of the Paranoid Tradition in American Politics

Professor Fuchsman does a fine job of providing examples of the waves of political paranoia in our history and politics. He does an especially good job covering Trump’s paranoid movement as well as racial elements in paranoia. However, he does not write very much about the psychohistory of paranoia. To my mind, it is insufficient to quote David Brion Davis and Nancy McWilliams on the basic terminology of paranoid projection, reference Steven Buser’s theory of Post-Trumpmatic Stress Disorder, and write about Erikson’s theory of how the Founding Fathers saw themselves as “freeborn sons.”  These references are insufficient. It would be good to see Fuchsman’s own detailed and explicit psychohistorical interpretation. The only time he uses the term psychohistory (in any of its forms) is in his title.

It is my hope that in his response to the commentaries and in some future scholarship, Fuchsman will turn his considerable erudition and intellectual powers to the psychodynamics of paranoia. The splitting of the world into “good” and “bad” starts in the mind of the infant. Fear of both the real and the imagined is the basis of paranoia. Paranoid othering starts in the minds of ordinary Americans, then gets projected onto politics and used by politicians for their purposes. Although Fuchsman has some discussion of it, this fear and its origins need to be examined in greater psychoanalytic depth. Reading (or rereading) Julia Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves (1991) might be a useful starting point for his response to commentaries, and even for Fuchsman’s work-in-progress opus, The Nature of Being Human. While appreciating his current work, I also look forward to Professor Fuchsman’s future psychohistorical contributions to this important subject.

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